Author: KPSC

A fire at Tent of Nations (TON) is a setback, but Nassar family still focuses on pursuing its mission of building understanding and hope for a better future.

May 25, 2021
Update from Daoud Nassar:

On Friday, May 20, the Tent of Nations farm was struck by a horrendous fire fed by strong winds. Our family, along with the support of many young people from the village, our neighbors and the fire department, were able to control the fire after some hours. Thank God, no one from the family was hurt, but the damage is huge and painful to see. The fire completely destroyed over one thousand new and mature olive, grape, almond, fig and pine trees. Another 700 trees were affected by the heat and the smoke and caused some damage; we are trying to rescue these trees by watering them on a daily basis, using our limited rain-water sources stored in the cisterns you all helped us to build; we are grateful for that. To this moment, we do not know the cause of the fire or who was behind it.

We know that you will want to know what is being planned to restore the loss of so many trees, what is the plan and the timing, and what you can do to help. Tree planting cannot begin until the fall, but there is much to be done to prepare the soil and repair the damage, and we will keep you informed and let you know about the ways you can help. This loss will not deter us and the Tent of Nations from pursuing its mission of building understanding and hope for a better future for our grandchildren.

With gratitude – Daoud

NOTE: Please continue to pray for the Tent of Nations. After June 1, groups and individuals will be allowed to enter the country. Volunteers will be needed to help prepare the land for planting new trees and repairing the damages to the farm (please see the Tent of Nations website in order to sign up for volunteer work or to schedule a visit).

There will be financial support needed in order to restore the land and infrastructure. Contributions (checks made out to FOTONNA) can be sent to the new FOTONNA Finance Director at: Beth Moore – FOTONNA Finance Director – 3436 East Avenue, South – La Crosse, WI 54601. A PayPal option will be made available soon; check the FOTONNA website for more information. You can also access a new Contribution Form on the Website at this time.

Please note that Tent of Nations (TON) is not an NGO. They are a small family-owned farm that welcomes individuals and groups to visit, volunteer, and hear their story.  They are not affiliated with any other organization, and are privately funded through Friends of Tent of Nations.

Palestinian activists are fighting back against a history of takedowns with one-star reviews and ancient Arabic.

By Elizabeth Dwoskin and Gerrit De Vynck | The Washington Post | May 28, 2021

“Ultimately, what we’re seeing here is existing offline repression and inequality being replicated online, and Palestinians are left out of the policy conversation,”
— Jillian York, a director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Just days after violent conflict erupted in Israel and the Palestinian territories, both Facebook and Twitter copped to major faux pas: The companies had wrongly blocked or restricted millions of mostly pro-Palestinian posts and accounts related to the crisis.

Activists around the world charged the companies with failing a critical test: whether their services would enable the world to watch an important global event unfold unfettered through the eyes of those affected.

The companies blamed the errors on glitches in artificial intelligence software.

Continue reading “Facebook’s AI treats Palestinian activists like it treats American Black activists. It blocks them.”

Israel has quietly sought, and perhaps achieved, a large measure of autonomy from its half-century of reliance on the United States.

By Max Fisher | The New York Times | May 24, 2021

Once reliant on American arms transfers, Israel now produces many of its most essential weapons domestically.

Israel, a small country surrounded by adversaries and locked in conflict with the Palestinians, depends absolutely on American diplomatic and military support. By giving it, the United States safeguards Israel and wields significant leverage over its actions.

That’s the conventional wisdom, anyway. For decades, it was true: Israeli leaders and voters alike treated Washington as essential to their country’s survival.

But that dependence may be ending. While Israel still benefits greatly from American assistance, security experts and political analysts say that the country has quietly cultivated, and may have achieved, effective autonomy from the United States.

Continue reading “As Israel’s dependence on U.S. shrinks, so does U.S. leverage”

U.S. leaders must now confront their country’s and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this catastrophe.

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies | Mondoweiss | May 21, 2021

U.S. policy has perpetuated the crisis and atrocities of the Israeli occupation by unconditionally supporting Israel in three distinct ways: militarily, diplomatically and politically.

The U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral party to the conflict. In fact, large majorities of Americans have told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But U.S. media and politicians betray their own lack of neutrality by blaming Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli attacks as a justifiable response to Palestinian actions. The classic formulation from U.S. officials and commentators is that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” never “Palestinians have the right to defend themselves,” even as the Israelis massacre hundreds of Palestinian civilians, destroy thousands of Palestinian homes and seize ever more Palestinian land.

Continue reading “U.S. policy has perpetuated the crisis and atrocities in Gaza”

There are indications of a shift in attitudes on unconditionional aid to Israel.

