The primary damage to Israel done by the BDS campaign is reputational. It casts a shadow over Israel’s integrity for people who have no interest in MidEast politics. The government says it has no impact on its growing economy but it has set up a unit in the Strategic Affairs Dept to spearhead the denigration of BDS. It’s floundering, Adelson’s billions may not be enough.

What passes as antisemitism in the UK today has no connection to antisemitism up to 1945 – a sustained dispossession, humiliation, exclusion and finally mass murder of Jews. Now, for the desperate, it seems to mean any support for anything Palestinian or any impolite comment about anything at all to a Jewish person.

Some one started a rumour that there was a great treasure to be found if Labour looked for it. This treasure was evidence that antisemitism in the Labour Party was rampant. Anyone who had spotted it was invited to send the evidence, pinpointing its whereabouts, to Sami Chakrabarti who had been commissioned to inquire into the allegation. To the tremendous disappointment of some, no such evidence could be found. Why not? Well obviously because the search was not thorough enough. Should Chakrabarti have resorted to the rack to extract confessions? A letter from over 100 Jews protesting at the attacks on the searchers for coming up empty-handed.

Our postings editor is having a well-earned break and so this week’s summary – August 1st to 7th, 2016 – isn’t much more than a brief description of postings.

In another tour down memory lane, we revisit the Magnes Zionist’s 2007 contribution on the forced exile of the Jews after the failure of their revolts against the Romans in 70 and 135CE.

To this day, writes Jeremiah Haber, most lay people, Jews and non-Jews, accept the myth of the exile, whereas no historian, Jew or non-Jew, takes it seriously. Drawing on the work of Prof Yisrael Yuval, Haber looks at “the disconnect between popular and scholarly belief and tr[ies] to examine the origin of the myth several centuries after the event occurred”.

In a relatively quiet week, we are revisiting some interesting analyses and interventions from the past. Here is Diane Mason’s entertaining piece from 2010, Tell Me Again, Who Made The Desert Bloom?. In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine. Mason draws on it extensively in her account of the productivity of Palestinian agriculture at the time. Yet another Zionist myth bites the dust…

Israel is divided – and the army being blown apart says Uri Avnery – by the Azaria affair. Sergeant Azaria, remember, shot and killed a wounded, incapacitated Palestinian at point blank range. For the army command killing a wounded enemy is against orders. For a large part of the population, especially the religious and the right, Azaria is a hero. Lieberman and Netanyahu are supporting him – against the army command…

Many countries have appalling histories of the mistreatment of children in recent times. Israel, too, has its own dark history of rank racism in its earliest years, when substantial immigration of Jews from Arab countries was accompanied by a visceral contempt for their ‘backwardness’. Here Jonathan Cook tells the story of the theft of Yemeni and other children from their biological parents simply because they were Mizrachi – to be brought up by good Ashkenazi families instead…

A document obtained by Peace Now reveals the big bluff behind the pretext of “military necessity” used since 1967 to seize Palestinian land, on which about one-third of the settlements were established. This method was used throughout the 1970s until it was banned by the Elon Moreh ruling in 1979. Today the government has found another bluff and is using “declarations of state lands” in order to expropriate lands in area C for the purpose of settlements.

In videos released last week in English and Hebrew, Benjamin Netanyahu urged Palestinian citizens to become more active in public life. But these videos are addressed to European audiences, disquieted at the rank discrimination against Palestinians in Israel. The reality on the ground is that this discrimination is growing worse, as Jonathan Cook makes clear.

Over the last decade, Israel has demolished over 1,100 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, leaving more than 5,199 people homeless, including at least 2,602 minors. The extensive demolitions are part of a broader Israeli policy of forced transfer. Here is the speech given by Hagai El-Ad, executive director of B’Tselem, at a conference on home demolitions held at the Knesset on 27 July 2016.

The Royall Report, into alleged antisemitism at the Oxford University Labour Club earlier this year, was submitted to the Labour party in May. A brief summary was published but never the full report. That has finally been leaked to the Jewish Chronicle which does its best to inflame the situation, trumpeting that ‘Baroness Royall report reveals Oxford Labour students engaged in antisemitism’. It doesn’t. Here, JfJfP founder signatory Naomi Wayne offers an immediate response explaining why she finds the report a very odd and a very deficient document.

If the aim of ISIL is to get maximum publicity for barbaric acts, they succeeded when acolytes cut the throat of the gentle French priest Jacques Hamel. Could the Catholic church be the first body to challenge ISIL morally – and win back French people to Catholic Christianity?

This is another good news story from Gaza – that is, a report of normal cultural life finding ways to flourish. It’s about public libraries and their shortage of books (except religious ones. They need science, history, literature in Arabic). Surely this is something that people of good will could help with.

Combatants for Peace, the NGO made up of former Israeli and Palestinian fighters, celebrated its tenth anniversary last May. All who belong think that violence merely fuels more violence and the occupation is itself an act of violence. They are slowly building wider support as people give up on their official leaders ever bringing about an end to violence.

This week, July 25th to 31st, 2016, is the fourth week of the trial at Jaffa military court of Elor Azaria, the baby-faced killer of Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, who, with Ramzi al-Qasrawi had knifed a soldier on March 24, causing a minor injury. All Israeli media have been covering it but it is Haaretz which has probed what […]

Israeli leaders may rejoice in the military and diplomatic support they receive internationally. But not one of their friends supports their two-edged policy of building settlements on Palestinian land and demolishing Palestinians homes – also on Palestinian land. There is no peaceable future in this.

The trial of Elor Azaria (see posting for info) has swamped the immature IDF medic with its import. It’s pushed the rift between the IDF and politicians to a dangerous distance. It’s created a public celebration of Arab-murder. It’s created a competition about who is the most patriotic.

Joseph Grim Feinberg looks back at the sort of Jewishness that developed with the labour movement and sideways at the many sorts of Zionism that are discussed in Israel. His own Jewishness thrives on criticism of rigid concepts.

This is about the defiant optimism of one Palestinian developer and young middle-class people in Gaza City (sea, sun and fun). The two curses, the Israeli siege plus three lethal assaults and the ineffective Palestinian leadership plus Hamas aggression are acknowledged.