Palestinian refugees protest to demand asylum in Lebanon
All hail the Peacemakers 21
Mon, 2019-09-16 00:31
#352
Mon, 2019-09-16 16:07
#353
Israel elections: Voters head to polls again
Mon, 2019-09-16 16:09
#354
Israel election: Annexation threat looms over farmers
Tue, 2019-09-17 11:42
#355
Last Tuesday, exactly a week before Israel’s September 17 elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that if reelected, he will finally annex the Jordan Valley, land that makes up more than 30 percent of the occupied Palestinian West Bank. He further promised that the remainder of the settlements in the West Bank—but not the Palestinians who call the area home—will be annexed at a later stage.
Tue, 2019-09-17 11:46
#356
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, ahead of the parliamentary elections in Israel this Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that if re-elected, he would annex up to one-third of the occupied West Bank.
His announcement prompted widespread international condemnation. But for most Palestinians such declarations mean nothing. We’ve heard many statements of support over the years, and nothing ever changes. Cynicism is widespread; by now, many of us would prefer straight talk. As Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote recently, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s plan: “Let him turn the reality in this territory into a political reality, without hiding it any longer. The time has come for truth.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/israel-election.html?fbclid=I...
Tue, 2019-09-17 16:44
#357
Betty McCollum, a member of the US Congress, is hitting back at a fellow Democrat who pulled her backing from a bill to protect Palestinian children from Israeli military detention and torture.
Earlier this month, Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dingell withdrew her name from McCollum’s bill, HR 2407.
Dingell “removed her name from HR 2407, calling it ‘counterproductive to a peaceful, two-state solution,’” McCollum, of Minnesota, tweeted Tuesday.
“Does ongoing US funding for Israeli military detention and abuse of Palestinian children promote peace or human rights violations?”
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/democrats-clash-over-b...
Tue, 2019-09-17 16:50
#358
Efforts to revoke the residency of Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), have been escalated to Israel’s deputy Attorney General for a decision over his status in the country.
Barghouti, considered “major threat to the citizens of Israel” by the country’s ultra-right politicians, has already been banned from entering the US; a decision denounced by the Palestinian human rights activists as “McCarthyite repression”. His entry ban in April along with Israel’s decision to block American Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering the country due to their support for BDS, is being used by Barghouti’s opponents in Israel to revoke his residency status.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190916-israel-to-rule-on-revoking-bd...
Tue, 2019-09-17 16:51
#359
NEW POLLING DATA commissioned by the progressive organization Data for Progress shows that a plurality of US voters support reducing military aid to Israel based on its violations of Palestinian human rights. When asked about support for reducing military aid to governments that abuse human rights in general, even more voters are in favor, and fewer are opposed.
Currently, Israel receives $3.3 billion in military aid and $500 million in missile defense funds each year, an arrangement laid out in a 2016 memorandum of understanding signed by the Obama administration and the government of Israel. Progressives in the Democratic Party—including Reps. Ilhan Omar, Mark Pocan, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have raised the possibility of reducing US military aid in response to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. This rift between progressives and Israel was only further exacerbated after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu barred Omar and Rep. Rashida Tlaib from visiting Israel and the West Bank in August, prompting angry pushback from top Democrats.
https://jewishcurrents.org/poll-democratic-voters-support-cutting-aid-to...
Tue, 2019-09-17 21:01
#360
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to secure a ruling majority in Israel's second election of 2019, exit polls released by Israeli television channels on Tuesday indicate. Exit polls show that Netanyahu's right-wing bloc will gain 53-56 seats. The biggest party, according to the polls, is Benny Gantz's Kahol Lavan. However, since neither Netanyahu nor Gantz appear to have gained a 61-seat majority, the two are likely to head to deliberations with President Reuven Rivlin who will determine which of them gets the mandate to try and form a governing coalition.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/.premium-israel-election-e...
Wed, 2019-09-18 14:32
#361
Who will be Israel's next prime minister? | Inside Story
Wed, 2019-09-18 18:24
#362
Israel elections: Who will come to power?
Fri, 2019-09-20 17:52
#363
Why Criticism of Israel is Not Antisemitism
Fri, 2019-09-20 18:40
#364
https://www.timesofisrael.com/expel-or-kill-graffitied-in-palestinian-to...
Residents of the central West Bank village of Duma woke up on Monday to find four homes graffitied with Hebrew hate slogans and tires slashed on five cars in the latest apparent hate crime targeting a Palestinian town.
Among the phrases graffitied were “Expel or kill” and “Jews wake up and expel the adversary,” photos supplied by the Yesh Din rights group showed.
Fri, 2019-09-20 21:46
#365
Netanyahu Loses BIG In Israeli Election
Sat, 2019-09-21 13:59
#366
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-as-islamophobia-is-embraced...
