Category: News

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”

To say the current Palestinian political crisis is simply a Hamas-Fatah split is to ignore a history of division that cannot be solely blamed on Palestinians.

By Ramzy Baroud | Mondoweiss | Sept 29, 2021

Even Palestinian division has rarely been a Palestinian decision, although the Palestinian leadership deserves much blame for failing to develop a pluralistic political system that is not dependent in its survival on a single group or individual.

The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted, and must not be conveniently reduced to the Hamas-Fatah split, or disagreements around elections—and the lack thereof—and the Oslo Accords. The divisions are linked to events that preceded all of this and are tied to the issue of who is the representative of the Palestinian people. Today’s disunity is the outcome of one political party’s decades-long sortie becoming dominant.

This dates back to Palestinian politics prior to the establishment of Israel in 1948 on the ruins of historic Palestine, when various Palestinian clans fought for control over the entire Palestinian body politic. Disagreements led to conflict, often violent, though, at times, it also resulted in relative harmony, for example, the establishment of the Arab Higher Committee (AHC) in 1936.
Continue reading “Why Palestinians are divided”

An Israeli consul general baselessly accused a graduate student of antisemitism and said she shouldn’t teach a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

By Murtaza Hussain | The Intercept| Sept 28,2021

“It is not a new phenomenon where outside parties have tried to stifle academic freedom on this subject…But these people have never seen me teach, never seen my past evaluations which have said that I treat students fairly, and thus have no right to dictate what I say inside the classroom.”
— Kylie Broderick, UNC Ph.D. student

This August, Israeli consular officials in the southeast U.S. arranged meetings with a dean at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to discuss a graduate student teaching a course on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to two UNC professors with knowledge of the meetings, who asked for anonymity for fear of retribution, the Israeli official accused the Ph.D. student of antisemitism and said she was unfit to teach the course.

The intervention by an Israeli government official, Consul General to the Southeastern United States Anat Sultan-Dadon, followed a pressure campaign by right-wing pro-Israel websites and an advocacy group to remove the graduate student, Kylie Broderick, from teaching the history department course called “The Conflict over Israel/Palestine.” The websites and pro-Israel advocacy group pointed to postings Broderick had made on Twitter that criticized Israel and Zionism and, without evidence, cited the postings as evidence of antisemitism.

Continue reading “Israeli diplomat pressured UNC to remove teacher who criticized Israel”

As long as Britain and other states continue to superficially endorse a two-state solution, Israel will become entrenched as a full-blown apartheid state with international blessing.

By Ilan Pappé | Consortium News | Sept 27, 2021

There is a pattern to British policy that can be identified today as it could in 1948: staff on the ground watch and report the destruction of Palestinian life and the apartheid aspects of Israel while U.K. policy-makers remain loyal to the description of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East

Britain today is a secondary actor in the international arena and its ability to influence the so-called peace process in Israel and Palestine is limited. It cannot be considered a significant contributor to efforts to find a solution to Israel’s continued colonization and occupation of Palestine.

Yet Britain bears massive historical responsibility for the situation of the Palestinian people and shares the overall Western blame for the present reality in the occupied territories.

In 1917, after the so-called Balfour Declaration, Britain enabled the settler colonial movement of Zionism to begin a project of state building in Palestine. During its subsequent rule as a ‘mandatory’ power, the U.K. provided assistance to the small community of Jewish settlers to build the infrastructure of their future state, while being aware that the indigenous people of Palestine, who were 90 percent of the population in 1917, rejected this prospect.

Continue reading “Britain Is ensuring the death of a Palestinian State”

A writer from Gaza reflects on Israel’s “defensive weapon,” Iron Dome.

By Muhammad Shehada | Newsweek | Sept 24, 2021

… the progressive push to defund the Iron Dome was quite simply a recognition of our pain.

Progressive House Democrats sparked a charged debate after they got their party to remove $1 billion of additional funding to Israel to replenish its Iron Dome from a congressional bill earlier this week. The Iron Dome is a defense missile technology that shoots down rockets, which Israel uses to defend itself from attack.

Some praised the progressives for an act of resistance to the near unquestioned support Israel receives from Congress. Others criticized the push to remove funding for the Iron Dome as wrong, given that it is meant to save Israeli lives. Still others pointed out that Israel, with a GDP of nearly $400 billion, doesn’t need and shouldn’t be receiving such generous amounts of U.S. aid that other countries need more desperately—an argument made last year by Yossi Beilin, former Israeli Minister of Justice, and Daniel Kurtzer, former Ambassador to Israel under President Bush.

Continue reading “What the Iron Dome means to us Palestinians”

The UN played a crucial role in defeating South African apartheid – it is time to investigate Israel’s unequal regime.

By Hanan Ashrawi & Lakhdar Brahimi | The Guardian |  Sept 25, 2021

The Palestinian people – whether under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, inside Israel or living as refugees and forced exiles – has waited for decades for the UN to implement the tens of resolutions it has adopted in support of Palestinian rights.

This week, world leaders have gathered in New York for the 76th session of the United Nations general assembly, struggling to prove its continued relevance in a bruised world. The major themes so far have been the climate crisis, vaccinating the world against Covid-19 and the new regime in Afghanistan – and rightly so. But there is another issue that also demands our attention, where progress could restore faith in the general assembly’s ability to act: the deepening regime of Israeli Jewish supremacy over millions of Palestinians, which has been recognised by more and more observers as a regime of apartheid. We join many global leaders in calling for the general assembly to investigate this regime, and consequently take the necessary measures of accountability to dismantle it.

Continue reading “As world leaders gather at the UN, the violation of Palestinian rights must be on the agenda”