Month: October 2021

The writer has refused to sell Hebrew translation rights to her latest novel Beautiful World, Where Are You due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

By Lucy Knight | The Guardian |  Oct 12, 2021

“In this particular case, I am responding to the call from Palestinian civil society, including all major Palestinian trade unions and writers’ unions.”
— Sally Rooney, author statement

Sally Rooney has turned down an offer from the Israeli publisher that translated her two previous novels into Hebrew, due to her stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

The Irish author’s second novel Normal People was translated into 46 languages, and it was expected that Beautiful World, Where Are You would reach a similar number. However, Hebrew translation rights have not yet been sold, despite the publisher Modan putting in a bid.

Continue reading “Sally Rooney turns down an Israeli translation on political grounds”

Biden administration continues to exert pressure on Bennett over settlements which most of the international community view as illegal.

By Barak Ravid | Axios | Oct 6, 2021

A senior U.S. official told me the Biden administration has been engaged with the Israeli government regarding settlements on a weekly basis since the meeting between Bennett and the president.

The Biden administration has been privately pressuring the Israeli government to show restraint ahead of a key decision on settlement building in the West Bank, Israeli and U.S. officials tell Axios.

Why it matters: Both sides want to keep this from becoming a point of tension between President Biden, who considers the settlements a threat to the two-state solution, and Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who leads a pro-settler party and is under political pressure on the issue.

• Most of the international community views the West Bank settlements as illegal, and the Palestinians argue that Israel is claiming more and more land that should be part of their future state.

Continue reading “Biden quietly puts pressure on Israel over West Bank settlements”

Americans are now seeing the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation through the prism of the fight for racial justice.

By Dr. Ramzy Baroud | Middle East Monitor | Oct 5, 2021

Despite the eventual outcome, the fact that such a discussion even took place in Congress was a milestone in the struggle for racial justice.

There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, one that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially young people, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into reducing Israel’s stranglehold over the US Congress tangibly, it promises to be of great consequence in the future.

Recent events at the US House of Representatives demonstrated this unprecedented reality. On 21 September, Democrat lawmakers successfully rejected a caveat that proposed to give Israel $1 billion in extra military funding as part of a broader spending bill, after objections from several progressive Congress members. The money was destined specifically to fund the purchase of new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system.

Continue reading “Racial justice vs. the Israel Lobby: when being pro-Palestine becomes the new normal”

For the past 15 years, I have witnessed how the Israeli army cuts Palestinian communities from accessing water in order to expel them and take their land.

By Daphne Banai | +972 Magazine | Sept 24, 2021

Denying water to the Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills is one of many brutal methods for expelling the local population in order to take its land and hand it over to Jewish settlers.

Abu Hani and his family live only two kilometers from the Israeli settlement outpost of Avigayil in the occupied South Hebron Hills. But unlike Avigayil’s residents, who are connected to Israel’s national water grid, Abu Hani and his children are barred from doing so. Not only do they not receive a drop from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, the Israeli authorities also prohibit them from maintaining cisterns for storing rainwater, as they had been doing until Israel took over the area.

Continue reading “The brutality of denying water to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills”

As American Jewry’s Zionist consensus crumbles, we must learn to address one another across communal divides.

By Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | Sept 20, 2021

American Jews of all ideological stripes need shared spaces, based on mutual respect, which encourage the kinds of conversations that aren’t possible on Twitter.

This spring and summer, as violence engulfed Israel-Palestine and antisemitic attacks in the US made media headlines, some hawkish Jewish commentators began using an arresting phrase to describe Jews who oppose the Jewish state. In a tweet in May, UCLA professor Judea Pearl proposed that just as Jewish leaders in the 17th century excommunicated the followers of the false messiah, Shabtai Tzvi, it was now time “to proclaim Jewish-born Zionophobes: ‘Ex-Jews.’” That same month, in an article in the Orthodox publication Cross-Currents, Yitzchok Adlerstein, director of Interfaith Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, scrolled through his own roster of historic turncoats—“the Pablo Christianis and Johannes Pfefferkorns who reinvented themselves as Christians to find fame and money”—before declaring that Bernie Sanders, who “devotes his energies to undermining the largest Jewish community in the world,” is an “ex-Jew.” In June in Tablet, historian Gil Troy and former Soviet dissident and Israeli cabinet minister Natan Sharansky improvised on the theme: They labeled Jewish anti-Zionists “Un-Jews.”

Continue reading “Reclaiming the Covenant of Fate”