The BBC-HBO television series “Years and Years,” which premiered earlier this year, is a drama about the political deterioration of the world. In the opening scene of the first episode, Emma Thompson appears as Vivienne Rook, an uninhibited populist politician. Asked on a political-talk show what she would say to a Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip about the fact that Israel has reduced their supply of electric power to two hours a day, she responds straight off: “I don’t give a fuck.”
Sat, 2019-09-21 15:46
#367
Netanyahu Might Be In HUGE Trouble After Israeli Election
Tue, 2019-09-24 00:40
#368
Israeli occupation authorities approved the destruction of thousands of trees between the western entrance of the town of Taqou’ and the entrance of the village of al-Minya, southeast of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank, said a local activist.
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/israel-to-destroy-2000-olive-trees-nea...
Tue, 2019-09-24 12:45
#369
If you criticize Israeli policy, you will lose your federal funding. That is the message the Department of Education is sending with its threat to withdraw federal support for the Consortium for Middle East Studies, operated jointly by Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, if it does not alter the content of its programming.
Just three months after Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, ordered an investigation into a conference about the politics of the Gaza Strip that the consortium had sponsored – an authoritarian threat, in and of itself – the Department of Education issued a letter demanding that the Duke-UNC consortium remake its curriculum. Or else.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/23/the-trump-administ...
Tue, 2019-09-24 12:48
#370
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/live-fear-israel-190922182545...
Berlin, Germany - A German jury's decision to strip British Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie of a literary prize, because of her pro-Palestinian activism, underscores how ignoring Palestinian rights has become normalised in Germany, according to pro-Palestinian figures in the country.
On September 18, days after its initial decision, the eight-member jury of the Nelly Sachs Prize, named after the German-Jewish Nobel laureate, a poet and playwright, withdrew its $16,000 award over Shamsie's support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Tue, 2019-09-24 13:03
#371
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/09/minister-american-democrats/?fbclid=IwAR2...
No one knows who will lead the next government of Israel, but American Zionists are exulting over the political blow to Netanyahu and the good chance that he will lose the prime ministership. Not that the most likely man to succeed him, Benny Gantz of Blue and White, will do anything to end the Israel-Palestine conflict. No, but Gantz is just a much better face for Israel.
Here are some of these views.
The New York Times editorial board says that that the most important thing about Netanyahu’s exit is that it would improve Israel’s image among Democrats so as to reverse the “dangerous shift” in American politics against Israel.
At the same time, elements of the Democratic Party have grown increasingly suspicious of Israel, if not hostile to it. Mr. Netanyahu’s exit, should it materialize, may halt this dangerous shift and provide a new Israeli government the opportunity to reclaim broad bipartisan support in the United States.
Tue, 2019-09-24 13:22
#372
http://qudsnen.co/i-was-stopped-from-speaking-out-against-israels-crimes...
I was set to take part in a Labour Party conference fringe event this weekend talking about my work advocating for Palestinian rights – but was unable to travel to Brighton because of a peculiar delay in the processing of my UK visa application. I suspect that Israel’s far-right government has once again outsourced its desperate war of repression against those supporting Palestinian rights to another western government.
I was invited to two different events, organised by the National Education Union, Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Momentum-aligned fringe event The World Transformed, to speak about the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality and our nonviolent resistance to Israel’s decades-old regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.
I was planning to expose the deepening complicity of the British government, corporations and institutions, in enabling Israel’s brutal system of oppression, while highlighting how Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – a non-violent tactic against the occupation – has become a significant partner in a growing international progressive wave fighting the global far-right led by Trump.
Thu, 2019-09-26 13:10
#373
Primer: the Joint List & a Democratic Middle East
Thu, 2019-09-26 16:20
#374
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/world/middleeast/israel-election-resu...
After the polls closed in the Israeli election last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to have suffered a humiliating blow.
His chief opponent, Benny Gantz, a former military chief and leader of the centrist Blue and White party, emerged slightly ahead of the conservative Likud leader and seemed on course to be given the first chance to form Israel’s next government.
But by Wednesday, in a surprise twist, Mr. Netanyahu — long called “the magician” for his political survival skills — was back on center stage.
President Reuven Rivlin chose him to try to cobble together a coalition, opening the door to a continued shift to the right for Israel and offering a potential political lifeline to Mr. Netanyahu, who faces a looming indictment for corruption.
Fri, 2019-09-27 16:10
#375
Benjamin Netanyahu chosen to form new Israel government
Sun, 2019-09-29 21:00
#376
AUDIO: Netanyahu mainstreams Kahane
Mon, 2019-09-30 19:17
#377
It’s been barely noticed, but this past week saw an incursion of politics into sports like no other. With little reason, the Israeli government made the decision to cancel the Palestinian national football club championship, otherwise known as the FIFA Palestine Cup. The contest between Gaza’s Khadamat Rafah club and Nablus’s FC Balata, located in the central West Bank, had to be called off when Israel denied travel permits to the Gaza team. The trip would have been just a couple of miles.
Imagine the United States invading Canada to prevent the CFL championship from taking place. That is what has happened in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Wed, 2019-10-02 21:03
#378
Israel's PM Netanyahu corruption: Pre-indictment hearing to begin
Fri, 2019-10-04 19:02
#379
Long live Palestine and crush Zionism - Swedish song with English subtitles
Sun, 2019-10-06 14:32
#380
Uncomfortably Numb: Inside Gaza's Opioid Addiction Crisis | REWIND
Sun, 2019-10-06 15:32
#381
Palestinians protest over domestic violence
Sun, 2019-10-06 16:08
#382
Cousins Club of OC - Israeli Palestinian Panel Discussion Jul 16 2019
Thu, 2019-10-10 16:12
#383
West Jerusalem residents accuse police of neglecting Arab towns
Tue, 2019-10-15 12:55
#384
Michael Breaks Down Israel, Palestine & Post-Election Political Factions (TMBS 108)
Thu, 2019-10-17 11:34
#385
An Israeli octogenerian activist was severely beaten in the occupied West Bank after he tried to protect Palestinian olive farms from armed settlers near the occupied village of Burin.
Eighty-year-old Rabbi Moshe Yehudai said "he feared for his life" on Wednesday after masked Israeli setters charged at him with crowbars whilst he and a group of foreign volunteers were helping Palestinians harvest much needed olives.
Yehudai is a part of Rabbis for Human Rights, an organisation which recruits Israeli and foreign volunteers to accompany Palestinians at risk of settler violence when tending their crops.
More than 30 masked settlers charged at Yehudai and the other activists and farmers. According to Times of Israel, he was the fifth person in the group to be attacked and was left with injuries to his head and a broken arm.
https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2019/10/17/masked-israeli-settler...
Fri, 2019-10-18 16:31
#386
Azmi Dari, who lives in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Isawiyah, told Haaretz that he was attacked at about 5 A.M. by ultra-Orthodox youths on his way to work. “An older man wearing a Jellabiya was riding with me," he said, referring to the traditional Arab garment, "so they recognized that we were Arabs and began to shout: 'Arab, Arab,’ and threw a rock through the window.”
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-hundreds-of-ultra-orthodox-...
Fri, 2019-10-18 23:43
#387
Nazareth: The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.
Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.
Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Israel is regularly criticised for its belligerent occupation, its relentless expansion of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and its repeated and savage military attacks, especially on Gaza.
https://countercurrents.org/2019/10/israel-prepares-to-turn-bedouin-citi...
Sat, 2019-10-19 18:34
#388
Saudi football team criticised for occupied West Bank match
Tue, 2019-10-22 14:09
#389
Who will govern Israel? | Inside Story
Wed, 2019-10-23 12:55
#390
The suppression of Palestine activism on American campuses is a well-documented phenomenon, with multiple Zionist organizations targeting students and faculty who organize for justice for Palestine, creating lists that vilify them as anti-Semites, threatening to destroy their careers and employment opportunities, and sometimes succeeding in doing so, in what has generally come to be known as The Palestine Exception to Free Speech.
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/c-is-for-censorship/?fbclid=IwAR2ScI0JOjO...
Wed, 2019-10-23 13:33
#391
What started as a student act of civil disobedience against Santiago’s rising metro fares has now expanded outside the Chilean capital. In a sudden uprising against austerity and persistent economic inequality, a proposed fare increase (the equivalent of €0.02) was simply salt on an open wound for the poor and working-class citizens of Chile. Peaceful protests, when forcibly dispersed by the national police, have turned violent. The government, led by conservative billionaire President Sebastián Piñera, responded by declaring a state of emergency and calling in the military to quell protests, declaring that the state was “at war”.
While the military enforces brutality towards civilians not seen since the dictatorship that ended in the early 1990s, it is important to highlight the international connections to such brutality. The state of Israel’s tactical and resource-based military support in the past and present for Chile should be noted in particular.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/chile-protests-army-israel-palestin...
Wed, 2019-10-23 13:40
#392
The Palestinian Authority has blocked 59 Palestinian and Arabic-language news websites and social media pages.
The Ramallah magistrate’s court issued the order on 17 October at the request of the PA attorney general, Akram Ismail Khatib, but it was not reported until Monday.
The court order claims the websites violate the PA’s Electronic Crimes Law, which human rights groups say is “a tool to silence legitimate free expression and criticism of the authorities.”
The law was decreed by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas in 2017, and was met with strong Palestinian rejection.
Social media users expressed outrage using the hashtag “blocking is a crime.”
