Category: News

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”

Tent of Nations is an educational and environmental farm next to the village of Nahalin, on a hill top southwest of Bethlehem. The farm has been in Daoud Nassar’s family since 1916 when his grandfather purchased the land known as Dahers’ Vineyard.   For more than 25 years the Nassar family has been embroiled in a legal battle to protect their property from confiscation by the Israeli government. Despite the frustration and constant struggles, they have made their farm—the last Palestinian-controlled hilltop in the area—a symbol of peace simply by farming their land and welcoming guests and volunteers of all nationalities and religions.

By Daoud Nassar – Facebook | May 21, 2021

It was appalling to witness the rapid spread of the fire to more fields damaging thousands of olive, almond, and grape trees.

Today was a very hard day. While we were on our way to the farm after picking up some farming tools from Bethlehem for ploughing, we received a phone call that left us with no words. The neighboring farmers informed us that our farm was set on fire. Our day took a sudden shift as we rushed to the farm, tried to secure water to extinguish the fire with our very limited sources on the farm, and call for help! It was appalling to witness the rapid spread of the fire to more fields damaging thousands of olive, almond, and grape trees. Thankfully, we were able to control the situation with the help of family members and nearby villagers after spending seven hours in the smoke.

It was very devastating to see that all of the new trees that we planted and watered for the past five months were gone in seconds. To this moment, we do not know the cause of the fire or who was behind it. We will inform you as soon as we know more.

Continue reading “Tent of Nations farm set on fire”

Baseless claims that US journalists helped launder about the Associated Press and Hamas prompted a right-wing smear campaign

By Matthew Petti  | Responsible Statecraft | May 21, 2021

Recent college graduate Emily Wilder was fired from the Associated Press on Thursday after right-wing activists dug up her previous involvement in Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, two pro-Palestinian campus organizations.

It started with an Israeli bomb smashing into the Associated Press offices in Gaza. It ended with an AP journalist fired for her pro-Palestinian activism while she was a college student.

The Israeli military has justified its May 15 attack on al-Jalaa Tower — which hosted numerous foreign press bureaus in Gaza — by claiming that the Palestinian militant group Hamas had offices in the building. The Associated Press has denied that claim, and Israel has not publicly provided evidence to support its side of the story.

But right-wing U.S. media and a disgruntled former AP employee have attempted to drum up justification for the airstrike by painting the American news agency as a partisan, pro-Hamas source. Their claims have been given airtime by mainstream journalists, putting the AP — rather than the foreign military that bombed it — on the defensive.

Continue reading “How an Israeli attack in Gaza led to the firing of an AP reporter”

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”

This conflict won’t be resolved without an honest accounting of the roots of occupation and exclusion.

By Alice Rothchild | The Seattle Times | May 19, 2021

Palestinians have clearly reached a breaking point after suffering from 72 years of racist and exclusionary policies by the Israeli government, its ongoing seizure of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and the increasingly rightward, tending toward fascistic, political parties.

Gaza is roughly a 26-by-6-mile strip of land with 2 million people living under a brutal 14-year siege where, until last week, they were struggling to control a rampant COVID-19 outbreak. Now, in just nine days, using the most advanced and lethal weaponry the United States can provide, an estimated 219 Gazans have been killed, including 63 children, 1,500 injured with 72,000 internally displaced. Dozens of educational facilities, six hospitals and 11 primary health care centers have been damaged, and water, sanitation and electrical infrastructure bombed. Israel is not allowing the entry of vaccines, and it damaged the only testing lab. There would be no available hospital beds and a shortage of critical medications and oxygen if someone were to be diagnosed with the virus.

Continue reading “Palestinian oppression and despair in stark relief in Netanyahu’s war”

Statement of protest and solidarity with the Palestinian people from the mentors of We Are Not Numbers in acknowledgement of the general strike in historic Palestine and the diaspora.

By We Are Not Numbers  | May 18, 2021

I am on the board of We Are Not Numbers and I have been working with mentors in the program to craft this statement to express our outrage and concern for the massive Israeli assault on Gaza. Our job is to support and uplift voices from the region. This statement only has power if it is read and discussed. Please send to friends, family, colleagues, use your social media, call your local newspapers. SPREAD THE WORD. THE MASSACRE IS EVER MORE CATASTROPHIC. I just received an email stating that the Ministry of Health offices were ruined, the only biological and covid testing facility destroyed, 6 hospitals and 9 primary clinics are damaged to ruined, drinkable water is short and non drinkable absent for many. The Israelis bombed the street leading to Al Shifa Hospital. Two schools that are now shelters for the dispossessed have been told they are bombing targets. These are war crimes against medical workers and innocent civilians.
— Alice Rothchild, board member

We the undersigned are mentors for the We Are Not Numbers youth storytelling project. We work with Palestinian writers 18 to 30 years of age to develop their writing skills and share their stories, poetry, and graphic art with the English-speaking public. In this capacity, we have each gotten to know a number of young people, most of whom are living in Gaza, who want to be heard and understood, who have powerful stories to tell, and are rendered largely invisible by the world. Despite the wars, the besiegement, and the relentless attacks they have faced, they braved their experiences and crafted their narratives in ways that humbly allowed us to catch a glimpse of being young, born under siege, and living with intermittent electricity, water, fuel and internet, a drastic lack of employment, drones buzzing overhead and no access to basic public services.

Continue reading “We support Palestine”