Author: Kairos Puget Sound Coalition

With a Biden victory a mixed reality emerges between those who experience colonialism first hand and the broader social justice movement.

By Benay Blend | Palestine Chronicle  |  Jan 26, 2021

…a Biden presidency will “attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.”
— Erica Caines, writer and organizer

“As Palestinians,” writes Zarefah Baroud, “we are taught to comply with our oppression for the sake of a peace we won’t be included in. Unlearn this,” she suggests, and moreover, “when a Zionist is elected, you don’t have to cheer. We are entitled to aspirations and agendas for our people’s best interests, just like everybody else.”

From Raphael Warnock, who backtracked his criticism of the Occupation for the sake of a few Zionist votes, to activists who overlooked Biden’s foreign policy in return for a (neo)liberal agenda at home, Baroud exposes the cracks within the solidarity movement. When anti-imperialism got swept away by the overriding goal of defeating Trump, colonized people at home and around the world lost importance.

Continue reading “On the high cost of solidarity: Joe Biden, Palestine and The Left”

The Never Trump political consultants are deluded if they think that working for Benjamin Netanyahu’s main opponent in Israel’s upcoming election serves democracy and the rule of law.

By Peter Beinart  | The New York Review  | Jan 27, 2021

Given how many professional Republicans have abetted Trump, former GOP insiders like Stevens deserve credit. Which makes it doubly depressing that Stevens—along three other Lincoln Project leaders, Steve Schmidt, Rick Wilson, and Reed Galen—are now working for Gideon Saar’s campaign to be prime minister of Israel.

Ever since a group of Republican operatives launched the Lincoln Project, more than a year ago, to defeat Donald Trump, skeptical progressives have wondered: Do they realize the rot inside the GOP runs much deeper than Trump? The answer, increasingly, appears to be yes.

Despite having been longtime pillars of the GOP establishment, the Lincoln Project’s founders now acknowledge that white supremacy infects the entire Republican Party. Last October, they filed an amicus brief against GOP-led voter suppression in Texas. That same month, Lincoln Project member Stuart Stevens—who has worked for Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney—told The New Yorker that, “Even if Donald Trump loses in 2020, the Republican Party has legitimized bigotry and hate as an organizing principle.” When I talked to Stevens, he volunteered that William F. Buckley Jr.—a founder of the modern American conservative movement—“started out as a stone cold racist.”

Continue reading “What the Lincoln Project Gets Wrong About Israel-Palestine”

By Palestinian children are frequent targets of the Israeli military and court systems – contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Israel is a signatory. Since 2000, over 12,000 Palestinian children have experienced detention.

Kathryn Shihadah   | Israel-Palestine News  | Jan 28, 2021

Although a signatory to the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), Israel has declared that the Convention “does not apply in the [Palestinian] West Bank.”

The International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) posted a brief article on Monday, but it is part of a much larger and very disturbing story.

IMEMC reported that on Sunday night, 4 Palestinian children in a village near Jerusalem were detained and interrogated by Israeli forces. The children were ages 9-10. They endured “several hours” of questioning before being released later that night.

On average, Israel arrests and prosecutes 500-700 Palestinian children ages 12-17 every year; sometimes, as in this case, children even younger are taken. The youths are prosecuted in a military court system that “lacks basic and fundamental guarantees of due process in violation of international standards.”

Continue reading “Israel detains, interrogates four Palestinian children, ages 9-10”

A look at how Biden’s pledge for diversity is being shaped within the first days of his administration.

By Theo Stamatis |  Arab America  |  Jan 27, 2021

So far, there have been seven Arab Americans chosen to be in the Biden Administration and there are more to follow.

As the new administration steps into its first 100 days, President Joe Biden has promised the American people that his administration will reflect America’s diversity. Throughout his campaign and once elected president, Biden has been a vocal advocate of every ethnicity and background being represented: African American, Hispanics, Asians, and finally at the table – Arab Americans. Biden’s victory recognizes the overwhelming advocacy from the Arab American communities across the country. Roughly 59% of Arab Americans supported him last November compared to 35% for Trump. So far, there have been seven Arab Americans chosen to be in the Biden Administration and there are more to follow. Meet some of the new Biden officials.

Read the full article here →

Mona AlMsaddar tells incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken that his family’s story of surviving World War II resonates with her own family’s history of the Nakba.

By Mona AlMsaddar |  Mondoweiss  | Jan 22, 2021

…reading about your stepfather’s forced exile brings to mind my maternal grandparents and their forced displacement by the creation of Israel in 1948. We call it the Nakba (catastrophe).

