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-articleTitle: Natalie Portman Rejects Israel Prize in Light of its Crimes in Gaza
-pageTitle: Natalie Portman Rejects Israel Prize in Light of its Crimes in Gaza | BDS Movement
-description: April 19, 2018 — After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel's recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.087Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/natalie-portman-rejects-israel-prize-light-its-crimes-gaza
 ---
-April 19, 2018 — After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel's recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has made its brand so toxic that even well-known Israeli-American cultural figures, like Natalie Portman, now refuse to blatantly whitewash, or art-wash, Israeli crimes and apartheid policies.
-The Palestinian-led, Nobel Peace Prize nominated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights has been growing in the cultural mainstream in the last few years. Of the twenty six Oscar nominees in 2016, none has accepted an all-expense-paid Israeli propaganda junket.
-Towards the end of 2017, the New Zealand star Lorde heeded appeals from BDS activists and announced the cancellation of a gig in Tel Aviv. In response to an ugly smear campaign against her run by Israel lobby figures in the US, over one hundred artists, including Hollywood stars, signed a letter in the Guardian supporting her.
-As a Washington Post report on Lorde’s act of solidarity with Palestinians concluded:
-Lorde will almost certainly be one of the last major artists to schedule an Israel concert date without appearing to have fully considered the global implications. From now on ... merely scheduling a concert date in Israel will be considered a political act.
-Portman’s rebuff to Israeli honors underlines this conclusion.
-As was the case in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, the BDS movement calls on all artists and cultural figures to respect the nonviolent Palestinian picket line and stay away from apartheid Israel until the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people are fully respected.
-The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was initiated in 2004 to contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality. PACBI advocates for the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, given their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. Visit PACBI at https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi and follow us on Twitter @PACBI

+articleTitle: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal
+pageTitle: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal – Mondoweiss
+description: Israel just submitted its latest objections to Hamas’s revised ceasefire proposal amid unprecedented international outcry over hunger in Gaza, as 27 Palestinians have died of starvation in the last week alone.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:58:17.458Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/as-gaza-starvation-shocks-the-world-witkoff-is-in-israel-to-push-for-a-ceasefire-deal/
 ---
+The U.S. envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Thursday, reportedly to push for concluding a ceasefire deal in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Witkoff is scheduled to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and will possibly visit U.S. and Israel-backed distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which Palestinians have described as “death traps” where over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army.
+Witkoff’s visit comes a day after Israel gave Egyptian and Qatari mediators its objections to Hamas’s recent response to the latest Witkoff proposal. The objections were over Hamas’s condition that the Israeli army withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor — the militarized area straddling the Palestinian-Egyptian border — and the principle of exchanging bodies of slain Israeli captives for living Palestinian prisoners.
+Hamas had handed its response to Witkoff’s proposal last week to mediators, which Israeli officials told Israeli media and Axios was “better” than Hamas’s previous response and “could be built upon.”  Hamas had submitted revised Israeli military withdrawal maps that included areas like the Philadelphi Corridor and proposed a split in aid distribution between the UN and the GHF. Following Hamas’s response, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the ceasefire talks, followed by declarations by U.S. President Trump announcing that the talks had collapsed and that Hamas “wanted to die.”
+Although it remained unclear what part of the Hamas response provoked this kind of U.S. reaction, it came as a surprise, considering that Israeli officials had reportedly described it as workable.
+Notably, Israel’s objections, handed to mediators last Tuesday, did not include Hamas’s amendments to the aid distribution mechanism.
+Global shock at Gaza famine
+Israel’s omission of its previous objections to Hamas’s aid distribution amendments comes amid an unprecedented wave of international outrage over Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of at least 27 Palestinians in the last week alone, raising the total number of Palestinians dying of hunger in the Strip since October 2023 to 122, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
+The mounting international criticism even reached the U.S. president himself, who admitted on Tuesday that “you can’t fake that,” describing the situation in Gaza as “real starvation.” Trump’s statements followed the explicit condemnation of Israel’s policies by 25 countries, including France, the UK, and Canada.
+Meanwhile, Israel allowed the entry of hundreds of aid trucks into the Strip, as well as airdrops of food by neighboring countries and its own military. The airdrops have been criticized by Gazans as unsafe, with plummeting aid crates killing several Palestinians in previous attempts, while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said on Tuesday that the aid allowed now entering the Strip was “a drop” that must “turn into an ocean.”
+Simultaneously, Israeli forces continued to open fire on Palestinian aid-seekers who attempted to reach the recent aid trucks, according to Palestinian reports. On Wednesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire on aid-seekers who tried to access a food truck that had been allowed into the Strip in the Sudaniyeh neighborhood in north Gaza, killing at least 51 and wounding over 600. Al Jazeera Mubasher aired video footage of dozens of slain and wounded Palestinians from the incident strewn across the morgue floor of what remains of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the number of aid-seekers killed by Israeli forces has risen to 1,300.
+As ceasefire talks are expected to resume following Witkoff’s visit to the region, the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot revealed on Thursday that PM Netanyahu had reportedly told his ally on the religious right, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, that if a deal wasn’t reached with Hamas in the coming days he would direct the army to displace thousands of Palestinians from the Strip, a promise Netanyahu allegedly made to persuade Ben-Gvir not to quit the government coalition over ceasefire talks.
+Yediot also reported that Israel was actively negotiating with five countries to accept Palestinians from Gaza, including Libya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

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-articleTitle: Palestinians Salute the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for its Endorsement of the Academic Boycott of Israel
-pageTitle: Palestinians Salute the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) for its Endorsement of the Academic Boycott of Israel | BDS Movement
-description:  The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) salutes the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.115Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/palestinians-salute-association-asian-american-studies-aaas-its-endorsement-academic-boycott
 ---
-The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) salutes the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in the United States for its principled support for the cause of justice in Palestine by adopting, at its annual meeting in Seattle on 20 April 2013, a resolution supporting the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and in solidarity with the world-wide movement responding to this call from Palestinian civil society.
-Palestinian academics, students and society at large deeply appreciate and are inspired by this most effective expression of international solidarity that reminds us of similar initiatives taken by academics and academic associations worldwide in the 1980s in support of the academic boycott of South Africa under apartheid.
-The adoption of this resolution by the General Membership of the AAAS is precedent-setting. This is the first time that a professional association of academics anywhere outside the Arab world adopts such a clear and unequivocal resolution in support of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions due to their entrenched complicity in Israel’s persistent denial of basic Palestinian rights, including the right to education and freedom of movement.
-The resolution, approved unanimously, resolves that the Association for Asian American Studies “endorses and will honor the call of Palestinian civil society for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions,” and that it “supports the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine and in support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.” [1].
-PACBI wishes to acknowledge, with gratitude, the determined efforts of all the academics who worked on and who endorsed this unprecedented resolution. Considering the prevailing climate of intimidation in the US academy when it comes to voicing the slightest criticism of Israel’s violations of international law, it indeed takes courage to advocate for the academic boycott and to demand that the rights of those who support the BDS movement should be protected.  Such resolutions indicate a refusal to be intimidated by the persistent efforts of apologists for the Israeli state and Israel lobby groups inside and outside the academy to keep BDS outside the domain of acceptable public discourse.
-This decision cannot but be viewed as a triumph for the logic of academic boycott against Israel‘s complicit academy, as consistently reflected in the positions of the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees (PFUUPE) as well as PACBI and its partners worldwide. It is, indeed, a significant step in the direction of holding Israeli institutions accountable for their collusion in maintaining the state‘s occupation, colonization and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people.
-The AAAS resolution amounts to a clear decision to challenge the notion that Israel’s complicit institutions, including the academy, can be "normal" partners of any self-respecting institution or association.  Indeed, it has to be recognized by academics the world over that Israeli universities, in particular, are part and parcel of the structures of domination and oppression of the Palestinian people.  Far from being neutral, Israeli academic institutions have played a direct and indirect role in promoting, justifying, developing or otherwise abetting the state‘s racist policies and persistent violations of human rights and international law.  As the resolution acknowledges, it is significant that not only have Israeli academic institutions failed to condemn the state‘s colonial policies and practices and the longstanding siege of Palestinian education, they have facilitated, enabled, and often encouraged the collaboration of their academic departments, faculty members and researchers with the Israeli military-security establishment, above all in the occupation regime, in flagrant violation of the principles of the independence of universities and academics.
-The AAAS has proven beyond doubt that effective solidarity with the oppressed is the most morally and politically sound contribution to the struggle to end oppression and to promote human rights and justice. We are certain that this outstanding expression of solidarity and support for the Palestinian BDS movement will galvanize academics across the United States as well as in other countries to issue similar calls for the boycott of the Israeli academy and its complicit institutions.  As in South Africa during apartheid, only by isolating these institutions can there be any chance of ending their complicity in Israel’s multi-tiered system of oppression against the Palestinian people.
-PACBI
-www.pacbi.org
-[email protected]
-------------------------------------------------
-[1] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/04/24/asian-american-studies-association-endorses-boycott-israeli-universities

+articleTitle: One year of organizing tech workers against Israeli Apartheid
+pageTitle: One year of organizing tech workers against Israeli Apartheid – Mondoweiss
+description: Organizers with the No Tech for Apartheid campaign discuss its current state and what’s next in the effort to end tech support for Israel’s apartheid system.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:40.428Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/one-year-of-organizing-tech-workers-against-israeli-apartheid
 ---
+Mondoweiss has been covering the “No Tech for Apartheid” movement for over a year now. In October 2021 hundreds of workers at Google and Amazon published an open letter in The Guardian condemning Project Nimbus, a billion dollar contract between the two tech companies and the Israeli government. The deal helps provide cloud services to the Israeli Defense Forces.
+The letter reads: “We cannot look the other way, as the products we build are used to deny Palestinians their basic rights, force Palestinians out of their homes and attack Palestinians in the Gaza Strip – actions that have prompted war crime investigations by the international criminal court.”
+A lot has happened since that letter ran, as the No Tech for Apartheid movement has continued to grow. Our U.S. correspondent Michael Arria checked in with two organizers to talk about its current state and what might come next.
+Ariel Koren is an activist and was formerly a product marketing manager at Google for Education. Earlier this year Koren was forced out of her job after facing retaliation from the company over her activism. Bathool Syed is an activist and content strategist at Amazon. We’ll also hear some testimonials from Google and Amazon workers from a video the campaign published a few months ago.
+Share this podcast
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-articleTitle: How EU planned a new prison for Jenin during an Israeli invasion
-pageTitle: How EU planned a new prison for Jenin during an Israeli invasion | The Electronic Intifada
-description: There's something murky about the "model" jail.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:44:31.688Z
-url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/how-eu-planned-new-prison-jenin-during-israeli-invasion
 ---
-An EU team visits the new prison in the Jenin area of the occupied West Bank. (EUPOL COPPS) Annexation is back on the agenda.
-Bezalel Smotrich, a senior Israeli government minister, is threatening that 2025 will be the “year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.”
-If he is serious – and there’s no reason to suspect the self-proclaimed “fascist homophobe” is bluffing – then we can expect Israel will soon formally claim ownership of the Palestinian land it has stolen in the West Bank.
-Of course, Israel will not include a confession to land theft in any announcement. Calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” is a way of asserting a biblically-ordained “right” to a territory Israel has occupied since 1967.
-No other nation recognizes that “right.” But Smotrich and his colleagues are hoping that the US will do so – once Donald Trump is inaugurated as president in January.
-Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick as US ambassador to Israel, has already signaled that annexation could occur.
-Will the European Union prove less acquiescent than Trump?
-Four years ago, a formal annexation of Israel’s settlement blocs in the West Bank seemed imminent. At the time, the EU warned that any such move would inevitably have consequences for its relationship with Israel.
-With the benefit of hindsight, there are reasons to doubt that Brussels officials regarded their own warnings as credible.
-Genocide should be an even bigger red line than formal annexation. Yet the EU has kept on cooperating with Israel as it wages a war of extermination against Gaza.
-Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has condemned Smotrich’s new threat on the basis that it jeopardizes “any prospects for” a two-state solution.
-The endless repetition of the two-state mantra does not alter an unpalatable truth: The European Union has paved the way for annexation.
-It has done so by playing a significant role in carving up the West Bank.
-Under the Oslo accords – signed in the 1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – the territory was divided into three zones. The largest zone – Area C – comprises more than 60 percent of the West Bank and encompasses Israel’s main settlements.
-As Israel’s domination was essentially guaranteed when the accords were being implemented, the Israeli authorities were easily able to exploit them so that colonization could be ramped up. The logical next step is to do precisely what Smotrich is proposing: annex Area C.
-Solitary confinement
-By enforcing the Oslo accords, the European Union has helped to corral Palestinians into a sliver of their historic homeland.
-For most of the past two decades, the EU has assumed responsibility for training the Palestinian Authority’s police force and prison administrators.
-That force is obligated to keep out of Area C. In the other parts of the West Bank, it is completely subservient to Israel.
-Its subservience has been emphasized each time this year that Israel has invaded Area A of the West Bank – the largest Palestinian towns and cities. The PA’s forces were, for all intents and purposes, absent as Israel killed and maimed Palestinians, many of them children.
-Israel’s raids of Jenin and Tulkarm in August and September lasted for 10 days. It was the longest such offensive against the West Bank since 2002 – when the notoriously bellicose Ariel Sharon was Israel’s prime minister.
-Grotesquely, the EU spent the days and weeks before, during and after the  raids in August and September helping the Palestinian Authority to establish a new prison just outside Jenin.
-Through a freedom of information request, I have obtained several reports drawn up by the EU’s policing mission in the West Bank on that prison.
-They describe how the prison – named the Barghasha Rehabilitation Correction and Rehabilitation Centre – has eight solitary confinement cells.
-As the documents have been censored, it is not known what comments the EU team made about solitary confinement, though it undertook to raise concerns about the privacy of detainees.
-I contacted the EU policing mission asking if it was seeking to avoid the use of solitary confinement in Palestine. The mission, which goes by the acronym EUPOL COPPS, refused to answer my question, bar claiming that its work on detention is “always aligned with international standards.”
-The Palestinian Authority has a record of coupling solitary confinement with other cruelty toward prisoners.
-In 2022, a number of detainees went on hunger strike after they had been arrested by PA forces. Amnesty International and other human rights groups documented how they were placed in solitary confinement, as well as being physically tortured.
-EUPOL COPPS has publicly lauded the new prison beside Jenin as a “model” rehabilitation center.
-The internal documents I have obtained indicate that there is something quite murky behind the “model.”
-The new prison has been set up ostensibly to address overcrowding in other jails.
-One of the internal papers indicates that the EU team held discussions on 29 August – the day after Israel’s invasion of Jenin began – with a brigadier serving the Palestinian Authority. The paper notes that “the brigadier will ask for coordination from the Israeli authorities for the transport of the prisoners” to Jenin from other jails.
-Another document indicates that Israel checks “electricity equipment” in the prison.
-The way such “coordination” and “checks” are treated as purely practical belies the fact that Israel is calling the shots more than ever.
-The destruction of Gaza and the increased violence by Israel’s soldiers and settlers in the West Bank are aimed at ousting Palestinians from their homeland.
-Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, stated last month that “the devastation inflicted on Gaza is now metastasizing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”
-She observed that Israel as a state is “predicated on the goal of Palestinian erasure.”
-Opening a “model” prison does not magically change how Israel is not only depriving Palestinians of basic freedom but ultimately trying to wipe them out. And the European Union’s propaganda cannot obscure how it is helping Israel to advance its objectives.
 Tags

+articleTitle: Pro-Israel group targets Jewish professor over Palestine activism
+pageTitle: Pro-Israel group targets Jewish professor over Palestine activism | The Electronic Intifada
+description: Anti-BDS efforts pushed by legislators advance in New York and Illinois.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:21:59.975Z
+url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/pro-israel-group-targets-jewish-professor-over-palestine-activism
 ---
+Legislators around the United States are pushing forward bills, resolutions and blacklists to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
+This month, lawmakers in New York and Illinois advanced the countrywide anti-BDS effort.
+New York senators voted to cut $485 million in state funding to City University of New York (CUNY), shifting the cost burden to the city.
+Meanwhile, a CUNY professor who advises Students for Justice in Palestine was hauled before an investigative panel.
+Republican State Senator Ken LaValle, who chairs the chamber’s committee on higher education, said the funding cut was meant to “send a message” to the university that it had not done enough to fight anti-Semitism on its campuses.
+The slash to the state budget was originally proposed by Governor Andrew Cuomo as a way of trimming the state’s operating costs.
+However, on 14 March, senators discovered that the Republicans had worded the budget proposal as a penalty to the school for its supposedly insufficient response to alleged anti-Semitic incidents on four of its 11 campuses.
+Democratic Senator Liz Krueger from Manhattan said the resolution was “breathtakingly shocking.”
+“This was one giant ‘what the heck?’ moment,” she told reporters.
+Marty Golden, the sole Senate Republican who represents Brooklyn, criticized the resolution, calling it politically motivated.
+Unfounded allegations
+The allegations of anti-Semitism at CUNY originated in a 14-page letter authored by Zionist Organization of America president Morton Klein accusing the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) group of carrying out anti-Semitic acts over the last three years.
+The letter alleges incidents including swastikas appearing on campus and protesters shouting  “Zionists go home!”
+“The SJP has created a hostile campus environment for many Jewish students, causing them to feel harassed, threatened and even physically unsafe, in violation of the law,” Klein claims.
+The letter calls on the university to publicly condemn the group and investigate its funding.
+Klein includes no evidence to support the allegations of swastikas on campus or that they were produced by members of SJP.
+Radhika Sainath, an attorney at Palestine Legal, who is also advising members of SJP, told the Wall Street Journal that the ZOA inaccurately pinned “some instances of real anti-Semitism” on Palestine activists.
+“Here in New York City, the ZOA seems to think that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to students supporting Palestinian rights at CUNY,” Sainath told The Electronic Intifada last week.
+ZOA has made similar allegations against campus groups around the country, prompting investigations by the federal Department of Education under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act.
+The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights dismissed two of these complaints at Rutgers University and the University of California, Irvine. A third complaint was settled before the government could finish its investigation.
+In response to the ZOA letter, CUNY Chancellor James B. Millikin hired two lawyers, Paul Schechtman and Barbara Jones, to review Klein’s claims.
+CUNY also established two task forces, one to review the school’s “policies on speech and expression” and another to assess how the school can best encourage “a climate of mutual respect and civil discourse.”
+In his response to ZOA, Millikin wrote that the school “cannot infringe on the constitutional rights of free speech and association of its students, faculty and staff.”
+The Anti-Defamation League praised CUNY’s response, while Klein said he was disappointed, insisting Millikin condemn SJP.
+Klein is nonetheless pleased with the Senate’s resolution.
+In response to the Senate’s plan to cut CUNY’s budget, Millikin reiterated that his institution cannot infringe on free speech.
+“Fabricated or absurd”
+Sarah Schulman, a professor of English at CUNY’s Staten Island campus, where ZOA claims swastikas appeared, was called to testify before the CUNY task force on anti-Semitism that Jones and Schechtman are heading.
+Schulman, who is Jewish, has been specifically targeted by the pro-Israel groups. The New York Daily News ran an “exclusive” story echoing the ZOA’s accusations of anti-Semitism against her and quoting tweets she made criticizing Israel’s summer 2014 attack on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians.
+Schulman is a school adviser of the SJP chapter at the College of Staten Island.
+Jones presented Schulman with the ZOA’s list of accusations. In a Facebook post recounting her testimony on 22 March, Schulman states all the accusations were “fabricated or absurd.”
+Schulman says there is no record that any swastikas were drawn on the walls of the college.
+“There is no incident report of anyone ever doing such a thing at [College of Staten Island], even the president of the college does not recall this ever happening,” according to Schulman.
+“The letter was really a list of slanders against Muslim students,” Schulman writes of the ZOA accusations. “Over and over there were vague charges that ‘a Muslim student’ said something unpleasant to a Jewish student. But never was there any evidence that this composite Muslim student had anything to do with SJP.”
+Schulman told the investigators that the ZOA has been been harassing her on the Internet, sending a daily barrage of tweets to her publisher, reviewers and colleagues and publishing false information on her Wikipedia biography page, including that she visited Gaza as a “guest of Hamas.”
+“At the end of the meeting I was asked what I thought the task force should include in their final report,” Schulman writes. “My suggestion: ‘That Students for Justice in Palestine should be treated like every other student group.’”
+Meanwhile, in the wake of Klein’s accusations against CUNY, the New York City Council’s Jewish caucus is moving forward with a bill that would require the university to implement a more stringent mechanism to monitor alleged anti-Semitism on campus.
+Blacklisting boycotters
+Last July, Illinois became the first state to blacklist foreign companies that boycott or abstain from conducting business with Israel’s occupation or settlements in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. The law compels the state’s pension fund to divest from those companies.
+On Tuesday, the Illinois Investment Policy Board blacklisted 11 companies.
+The list includes financial institutions and supermarket chains which have divested from or stopped conducting trade with businesses and growers in the occupied Palestinian territories.
+It includes several European banks, such as Nordea and ASN, that have divested from companies that violate Palestinian rights by participating in Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, all of which are illegal under international law.
+The global security and imprisonment firm G4S also appears on the list.
+Earlier this month, the UK-based firm, which provides equipment and surveillance technology to Israeli prisons and checkpoints, announced plans to end all business in Israel within the next two years.
+The firm’s planned exit from Israel came after it had lost millions of dollars worth of contracts as a result of activist campaigns.
+The Illinois investment board also maintains a list of companies the state is blacklisting for failing to boycott Sudan.
+In January, Human Rights Watch issued a landmark report calling on all corporations to completely end their business activities in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including Jerusalem.
+“The only way for businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities is to stop working with and in Israeli settlements,” Arvind Ganesan, director of the business and human rights division at Human Rights Watch, said.
+The Illinois law and similar bills around the country seek, in effect, to penalize firms for respecting human rights.
 Tags

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-articleTitle: On BDS Bashers and their Search for Palestinian Fig Leaves
-pageTitle: On BDS Bashers and their Search for Palestinian Fig Leaves | BDS Movement
-description: In the context of applying the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s guidelines for the international academic and cultural boycott of...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.162Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/figleaves
 ---
-In the context of applying the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s guidelines for the international academic and cultural boycott of Israel, PACBI sometimes faces scenarios where boycott bashers attempt to redeem their conscience, and with it some moral ground, by using token Palestinians (or more rarely other Arabs) as a fig leaf to cover up their complicity in Israel’s violations of international law and Palestinian rights.  While the pool of available “fig leaves” is diminishing every year, thanks to the recent impressive spread of BDS consciousness among Palestinians and in the Arab world, there are still those who are ready to accept for their names to be manipulated in the cynical political agendas of international boycott violators.  When these Palestinians and Arabs play such roles, it is sometimes due to a lack of political understanding, but, more often than not, it is due to a willingness to put personal interest ahead of collectively upheld principles of resistance to colonial oppression and apartheid.
-Through the 1990s and the first half of the last decade, many Palestinians were lured into joint projects because of the hope for a real just peace, as well as the fact that seemingly unlimited sums of money were allocated to such joint projects by European and U.S. donors.  Over the last two decades, it became clear that these projects had political agendas that centered on selling the illusion of peace to Palestinians – and the world – and on bribing Palestinians into submission to Israeli dictates and its perpetual colonial hegemony.  If an Israeli organization wanted to secure generous funds for a project all it had to do was to include a Palestinian “partner,” and vice versa.  These Palestinian-Israeli collaborations created the perfect cover for Israel’s ongoing colonization, occupation and apartheid, and they undermined the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
-By now, most normalization [1] projects involving Palestinians and Israelis have ceased after being exposed as utterly futile or, worse, as a well-designed fraud meant to give Israel leeway to pursue its colonial project under the cover of “peace-making” from the bottom up, as was fabled during the Oslo “peace process.”  The few remaining normalization projects have continued due to the lingering structures of power domination and dependency created throughout the Oslo years.
-One good example is the McGill Middle East Program (MMEP) in Civil Society and Peace Building, a leftover normalization project from the heyday of Oslo that has yet to be challenged.  In the context of a single joint project, the prestigious Canadian university signed separate agreements with Arab academic institutions (An-Najah University, Al-Quds University, and Jordan University) and with Israeli institutions.  The fact that representatives of “both sides,” as it were, participate in the overall project with its common goals, sit on the same project committees, and attend joint meetings, largely blows the cover of “separateness” and exposes the normalization agenda of this project.  The Palestinian institutions involved, while publicly eschewing normalization with Israeli universities, have continued to be active in this project, apparently seeing more benefit to their own institutions from keeping this partnership alive than the harm it does through undermining the growing academic boycott of Israel and its complicit institutions.
-Palestinians are not unique in this sense.  Given the dire conditions of resource starvation resulting from decades of Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies, Palestinians, like most other peoples struggling for de-colonization and self-determination, have had our share of not just what we call willing fig leaves, but also of those who collaborate at a much deeper level with the oppressors in return for narrow benefits.  Avoiding the romanticization of the oppressed, and of the Palestinian struggle, is important to arrive at a rational critique of this phenomenon that is as old as revolutions all over the world.  As in most other cases, there are generally those who would put their own interests above that of their community.  However, a few wilting trees of opportunism or even betrayal should never hide the forest of consensus behind Palestinian civil resistance against Israel, a consensus that is reflected in the leadership of the boycott campaign, the BDS National Committee (BNC).
-International academics and cultural figures, including music bands, that insist on crossing the Palestinian boycott picket line despite being asked by the BDS movement not to do so, often seek to organize a concert, a lecture, or even a symbolic tour in the occupied Palestinian territory -- especially Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem -- as the standard way through which they try to "balance" their political position and redeem themselves after violating the boycott appeal.  By doing so, they in fact add insult to injury, as they are asking Palestinians to engage in normalizing projects similar to those of the Oslo era discussed above.  Claiming neutrality in this blatantly lop-sided colonial situation and trying to project a false image of symmetry between oppressor and oppressed is beyond groundless and ill-conceived; it is morally suspect.
-Musicians will often ask Palestinian organizations to organize a “Palestine tour.”  Some Palestinian organizations may naively agree to such tours without first checking whether the musicians are simultaneously violating the boycott.  Other organizations may willingly provide a Palestinian cover for such boycott violations because they themselves have not been able to transcend the corrupting, co-opting, and dependency-creating relations and dialogue discourse that have prevailed during the failed so-called Oslo “peace process.”
-Managing to speak to some Palestinians here or there, or to partner with some clueless or deliberately fig-leafing Palestinian institution, cannot possibly reduce the damage done by violating the boycott guidelines, as such violations serve first and foremost to save Israel’s fast-dissipating veneer of respectability on the world stage.  No fig leaf, no matter how large it may seem, can hide the act of complicity in whitewashing Israel’s occupation and apartheid that these boycott bashers commit when they cross the picket line.
-One classic example was Leonard Cohen, who despite being repeatedly appealed to by PACBI [2] and its partners everywhere [3] to cancel his gig in Tel Aviv, insisted on going ahead with it and even accepted as a main sponsor of the gig an Israeli bank deeply implicated in the construction of illegal Israeli colonies on occupied Palestinian land.  After being widely criticized for this blatant violation of the Palestinian-led boycott, Cohen sought just about any Palestinian interlocutor, venue or organization that he could use for “balance” and to fend off the critics.  However, by wearing a mantle of “healing” and “peace” without uttering a word about justice or about Israel’s violations of international law, Cohen failed to convince any Palestinian organization to cooperate with him [4], leaving him without the frantically coveted fig leaf.  This, in conjunction with concerted pressure campaigns waged in many countries [5], ultimately convinced Amnesty International to abandon the idea of cooperating with Cohen to channel proceeds from his concert to “human rights” groups. [6]
-Another example was the University of Johannesburg’s (UJ), which fell under enormous pressure [7] by South African academics to break its links with Ben Gurion University (BGU) and, as a result, attempted to find a Palestinian university ready to engage in a trilateral, albeit indirect, relationship with BGU.  UJ was faced with a consensus in the Palestinian academy -- including government officials, university presidents and academic unions -- rejecting such a relationship, and insisting that meaningful solidarity with Palestinians today means severing links with complicit Israeli institutions like BGU and respecting the BDS principles.  Unable to find such a Palestinian partner, the UJ Senate ultimately canceled its joint project with BGU. [8]
-More recently, Shakira tried to do the same, using her UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador status to arrange a visit to a Palestinian NGO in occupied Jerusalem to “balance” her shameful participation in an official Israeli propaganda event at the invitation of the Israeli president, Shimon Peres.  Peres’s well documented role in the myriad crimes and international law infringements committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory and in South Lebanon is undeniable. [9]  The targeted Palestinian NGO canceled Shakira’s visit at the last moment when it realized how she had violated the boycott, and that providing her with a Palestinian alibi could damage the BDS movement’s peaceful struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
-Of course, no society can ever be monolithic or of one mind.  Despite the persistence of some international artists, musicians and other cultural workers in breaking the boycott, and despite the willingness of a dwindling number of Palestinians to continue to serve as fig leaves when lured to do so, the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, through their representative organizations and unions, have endorsed BDS and its guidelines.  It is time that international writers, academics, artists and others start listening to the voices of this vast majority and to respect our struggle for freedom and justice by, at the very least, refraining from undermining our boycott principles.  This is a basic moral obligation that most of the world had honored during the struggle against South African apartheid and should consistently honor in our case as well.
-Notes:
-[1] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1220
-[2] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1006
-[3] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1009
-[4] http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1039
-[5] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1069
-[6] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1080
-[7] http://www.ujpetition.com/
-[8] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1532
-[9] http://pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=833

+articleTitle: Weekly Briefing: U.S. support continues to enable the rise of Israeli fascism
+pageTitle: Weekly Briefing: U.S. support continues to enable the rise of Israeli fascism – Mondoweiss
+description: The incoming Israeli government is by far the most right-wing and racist government in Israeli history, and that’s saying a lot. And so far the messaging from the Biden administration seems to be that its policy towards this new government will be one of benign neglect.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:43.158Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/u-s-support-continues-to-enable-the-rise-of-israeli-fascism/
 ---
+It’s been almost four weeks since Israel held its fifth parliamentary election in three years and as is usual when it comes to reporting the unpleasant truth about Israel, the mainstream media in the United States is largely absent. Apparently the facts that Benjamin Netanyahu has tapped Israel’s equivalent of the Grand Master of the Ku Klux Klan to be the next minister of internal security and has broken with prior practice and handed him control of the border police (formerly under military command) aren’t enough to warrant mention in the New York Times.
+Less surprisingly, the continued slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli military remains a forbidden topic, which makes sense because if the Times reported the news it would have to report that as of this writing at least 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel this year alone, and 51 of them were children. As the situation deteriorates ever further, outgoing prime minister Yair Lapid’s message is that Israel’s reach will find all terrorists “from the Casbah of Nablus, the refugee camp in Jenin, to arenas near and far..” And this from the so-called moderate.
+The incoming government is by far the most right-wing and racist government in Israeli history, and that’s saying a lot. And so far the messaging from the Biden administration seems to be that its policy towards this new government will be one of benign neglect. In fairness to the administration, we will have to wait until the next Knesset is formally seated before we can gauge how it will react but there is not much reason to be optimistic. It is largely American acquiescence to the worst of Israel’s policy and behavior that has enabled Israel to devolve into a fascist nightmare.