A list of blocked websites includes Arab48, Wattan TV, Shehab News Agency, Quds News Network, Gaza Now, Metras and others.
No Israeli websites have been blocked.
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/palestinian-authority...
Wed, 2019-10-23 17:19
#393
An Israeli drone was shot down in southern Lebanon by a man with a hunting rifle on Wednesday, local media reported.
The Israeli military confirmed a drone was downed within Lebanese territory, claiming it was on a "routine security operation".
A video shared by Lebanese media showed a small surveillance drone hovering in the sky before several shots ring out which, Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star reported, were fired from a hunting rifle.
A man who appears in the video says: "The army's sleeping but we're not sleeping."
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/lebanese-man-hunting-rifle-downs-isra...
Thu, 2019-10-24 15:54
#394
Teams of Israel’s Authority for Development and Settlement of Bedouin and the Land Administration broke distributed 140 demolition orders to homes and a mosque in Rahat, Safa news agency reported yesterday.
All of the houses are owned by the families of Al-Atayqa and Al-Buhairi, who have been living in them for more than 70 years; before the creation of the occupation state of Israel.
The mosque, according to the Arab residents of the area, was built at least 40 years ago.
In a statement, residents called for people not to buy leases to the land as they are owned by the two families. Anyone who violates the consensus would be subject to the traditional tribal prosecution.
It also called for Arab residents and leaders to join their resistance against displacement.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20191024-israel-issues-140-demolition-...
Sat, 2019-10-26 11:28
#395
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/un-expert-calls-for-international-ba...
The United Nations independent expert on human rights in the Palestinian territories is calling for an international ban on all products made in Israeli settlements, as a step to potentially end Israel's 52-year-old "illegal occupation."
Michael Lynk told the General Assembly's human rights committee Wednesday that the international community should also issue "a clarion call to the United Nations" to complete and release a database "on businesses engaged in activities related to the illegal settlements."
Sun, 2019-10-27 18:46
#396
Palestinian and Israeli activists launched a viral campaign on Sunday demanding the release of a Jordanian citizen who has been on hunger strike for the past month after being imprisoned by Israel without trial since August.
Hiba al-Labadi, a 32-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian national, was detained by Israeli forces on August 20th at the Allenby Bridge border crossing while traveling from Jordan with her mother to a wedding in the West Bank city of Jenin. Her arrest was reportedly related to meetings she allegedly had with Hezbollah affiliates during a previous visit to Beirut, where she was visiting her sister.
https://972mag.com/al-labadi-administrative-detention-jordan/144166/?fbc...
Mon, 2019-10-28 13:25
#397
October 28, 2019 - In a historic step, Oslo’s newly installed City Council is banning Israeli settlement goods and services from public procurements. The ban on goods from Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is a part of the newly adopted platform for 2019 - 2023 approved by Oslo’s recently-elected City Council, led by the Socialist Left (SV), Labour and Green parties.
Despite concerted efforts by Israel and its right-wing allies in Norway and worldwide to repress accountability measures in support of Palestinian rights, Oslo, Norway’s capital and largest city, has now become the sixth Norwegian municipality to ban settlement goods and services, along with one county council.
https://www.bdsmovement.net/news/norways-capital-oslo-banning-israeli-se...
Tue, 2019-10-29 11:24
#398
The Jewish, secular, socialist, anti-Zionist Arbeiter Bund party of the old Russian Empire brought an overflow crowd last month to the auditorium at the Center for Jewish History on West 16th Street, New York City.
The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research held a September 16 panel discussion on “Bundism’s Influence Today” — on its alternative vision of being Jewish in the world, opposite to Zionism’s premise that genuine Jewish life yearns for Jewish political sovereignty.
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/anti-zionism-is-celebrated-on-a-new-york-...
Tue, 2019-10-29 11:26
#399
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/why-did-microsoft-fund-israeli-firm-sur...
Microsoft has invested in a startup that uses facial recognition to surveil Palestinians throughout the West Bank, in spite of the tech giant’s public pledge to avoid using the technology if it encroaches on democratic freedoms.
AnyVision, which is headquartered in Israel but has offices in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, sells an “advanced tactical surveillance” software system, Better Tomorrow. It lets customers identify individuals and objects in any live camera feed, such as a security camera or a smartphone, and then track targets as they move between different feeds.
Wed, 2019-10-30 13:08
#400
https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/whitewash-israel-closes-investigations-in...
The Israeli military has closed the case files of three Palestinians who were killed by its forces in 2018, prompting backlash from rights groups like B’Tselem who initially investigated the killings. The Military Advocate General’s Corps (MAG Corps) closed the cases of three Palestinians who were killed in the occupied West Bank, which B’Tselem described as “unjustified.”
Wed, 2019-10-30 16:43
#401
Israel's Tightening Control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza