Category: News

At the J Street Conference this past weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered a speech fit for AIPAC.

By Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents | Dec 6, 2022

Blinken didn’t say that settlements violate international law—another longstanding US position that Trump overturned and the Biden administration has failed to restore.

When J Street announced that Secretary of State Antony Blinken was speaking at its national conference, it raised the possibility that the Biden administration had finally had enough. Faced with an incoming Israeli government dedicated not merely to entrenching Israel’s control over millions of stateless Palestinians but willing to threaten those who resist with expulsion, perhaps the Biden administration finally found the contradiction between its words and its actions too great to bear. Since taking office, the president has repeatedly vowed that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy”—even as his administration stood by while Israel criminalized Palestinian human rights groups and demolished homes in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. Maybe when faced with the prospect of continuing to unconditionally subsidize a government that not only practiced apartheid but flirted with mass ethnic cleansing, the Biden administration would finally change course.

Continue reading “For the Biden administration, there are no red lines on Israel”

Despite their connections to apartheid, Israeli tech companies like Oosto continue to find support from foreign investors and governments, including the United States. The double standard towards Israeli tech perpetuates a culture of oppression targeting Palestinians.

By Jack Dodson | Mondoweiss | Dec 4, 2022

Biden’s proposed AI Bill of Rights exemplifies the double standards the U.S. government, financial, and corporate sectors employ when it comes to technology and human rights.

Bruce Reed, deputy chief of staff to United States President Joe Biden, took the stage at a press event on October 4 to celebrate a milestone for his administration. They would be releasing a blueprint for use of artificial intelligence that would guide future policies around its ethical use.

“Most Americans think Washington can be better at artificial than at intelligence, but this is a group that got it right,” Reed said, before arguing that tech should be used to strengthen democracy rather than undermine it. “We’re kicking off this work, leading by example, with real commitments from across the federal government.”

Continue reading “Apartheid is lucrative for Israeli tech”

The November 2022 elections has given Knesset member Itamar Ben-Gvir, a follower of far-right ideologue Meir Kahane the promise of realizing ideas like the forced expulsion of Palestinians and leftists.

By Joshua Leifer | Jewish Currents | Sept 23, 2022

He represents in his person the possibility of reconciling Zionism’s ego and id, of fully unleashing the violent ethnonationalism that the rule of law both channels and represses.

Early last week, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the 46-year-old lawyer and leader of Israel’s extreme-right Jewish Power party, released a short campaign video on social media. “This is a clip you must watch to the end,” he tweeted. The video shows a succession of short quotes attributed to “B.G.,” set against grainy black-and-white footage from the early days of Zionist settlement in British Mandate Palestine. “The Bible is the soul of the Jewish People, from its beginning and for all the generations,” reads one quote. “One does not receive a land, one conquers it,” reads another. “If you put all the values in the world on one hand, and the existence of Israel on the other, I would choose Israel’s existence,” reads a third. At the end, Ben-Gvir himself appears in the frame, wearing a suit and tie, his usually conspicuous yarmulke now only barely visible on the back of his head. “I agree with every word, yet it wasn’t I who said these, but a different B.G.,” he smiles. Then, as a picture of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding leader, appears in the foreground alongside Ben-Gvir, he says, “Let’s get Israel back on track.”

Continue reading “Kahanism’s Raucous Return”

By Thomas L. Friedman | The New York Times | Nov 4, 2022

“What we are seeing is a shift in the hawkish right from a political identity built on focusing on the ‘enemy outside’ — the Palestinians — to the ‘enemy inside’ — Israeli Arabs,”
— Moshe Halbertal, Hebrew University 

Imagine you woke up after the 2024 U.S. presidential election and found that Donald Trump had been re-elected and chose Rudy Giuliani for attorney general, Michael Flynn for defense secretary, Steve Bannon for commerce secretary, evangelical leader James Dobson for education secretary, Proud Boys former leader Enrique Tarrio for homeland security head and Marjorie Taylor Greene for the White House spokeswoman.

“Impossible,” you would say. Well, think again.

As I’ve noted before, Israeli political trends are often a harbinger of wider trends in Western democracies — Off Broadway to our Broadway. I hoped that the national unity government that came to power in Israel in June 2021 might also be a harbinger of more bipartisanship here. Alas, that government has now collapsed and is being replaced by the most far-far-right coalition in Israel’s history. Lord save us if this is a harbinger of what’s coming our way.

Read the full article here →   (subscription may be required)

How has support for the Palestinian cause of BDS – for boycotts of those directly involved in Israel’s decades-long oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians – come to be reinterpreted as racism against Jews?

By Jonathan Cook | Middle East Eye | Nov 23, 2022

Caryl Churchill has been stripped of her award because state-sponsored racism still lies at the heart of the European project.

There are troubling insights to be gained into modern European racism from the German arts community’s decision to revoke a lifetime achievement award to the respected British playwright Caryl Churchill over her trenchant support for the Palestinians.

On 31 October, Churchill was stripped of the European Drama Prize she had been given in April in recognition of her life’s work. The decision was backed by Petra Olschowski, the arts minister of the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, who said: “We as a country take a clear and non-negotiable stance against any form of antisemitism. This is all the more reason why a prize funded by the state cannot be awarded under the given circumstances.”

Continue reading “Why German state racism is now directed at the Palestinians”

By Miko Peled | MintPress News | Nov 21, 2022

The military is there to assist the settlers, not protect the Palestinian civilians who they are constantly terrorizing.

Saturday, November 19, 2022, was according to Jewish tradition Shabat Chayei Sarah – the Shabbos, or Saturday commemorating the death and burial of the biblical matriarch Sarah. In the biblical story, her husband Abraham purchased her burial plot in the ancient city of Al-Khalil. According to Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro, the “commemoration” events that Al-Khalil has been subjected to over the last few decades have nothing to do with Jewish tradition, only, “Zionist Embellishments.”

Al-Khalil, or Hebron in Hebrew, is the largest city in the West Bank, with close to a quarter of a million residents. The Old City part of Al-Khalil, also known as H-2, is a beautiful place, with narrow alleyways and architecture that bears witness to the centuries of grandeur it enjoys, the fourth-holiest city in Islamic tradition. Around 25,000 Palestinians and close to 800 Jewish settlers live in the old city. The settlers are vile, racist and violent to a point where 800 of them are able to terrorize thousands of their Palestinian neighbors.

Continue reading “Settler pogroms against Palestinians will become the norm under new Israeli government”

Netanyahu’s elevation of the racist messianic politicians Ben-Gvir and Smotrich despite calls by Israel’s friends in the U.S. to ostracize them has caused an earthquake in the Israel lobby.

By Philip Weiss | Mondoweiss | Nov 21, 2022

The FBI is reportedly starting an investigation into Israel’s killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh way back on May 11…

The shocking success of the racist-fascist party Religious Zionism in the Israel election three weeks ago has caused an earthquake inside the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. And that earthquake has allowed Joe Biden to take unprecedented –for him– baby-steps to confront the Israeli government.

In fact, the Biden administration appears to be scripted by J Street, which is trying to replace AIPAC in the Israel lobby as the true representative of American Jews.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s review the sequence.

Continue reading “Israel lobby’s realignment over Ben-Gvir is giving Biden room to criticize”

Continued support for Israel clearly contradicts the supposed US commitment to human rights, dignity, and justice.

By Alice Rothchild | The Palestine Chronicle | Nov 17, 2022

The recent election in Israel has resulted in historically the most racist, ultranationalist, homophobic, religiously fundamentalist parties joining in a coalition to govern.

The predicted Republican tsunami now turned red puddle revealed that despite gerrymandering, voter suppression, and massive amounts of right-wing billionaire money and disinformation, US voters have major qualms about a MAGA universe engulfing the country.

On state and national levels, voters mostly rejected takeovers by election deniers and conspiracy promoters, and voiced support for abortion rights, increased wages, marijuana legalization, and candidates who have some degree of experience and qualifications rather than celebrity status and allegiance to the former president.

This election can be contrasted with one of the US’s most important allies, a country Biden and numerous elected officials have repeatedly pledged almost total allegiance to and billions in military and political support.

Continue reading “United States and Israel: Election contradiction”

Israel’s victims are required to defend their oppressors as well as themselves, or be accused of “anti-Semitism.”

By Joseph Massad | The Electronic Intifada | Nov 9, 2022

No other colonized people has been forced to carry such a double burden.

Since the beginning of Zionist Jewish colonization of their country in the 1880s, Palestinians have faced demands that they carry a double burden: to fight off the Jewish racist colonists while having to defend their colonizers against anti-Jewish European Christian racism.

No other colonized people has been forced to carry such a double burden. Not even the Indigenous African peoples of Liberia were asked to defend their own Black American racist colonizers who despised them against European and US anti-Black racism that targeted the Black colonists.

Neither were Black South Africans ever asked to defend their Afrikaner oppressors against the British who oppressed the Afrikaners, even placing them in concentration camps.

Continue reading “The burden Western liberals impose only on Palestinians”

The re-fragmentation of Palestinian parties in Israel exemplifies the lack of a political compass to guide their struggle, with the public divided on how to confront both a far-right government and a broken liberation movement.

By Amjad Iraqi | +972 Magazine | Nov 7, 2022

The total disintegration of the Joint List, by cruel historical timing, is a critical piece of the far right’s momentous victory.

The triumph of Kahanism and the impending return of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister have, quite rightly, dominated headlines in the wake of Israel’s dramatic general election last Tuesday. With a solid majority of 64 Knesset seats, Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc, which includes the extremist Religious Zionism slate led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, is preparing to embark on an aggressive and radical program of action on both sides of the Green Line, with the incoming premier already receiving warm words of welcome from far-right and authoritarian leaders from India to Hungary to the United States.

On the other side of the political spectrum, an opposing development may prove to be just as pivotal — and no less dangerous. A few weeks before voters headed to the polls, the four Palestinian-led parties in Israel, which had been united under the “Joint List” just two years ago, affirmed that they would be running as three competing slates in this year’s election. Although they attained a combined total of 10 seats — the same as in the previous Knesset — with a 53 percent Arab voter turnout, these figures conceal a deep rupture that now exists between the parties and within the wider Palestinian community in Israel, the effects of which have destroyed a contentious yet vital engine of their politics.

Continue reading “The Joint List is dead. Who will lead the fight for Palestinian citizens?”