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-articleTitle: BDS Joins the Global Call for Climate Justice at COP26
-pageTitle: BDS Joins the Global Call for Climate Justice at COP26 | BDS Movement
-description: What is COP26? Every year, the United Nations holds a global climate change conference known as the 'Conference of the Parties'. From October...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.234Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/BDS-Joins-Global-Call-For-Climate-Justice-COP26
 ---
-What is COP26?Every year, the United Nations holds a global climate change conference known as the 'Conference of the Parties'. From October 31th 2021 to November 12th 2021,  world leaders will meet in Glasgow for the 26th annual session, or COP26.As the climate emergency gets worse across the planet, wreaking havoc on every continent but disproportionately devastating poorer nations and oppressed communities, decisions made at COP26 will have long-reaching effects on those currently most affected by climate change. Palestine is a Climate Justice Issue!The catastrophic climate crisis is exacerbated by global inequality and oppression and engineered by complicit governments and corporations that put profit before people and the planet. This is especially true when it comes to Israel’s apartheid. The climate crisis disproportionately affects Palestinians living under and resisting Israeli occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism. Indigenous Palestinians living under these conditions, with no control over their land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the climate crisis. With Israel monopolizing resources, rising temperatures are exacerbating desertification as well as water and land scarcity, entrenching climate apartheid. Israeli corporations such as Netafim, Mekorot and Haifa Chemicals, as well as settler-colonial organizations like the Jewish National Fund (JNF), play a key role in apartheid Israel’s destruction of Palestinian agriculture, dispossession of Palestinian farmers, and land grabs to strengthen Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise.  While Israel destroys Palestinian agriculture and the livelihood of farmers, practices apartheid and colonizes Palestinian lands through its agro-business, it sells itself and its agribusiness industry in the global south as providing solutions for sustainable agriculture. Yet these practices are often exploitative and unsustainable, and exacerbating existing issues in various regions. Multinational corporations like AXA and HSBC are also complicit in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. They invest in companies and banks arming Israel, financing its illegal settlements and pillaging Palestinian land and natural resources.Israel Greenwashes Apartheid!Apartheid Israel projects a false climate-friendly image to the world while pillaging Palestinian natural resources and destroying the environment. Since the occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967- the West Bank and the Gaza Strip- Israel uprooted more than 2.5 million trees,  including over 800,000 ancient Palestinian olive trees.  Israel’s racist and false claim, “making the desert bloom,” is intended to hide its violent destruction of Palestinian society and its unsustainable agricultural and water use practices. For example, 97.7% of Israel’s electricity production comes from fossil fuels, including natural gas extracted in part by illegally pillaging Palestinian gas resources. The Eastern Mediterranean pipeline, or EastMed, is a planned offshore/onshore natural gas pipeline, directly connecting apartheid Israel’s energy resources to Europe. Israel not only denies Palestinians access to gas reserves off the coast of Gaza but has also illegally exploited these resources for its exclusive benefit while depriving Indigenous Palestinians of revenues. All the while, two million Palestinians in Gaza continue to suffer acute electricity shortages compounded by Israel’s refusal to fulfil its obligations as an occupying power. Through the EuroAsia Interconnector, apartheid Israel is seeking to export energy to Europe to create dependency upon its fossil fuel-based and illicitly generated energy sources. Crucially, the Interconnector would connect Europe’s electricity grid with Israel’s grid that incorporates the illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including East Jerusalem, implicating Europe in Israel’s war crimes.Expose the JNF!Israel’s greenwashing and apartheid policies are made possible through complicit governments, companies and institutions that support and enable its regime of oppression. One such major institution is the Jewish National Fund. For 120 years, the JNF has been responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Palestinians. Most recently, the JNF has been behind the demolition and expulsion of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem neighbourhoods like Silwan as part of its involvement in supporting illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Now, the JNF seeks to greenwash its crimes as a participant in the COP26 climate summit. Join the BDS movement at COP26 to expose the JNF!Take Action Now!Join the Palestine Solidarity Bloc during the global demonstrations for climate justice on 6th November. pic.twitter.com/kzXwf1LJ0s" src="http://clicktotweet.com/img/tweet-graphic-4.png" />The Jewish National Fund greenwashes Israeli apartheid. #ExposeJNF now!#COP26https://bit.ly/3CuOxj3" src="http://clicktotweet.com/img/tweet-graphic-4.png" />Multinational and Israeli corporations greenwash Israeli apartheid and environmental destruction.

+articleTitle: Weekly Briefing: U.S. support continues to enable the rise of Israeli fascism
+pageTitle: Weekly Briefing: U.S. support continues to enable the rise of Israeli fascism – Mondoweiss
+description: The incoming Israeli government is by far the most right-wing and racist government in Israeli history, and that’s saying a lot. And so far the messaging from the Biden administration seems to be that its policy towards this new government will be one of benign neglect.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:43.227Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/u-s-support-continues-to-enable-the-rise-of-israeli-fascism
 ---
+It’s been almost four weeks since Israel held its fifth parliamentary election in three years and as is usual when it comes to reporting the unpleasant truth about Israel, the mainstream media in the United States is largely absent. Apparently the facts that Benjamin Netanyahu has tapped Israel’s equivalent of the Grand Master of the Ku Klux Klan to be the next minister of internal security and has broken with prior practice and handed him control of the border police (formerly under military command) aren’t enough to warrant mention in the New York Times.
+Less surprisingly, the continued slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli military remains a forbidden topic, which makes sense because if the Times reported the news it would have to report that as of this writing at least 200 Palestinians have been killed by Israel this year alone, and 51 of them were children. As the situation deteriorates ever further, outgoing prime minister Yair Lapid’s message is that Israel’s reach will find all terrorists “from the Casbah of Nablus, the refugee camp in Jenin, to arenas near and far..” And this from the so-called moderate.
+The incoming government is by far the most right-wing and racist government in Israeli history, and that’s saying a lot. And so far the messaging from the Biden administration seems to be that its policy towards this new government will be one of benign neglect. In fairness to the administration, we will have to wait until the next Knesset is formally seated before we can gauge how it will react but there is not much reason to be optimistic. It is largely American acquiescence to the worst of Israel’s policy and behavior that has enabled Israel to devolve into a fascist nightmare.

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-articleTitle: Expose Israeli Apartheid and Greenwashing
-pageTitle: Expose Israeli Apartheid and Greenwashing | BDS Movement
-description: Across the world, grassroots groups are engaged in sustained efforts to mobilize for indigenous rights to land and resources, to sustainability,...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.264Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/expose-israeli-apartheid-and-greenwashing
 ---
-Across the world, grassroots groups are engaged in sustained efforts to mobilize for indigenous rights to land and resources, to sustainability, against the exploitation of farmers, against climate colonialism and false solutions to combat it. Palestine is a part of these mobilizations. Apartheid Israel has been ethnically cleansing Indigenous Palestinians from their homes, their land, their villages and farms for decades. Israeli companies like Mekorot and Netafim steal resources from Palestinians and direct them to illegal colonial settlements. The same companies greenwash their crimes by posturing as companies that provide sustainable “solutions” across the world when in reality, these false solutions enable the privatization of resources and exploit local communities. Other Israeli companies like Haifa Chemicals and Adama contribute to the destruction brought on by agrotoxics.So-called “charity organizations” like the racist and colonial Jewish National Fund build 'parks' atop ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages to hide them. Companies like Siemens and Chevron profit from business with fossil gas that fuels Israeli apartheid and its grave violations of Palestinian rights on the one hand and the climate crisis on the other. Companies like HD Hyundai, PUMA, AXA, and Barclays claim to be concerned about climate justice while being complicit in apartheid against Palestinians. Climate summits like the upcoming COP28 platform these corporations to help greenwash their crimes while silencing grassroots democratic voices. Read the BNC statement on COP28These struggles are linked to global grassroots struggles for indigenous land rights, sustainability, and against climate catastrophe brought on by corporate greed. Together, we oppose the global structures of neoliberalism and colonialism and challenge the severe inequality these structures bring to our communities. On September 4th, join us for a social media day of action to highlight the ongoing campaigns to expose Israeli greenwashing and bluewashing, including at global summits like the COP28. Join us in presenting a united grassroots progressive front against oppression and, crucially, against attempts to greenwash oppression everywhere.

+articleTitle: West Bank Dispatch: Waiting for the next crackdown
+pageTitle: West Bank Dispatch: Waiting for the next crackdown – Mondoweiss
+description: It is only a matter of time before the Israeli military and security apparatus unleashes its next wave of collective punishment in response to the Jerusalem twin bombings. We are merely waiting before the calm inevitably gives way to the storm.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:43.255Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/west-bank-dispatch-waiting-for-the-next-crackdown/
 ---
+Key Developments (Nov 21 – 28)
+In-Depth
+This week was far from quiet. Three Palestinians were killed in Nablus as part of Israel’s ongoing “Break the Wave” campaign, and a twin bombing of two bus stations in Jerusalem killed two Israelis and injured dozens more. Yet the expected Israeli crackdown and wave of arrests following the operation is yet to occur. In a way, the Israeli governmental and military response has lagged behind the panic and rage gripping the Israeli political spectrum, which is out for blood.
+Itamar Ben Gvir, who is expected to become National Security Minister in Israel, wasted no time in capitalizing on the operation, demanding that Israel exact a “heavy price from terror” and re-invade Palestinian towns and cities, while proposing the institution of draconian measures of collective punishment against Palestinian society, alongside a return to targeted assassinations.
+That no news has been forthcoming about the perpetrators of the operation could mean anything — that the Israeli intelligence simply has not found those responsible, or that it has found a lead but is maintaining a gag order for its own security reasons, perhaps seeking to uncover a wider network or organized cell. Either way, the silence from the security establishment only raises expectations about when the inevitable crackdown is likely to begin. One thing is for certain — it will punish as many Palestinians as possible in order to restore Israeli “deterrence,” since collective punishment has ever been a favored tactic in the arsenal of Israeli colonial domination. Already Ben Gvir has promised immunity to Israeli soldiers who kill Palestinians, and his upcoming role as National Security Minister is likely to see him oversee the formation of his own fascist army.
+Despite the Israeli security establishment’s relative silence, analysis from Israeli political pundits echoes what the establishment is no doubt thinking—that these bombings, despite the comparatively lower casualties than a more recent string of stabbing and ramming “lone wolf” attacks that claimed the lives of 3 Israelis, is worrying for the Shin Bet because the bombs were reportedly relatively sophisticated, having apparently been detonated remotely. Public claims that it was carried out by an “organized infrastructure” has stoked fears that there will be a return to a barely-forgotten era of bombings from the Second Intifada that has left a scar in the Israeli collective psyche.
+But the perception that these bombings are unprecedented is somewhat misleading. Even if one were to avoid comparing them to the operations conducted by Palestinians over the past year, in the summer of 2019 an organized cell of purported PFLP militants had successfully remotely detonated an explosive that killed an Israeli, known as the Ein Bubin operation. Like with the Jerusalem bombing, the Israeli military and the intelligence abided by a gag order as it silently launched its manhunt. When the cell was uncovered, apprehended, and summarily tortured, that was when the true crackdown would begin. Hundreds of arrests ensued, detaining anyone with any association, proven or fabricated, with the PFLP.
+Nothing less than an equally extensive campaign of arrests should be expected from the army now. We are merely waiting, before the calm inevitably gives way to the storm.
+Important figures
+Mondoweiss Highlights
+Jerusalem’s last decade of revolt, by Fayrouz Sharqawi

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-articleTitle: Military embargo against Israel
-pageTitle: Military embargo against Israel | BDS Movement
-description: Never was the urgency greater to stop Israel’s #GazaGenocide by ending all military relations with it as well as all complicity in its war crimes and...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:06:41.792Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/Military-Embargo-Against-Israel-Urgent-Action
 ---
-Never was the urgency greater to stop Israel’s #GazaGenocide by ending all military relations with it, as well as all complicity in its war crimes and crimes against humanity, including apartheid. Military ties with Israel include the sale, transit, or purchase of weapons and military-security technology, including spyware; training; joint research and development projects; provision of equipment and services to Israel’s military; and more. Israeli PM and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We need three things from the US: munitions, munitions, and munitions.” When the munitions stop, so will Israel’s indiscriminate massacres of Palestinian civilians and its wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza.Buying Israeli military-security technology, field-tested on Palestinian bodies and society, also supports Israel’s war chest and benefits from its crimes against and dehumanization of Palestinians, particularly those in the besieged and occupied Gaza Strip.Without these ties, Israel’s military wouldn’t be able to carry out its current genocide, and its settler-colonial apartheid regime would not be sustainable. Military relations with Israel also violate international law. Weapons trade and transfer with countries that are suspected of committing war crimes are strictly illegal. Read the analysis of Al-Haq.Military-security ties take many forms, and fighting them can involve a wide range of efforts, including direct action, lobbying, and pressuring local and federal governments, corporations, universities, and other institutions to end complicity. Some examples of complicity include: The US gives direct military funding to apartheid Israel’s genocide (and other crimes). US weapons are transferred to Israel typically through nine transit states (some of which export their own weapons to Israel): Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Over 130 countries buy Israeli “field-tested” weapons, which are often used to perpetrate or exacerbate human rights violations in those countries. Military cooperation agreements with Israel open the door for Israeli arms companies to sell weapons to countries in which the public opposes arms imports from Israel.Israel is a global leader in using and exporting spyware technology that violates privacy and human rights. Israeli military companies, subsidiaries, and international arms producers have offices and production plants worldwide. The #NoTechforApartheid campaign warns of the danger of tech companies such as HP, Google, and Amazon equipping Israel’s armed forces with dangerous technologies that enable their commission of grave human rights violations and war crimes.Arms fairs allow Israeli arms companies to hawk their weapons. Take action to protest Israeli presence in arms fairs (and, of course, against arms fairs in general!).The European Union breaks its own rules by financing Israeli military research with money earmarked for civilian research. What can groups do locally to impose a comprehensive military embargo on apartheid Israel? Start the researchBuild the coalitionBuild the pressurePromote your impact Remember:When done as part of a strategy, peaceful direct action effectively exposes complicity, raises public awareness, and embarrasses corporations and governments.Campaign building requires planning, media work, coalition building, strategic message crafting, and a division of labor between individuals and organizations based on their strengths and contacts.BDS campaigns are intersectional, ethically considerate of the rights and safety of participants, nonviolent, and categorically anti-racist. This must be reflected in military embargo campaigns as well.If you need support in building your military embargo campaign or you have questions about arms companies in your area or the transfer of weapons through your area, don't hesitate to get in touch with us at the BDS movement.

+articleTitle: Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in occupied West Bank, including two brothers
+pageTitle: Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in occupied West Bank, including two brothers – Mondoweiss
+description: The three Palestinians killed overnight were identified as Jawad Rimawi, 22, Thafer Rimawi, 21, and Mufid Ikhlayel, 44.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:43.297Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/israeli-forces-kill-4-palestinians-in-occupied-west-bank-including-two-brothers/
 ---
+Three Palestinians were killed by Israeli military forces during raids overnight on Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, including two brothers.
+The three Palestinians were identified by the Palestinian Health Ministry as Jawad Rimawi, 22, Thafer Rimawi, 19, and Mufid Ikhlayel, 44. Earlier reports stated Thafer’s age to be 21; a ministry of health representative confirmed to Mondoweiss, however, that he was in fact 19.
+The Rimawi brothers were killed when Israeli forces raided the Ramallah-area village of Kufr Ein, in the central West Bank. According to the health ministry, Jawad was shot with live ammunition in the stomach and pelvic area, and Thafer was shot in the chest.
+Local sources from Kufr Ein told Mondoweiss that confrontations erupted during an Israeli raid on the nearby town of Beit Rima. The boys were reportedly shot while the soldiers were pulling out of Beit Rima, passing through the neighboring village of Kufr Ein.
+On Tuesday morning, videos of the two boys’ parents mourning their deaths at the hospital were circulated widely on social media, as Palestinians grieved the loss of the two young men.
+Israa Rimawi, the mother of the two slain men, was shown in a widely circulating video saying “we are giving our souls, we are giving our souls,”  and a woman trying to console her as they left the hospital, saying “just imagine them in heaven.”
+According to local media reports, Jawad had recently graduated from Birzeit University in Ramallah with a business administration degree, while Thafer was studying technology at the same university. A general strike was declared in Ramallah on Tuesday in mourning over the two brothers.
+Mourners attend the funeral of Jawad Rimawi, 22, and Thafer Rimawi, 19, who were killed by Israeli army forces, in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank on November 29, 2022. (Photo: Wajed Nobani/APA Images)
+The martyr of Beit Ummar
+Mufid Ikhlayel was killed after he was shot in the head by Israeli forces while they were raiding the town of Beit Ummar, in the southern West Bank district of Hebron. According to local news reports, the raid began shortly after 10 p.m. on Monday night, and lasted several hours into the early hours of Tuesday morning.
+According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 22 Palestinians were injured in Beit Ummar, six with teargas, five with rubber bullets, two others while running, and nine with live ammunition, including Ikhlayel. He was declared dead shortly before 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
+Ma’an News Agency also reported that Israeli forces attacked medics in the town as they attempted to treat the wounded.
+Palestinian officials and political factions condemned the killing of Ikhlayel and the Rimawi brothers on Tuesday. The office of President Mahmoud Abbas released a statement calling for international intervention and for the U.S. government to assume responsibility for the continued killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military, which the U.S. provides with billions of dollars of funding each year.
+Police kill Palestinian after car ramming
+Separately, a Palestinian was shot by Israeli police on Tuesday morning on a highway outside Ramallah after carrying out a car-ramming that injured one Israeli. Israeli media reported that the woman, 20 years old, was being treated in an Israeli hospital for a head injury, but was reportedly in stable condition. Palestinian media outlets reported the woman to be an Israeli soldier, and images of the woman after the ramming dressed in an Israeli army uniform have been circulated on social media.
+Israeli media reports said that the Palestinian man, who was shot after a brief police chase, was also taken to an Israeli hospital where he was declared dead.
+Israel’s Kan Public broadcaster identified him as 45-year-old Rani Mamoun Fayz Abu Ali, a father of five from the Ramallah-area town of Beitunia. At the time of publication the Palestinian Ministry of Health had not yet confirmed his identity.
+2022 has been one of the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied territory in recent years. The killing of the Rimawi brothers, Ikhlayel, and Abu Ali brings the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers this year to 210.
+Of the 210 Palestinians killed in 2022, 154 were killed in the West Bank, 20 of whom were from the Ramallah and Al-Bireh governorate.

