Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran an article by National Library of Israel employee Gil Weissblei that refers to 1937 Palestine as “pre-state Israel”. An editor defends the choice, saying the photos in the story document the “embryonic” state of Israel.
We must reject the “who was here first?” argument about national rights in Palestine. Then we can focus on the real history. Our pasts intersected throughout the centuries. We must stop viewing Palestinian and Jewish histories as competing, mutually exclusive entities.
A poll, conducted in January and February 2017, exposes a vast divide between Canadian government policy and public opinion when it comes to Israel. The poll found that 66% of respondents who expressed a view consider Canadian government sanctions on Israel to be a reasonable means of ensuring Israel’s compliance with international law. An even higher proportion of respondents (78%) believe that the Palestinian call for a boycott is also a reasonable means of ensuring Israel’s respect for international law. Although a large majority of Canadians are now receptive to sanctions and a boycott, the recently elected government of Justin Trudeau is continuing Stephen Harper’s inglorious tradition of aiding and abetting Israel at every opportunity.
How will the ADL and more progressive Jews respond to Trump’s unholy alliance of white nationalism, Zionism and Islamophobia? The history is worrying. In 1982, ADL’s director said, The need was to fund Israel’s military. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.”
When Netanyahu embraced Trump, he exemplified the collusion between Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism. In fact, it is now clear that the Israeli government cannot protect- and does not represent liberal Jews who wish to live in peace within diverse communities around the world, or within Israel itself.
A new poll finds that 46 percent of Canadians, including a majority of those who support every party but the Conservatives, hold a negative view of Israel. The Canadian government is seen to have a pro-Israel bias by 61 percent of respondents, while 91 percent do not think criticism of Israeli government policy is necessarily anti-semitic. These results suggest that Canada’s big political parties are out of step with Canadians on these issues.
“Every time someone says– and people say it all the time, I get it on twitter all the time– ‘There’s no such thing as a Palestinian,’ or ‘There was nobody there when the Zionists arrived’– these are genocidal statements,” Ben Ehrenreich says at Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies.
In Trump’s world where money talks, poor Yemenis are banned from entering the United States (and are killed back home) and Syrians fleeing violence are portrayed as terrorists, while Saudi princes who cling to power by torturing and beheading dissidents get safe passage to their luxury digs in Manhattan’s Trump Towers.
What the mainstream press leaves out: January 8 killings of four soldiers in Jerusalem were likely result of a young Palestinian man losing all hope as well as the ability to cope in an increasingly oppressive situation, targeting the people who have made his life a misery, writes Alice Rothchild.
Noushin Framke was born in Iran in 1960 into a family where politics was ubiquitous and permeated every layer of life. Her father was a political prisoner under the last Shah’s regime; he had been rounded up with many writers and intellectuals after the 1953 CIA coup. Now, she reflects on President Trump’s executive order banning immigration from Iran and how a family that has always been obsessed with politics is coping.
Two years of Saudi-led coalition bombing of Yemen has culminated in a situation in which 18.8 million people are now in need of some form of humanitarian aid. Britain and the U.S. are implicated in Saudi war crimes, but the western press has largely ignored the atrocities.
The Stop the Wall movement in Palestine began a dozen years ago and has transformed the international struggle: bringing people together based on human rights to end the occupation, end racial discrimination towards Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, and to support the right of return for refugees.