By Daoud Kuttab | Arab News | May 20, 2021

“Since the events in Ferguson (Missouri), there have been many black-led organizations who have traveled to Palestine and have learned firsthand what the situation is like, and have since networked Palestine with the African American community,
—Sarah Nahar, an African-American activist

PHILADELPHIA, US: A recent headline in the Boston Globe, a leading US paper, which read “US aid to Israel should be a force for peace,” has surprised many readers.

The paper, in its May 19 edition, published it as part of a hard-hitting column by its editorial board, adding: “Ultimately, conditioning aid to Israel should not be controversial.”

Trudy Rubin, a leading columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, meanwhile, put Hamas and the Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu on the same level, saying: “By treating Palestinians as irrelevant, Bibi provoked violence that has killed hundreds of mostly Palestinian civilians and threatened Israeli towns and cities.”

Continue reading “Tangible change in US public opinion toward Palestinians”

A Palestinian citizen in Israel lives as a second-class citizen, denied basic rights.

By Nimer Sultany | The Guardian | May 19, 2021

In the context of Israel’s rule over us, however, coexistence is a fiction that conceals a reality of separate and unequal lives.

On Tuesday, in my hometown of Tira, which is inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the shops were closed and the streets were empty. A general strike had been declared in protest over Israel’s policies, whether the ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, the storming of al-Aqsa mosque, or the onslaught on Gaza.

As the Palestinian death toll continues to rise, commentators lament the shattering of coexistence inside Israel between Palestinian and Jewish citizens. Yet in my experience as a Palestinian citizen in Israel, no such coexistence existed in the first place. Coexistence implies a background of equality, freedom and mutual respect. In the context of Israel’s rule over us, however, coexistence is a fiction that conceals a reality of separate and unequal lives.

Continue reading “Peaceful coexistence in Israel hasn’t been shattered – it’s always been a myth”

We must be clear: What started this immediate horror was the intensification of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

By Jeremy Scahill | The Intercept | May 14, 2021

It is an effort to “both sides” what is an asymmetric campaign of terror waged by a nuclear power against a people who have no state, no army, no air force, no navy, and an almost nonexistent civilian infrastructure.

Warning: This article contains images of violence and death.

The U.S.-backed, armed, and funded extreme right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu is currently engaged in a systemic collective punishment campaign against the people of Gaza. More than two million of them are trapped in an open-air prison camp with nowhere to run or hide from this scorched earth operation. Children are being slaughtered. Civilian residential buildings are being razed to the ground. Meanwhile ethno-nationalist militias are rampaging through the streets of Israel and terrorizing their Arab neighbors in a campaign of organized mob violence. We must be clear: what started this immediate horror was the intensification of Israel’s ethnic-cleansing campaign against Palestinians in East Jerusalem, forcibly evicting people from their homes to hand them over to Israeli settlers. The incendiary situation was then exacerbated during a Ramadan siege by Israeli forces at one of the holiest sites in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Continue reading “But what about Hamas’s rockets?”

A Jewish voice makes the case that the wars will not end until Palestinians can return home.

By Peter Beinart | The New York Times | May 12, 2021

The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.

Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.

Continue reading “Palestinian refugees deserve to return home. Jews should understand.”

Gaza officials say 20 people were killed in the airstrikes. The escalation followed clashes between the Israeli police and Palestinian protesters at Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem

By Patrick Kingsley & Isabel Kershner | The New York Times | May 10, 2021

The dispute, focused on a single Jerusalem neighborhood, has exploded into a major flare-up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, gaining world attention after a period in which the Palestinian cause had been largely marginalized…

JERUSALEM — Weeks of simmering tensions in Jerusalem between Palestinian protesters, the police and right-wing Israelis suddenly veered into military conflict on Monday, as a local skirmish in the decades-long battle for control of the city escalated into rocket fire and airstrikes in Gaza.

After a raid by the Israeli police on the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem left hundreds of Palestinians and a score of police officers wounded, militants in Gaza responded by firing a barrage of rockets at Jerusalem, drawing Israeli airstrikes in return.

Continue reading “After raid on Aqsa Mosque, rockets from Gaza and Israeli airstrikes”

A prominent DC think tank has offered a way forward that most in the foreign policy establishment have refused to consider.

By Mitchell Plitnick | Responsible Statecraft | May 4, 2021

If anything has characterized the recent policy discourse around Israel and Palestine, it is despair.

It’s been seven years since the last round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations collapsed. Since then, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank has become entrenched, its siege on the Gaza Strip has deepened, and a growing number of observers are acknowledging that the two-state solution has failed.

Palestinians, who only recently had hope that they might be able to elect a new leadership, have seen national elections — not held since 2006 — postponed indefinitely, while Israel, facing the prospect of a fifth national election in little more than two years, is less incentivized than ever to find a resolution to its ongoing occupation.

Continue reading “Washington elites embrace rights-based approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict”