Author: KPSC

Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has prompted US labor unions to mobilize at unprecedented levels, further establishing Palestinian rights as a core component of progressive politics.

By Alex Kane | +972 Magazine | Aug 31, 2021

“Labor power has always been about international solidarity and all exploited people rising up against all forms of oppression,”
— Lara Kiswani, executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center

As Israeli airstrikes dropped U.S.-made bombs on Gaza in May, damaging schools and hospitals, displacing thousands of Palestinians, and killing 260 people, many Americans looked on in horror. Then, some decided to take action.

On May 19, the United Educators of San Francisco, the union representing 6,200 public school teachers and aides in the California city, passed a resolution endorsing Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), a movement promoting pressure on Israel until it stops violating Palestinian human rights. The union also called for the United States to end military aid to Israel, which it said was committing the crime of “apartheid.” (The United States sends $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel.)

Continue reading “How Palestinian resistance inspired a new generation of labor activism”

A coalition of Florida organizations are calling for a boycott of Duty Free Americas over its financial support for racist, ultra-nationalist Israeli settler groups in the West Bank.

By Michael Arria | Mondoweiss | Sept 3, 2021

“The call for boycott of Duty Free Americas is especially important for us Floridians to answer because the owners of this company are our neighbors — with most of the stores located in this state — and we must hold them responsible and accountable for the millions of dollars they have donated to the ongoing Nakba,”
—  Lara Abu Ghannam CAIR-Florida’s Central Florida Regional Coordinator 

The South Florida Coalition for Palestine is calling for a boycott of Duty Free Americas over the Miami-based company’s connection to illegal Israeli settlements and the forced expulsion of Palestinians.

The Duty Free Americas chain is owned by the Falic family, who operate more 180 stores at airports and border crossings in the United States and Latin America. According to a 2019 AP investigation the Falics have donated $5.6 million to settler groups over a ten-year period. They’ve also lent financial support to racist, ultra-nationalist Jewish groups in Hebron.

Continue reading “Activists launch campaign to boycott Duty Free Americas over support for Israeli settler organizations”

The story of Layan Nasir’s baptism as an infant to her detention as a university student reveals the arbitrariness of the Israeli occupation.

By Fadi Diab | Mondoweiss  | Aug 23, 2021

Layan and other students are accused of belonging to an “unlawful association” at Birzeit University. The “unlawful association” is a union of students acting per the rules of their university and the Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education.

Layan Nasir, a parishioner at St. Peter’s Anglican/Episcopal Church in Birzeit, Palestine, is a 21-year-old Nutrition and Dietetics student at Birzeit University. A remarkable young woman with a calm demeanor, tender spirit, and incredible potential, Layan was raised in a devout Anglican family to live her faith in the midst of the whatever challenges may come in life.

The story of Layan’s baptism as an infant embodies the Palestinian experience of faith under colonial domination. On the day of her baptism, Israeli forces blocked the road between Ramallah and Birzeit, a short 12 kilometers away. The Anglican priest in Ramallah, Fr. Samir Esaid, serving the community in Birzeit, was stopped at the checkpoint and denied passage. He explained the situation to the soldiers to no avail. So, Fr. Esaid called the Catholic priest in Birzeit, Fr. Eyad Twal. Layan and her brother were baptized in an Anglican church by a Catholic priest.

Continue reading “West Bank church stands with unjustly incarcerated parishioner Layan Nasir”

A retired pediatrician speaks out about the wounds of the Israeli occupation that are bloodless and invisible, but which will eventually find their way to pierce the heart.

By Harry Gunkel  | Mondoweiss  | Aug 19, 2021

But how will we calculate and honor the misery of despair, the emptiness of careers lost because of forbidden opportunities, the sadness of unrealized dreams, the ruin of relationships?

Between July 26 and 30, three Palestinian teenagers were killed by Israeli forces. During the same week, a fourth died of gunshot wounds suffered some weeks before. These four children were among the many killed in the West Bank so far in 2021, along with 66 children killed by Israel’s attacks on Gaza in May. Within hours, punctuating that week of unabashed violation of international law, human rights and morality, Israeli forces raided the Ramallah offices of Defense for Children International – Palestine in the dark early morning hours of July 29, forcing entry and confiscating computers and confidential client files. On August 16, four Palestinian young men, two of them teenagers, were murdered by Israel forces in Jenin.

More killings of Palestinians without reason, without remorse, without punishment or responsibility. No chance for families to grieve or mourn properly while scrambling to protect other children and waiting for the next assault on their neighborhood or village or city.

Continue reading “The wounds of occupation”

A new, “improved” definition of antisemitism still fails to acknowledge the history of Palestinian dispossession.

By Kathryn Shihadah |  If Americans Knew/ Israel-Palestine News | Aug 14, 2021

Proponents of justice and racial equality would do well to remember that while anti-Semitism has its victims, Zionism in the last half century arguably has had more…

The Jerusalem Declaration on Anti-Semitism (JDA) was released in March as a progressive variant of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) “working definition” of anti-Semitism – a definition that, despite its wide acceptance, is deeply problematic.

Progressives agree that JDA is a huge improvement over IHRA. JDA acknowledges that support for the Palestinian cause is “not on the face of it” antisemitic; it also leaves room for opposition to Zionism, criticism of Israel (including use of the word “apartheid,” or a “double standard” framing), and even the BDS (boycott, divest, and sanction) movement.

Continue reading “Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism ignores Palestinian rights, narrative”

The ongoing protests in the West Bank village of Beita are for land rights, water rights and basic human rights.

By Ramzy Baroud | Mondoweiss | Aug 11, 2021

“Israel even controls the collection of rainwater throughout most of the West Bank and rainwater harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities are often destroyed by the Israeli army,”
— Amnesty International Report, 2017

There is an ongoing, but hidden, Israeli war on the Palestinians which is rarely highlighted or even known. It is a water war, which has been in the making for decades.

On July 26 and 27, two separate but intrinsically linked events took place in the Ein al-Hilweh area in the occupied Jordan Valley, and near the town of Beita, south of Nablus.

In the first incident, Jewish settlers from the illegal settlement of Maskiyot began construction in the Ein al-Hilweh Spring, which has been a source of freshwater for villages and hundreds of Palestinian families in that area. The seizure of the spring has been developing for months, all under the watchful eye of the Israeli occupation army.

Continue reading “Water wars in the West Bank”

To live under forced exile in the heart of my homeland or to live in voluntary exile as a resident alien—this is my choice. Either way, to be a stranger in a strange land.

By Sayed Kashua | The New York Review of Books | Aug 7, 2021

 How can a young refugee forget his homeland if he lives with constant reminders that he is a foreign element, unwanted, even despised?

On the day my brother called, the local news reported a bear sighting in a backyard in Richmond Heights, the Missouri suburb where we live. Another round of fighting had broken out between Israelis and Palestinians, exactly seven years after the bloody cycle of 2014, which was the summer my wife and I decided to leave our home in Jerusalem. We were spurred by political despair and a loss of hope for a better future.

Continue reading “My Palestinian Diaspora”

There’s no equating Palestinian rocket fire and massacres by warplanes.

By Maureen Clare Murphy | The Electronic Intifada  | Aug 4, 2021

…the group’s equation of alleged war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza perpetuates the myth of parity between a colonizing state and its subjects.

Israel used weapons made by Chicago-based Boeing to destroy residential towers in Gaza, massacring families in their homes in May, a new report by Human Rights Watch confirms.

The documentation contained in Human Rights Watch’s investigation is valuable and necessary and will serve those seeking to burst Israel’s bubble of impunity to prevent the next bloodbath in Gaza.

But the group’s equation of alleged war crimes committed by Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza perpetuates the myth of parity between a colonizing state and its subjects.

Continue reading “How Human Rights Watch favors Israel”

NSO Group, the Israeli firm that sells its spyware to authoritarian regimes around the world, emerged from a military unit that perfected its surveillance techniques on Palestinians.

By Yousef Munayyer | Jewish Currents  | July 26, 2021

With an occupied and stateless population of Palestinians under its rule, to which it has granted no citizenship rights or civil liberties, Israel is free to develop, test, and perfect its surveillance technology on millions of unwilling subjects.

Last week, a joint investigation by 17 media outlets—including The Washington Post, The Guardian, and Haaretz—revealed that Israeli intelligence firm NSO Group had licensed military-grade spyware known as Pegasus to a long list of authoritarian regimes. The report drew on a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers; a close forensic analysis of some of the phones confirmed that they had been hacked by surveillance software capable of monitoring the targets’ movements, listening to their conversations, and accessing their private data.

The list included the phones of several people close to murdered journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi: His wife’s phone was targeted in the months before his gruesome murder, while his fiancée’s phone was hacked in the days after his death. The phone number of Princess Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum was added to the list shortly after her escape from the United Arab Emirates and just days before she was captured on her way to Sri Lanka by Indian commandos, who returned her to Dubai. Numbers belonging to some 14 current or former heads of state were found on the list as well.

Continue reading “Exporting the tools of apartheid”