The following open letter to Antony Blinken was first published by We Are Not Numbers. Blinken is expected to soon be confirmed as U.S. President Joe Biden’s secretary of state. When accepting his nomination, Blinken recalled his stepfather Samuel Pisar, who was one of 900 children in his school in Bialystok, Poland, but the only one to survive the Holocaust after four years in concentration camps. He went on to recall Pisar’s escape from a death march in Nazi-controlled Germany, after which the boy was rescued by a Black U.S. soldier. Just before being lifted onto a tank, Pisar “fell to his knees, and said the only three words he knew in English that his mother had taught him before the war: “God bless America.”​ Later in his confirmation hearing Blinken also said the U.S.-Israel relationship was “sacrosanct” and the U.S. would keep its embassy in Jerusalem, which he called the capital of Israel.

Continue reading “Mr. Blinken, we share similar family stories”

For Palestinians the information in the B’Tselem human rights report is what they have been reporting for years.

By Benay Blend  |  The Palestine Chronicle  |  Jan 19, 2021

“Everything is framed in terms of the occupier, its interests, its desires, its wants and dislikes. It’s never about the people who *face* apartheid, occupation, and Israeli settler colonialism.”
— Remi Kanazi, Palestinian poet and activist

“Everyone’s reporting on the B’Tselem report like it’s the first they’ve ever heard anyone say that Israel’s an apartheid state,” commented Susan Abulhawa, Palestinian author and activist. “It’s like nothing about Palestinian lives, realities, and experiences is true or real until Israelis proclaim it.”

Abulhawa’s commentary refers to the Israeli human rights group’s position paper (January 12) that declared “the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group—Jews—over another—Palestinians.” Moreover, it labeled that system an apartheid regime.

On the one hand, B’tselem’s report got a lot of traction partly because it makes Israeli denial all that much more difficult to support, either by its own people or by journalists who are afraid of being labeled anti-Semitic.

On the other hand, Palestinian poet and activist Remi Kanazi captured the irony of this moment in a tweet:

“Palestinians are always spoken about, but rarely ever spoken to or allowed to speak. Everything is framed in terms of the occupier, its interests, its desires, its wants and dislikes. It’s never about the people who *face* apartheid, occupation, and Israeli settler colonialism.”

Read the full article here →

For centuries, Aizarya has been a satellite of the holy city. Now Israel wants to close off its access with a wall in a scheme denounced as de facto annexation.

By Qassam Muaddi |   Middle East Eye  | Jan 20, 2021

“It wouldn’t change much for me, as a minibus driver. I’d still have to drive through this crowded cage to the new way out. But it would cut the town off completely from Jerusalem,”
— Islam Rabea, minibus driver

Vehicles move slowly a few metres down the crowded main street of Aizarya, a Palestinian suburb east of Jerusalem, before stopping again.

Islam Rabea, a 23-year-old minibus driver, pulls on the handbrake and begins musing again.

“This town is more crowded than a can of tuna fish,” he says. “There’s one entrance, which is also the only exit, and I drive people to it back and forth all day.”

Aizarya’s only route to the outside world is to the east via an Israeli-built road, facing the entrance of Maale Adumim, the largest illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank, built almost entirely on lands belonging to the Palestinian town.

Continue reading “‘Stripped to the bone’: Israel advances plan to cut off Palestinian suburb from Jerusalem”

A critique of the damage caused by the claim that the two “regimes” can be separated.

By Philip Weiss  | Mondoweiss |  Jan 19, 2021

Thrall’s thrust is that liberal Zionists have bolstered the persistence of apartheid by insisting that that’s not happening in Israel, it’s only the West Bank.

We all understand that this is a time of tremendous potential shift in the discourse of Palestine in the U.S. When Joe Biden comes in, liberal Zionists, who can take some credit for electing him, will make up the central branch of the Israel lobby inside the Democratic Party. Secretary of State Tony Blinken is their friend. So is his deputy Wendy Sherman. So liberal Zionists will own our Israel policy.

And Biden along with liberal Zionists will be coming under huge pressure from the Democratic left, the Sandersite progressives who have been fighting for Palestinian rights in the halls of Congress, to actually do something at last for Palestinian freedom.

The latest sign of this pressure are the official reports saying Israel is enforcing apartheid, notably Yesh Din last July and B’Tselem last week. These follow a similar declaration years ago by the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, among others. And when Israel is declared apartheid state, there’s one plain outcome: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

Continue reading “Nathan Thrall calls out J St and other liberal Zionists for enabling apartheid”