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-articleTitle: The Association of Black Anthropologists Endorses the Resolution to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions
-pageTitle: The Association of Black Anthropologists Endorses the Resolution to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions | BDS Movement
-description: The Association of Black Anthropologists hereby endorses the Resolution to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions. In keeping with the AAA’s “...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:10.418Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/association-black-anthropologists-endorses-resolution-boycott-israeli-academic-institutions
 ---
-The Association of Black Anthropologists hereby endorses the Resolution to Boycott Israeli Academic Institutions. In keeping with the AAA’s “commit[ment] to the promotion and protection of the right of people and peoples everywhere to the full realization of their humanity,” (1999 DAHR) we heed the resounding call from Palestinian civil society organizations to take action toward affirming their inalienable right to self-determination. We raise our voice in concert with the chorus of prominent American academic organizations that have already expressed support for the Resolution. While some members of the AAA have publicly expressed concerns regarding the efficacy of the proposed boycott, we reject the colonial inclination to speak for oppressed peoples, instead respecting that the aforementioned Palestinian civil societies know what will be most useful in their struggle toward liberation. As past AAA president Alisse Waterston wrote, “If the boycott proves ineffectual, this must be weighed against complicity with the silencing of the condition of Palestinians under apartheid, leaving them isolated, lonely, and invisible.”  Additionally, we challenge the sincerity of any notion that a boycott would diminish academic freedom at Israeli universities when many are actively colluding with the state in the repression of dissent against its apartheid project. Meanwhile, Israel undermines the free exchange of ideas at Palestinian academic institutions through such measures as imposing strict limits and quotas on international faculty and students visiting Palestinian universities for work and study. As Black anthropologists whose work often centers around issues of structural subjugation, we recognize the striking similarities between the Netanyahu government’s abhorrent treatment of Palestinians and Arabs on one hand and the South African National Party’s institution of apartheid against Black Africans writ large. Based on the above evaluation of the circumstances surrounding the Resolution, in addition to the case expertly presented by the Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions group and points expressed by countless others who support a boycott of institutions complicit in Israeli apartheid and violations of international law, we encourage all members of the AAA to vote in favor of the boycott. In 2021, the ABA was a signatory on the AAA Middle East Section (MES)’s statement condemning the forced evictions and retaliatory violence by Israeli state forces against Palestinians. In 2023, the ABA stands once again in solidarity with Palestinian academics, against Israeli apartheid and the oppression of Palestinians.As our colleagues of AnthroBoycott remind us, the time for action is now. The Association of Black Anthropologists

+articleTitle: West Bank Dispatch: Waiting for the next crackdown
+pageTitle: West Bank Dispatch: Waiting for the next crackdown – Mondoweiss
+description: It is only a matter of time before the Israeli military and security apparatus unleashes its next wave of collective punishment in response to the Jerusalem twin bombings. We are merely waiting before the calm inevitably gives way to the storm.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:44.050Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/west-bank-dispatch-waiting-for-the-next-crackdown
 ---
+Key Developments (Nov 21 – 28)
+In-Depth
+This week was far from quiet. Three Palestinians were killed in Nablus as part of Israel’s ongoing “Break the Wave” campaign, and a twin bombing of two bus stations in Jerusalem killed two Israelis and injured dozens more. Yet the expected Israeli crackdown and wave of arrests following the operation is yet to occur. In a way, the Israeli governmental and military response has lagged behind the panic and rage gripping the Israeli political spectrum, which is out for blood.
+Itamar Ben Gvir, who is expected to become National Security Minister in Israel, wasted no time in capitalizing on the operation, demanding that Israel exact a “heavy price from terror” and re-invade Palestinian towns and cities, while proposing the institution of draconian measures of collective punishment against Palestinian society, alongside a return to targeted assassinations.
+That no news has been forthcoming about the perpetrators of the operation could mean anything — that the Israeli intelligence simply has not found those responsible, or that it has found a lead but is maintaining a gag order for its own security reasons, perhaps seeking to uncover a wider network or organized cell. Either way, the silence from the security establishment only raises expectations about when the inevitable crackdown is likely to begin. One thing is for certain — it will punish as many Palestinians as possible in order to restore Israeli “deterrence,” since collective punishment has ever been a favored tactic in the arsenal of Israeli colonial domination. Already Ben Gvir has promised immunity to Israeli soldiers who kill Palestinians, and his upcoming role as National Security Minister is likely to see him oversee the formation of his own fascist army.
+Despite the Israeli security establishment’s relative silence, analysis from Israeli political pundits echoes what the establishment is no doubt thinking—that these bombings, despite the comparatively lower casualties than a more recent string of stabbing and ramming “lone wolf” attacks that claimed the lives of 3 Israelis, is worrying for the Shin Bet because the bombs were reportedly relatively sophisticated, having apparently been detonated remotely. Public claims that it was carried out by an “organized infrastructure” has stoked fears that there will be a return to a barely-forgotten era of bombings from the Second Intifada that has left a scar in the Israeli collective psyche.
+But the perception that these bombings are unprecedented is somewhat misleading. Even if one were to avoid comparing them to the operations conducted by Palestinians over the past year, in the summer of 2019 an organized cell of purported PFLP militants had successfully remotely detonated an explosive that killed an Israeli, known as the Ein Bubin operation. Like with the Jerusalem bombing, the Israeli military and the intelligence abided by a gag order as it silently launched its manhunt. When the cell was uncovered, apprehended, and summarily tortured, that was when the true crackdown would begin. Hundreds of arrests ensued, detaining anyone with any association, proven or fabricated, with the PFLP.
+Nothing less than an equally extensive campaign of arrests should be expected from the army now. We are merely waiting, before the calm inevitably gives way to the storm.
+Important figures
+Mondoweiss Highlights
+Jerusalem’s last decade of revolt, by Fayrouz Sharqawi

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-articleTitle: Sports Stars Stand Up for Palestinian Rights in Unprecedented Numbers
-pageTitle: Sports Stars Stand Up for Palestinian Rights in Unprecedented Numbers | BDS Movement
-description: During Israel’s most recent round of violent attacks on Palestinians, athletes from around the world and across sports spoke up for Palestinians...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:11.171Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/sports-stars-stand-for-palestinian-rights-unprecedented-numbers
 ---
-During Israel’s most recent round of violent attacks on Palestinians, athletes from around the world and across sports spoke up for Palestinian rights in unprecedented numbers.As Israel carried out military assaults on besieged Gaza, killing more than 247 Palestinians, including 66 children, ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem, violent repression of protests against Palestinians and mass arrests across the occupied West Bank and within present-day Israel, many in the sports world expressed outrage. Active men and women football players (association and American), entire football teams, cricket players, basketball players, boxers and others have all taken to social media to courageously show their solidarity with Palestinians living under the brutal oppression of Israeli apartheid.Palestinian athletes have long documented Israel's brutal and persistent attacks on Palestinian sports. Israel has shot and imprisoned Palestinian athletes and killed Palestinian children playing football more than once. This past May, Israeli soldiers killed two promising football players, 16-year-old Said Odeh of Balata in the occupied West Bank and Muath Nabil Al-Zaanin of Beit Hanoun FC in Gaza. Israel has bombed and destroyed Palestinian stadiums and sports structures, and it routinely denies freedom of movement to Palestinian athletes traveling to training and matches, both within the occupied Palestinian territory and abroad. In 2018 alone, Israeli snipers ended the careers of dozens of Palestinian athletes in Gaza participating in peaceful protests. The Israel Football Association includes Israeli clubs based in illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land and has failed to address rampant racism in Israeli football. Israel instead uses international sporting events to sports-wash its regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid against Palestinians. Palestinians are calling on the world of sports to take a stand for Palestinian rights by refusing to participate in Israeli sports-washing events and by joining the global campaign to boycott Puma due to its complicity in Israeli apartheid through its sponsorship of the Israel Football Association.  Below are just some of the recent expressions of solidarity from athletes and teams worldwide.Footballer Riyad @Mahrez22 shows solidarity with Palestinians as he celebrates @ManCity's win last night.UK Premier League footballers have been taking a stand for Palestinian rights.After the ceasefire, let's #CeaseApartheid. It's #InOurHands. pic.twitter.com/yj13ONww2q— PACBI (@PACBI) May 24, 2021Thank you! @paulpogba and Amad Diallo show solidarity with Palestinians.In unprecedented numbers, football players are taking a stand for Palestinian rights.Ending Israel's decades-long oppression of Palestinians is #InOurHands.#SaveSheikhJarrah #GazaUnderAttack pic.twitter.com/4NnYFmfOwx— PACBI (@PACBI) May 18, 2021Gooooooool.@HamzaChoudhury1 and @Wesley_Fofanaa keep Palestinians in their hearts as they celebrate @LCFC's first-ever #FACupFinal win.Professional athletes are showing support for Palestinian rights, giving Palestinians hope. pic.twitter.com/YsqVqyiJud— PACBI (@PACBI) May 15, 2021Swedish football club Hammarby shows solidarity with Palestinians during its first-ever Swedish Cup win.Learn more about how amateur or professional teams, athletes, and fan clubs can take a stand for Palestinian rights. https://t.co/Nt5Jqwt2ou #InOurHands #BoycottPuma pic.twitter.com/iUOVoO58mH— PACBI (@PACBI) June 7, 2021happy with the debut from the first minute with an assist ... my prayers go to Palestine pic.twitter.com/Ho0VMXWxIq— Amad (@Amaddiallo_19) May 11, 2021Choqué par les images de violences subies par nos frères et sœurs palestiniens…Ne les oublions pas dans nos prières.#SavePalestine pic.twitter.com/Qx3TUu9k3q— Ismaël Bennacer (@IsmaelBennacer) May 11, 2021my heart and my soul and my support for you Palestine pic.twitter.com/ywrpPk5Xmf— Mohamed ELNeny (@ElNennY) May 10, 2021#Palestine #SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/t1JdD24chc— Riyad Mahrez (@Mahrez22) May 10, 2021In the meantime, apartheid continues, and Palestinians are being expelled from their homes while most “leaders” are complicit with their silence at best and their direct support at worst. #SaveSheikhJarrah— Fred Oumar KANOUTÉ (@FredericKanoute) May 7, 2021#FreePalestineاللهُمَّ أَصْلِحْ أَحْوَالَ المُسْلِمِِينَ فِي فِلِسطِينَ pic.twitter.com/X42D7oj09U— Chebake Issam (@ChebakeIssam) May 11, 2021#FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/XYdznz8Jxp— achrafhakimi (@AchrafHakimi) May 10, 2021PALESTINE #SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/MzbIeQu4yY— Benjamin Mendy (@benmendy23) May 11, 2021View this post on InstagramA post shared by Sadio Mane (@sadiomaneofficiel)I’m calling on all the world leaders, including the Prime Minister of the country that has been my home for the past 4 years, to do everything in their power to make sure the violence and killing of innocent people stop immediately. Enough is enough. @BorisJohnson— Mohamed Salah (@MoSalah) May 11, 2021https://t.co/WsDpB9TDyE pic.twitter.com/BR0qEgA0Up— Lewis Hamilton (@LewisHamilton) May 19, 2021Dualarım Kudüs’deki kardeşlerimle. Daha fazla masum insan ölmesin. Yeter artık. #FreePalestine #SavePalestine pic.twitter.com/NIoMoqIafj— Çağlar Söyüncü (@Syncaglar) May 11, 2021#FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/dVMNU1Fxri— Almamy Touré (@A_Toure38) May 11, 2021Eid Mubarak to all my brothers & sisters may Allah bless you and accept your fasts and prayers. May he also grant jannah to those who have lost their lives in Palestine #FreePalestine #SavePalestine #SaveSheikhJarrah pic.twitter.com/q6hUwo7CJp— Free Palestine (@KeshMan_) May 13, 2021View this post on InstagramA post shared by Anwar El Ghazi (@elghazi21)Isınmadayız! #FBvSVS pic.twitter.com/Lmz8ycTNZz— Fenerbahçe SK (@Fenerbahce) May 11, 2021Ethnic cleansing 101 https://t.co/O6uQyPehju— Oday Aboushi (@Oday_Aboushi75) May 20, 2021View this post on InstagramA post shared by Eric Cantona (@ericcantona)Prominent US women and men athletes show solidarity with Palestinians.@EdgeofSports: "Once silence has been broken, it is very difficult to stifle people back into submission."#SaveSheikhJarrah#GazaUnderAttack #InOurHandshttps://t.co/45RgrJqKGW pic.twitter.com/zLPrYOtplE— PACBI (@PACBI) May 16, 2021We all pray for peace in the Middle East. #FreePalestine #FreeGaza pic.twitter.com/I5CqNhShFp— Badou Jack (@BadouJack) May 11, 2021My heart goes out to the innocent Palestinian brothers & sisters in the month of Ramadan. Stay strong; God is with you. #freepalestine pic.twitter.com/CFv0pemVtF— Amir Khan (@amirkingkhan) May 12, 2021#PrayForPalestine— Kagiso Rabada (@KagisoRabada25) May 12, 2021Prayers for the people of Palestine. We just have to be human to stand up for humanity. #PrayForPalestine #المسجد_الأقصى pic.twitter.com/NPCqRLmUA0— Babar Azam (@babarazam258) May 11, 2021As an athlete who plays cricket worldwide, I want to see this world out of war. I can’t watch people being killed in #Afghanistan & #Palestine. No crime is more heinous than the killing of a child. I want these children to wake up to the sound of birds & not bombs.— Rashid Khan (@rashidkhan_19) May 12, 2021If you have even the slightest of humanity, you will not support what’s happening in #Palestine #SaveHumanity— Irfan Pathan (@IrfanPathan) May 10, 2021I stand with Palestine. I stand with humanity. #HumanRightsViolations #IStandWithPalestine #SaveHumanity pic.twitter.com/mTNiqw1tdn— Shadab Khan (@76Shadabkhan) May 12, 2021I just can’t understand why it is so difficult to treat others as you would want to be treated, or even better yet, treat each other as human beings. #PrayForPalestine— Daren Sammy (@darensammy88) May 12, 2021The unjust acts of terrorism and cruelty happening in Palestine are totally unacceptable. Our hearts bleed for our Muslim brothers & sisters. In the final days of this Holy Month of Ramadan, I request everyone to pray for the situation in Palestine #WeStandWithPalestine pic.twitter.com/uuR9YOmKel— Azhar Ali (@AzharAli_) May 12, 2021Please stop picking and choosing and stand up for humanity. The world needs a good, long look at itself if it’s going to let such things happen. pic.twitter.com/JGrgKokfqP— Shan Masood (@shani_official) May 11, 2021

+articleTitle: Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in occupied West Bank, including two brothers
+pageTitle: Israeli forces kill four Palestinians in occupied West Bank, including two brothers – Mondoweiss
+description: The three Palestinians killed overnight were identified as Jawad Rimawi, 22, Thafer Rimawi, 21, and Mufid Ikhlayel, 44.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:44.119Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/israeli-forces-kill-4-palestinians-in-occupied-west-bank-including-two-brothers
 ---
+Three Palestinians were killed by Israeli military forces during raids overnight on Tuesday in the occupied West Bank, including two brothers.
+The three Palestinians were identified by the Palestinian Health Ministry as Jawad Rimawi, 22, Thafer Rimawi, 19, and Mufid Ikhlayel, 44. Earlier reports stated Thafer’s age to be 21; a ministry of health representative confirmed to Mondoweiss, however, that he was in fact 19.
+The Rimawi brothers were killed when Israeli forces raided the Ramallah-area village of Kufr Ein, in the central West Bank. According to the health ministry, Jawad was shot with live ammunition in the stomach and pelvic area, and Thafer was shot in the chest.
+Local sources from Kufr Ein told Mondoweiss that confrontations erupted during an Israeli raid on the nearby town of Beit Rima. The boys were reportedly shot while the soldiers were pulling out of Beit Rima, passing through the neighboring village of Kufr Ein.
+On Tuesday morning, videos of the two boys’ parents mourning their deaths at the hospital were circulated widely on social media, as Palestinians grieved the loss of the two young men.
+Israa Rimawi, the mother of the two slain men, was shown in a widely circulating video saying “we are giving our souls, we are giving our souls,”  and a woman trying to console her as they left the hospital, saying “just imagine them in heaven.”
+According to local media reports, Jawad had recently graduated from Birzeit University in Ramallah with a business administration degree, while Thafer was studying technology at the same university. A general strike was declared in Ramallah on Tuesday in mourning over the two brothers.
+Mourners attend the funeral of Jawad Rimawi, 22, and Thafer Rimawi, 19, who were killed by Israeli army forces, in the city of Ramallah in the West Bank on November 29, 2022. (Photo: Wajed Nobani/APA Images)
+The martyr of Beit Ummar
+Mufid Ikhlayel was killed after he was shot in the head by Israeli forces while they were raiding the town of Beit Ummar, in the southern West Bank district of Hebron. According to local news reports, the raid began shortly after 10 p.m. on Monday night, and lasted several hours into the early hours of Tuesday morning.
+According to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 22 Palestinians were injured in Beit Ummar, six with teargas, five with rubber bullets, two others while running, and nine with live ammunition, including Ikhlayel. He was declared dead shortly before 2 a.m. on Tuesday.
+Ma’an News Agency also reported that Israeli forces attacked medics in the town as they attempted to treat the wounded.
+Palestinian officials and political factions condemned the killing of Ikhlayel and the Rimawi brothers on Tuesday. The office of President Mahmoud Abbas released a statement calling for international intervention and for the U.S. government to assume responsibility for the continued killing of Palestinians by the Israeli military, which the U.S. provides with billions of dollars of funding each year.
+Police kill Palestinian after car ramming
+Separately, a Palestinian was shot by Israeli police on Tuesday morning on a highway outside Ramallah after carrying out a car-ramming that injured one Israeli. Israeli media reported that the woman, 20 years old, was being treated in an Israeli hospital for a head injury, but was reportedly in stable condition. Palestinian media outlets reported the woman to be an Israeli soldier, and images of the woman after the ramming dressed in an Israeli army uniform have been circulated on social media.
+Israeli media reports said that the Palestinian man, who was shot after a brief police chase, was also taken to an Israeli hospital where he was declared dead.
+Israel’s Kan Public broadcaster identified him as 45-year-old Rani Mamoun Fayz Abu Ali, a father of five from the Ramallah-area town of Beitunia. At the time of publication the Palestinian Ministry of Health had not yet confirmed his identity.
+2022 has been one of the deadliest for Palestinians in the occupied territory in recent years. The killing of the Rimawi brothers, Ikhlayel, and Abu Ali brings the death toll of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces and settlers this year to 210.
+Of the 210 Palestinians killed in 2022, 154 were killed in the West Bank, 20 of whom were from the Ramallah and Al-Bireh governorate.

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-articleTitle: Palestinian civil society demands: end EU complicity in illegal and repressive Israeli surveillance
-pageTitle: Palestinian civil society demands: end EU complicity in illegal and repressive Israeli surveillance | BDS Movement
-description:   In its final report, published in May 2023, PEGA admitted Israel’s crucial role in the development and marketing of cyber weapons, “in...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:18.801Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/End-EU-Complicity-Israeli-Spyware
 ---
-In its final report, published in May 2023, PEGA admitted Israel’s crucial role in the development and marketing of cyber weapons, “in some cases [...] designed purposefully to serve as a tool for political power and control”. Yet, it failed to demand accountability from Israel and those European actors that have made the EU today the main host, user and exporter of Israeli spyware.    The report, adopted with a large majority, acknowledges that the source of commercially available spyware are Israeli companies, which all receive Israeli government support and encouragement to sell spyware to the highest bidder. It further admits that Israeli spyware companies are founded by former Israeli intelligence officers and test their technology on Palestinians in the course of brutal violations of privacy and basic human rights. The report further states that the Israeli government has used the sale of spyware to authoritarian regimes as a bargaining chip to strengthen diplomatic relations. PEGA recognizes that at least 14 EU member-states have been affected by spyware scandals. Harmful technology which is used against Palestinians does not stay in Palestine – it spreads its harm across the Global South and the Global North. The report’s clarity on Israel’s harmful role and the use of spyware to violate Palestinian rights would not have been possible without the support of European MPs who uphold human rights principles and the hard work of the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine (ECCP) in engaging with the PEGA special committee.Nevertheless, as important as this report is as a first step in the right direction, it is not sufficient to hold apartheid Israel to account, let alone stop its companies from hacking into phones and planting malicious programs into them. Our challenge is to mobilize pressure to completely ban Israeli and other spyware because it enables the persecution and repression of human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, opposition politicians, and others, undermining privacy, democracy and human rights and sowing discord and fear throughout the world. PEGA must demand accountability from two main culprits: first, Israeli officials who authorize the development and use of spyware on Palestinians as a tool of repression in order to perpetuate apartheid and sell spyware globally, and second,  European officials who buy Israeli spyware to use it for intimidating and silencing critical voices in Europe and who allow Israeli spyware companies to operate in and export from the EU. Spyware criminals who have broken numerous European laws remain free and continue to make large profits.PEGA has corroborated the facts Palestinian and international human rights organizations and media outlets have been exposing for years, yet the European Parliament has completely failed to take any practical measures to overturn, or even suspend, the ongoing EU policy of granting Israeli apartheid and those complicit with it full impunity. Even as PEGA issued its harsh report, the EU Directorate of Trade is poised to regulate - instead of banning - the export of spyware, pandering to the needs of the two major Israeli spyware companies that have moved their headquarters to the EU: NSO Group in Luxembourg and Intellexa in Cyprus. The European Parliament has never been ready to seriously address the dangers of spyware. The PEGA committee, stripped of authority to make binding decisions and not even provided with a single Hebrew-speaking researcher, chose to make the most of its limited mandate.As Palestinians we demand meaningful accountability, including a full EU ban on spyware, in order to protect our rights and the rights of people across the world against illegitimate surveillance and repression. We demand an immediate end of EU complicity and profiteering from Israeli cyber weapons that are “field-tested” on us, on our human rights activists and civil society organizations. Instead of stockpiling Israeli weapons at a never before seen rate, EU member states should end all military and security relations with Israel, including joint research, until it ends its regime of apartheid, settler-colonialism and military occupation.

+articleTitle: November 2022 – Page 2
+pageTitle: November 2022 – Page 2 – Mondoweiss
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:44.383Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/page/2
 ---
+Biden’s response to the rightwing whirlwind in Israel — weakness
+By Mitchell Plitnick
+November 26, 2022
+11
+We are beginning to see how Israel’s next far-rightwing government will make things difficult for the White House through the de facto annexation of the West Bank. And the early indications from Joe Biden’s administration indicate a continuation of the weak responses that have characterized his policy toward Israel for decades.
+Three martyrs in 24 hours
+By Mariam Barghouti
+November 25, 2022
+4
+Palestinian youth and resistance fighters in Nablus continue to resist settler-colonial encroachment and pay the price for it. Two Palestinians died during recent clashes with the Israeli army near Joseph’s tomb, while a resistance fighter succumbed to wounds sustained last summer within the same 24 hours.
+Jerusalem’s last decade of revolt
+By Fayrouz Sharqawi
+November 24, 2022
+3
+During the past ten years, Jerusalem has reemerged as the spark that sets off Palestinian revolt, culminating in the Unity Intifada of 2021.
+Egypt’s “expatriation” policy is meant to humiliate travelers from Gaza
+By Tareq S. Hajjaj
+November 23, 2022
+6
+Palestinians travelling out of Gaza are routinely subjected to inhumane and degrading treatment by Egyptian officials as they are escorted to Cairo International Airport and placed under guard until they board their planes.
+One Israeli killed, dozens injured in twin bombings in Jerusalem, hours after Israeli forces kill Palestinian teen in Nablus
+By Yumna Patel and Mariam Barghouti
+November 23, 2022
+8
+One Israeli was killed and several others were injured in two separate bombings that targeted bus stops in West Jerusalem Wednesday morning, while in Nablus and Jenin tensions soar amid continued Israeli military incursions.
+Student in Jenin killed by Israeli army on the way to school
+By Mariam Barghouti
+November 22, 2022
+3
+Mahmoud Al-Saadi was in his final year of high school, and his father worked all his life to secure an education for his son. Israel killed his father’s joy.
+A journey of revolts: bearing witness to the world outside us
+By Hurriyah Ziada
+November 22, 2022
+5
+Hurriyah Ziada reflects on how the Arab uprisings and Palestinian youth movements revealed the best and worst of society.
+West Bank Dispatch: Martyrs, lone wolves, and underground lions
+By Mondoweiss Palestine Bureau
+November 21, 2022
+0
+The past few months have seen the evolution of two dynamics in parallel — the proliferation of “lone wolf” attacks, and the expansion of organized Palestinian armed resistance groups. Israel has worked hard to eradicate both types of resistance, yet it has had considerably less success in anticipating and preventing the actions of the lone wolves.
+Israel lobby’s realignment over Ben-Gvir is giving Biden room to criticize
+By Philip Weiss
+November 21, 2022
+15
+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.
+Weekly Briefing: It got a little harder this week to maintain hypocrisy on Palestinian human rights
+By Philip Weiss
+November 20, 2022
+0
+It seems that every day makes it harder to maintain the Palestinian exception in the American discourse when it comes to occupation, persecution, and murder– a hypocrisy we are dedicated to exposing.

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-articleTitle: UN Human Rights Council votes to establish database of settlement companies
-pageTitle: UN Human Rights Council votes to establish database of settlement companies | BDS Movement
-description: The UN Human Rights Council has this afternoon voted to “to produce a database of all business enterprises” that operate in illegal Israeli...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:21.922Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/un-human-rights-council-votes-establish-database-settlement-companies
 ---
-The UN Human Rights Council has this afternoon voted to “to produce a database of all business enterprises” that operate in illegal Israeli settlements.
-The resolution passed with 32 votes in favour and 15 abstentions.
-Welcoming the news, Riya Hassan, Europe Campaigns Officer for the Palestinian BDS National Committee, the broadest coalition of Palestinian organisations that leads and supports the BDS movement, said:
-“By voting to establish this database, this resolution supports the view of the the BDS movement that companies must be held to account for their participation in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights and international law.”
-“Just as at the height of the boycott of South Africa, the BDS movement is successfully persuading international companies to end their support for Israel’s crimes and we are starting to notice a domino effect."
-French multinationals Veolia and Orange and CRH, Ireland’s biggest company, have all exited the Israeli market in recent months, mainly as a result of BDS campaigning.
-“This is a welcome step but the UN Human Rights Council must go further to hold Israel to account for its violations of international law including by supporting a full ban on trade with illegal Israeli settlements and a two-way military embargo.”
-“What use are the EU’s regular condemnations of the ongoing expansion Israel’s illegal settlements if they will not support measures aimed at stopping international businesses from supporting their expansion?”
-“We urge the UN to lead by example and terminate its contracts with G4S, a private security company that provides services and equipment to Israeli occupation prisons at which Palestinian political prisoners, including children, are held without trial and tortured."
-In recent months, UNICEF in Jordan and a major restaurant chain in Colombia became the latest high-profile bodies to end their contracts with G4S following BDS campaigns.
-In January, the United Methodist Church put five Israeli banks from Israel on a “blacklist” due to their complicity in human rights violations, including the financing of illegal Israeli settlements.
-A leading France-based Israeli businessman recently told the Israeli media that the growing strength of the BDS movement means that most major European companies now avoid investing in Israel.
-According to the  UN’s trade and development agency UNCTAD,  Foreign direct investment in Israel dropped by 46% in 2014 as compared to 2013, partially due to the impressive growth of the BDS impact, as stated by one of the report’s authors.
-In January 2016, Human Rights Watch issued a report, Occupation, Inc. urging international businesses to comply with their human rights responsibility and stop operating and servicing illegal Israeli settler colonies.

+articleTitle: ‘NYT’ covers up the rise of Jewish supremacist Ben-Gvir, as Netanyahu’s security
+pageTitle: ‘NYT’ covers up the rise of Jewish supremacist Ben-Gvir, as Netanyahu’s security minister – Mondoweiss
+description: Benjamin Netanyahu picked the racist Itamar Ben-Gvir as Minister of National Security. Negative consequences started immediately. So where’s the ‘NYTimes?’
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:44.556Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/nyt-covers-up-the-rise-of-jewish-supremacist-ben-gvir-as-netanyahus-security-minister
 ---
+As expected, on November 25 Benjamin Netanyahu picked the racist, Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir to be the powerful Minister of National Security in the next Israeli government.
+As expected, the New York Times and the Washington Post are so far ignoring Ben-Gvir’s appointment, even though the dangerous consequences have already started. (National Public Radio, to its credit, did include a brief on-air report.)
+Meanwhile, reporters and commentators at Haaretz, the indispensable Israeli daily, are already sounding the alarm about Ben-Gvir. Amos Harel, the paper’s unsentimental security correspondent, got straight to the point: “A few hours [after the appointment], a Givati Brigade soldier was filmed punching a leftist activist in Hebron, while his comrade explained to the camera that ‘Ben-Gvir will bring order. You’ve had it. I decide what the law is here.’”
+Harel summarized, “The [Netanyahu] government is perceived, both by the extreme right as well as by soldiers, as license to use unlimited force against Arabs and an opportunity to make sure that leftists understand the new balance of power.”
+This site has long argued that the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets distort their reporting from Israel/Palestine by covering up the racist far-right. Hiding the Ben-Gvir appointment and its immediate consequences is only the latest example.
+There is more. Haaretz also reported that Netanyahu is letting Ben-Gvir “substantially expand” his ministry, to include the Border Police in the West Bank, which were previously under Israeli army command. The paper quoted “a senior law enforcement source,” who warned that the change “turns the Border police into Ben-Gvir’s personal police in the territories.” And the same article also reported that outgoing Defense Minister Benny Gantz — who is no pacifist — accused Netanyahu of “creating a private army for Ben-Gvir in the West Bank,” adding that the move is “an admission that the real prime minister is going to be Ben-Gvir.”
+In what world is this not breaking news, deserving of coverage? Tensions in the occupied Palestinian West Bank are already at their highest level in years, and yet Israel’s security policy is now in the hands of a fascist who was considered so extreme when he was younger that he wasn’t even allowed to serve as a foot soldier in the Israeli army.
+Let’s contrast the U.S. mainstream silence with the Financial Times, the conservative, British pro-business newspaper. The FT ran a report within hours of the Ben-Gvir appointment, and in the second paragraph accurately described him as “an ultranationalist previously convicted of incitement to racism.”
+Today’s New York Times did, thankfully, include an honest, valuable report by Raja Abdulrahim, from Gaza City. Here’s the print edition’s headline: “Israeli Blockade Takes Steep Toll on Gaza’s’ Fishing Industry (and Diet).” The report followed all the mainstream conventions, including giving Israeli authorities the opportunity to try and refute the allegations. We’ll wait to see if the paper can eventually apply the same standard to the Itamar Ben-Gvir story.

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-articleTitle: New Victory: Carrefour closes all branches in Jordan due to BDS pressure
-pageTitle: New Victory: Carrefour closes all branches in Jordan due to BDS pressure | BDS Movement
-description: After a large scale and creative boycott campaign that contributed to huge financial losses and reputational damage, Majid Al Futtaim Group, the partner of the French Group Carrefour in most of the Arab region, announced the complete termination of its commercial dealings with Carrefour in Jordan.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:21.954Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/Carrefour-Closes-All-Branches-In-Jordan-BDS-Pressure
 ---
-After a large scale and creative boycott campaign that contributed to huge financial losses and reputational damage, Majid Al Futtaim Group, the partner of the French Group Carrefour in most of the Arab region, announced the complete termination of its commercial dealings with Carrefour in Jordan.The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest Palestinian coalition leading the global BDS movement, launched, with its partners, a global campaign to boycott Carrefour in December 2022, due to the French global retail group’s complicity in the crimes of the Israeli settler-colonial regime against the Palestinian people.Since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal war against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip, the call to boycott Carrefour has escalated due to its branches' support for the crime of genocide by providing free gift packages to Israel’s genocidal forces. One of these stores also launched a campaign to collect donations to support the “brave” Israeli soldiers participating in the genocide. Moreover, Carrefour Israel has partnership agreements with Israeli technology companies and banks involved in Israel’s war crimes and grave human rights violations against Palestinians.Carrefour in Jordan has been forced to close a number of its branches over the past year, leading to the decision to end its entire operation in the country. BDS activists have also recorded the closure of Carrefour stores in other countries in the Arab region, which confirms the impact of the broad popular boycott campaign and the significant role it can play in imposing heavy costs on giant companies due to their complicity in Israeli crimes.This success for our partners, BDS Jordan, comes at a time when BDS campaigns targeting other major consumer brands such as McDonald’s are expanding impressively, and campaigns to boycott, divest from or otherwise pressure companies that are implicated in Israeli crimes and gross human rights violations, such as AXA, HP, Chevron, Intel and others, are growing worldwide.According to Majid Al Futtaim Group’s semi-annual report for 2024, retail sector profits fell by almost half (by 47%) due to the decline in consumer confidence as a result of “the geopolitical conflict in the region,” referring to the widespread and influential popular boycott campaign across the region, from Jordan to Morocco, from Egypt and Tunisia to Bahrain and Kuwait and even the Emirates.Over the past two years, the #BoycottCarrefour campaign has seen numerous protests outside Carrefour stores, despite repressive measures in some countries to stifle activism calling for an end to complicity. In Jordan in particular, the Carrefour boycott campaign has evolved some unique innovations, including organizing pledges, letters, and electronic campaigns, in addition to organizing popular committees and regional and artistic competitions. All of this has led to remarkable customer and supplier engagement in the campaign.The Palestinian BDS National Committee - the largest coalition in Palestinian society in the homeland and diaspora and the leader of the global BDS movement - salutes its partners, BDS Jordan, and all Jordanians who contributed to this achievement. We look forward to escalating the #BoycottCarrefour campaign across the region to make Carrefour's partners, Majid Al Futtaim Group and (LabelVie) Group, completely sever their partnerships with the French company.We also continue to call for a boycott of all stores that carry the Carrefour brand or sell its products, until Majid Al Futtaim Group announces the complete termination of its partnership with the French group across the Arab World. We also call on the Emirati group Al Futtaim to pressure its French partner to end its complicity in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.Being associated with Carrefour today is not only a financial risk, but also entails moral and legal responsibilities. The French group must respond to the campaign’s demands to avoid a growing global popular boycott. Let us escalate our boycott of Carrefour everywhere to compel it to respect our people’s rights and to stop complicity in violating them.

+articleTitle: The Israeli army demolished a school in Masafer Yatta. Residents say it won’t be the last.
+pageTitle: The Israeli army demolished a school in Masafer Yatta. Residents say it won’t be the last. – Mondoweiss
+description: Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian primary school in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern West Bank saying it was built “illegally” in an Israeli military firing zone.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:44.829Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-israeli-army-demolished-a-school-in-masafer-yatta-residents-say-it-wont-be-the-last
 ---
+Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian primary school in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern occupied West Bank on Wednesday, under the pretext that the school was built “illegally” in an active Israeli military firing zone.
+Israeli forces raided the Palestinian village of Isfey al-Fauqa in Masafer Yatta, known also as the South Hebron Hills, early Wednesday morning during active school hours, as a number of students were inside the recently-constructed school receiving lessons.
+According to locals, Israeli forces evacuated the students and teachers before demolishing the structure, made of prefabricated buildings. Videos taken at the scene were widely circulated on social media, showing a number of distressed school children crying as the armed forces prepared the school for demolition.
+Other photos showed school children retrieving their textbooks and papers that were strewn across the ground following the demolition.
+The school was constructed by the Palestinian Authority as part of its “Tahadi” program, meaning “challenge” in Arabic, to build educational institutions in marginalized Palestinian communities across Area C, the more than 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control where Palestinian construction is banned.
+Beginning in 2016, the program, which has been funded in large part by the European Union, has seen the construction of over a dozen schools in Area C, including the one in Isfey al-Fauqa, which was constructed around two months ago.
+The school had been in service only for a couple of weeks prior to its demolition, and was servicing approximately 23 students from Isfay al-Fauqa and the surrounding villages.
+Just one day prior to the demolition, a number of diplomats and UN representatives had visited the school and posed for pictures in front of the new buildings. Following the demolition on Wednesday, the PA, the EU, and UN representatives criticized Israel for the move, saying that the Israeli government has a responsibility to ensure that children living in the occupied territory have access to a safe education.
+Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht claimed that the “full picture on the ground” was “very different” from the one presented on social media and in the press. Hecht said on Twitter that the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta were being “cynically & dangerously used as pawns to populate illegal structures.”
+“The [international] community’s support for these structures, [including] schools empty in the middle of the day, only creates further difficulty for all,” he said.
+But the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta say the school was built to address a real need in the rural community, where another four schools, many of them several years old, are also under imminent threat of Israeli demolition.
+“The purpose behind building the school in that location was to allow the kids from the Isfay area to have access to a school nearby, and not have to travel far distances in order to get to the existing schools across the Firing Zone,” local activist Sami Huraini told Mondoweiss.
+“What’s happening in Masafer Yatta is a war crime, and it will happen to the rest of the schools in Firing Zone 918,” Huraini said.
+In May 2022 the Israeli High Court made its final decision in a 20-year legal battle by the people of Masafer Yatta, ruling in favor of the army, which declared thousands of acres of land in the area as an active military “firing zone.”
+The court’s decision in May paved the way for the forcible displacement of an estimated 1,300 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, and the demolition of close to 900 structures, including homes, livestock pens, schools, clinics, mosques, water cisterns, and latrines. Rights groups have condemned the decision as a court-sanctioned war crime.
+In late August, the court rejected an appeal against the demolition of two schools in the villages of Khirbet al-Fakheet and Jinba, which lie in the heart of the firing zone.
+Since the high court’s decision, Palestinians in Masafer Yatta have stepped up their global campaign to #SaveMasaferYatta, calling for immediate intervention to prevent the expulsion of the residents by the Israeli army.
+Huraini called the international community “hypocritical” for failing to take a stronger stance on the situation in Masafer Yatta, saying “it shows how scared and weak the international community is in front of Israel.”
+“Our children should not have to travel such far distances in harsh conditions to get to school, while facing daily harassment from the settlers. These children should be able to go to school safely and freely, and have the right to an education, like all the other kids in the world.”

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-articleTitle: Statement by Spanish State Palestine Solidarity Groups On Barcelona City Council's Historic Decision Supporting Palestinian Rights
-pageTitle: Statement by Spanish State Palestine Solidarity Groups On Barcelona City Council's Historic Decision Supporting Palestinian Rights | BDS Movement
-description: April 19, 2017, Barcelona              Barcelona has taken a step forward in becoming a city...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:21.983Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/statement-spanish-state-palestine-solidarity-groups-barcelona-city-councils-historic-decision
 ---
-April 19, 2017, Barcelona
-Barcelona has taken a step forward in becoming a city free of apartheid
-With the support of the groups Barcelona en Comú, Partit Socialista de Catalunya, Candidatura d’Unitat Popular and Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, the Barcelona City Council has today in plenary session passed an official declaration which promotes the inclusion of clauses in contracts to ensure respect for human rights, specifically with companies which are linked to the Israeli occupation in Palestine. The declaration also urges the Government of Catalonia to create a center for study and assessment of the impact of Catalan enterprises investing abroad.
-The declaration recognizes the legitimacy of nonviolent campaigns and initiatives promoted by the Palestinian and international civil society to defend Human Rights and International humanitarian law in Palestine. Through this vote, Barcelona City Council puts an end to the complicity of the city of Barcelona with the flagrant, systematic human rights violations of the colonising occupation and expansion of the State of Israel in Occupied Palestinian Territories and recognizes the right to BDS.
-This decision comes at a time of increasing Israeli aggression against the Palestinian people and the international nonviolent BDS movement with total impunity. Further evidence of this impunity is the report of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA) that denounced the apartheid system that Israel imposes on the Palestinian population and therefore called for support of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, as was used against apartheid South Africa. Rima Jalaf, the ESCWA director subsequently resigned on receiving internal pressure to withdraw the report. It is no coincidence in this context that there is a campaign of defamation and criminalization of the nonviolent BDS movement, as shown by the harassment of human rights activist Omar Barghouti, who was recently arrested and interrogated for many hours by the Israeli authorities.
-Rafeef Ziadah, member of the International Secretary of the Palestinian National Committee of BDS states: “We salute the Barcelona Municipality and warmly welcome this significant step forward in the Palestinian-led, global BDS movement for freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians. After 50 years of Israel's military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and decades of its regime of apartheid and settler-colonialism, people of conscience around the world are joining the fast-growing BDS movement in support of the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people. The Barcelona Municipality's recognition of the right to advocate for Palestinian rights through the nonviolent tactics of BDS is not just a triumph for free speech and democratic rights. It is also a clear indicator of the widespread recognition of BDS as an inclusive, inspiring, anti-racist movement that is rooted in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that upholds the basic principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of the humanity."
-We celebrate this victory because we believe it to be a great step forward in raising the awareness of the role of local government in the defense of human rights and in breaking the complicity that inherently bolsters apartheid and the occupation of Palestine. This resolution is an institutional recognition of civil society demands for an end to complicity in violations of international law through nonviolent struggle, as practiced by the BDS movement.
-We hope that this resolution creates a precedent in Barcelona so that the city goes on to become an Area Free of Israeli Apartheid, as has already happened in 70 local authorities throughout Spain, and becomes a leader in defence of people's freedom and human dignity.

+articleTitle: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal
+pageTitle: As Gaza starvation shocks the world, Witkoff is in Israel to push for a ceasefire deal – Mondoweiss
+description: Israel just submitted its latest objections to Hamas’s revised ceasefire proposal amid unprecedented international outcry over hunger in Gaza, as 27 Palestinians have died of starvation in the last week alone.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:58:18.548Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/as-gaza-starvation-shocks-the-world-witkoff-is-in-israel-to-push-for-a-ceasefire-deal
 ---
+The U.S. envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is scheduled to arrive in Israel on Thursday, reportedly to push for concluding a ceasefire deal in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. Witkoff is scheduled to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and will possibly visit U.S. and Israel-backed distribution centers run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which Palestinians have described as “death traps” where over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army.
+Witkoff’s visit comes a day after Israel gave Egyptian and Qatari mediators its objections to Hamas’s recent response to the latest Witkoff proposal. The objections were over Hamas’s condition that the Israeli army withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor — the militarized area straddling the Palestinian-Egyptian border — and the principle of exchanging bodies of slain Israeli captives for living Palestinian prisoners.
+Hamas had handed its response to Witkoff’s proposal last week to mediators, which Israeli officials told Israeli media and Axios was “better” than Hamas’s previous response and “could be built upon.”  Hamas had submitted revised Israeli military withdrawal maps that included areas like the Philadelphi Corridor and proposed a split in aid distribution between the UN and the GHF. Following Hamas’s response, U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff announced that the U.S. was pulling out of the ceasefire talks, followed by declarations by U.S. President Trump announcing that the talks had collapsed and that Hamas “wanted to die.”
+Although it remained unclear what part of the Hamas response provoked this kind of U.S. reaction, it came as a surprise, considering that Israeli officials had reportedly described it as workable.
+Notably, Israel’s objections, handed to mediators last Tuesday, did not include Hamas’s amendments to the aid distribution mechanism.
+Global shock at Gaza famine
+Israel’s omission of its previous objections to Hamas’s aid distribution amendments comes amid an unprecedented wave of international outrage over Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, which has claimed the lives of at least 27 Palestinians in the last week alone, raising the total number of Palestinians dying of hunger in the Strip since October 2023 to 122, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
+The mounting international criticism even reached the U.S. president himself, who admitted on Tuesday that “you can’t fake that,” describing the situation in Gaza as “real starvation.” Trump’s statements followed the explicit condemnation of Israel’s policies by 25 countries, including France, the UK, and Canada.
+Meanwhile, Israel allowed the entry of hundreds of aid trucks into the Strip, as well as airdrops of food by neighboring countries and its own military. The airdrops have been criticized by Gazans as unsafe, with plummeting aid crates killing several Palestinians in previous attempts, while UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has said on Tuesday that the aid allowed now entering the Strip was “a drop” that must “turn into an ocean.”
+Simultaneously, Israeli forces continued to open fire on Palestinian aid-seekers who attempted to reach the recent aid trucks, according to Palestinian reports. On Wednesday, the Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli forces opened fire on aid-seekers who tried to access a food truck that had been allowed into the Strip in the Sudaniyeh neighborhood in north Gaza, killing at least 51 and wounding over 600. Al Jazeera Mubasher aired video footage of dozens of slain and wounded Palestinians from the incident strewn across the morgue floor of what remains of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the number of aid-seekers killed by Israeli forces has risen to 1,300.
+As ceasefire talks are expected to resume following Witkoff’s visit to the region, the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot revealed on Thursday that PM Netanyahu had reportedly told his ally on the religious right, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, that if a deal wasn’t reached with Hamas in the coming days he would direct the army to displace thousands of Palestinians from the Strip, a promise Netanyahu allegedly made to persuade Ben-Gvir not to quit the government coalition over ceasefire talks.
+Yediot also reported that Israel was actively negotiating with five countries to accept Palestinians from Gaza, including Libya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

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-articleTitle: Palestinian Authority blocks 59 news outlets
-pageTitle: Palestinian Authority blocks 59 news outlets | The Electronic Intifada
-description: No Israeli websites have been blocked by the PA.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:44:39.865Z
-url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/palestinian-authority-blocks-59-news-outlets
 ---
-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.
-Groups condemn PA decision
-Palestinian political parties and journalist syndicates condemned the PA’s decision.
-“The Palestinian Authority is burying its head in the sand by trying to prevent freedom of expression and returning national media to the darkness that the Israeli occupation sought to return it to and couldn’t,” Husam Badran, member of Palestinian resistance movement Hamas, stated on Monday.
-“The new ban can only mean that the Palestinian Authority and the occupation are fighting on the same side against Palestinian national expression and its exposure of the occupation’s violations, and of corruption and crime.”
-The Committee to Support Journalists in Palestine also condemned the PA’s “unjust” decision and demanded it be reversed.
-The Palestinian Youth Media Group called the ban a “massacre of freedom” that only serves “the Israeli narrative.”
-Prisoners solidarity group Samidoun said the ban revealed the PA’s “fear of a popular explosion against it similar to the Arab revolutions, the latest of which is Lebanon.”
-Facebook censorship
-Meanwhile, Facebook took down the page of the news website Palestinian Information Center on its platform earlier this month.
-The publication said Facebook gave it no prior notice or justification.
-The Arabic-language page had some five million followers, according to its website.
-The Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) reported an increase in violations against media freedoms in September, mostly done by Facebook.
-Facebook closed 34 Palestinian news pages and accounts of journalists based in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip that month claiming that they “violate the rules of the Facebook community,” MADA reported.
-Tags

+articleTitle: Review: Palestinian Revolution Cinema
+pageTitle: Review: Palestinian Revolution Cinema | The Electronic Intifada
+description: Hamid Dabashi, founder of the Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Project, has said that one of the distinguishing qualities of Palestinian national cinema is that it has and continues to be produced during the throes of trauma. This stands apart from other national cinema (German, Italian, and Iranian, to name a few) which came to maturity through dealing with past
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:22:00.024Z
+url: https://electronicintifada.net/content/review-palestinian-revolution-cinema/3520
 ---
+Film stills from They Don’t Exist (1974)
+Hamid Dabashi, founder of the Dreams of a Nation: A Palestinian Film Project, has said that one of the distinguishing qualities of Palestinian national cinema is that it has and continues to be produced during the throes of trauma. This stands apart from other national cinema (German, Italian, and Iranian, to name a few) which came to maturity through dealing with past national trauma. However, there has never been a Palestinian-produced feature film focusing on the Nakba. The forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland during the establishment of the State of Israel, the Nakba is the singular event from which Palestinians — whether living under military occupation, in exile, or under a state apparatus that discriminates on the basis of religion — can trace their current conditions.
+Yet, the Nakba is at the core of Palestinian cinema, as exemplified by the Palestinian Revolution Cinema series curated by Palestinian artist Emily Jacir, which was originally presented at the New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival in February 2007 and will show in Chicago this Saturday.  The films — produced during the late ’60s through the early ’80s — depict the Nakba not through archive footage of the 1947 and 1948 expulsion but rather through the then-contemporary, alternating images of smiling children in refugee camps (when they were still comprised of tents) and the ghostly trails of Israeli missiles falling from the sky.
+The films — all created in exile — document the continued Palestinian experience of Nakba with minimal reliance on factual narration. Rather, it is the images that speak for themselves.  In Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Do Not Exist (which takes its name from Golda Meir’s famous quotation in which she denied that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people) women in the southern Lebanon Nabatia refugee camp go about their daily lives — sweeping the floor, kneading dough, tending to the laundry.  The only narration is that of a girl reading a letter she penned to a fedayee (freedom fighter), which we hear again a couple of scenes later as a fedayee reads it.
+The chronology is loose and non-specific — after these scenes there is propaganda footage of Israeli fighter planes and then an Israeli air raid on Nabatiya (ironically accompanied by classical music) followed by footage of the stunned residents silently observing the destruction of the camp.  Witnesses and victims of the air raid are interviewed.  Their individual names do not particularly matter because, as one woman who lost her eldest son explains, “This is not happening just to us but the entire Palestinian people.”  The universality of the experience is emphasized — the collective trauma of the Palestinians and, as the film brings into context, the imperialist struggles in Vietnam and Mozambique, as well as the genocide perpetrated against Native Americans and that by Nazi Germany.
+The film boldly refutes both Meir’s assertion that there is no Palestinian people, as well as Moshe Dayan’s boasting that there is no longer a place called Palestine. And though it is not explicitly quoted in the film like Meir and Dayan, the footage of the camp negates Zionism’s founding myth of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The film answers these attempts to obliterate Palestinian nationalism with footage of a press conference in which revolutionaries state that Israel’s is a “policy of extermination against our resisting people.”  What Israel couldn’t do in 1948 — efface the entire nation of Palestine — would not succeed in the 1970s and to the contemporary viewer, it is clear that if Palestinians have survived all that they have, it is unlikely that this policy of extermination will succeed any time soon.
+Film stills from Born Out of Death (1981)
+The theme of national continuity makes a profound impact in the haunting Born Out of Death, dedicated to the over 300 killed and thousands more injured during the Israeli bombing of Faqahane, Lebanon on 17 July 1981.  There is no voice-over narrative at the beginning of this film, directed by German Monica Maurer, who worked with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s film unit. The frenzied, alternating images of funerals and victims of the bombing — juxtaposed with lingering, quiet footage of the shell-shocked mourners in a cemetery — are all the information we need.  Echoing the contradiction of the film’s title, children smile for the camera as they cling to the skirts of crying relatives in the very crowded cemetery.  Then quite jarringly comes the narration of a woman who describes herself as Fatima al-Halaby, 21, who was born in the south of Lebanon, married a Palestinian comrade, and then was killed when nine months pregnant.  “I was executed by a phantom,” she explains, adding that the second round of shrapnel to hit her opened her womb “like a cesarean.”  The surviving fetus is named “Palestine,” and Fatima states, “I may have died but Palestine is still living.”
+These children born of death (in the more general sense of displacement and war) are at the center of Khadija Abu Ali’s Children Nonetheless.  Much like the women doing housework in They Do Not Exist, the imagery of children doing things that children do — drawing, climbing on playground equipment, stringing beads — accompanied by flute and drums with an upbeat rhythm, is contrasted by interviews with and the stories of the children themselves.  Seven-year-old Wafa, in a small yet matter-of-fact voice, explains that her parents are dead; her mother was shot through the head and her father stabbed by Phalangists.
+Film still from Children Nonetheless (1980)
+The children in the film are residents of Beit Sumoud, which houses half of the children who lost their family during the Tel al-Zatar refugee camp siege, during which hundreds of children died and 15,000 residents were forced to flee — half of them children, some of them too small to be able to say their own names.  At Beit Sumoud, the children live with surrogate families.  The child Jihad was two years old when his mother was martyred while holding him in her arms.  Upon arrival to Beit Sumoud, he did not speak and was presumed to be deaf and dumb.  However, as a result of the nurturing environment of Beit Sumoud, he now smiles and it is explained, “little by little he became more expressive and willing to talk.”
+The experiences of the children at Beit Sumoud are paralleled with those living under Israeli occupation in Palestine.  An Israeli newspaper’s investigation of the pervasive exploitation of Palestinian child labor in the Israeli commercial sector (which indicted public figures such as then-general Ariel Sharon), coupled with the testimony of a boy who was arrested, beaten and humiliated in Ramallah, glues together the narrative of suffering universally experienced by the fractured Palestinian nation.  And yet we see the children flourish and their joy as they dance the traditional debke dance. And while the older children are shown learning how to shoot firearms, what seems to be the most effective weapon against Israel’s constant threat of effacement is the preservation of the Palestinian narrative and culture.
+That these examples of Palestinian revolution cinema — amongst the handful of surviving films after a Palestinian film archive housed in Beirut went missing during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon — are again being screened is an act of resistance against Israel’s historic efforts to efface, outlaw, and appropriate Palestinian culture. They are important not because they are historic curiosities, but because they retain their currency.  As Joseph Massad points out in Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, the founders of the revolutionary film units “were keen on recording revolutionary events, and they did not want to replicate the experience of previous revolutions that failed to record their pre-victory period on film, leaving such tasks to outsiders.”  What is so weighty about these films is that they were produced during the midst of trauma, providing a cinematic window unto a specific time of the Palestinian struggle, yet are still totally relevant today as the question of Palestine remains an open one, and Palestinians are still living the legacy of the Nakba.
+Maureen Clare Murphy is Managing Editor of The Electronic Intifada.
+The Palestine Revolution Cinema series includes AWAY FROM HOME (1969, 11 min.), and THE VISIT (1970, 10 min.), both by Qais il Zobaidi; CHILDREN NONETHELESS by Khadija Abu Ali (1980, 25 min.); THEY DON’T EXIST by Mustafa Abu Ali (1974, 25 min.); KOFR SHOBA by Samir Nimr (1972, 34 min.) [not available at time of review]; and BORN OUT OF DEATH by Monica Maurer (1981, 9 min.) In Arabic with English subtitles. Mini-DV and 16mm. Screening at 8:15 on 12 May 2007 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago.
+Related Links
+Coming Home: Palestinian Cinema, Annemarie Jacir (27 February 2007)
+Palestinian Revolution Cinema Comes to NYC, Emily Jacir (16 February 2007)
+BY TOPIC: Film Reviews & Features

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-articleTitle: International Day Against Racism is Urgent for Palestinians
-pageTitle: International Day Against Racism is Urgent for Palestinians | BDS Movement
-description: As we mark this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (#IDERD) we commemorate all of the Palestinians murdered in Israel’s...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.239Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/international-day-against-racism-urgent-for-palestinians
 ---
-As we mark this International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (#IDERD) we commemorate all of the Palestinians murdered in Israel’s racist #GazaGenocide. Palestinians in Gaza have now endured 167 days of Israeli attacks, over 32,000 Palestinians have been murdered, at least 13,000 of them were children. As we write, Israel is besieging patients and the displaced at al-Shifa Hospital and is threatening to blow it up. The UN has warned of catastrophic levels of hunger and starvation. In the words of Michael Fakhri, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, “We've never seen a civilian population go so hungry and so completely in any time in modern history. We've never seen children pushed into malnutrition so quickly.”This #IDERD, march with us to end #GazaGenocide and dismantle Israeli apartheid, march towards freedom, justice and equality for all!#IDERD is observed annually on the day of the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre when South African police murdered 69 Black people during a peaceful protest against apartheid laws. #IDERD is an annual call to end all forms of racial discrimination, segregation, and apartheid worldwide.Since 1948, Israel has maintained an apartheid regime over the entire Palestinian people through laws, policies and practices which ensure their prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment. South Africa’s apartheid system ended in 1994, but Israel’s apartheid regime against all Palestinians has been allowed to continue with impunity because of the support and complicity of Western governments. Escalate #BDS campaigns. Pressure states and institutions to divest from complicit companies. Impose an immediate #MilitaryEmbargo and targeted sanctions on apartheid Israel now.

+articleTitle: ‘NYT’ covers up the rise of Jewish supremacist Ben-Gvir, as Netanyahu’s security
+pageTitle: ‘NYT’ covers up the rise of Jewish supremacist Ben-Gvir, as Netanyahu’s security minister – Mondoweiss
+description: Benjamin Netanyahu picked the racist Itamar Ben-Gvir as Minister of National Security. Negative consequences started immediately. So where’s the ‘NYTimes?’
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:52.232Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/nyt-covers-up-the-rise-of-jewish-supremacist-ben-gvir-as-netanyahus-security-minister/
 ---
+As expected, on November 25 Benjamin Netanyahu picked the racist, Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir to be the powerful Minister of National Security in the next Israeli government.
+As expected, the New York Times and the Washington Post are so far ignoring Ben-Gvir’s appointment, even though the dangerous consequences have already started. (National Public Radio, to its credit, did include a brief on-air report.)
+Meanwhile, reporters and commentators at Haaretz, the indispensable Israeli daily, are already sounding the alarm about Ben-Gvir. Amos Harel, the paper’s unsentimental security correspondent, got straight to the point: “A few hours [after the appointment], a Givati Brigade soldier was filmed punching a leftist activist in Hebron, while his comrade explained to the camera that ‘Ben-Gvir will bring order. You’ve had it. I decide what the law is here.’”
+Harel summarized, “The [Netanyahu] government is perceived, both by the extreme right as well as by soldiers, as license to use unlimited force against Arabs and an opportunity to make sure that leftists understand the new balance of power.”
+This site has long argued that the New York Times and other U.S. media outlets distort their reporting from Israel/Palestine by covering up the racist far-right. Hiding the Ben-Gvir appointment and its immediate consequences is only the latest example.
+There is more. Haaretz also reported that Netanyahu is letting Ben-Gvir “substantially expand” his ministry, to include the Border Police in the West Bank, which were previously under Israeli army command. The paper quoted “a senior law enforcement source,” who warned that the change “turns the Border police into Ben-Gvir’s personal police in the territories.” And the same article also reported that outgoing Defense Minister Benny Gantz — who is no pacifist — accused Netanyahu of “creating a private army for Ben-Gvir in the West Bank,” adding that the move is “an admission that the real prime minister is going to be Ben-Gvir.”
+In what world is this not breaking news, deserving of coverage? Tensions in the occupied Palestinian West Bank are already at their highest level in years, and yet Israel’s security policy is now in the hands of a fascist who was considered so extreme when he was younger that he wasn’t even allowed to serve as a foot soldier in the Israeli army.
+Let’s contrast the U.S. mainstream silence with the Financial Times, the conservative, British pro-business newspaper. The FT ran a report within hours of the Ben-Gvir appointment, and in the second paragraph accurately described him as “an ultranationalist previously convicted of incitement to racism.”
+Today’s New York Times did, thankfully, include an honest, valuable report by Raja Abdulrahim, from Gaza City. Here’s the print edition’s headline: “Israeli Blockade Takes Steep Toll on Gaza’s’ Fishing Industry (and Diet).” The report followed all the mainstream conventions, including giving Israeli authorities the opportunity to try and refute the allegations. We’ll wait to see if the paper can eventually apply the same standard to the Itamar Ben-Gvir story.

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-articleTitle: BDS Gulf Holds its First Regional Anti-Normalisation Conference
-pageTitle: BDS Gulf Holds its First Regional Anti-Normalisation Conference | BDS Movement
-description: November 24, 2017 — Last week, BDS Gulf held its first regional anti-normalization conference in Kuwait City, with a broad participation of speakers...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.274Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/bds-gulf-holds-its-first-regional-anti-normalisation-conference
 ---
-November 24, 2017 — Last week, BDS Gulf held its first regional anti-normalization conference in Kuwait City, with a broad participation of speakers, organizations, activists and political figures from the entire Gulf region. The conference, which was followed by workshops focused on campaign strategies and a practical regional action plan, made several recommendations regarding anti-normalization and activating BDS campaigns in the Gulf summarized below.
-G4S
-In response to G4S’ complicity with Israel’s regime of oppression and its active involvement with the Israeli police forces, the conference called for launching a unified regional campaign targeting G4S’ contracts and bids in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries.
-G4S is considered a strategic target for BDS Gulf as it plans to build on the milestone achieved when the Kuwaiti Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS) divested its shares from the company last year. Additionally, G4S has lost dozens of contracts in Jordan and Lebanon over the past two years, giving the campaign in the Gulf a more fertile ground to build on the successes of the #StopG4S campaign in the Arab World.
-Despite the sale of its Israeli affiliate, which continues to trade under the “G4S Israel” name and uses the G4S logo, the company still holds 50% of Policity Ltd. which was contracted by the Israeli police to build and operate Israel’s National Police Academy, inaugurated in January 2015. Located in a 55-acre plot in Beit Shemesh, the National Police Academy combines all of Israel’s police training under one roof, replacing 20 facilities throughout the country.
-Israeli police forces are regularly condemned by human rights organizations for committing egregious violations of international law, including war crimes against Palestinians under Israel’s military occupation.
-Policity, the company owned and operated by G4S, is responsible for at least 40% of the training instruction of Israeli police, amounting to about 40,000 hours in the current contract. The training provided by National Police Academy includes crowd control, house raids, interrogation techniques, target shooting and undercover operations — repression tactics aimed exclusively at Palestinians.
-Additionally, in July, video evidence showed cars with the G4S logo supplying the security systems used by the Israeli government to restrict Palestinian access to the al-Aqsa mosque. FST Biometrics, the company that was expected to supply the smart surveillance cameras that Israel then planned to install at the doors of al-Aqsa Mosque, is a partner of AMAG Technology, a company owned by G4S.
-Ethical investment and procurement legislations
-The BDS Gulf conference, which was welcomed by the speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament and attended by a number of parliamentarians from several GCC countries, called for the adoption of national laws and regulations that would require private entities and public institutions alike to exclude companies complicit in Israel’s regime of occupation, colonialism and apartheid from bids and contracts.
-Such companies include G4S, Alstom, Hyundai Heavy Industries, HP, among others, especially those that are anticipated to be listed on the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ database of companies involved in Israel’s illegal settlement regime in the occupied territory.
-Divestment of sovereign funds
-The conference called upon public and sovereign funds, akin to the PIFSS in Kuwait, to divest their shares from international companies that are targeted by the BDS movement for their complicity in the occupation. Moreover, the conference recommended the publication of an investment screen, including a list of companies that are involved in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights, to guide institutions as to which companies should be considered for divestment.
-Anti-normalization
-On a broader level, the conference was widely regarded as a timely step to reaffirm the massive popular support in GCC countries for Palestinian rights and strengthening public and popular opposition to any possible change of policies towards normalizing relations with Israel in the region.
-The BDS Gulf conference reminded GCC states of their legal obligations to hold Israel to account through the imposition of sanctions including by ending military trade and actively seeking the expulsion of Israel from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), FIFA and other international forums.

+articleTitle: The Israeli army demolished a school in Masafer Yatta. Residents say it won’t be the last.
+pageTitle: The Israeli army demolished a school in Masafer Yatta. Residents say it won’t be the last. – Mondoweiss
+description: Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian primary school in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern West Bank saying it was built “illegally” in an Israeli military firing zone.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:52.281Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-israeli-army-demolished-a-school-in-masafer-yatta-residents-say-it-wont-be-the-last/
 ---
+Israeli forces demolished a Palestinian primary school in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern occupied West Bank on Wednesday, under the pretext that the school was built “illegally” in an active Israeli military firing zone.
+Israeli forces raided the Palestinian village of Isfey al-Fauqa in Masafer Yatta, known also as the South Hebron Hills, early Wednesday morning during active school hours, as a number of students were inside the recently-constructed school receiving lessons.
+According to locals, Israeli forces evacuated the students and teachers before demolishing the structure, made of prefabricated buildings. Videos taken at the scene were widely circulated on social media, showing a number of distressed school children crying as the armed forces prepared the school for demolition.
+Other photos showed school children retrieving their textbooks and papers that were strewn across the ground following the demolition.
+The school was constructed by the Palestinian Authority as part of its “Tahadi” program, meaning “challenge” in Arabic, to build educational institutions in marginalized Palestinian communities across Area C, the more than 60% of the West Bank under full Israeli control where Palestinian construction is banned.
+Beginning in 2016, the program, which has been funded in large part by the European Union, has seen the construction of over a dozen schools in Area C, including the one in Isfey al-Fauqa, which was constructed around two months ago.
+The school had been in service only for a couple of weeks prior to its demolition, and was servicing approximately 23 students from Isfay al-Fauqa and the surrounding villages.
+Just one day prior to the demolition, a number of diplomats and UN representatives had visited the school and posed for pictures in front of the new buildings. Following the demolition on Wednesday, the PA, the EU, and UN representatives criticized Israel for the move, saying that the Israeli government has a responsibility to ensure that children living in the occupied territory have access to a safe education.
+Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Richard Hecht claimed that the “full picture on the ground” was “very different” from the one presented on social media and in the press. Hecht said on Twitter that the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta were being “cynically & dangerously used as pawns to populate illegal structures.”
+“The [international] community’s support for these structures, [including] schools empty in the middle of the day, only creates further difficulty for all,” he said.
+But the Palestinians in Masafer Yatta say the school was built to address a real need in the rural community, where another four schools, many of them several years old, are also under imminent threat of Israeli demolition.
+“The purpose behind building the school in that location was to allow the kids from the Isfay area to have access to a school nearby, and not have to travel far distances in order to get to the existing schools across the Firing Zone,” local activist Sami Huraini told Mondoweiss.
+“What’s happening in Masafer Yatta is a war crime, and it will happen to the rest of the schools in Firing Zone 918,” Huraini said.
+In May 2022 the Israeli High Court made its final decision in a 20-year legal battle by the people of Masafer Yatta, ruling in favor of the army, which declared thousands of acres of land in the area as an active military “firing zone.”
+The court’s decision in May paved the way for the forcible displacement of an estimated 1,300 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, and the demolition of close to 900 structures, including homes, livestock pens, schools, clinics, mosques, water cisterns, and latrines. Rights groups have condemned the decision as a court-sanctioned war crime.
+In late August, the court rejected an appeal against the demolition of two schools in the villages of Khirbet al-Fakheet and Jinba, which lie in the heart of the firing zone.
+Since the high court’s decision, Palestinians in Masafer Yatta have stepped up their global campaign to #SaveMasaferYatta, calling for immediate intervention to prevent the expulsion of the residents by the Israeli army.
+Huraini called the international community “hypocritical” for failing to take a stronger stance on the situation in Masafer Yatta, saying “it shows how scared and weak the international community is in front of Israel.”
+“Our children should not have to travel such far distances in harsh conditions to get to school, while facing daily harassment from the settlers. These children should be able to go to school safely and freely, and have the right to an education, like all the other kids in the world.”

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-articleTitle: Silencing Truth
-pageTitle: Silencing Truth | BDS Movement
-description:     In the midst of Israel’s US and European enabled genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians, especially...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.306Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/silencing-truth
 ---
-In the midst of Israel’s US and European enabled genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians, especially Al Jazeera's Palestine crew and other Palestinian media workers, recently bade farewell to the talented Al Jazeera photographer, Samer Wael Abu Daqqa, who was killed in a deliberate Israeli airstrike in Gaza last Friday.
-Israeli occupation forces obstructed ambulance teams from reaching Samer for more than 5 hours, leaving him to bleed to death–a policy that the Israeli military has used for decades against wounded Palestinians.
-Israel’s targeting of Samer, and with him the inspiring Al Jazeera reporter, Wael Al-Dahdouh, has reminded Palestinians of the targeted murder last year of the iconic Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, while she was reporting from occupied Jenin.
-While trying to save Samer, who was shouting for help after being severely wounded by the Israeli strike, three Palestinian emergency service responders were killed by direct Israeli fire, and veteran Palestinian journalist Wael Aldahoud was injured—all in their professional uniforms. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), whose research has shown that 72 percent of journalists killed on the job in 2023 were killed in Gaza, condemned the Israeli attack on Samer Abu Daqqa.
-Since the start of its genocidal war on Gaza in October, Israel has sought to suppress coverage of its atrocities in Gaza by adopting a two-fold strategy: preventing the international media from entering Gaza and assassinating the most impactful Palestinian journalists in Gaza after threatening them that unless they stopped reporting they and their families would be killed, as reported by several Palestinian journalists.
-Wounded journalist Al Dahdouh, whose family had previously been killed in an Israeli strike following threats, eulogized Samer saying:
-We lost Samer in a barbaric [Israeli] attack that directly targeted us, despite prior coordination... Our consolation is that we will carry this noble humanitarian message. We will continue to do our duty with the best of professionalism, objectivity, and transparency, despite Israeli attacks targeting the lives of more than 80 fellow [Palestinian] journalists, and that directly targeted their families, offices, and cars. This is the case for the whole of the Gaza Strip. We will continue our duty and we will carry our message.
-Diaa al-Kahlout, the Gaza bureau chief of The New Arab's Arabic Language Service, was arrested by Israeli forces on December 7, prompting widespread concerns and condemnation from human rights groups, including Reporters Without Borders (RSF), while The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called for his immediate release. The spokesperson for the UN Secretary General expressed concerns about Al-Kahlout’s fate. Al-Kahlout was forcibly taken from his home in Beit Lahia in the north of the occupied Gaza Strip and reportedly subjected to physical abuse by Israeli soldiers. Subsequently, he appeared in a distressing video alongside other randomly kidnapped Palestinian men and boys. In the video, he was shown stripped of his clothes with bound hands.
-Reflecting inspiring courage and commitment for 70 days and counting, and despite the unimaginable grief, trauma and exhaustion, Palestinian journalists covering Israel’s genocide in Gaza continue to perform their professional mission, refusing to be intimidated.
-This latest murder is part of a consistent pattern of Israeli violent attacks against Palestinian journalists, and to a lesser extent international journalists covering Palestine, revealing the brutalities of Israel’s 75-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid. Yet, mainstream Western media coverage remains as racist and dehumanizing towards Palestinians and as supportive of Israel’s genocide, leading a former senior UN human rights official to say:
-The repeated non-critical recitation of false, dehumanizing Israeli propaganda by western media is not sloppy journalism -- it is war propaganda and incitement to #genocide for which they must be held accountable as their media counterparts were in the Nuremberg & Rwanda tribunals.
-Justice for Samer, for Shireen, for Dia, and for the tens of thousands massacred or injured or arrested by apartheid Israel during its ongoing genocide in Gaza, demands far more than mere condemnation. It starts with ending all business-as-usual with Israel, ending all forms of complicity in its regime of colonial oppression. Without unprecedented measures of accountability and lawful sanctions against it, starting with a comprehensive military embargo, Israel will set a new norm of might makes right, where powerful states can perpetrate a livestreamed genocide against weaker nations and racialized communities with utter impunity.
-In response to Israel’s targeted killing of tens of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, and many others elsewhere, Palestinian civil society urges local/national journalist syndicates and federations to take concrete action, including:
-Urge media studies and journalism faculties and departments to:
-Palestinians do not need charity. We need meaningful solidarity, and we demand accountability.

+articleTitle: The Americans most culpable for Netanyahu’s ‘Jewish’ revolution are silent as Israel
+pageTitle: The Americans most culpable for Netanyahu’s ‘Jewish’ revolution are silent as Israel implodes – Mondoweiss
+description: The most “pro-Israel” journalists in America would prefer Israel implode than have an embarrassing public debate about what’s happening in the Jewish state.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:53.566Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-americans-most-culpable-for-netanyahus-jewish-revolution-are-silent-as-israel-implodes/
 ---
+Read more from the Hasbara Culture series here.
+Benjamin Netanyahu is back. And thanks to him, Jewish populist madness has defeated sanity in Israel. Now experts are afraid that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is around the corner.
+For decades Netanyahu has gotten away with behavior that would have taken down any other politician worldwide. Where does Netanyahu’s impunity and immunity come from? How could he name the dangerous, outspokenly racist Itamar Ben-Gvir as police commissioner without a Jewish earthquake in response? What makes Netanyahu different from every Israeli politician who has come before him?
+In his memoir, Barack Obama wrote about Netanyahu that his “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power.”
+The Haaretz writer Carolina Landsmann described Netanyahu’s unique motto as “The future is dangerous to the Jews. Only Bibi is good for them.”
+“Bibi is good for the Jews” is what Netanyahu has successfully sold to the Jewish and Israeli public.
+This article will discuss what it means to be a “good Jew” to Netanyahu. And the ideas that he expounded over his career to differentiate himself from “bad for the Jews” politicians. It is part of my exploration of “hasbara culture,” a Jewish victimhood perspective that uses lessons learned from Jewish history to make sense of today’s world.
+In 1996 after losing to Netanyahu, Shimon Peres famously remarked, “The Jews have defeated the Israelis.” And this theme of the Jews vs. the “Israelis” or “leftists” has been the main feature of Netanyahu’s politics and rhetoric. “Bibi is good for the Jews” was the Likud’s slogan in 1996.
+Netanyahu explained the difference between the Jews and the “Israelis” in 1997, when he was famously caught on an open mike whispering to Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a Sephardic kabbalist, that “on the left, they’ve forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”
+What does Netanyahu think is un-Jewish about the left? What is it that Netanyahu believes they have forgotten? Netanyahu continued:
+“They believe they can trust our security in the hands of the Arabs.”
+What Netanyahu is claiming is that if the left were Jewish, they would know from (Jewish) experience that “the Arabs” (or any other enemy of the Jewish state) can’t be trusted.
+Netanyahu has successfully proselytized that being a good Jew means believing that the Jewish people face the threat of elimination.
+In a 2012 Haaretz article: called “Netanyahu: Israel Must Prevent the Elimination of the Jewish People”, Netanyahu expounded on his “Jewish” ideas:
+“There is no lack of bitter enemies today. The will to destroy the Jewish people has not changed. What has changed is our ability to defend ourselves and our determination to do so.”
+While ideas like this have been present in politicians’ rhetoric before him, Netanyahu has undertaken a cultural revolution with them. The ideas that “the will to destroy the Jewish people has not changed,” and that the future is dangerous to the Jews, and only Netanyahu is good for them have transformed Israel.
+Carolina Landsmann describes Netanyahu’s “destruction.”
+We need people who can see the destruction that Netanyahu himself—not the right, not Likud, not his voters, all of whom are his victims no less than the “left”—wreaked here. We need Israelis who detect the retreat of the modern sovereign enterprise of the Jewish people, which Netanyahu brought about when he stuck his hand into the relatively fresh Jewish-Israeli seam and unstitched it. We need Israelis who understand that Netanyahu operated like a Jewish agent from the galut [exile].
+Ironically social scientists find the uber-Zionist Netanyahu’s Jewish victimhood perspective as “Un-Zionist.” Here is Moshe Berent writing in an important new book on the “victimhood discourse” in Israel how Israel’s Jewish self-image has been transformed through time:
+Zionism’s initial position was the rejection of the traditional notion of victimization as a law of history about which nothing can be done: the establishment of a Jewish nation-state was supposed to solve the “Jewish problem” and to put an end to the victimization of the Jews. Yet… it seems the establishment of the Jewish nation-state not only did not solve the Jewish problem but the Jewish state itself has become the successor of the problem and the main object of victimization.
+Let’s contrast Netanyahu with what “Israeli” Prime Ministers sound like. In 1964 former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said this about hostility towards Israel:
+“Arab hostility is not an eternal factor. Even today, when the situation looks hopeless, we have to remember that nations, hostile to each other for tens of years, found avenues to each other’s heart, when the political circumstances changed.”
+And Rabin was searching for avenues into the Palestinian people’s hearts when he said in 1994:
+“I appeal now to the Palestinian people and say: Our Palestinian neighbors, one hundred years of bloodshed implanted in us hostility toward one another. For one hundred years we lay in wait for you, and you lay in wait for us. We killed you, and you killed us. Today, we stretch out our hands in peace. Today, we are beginning a different reckoning.”
+Whatever one’s opinion about the Oslo accords, it’s crucial to recognize that Rabin was being genuine here:
+“The new hope which we take with us from here is boundless. There is no limit to our goodwill, to our desire to see a historic conciliation between two peoples who have until now lived by the sword in the alleyways of Khan Yunis and the streets of Ramat Gan, in the houses of Gaza and the plazas of Hadera, in Rafah and Afula.
+Now look at another Israeli PM with the Israeli/”Leftist” perspective. “Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak reiterated to me last week that he’d likely have become a terrorist if he had been born Palestinian. He explained how important it is for peace for us to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our enemies,” the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote four years ago.
+This ideological disagreement is what is dividing Israel and the Jewish world.
+Because if like Netanyahu you believe that Israel’s present foes are the same pathological Jew haters from the Jewish past, then it is suicidal for Jews “to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our enemies.” The Jew haters’ perspective is just that they want to kill Jews. So, naturally those Jews who try to see the Palestinian perspective are not only suicidal but traitors to the Jewish people as well.
+This is the hatred Netanyahu has unleashed on the left. This is why the left has been decimated in Israel. Netanyahu has made the left taboo. This ideology is behind the vicious hatred we recently saw from an Israeli occupying soldier toward a Breaking the Silence member who dared to criticize the occupation.
+That’s why these days to be a successful politician in mainstream Israeli politics it’s necessary to show deference to Netanyahu’s worldview. There is nothing politicians in Israeli politics want to avoid more than to be thought a leftist.
+Ehud Barak was the last Israeli politician who confronted Netanyahu’s a-historical “Jewish” ideological agenda.
+The most critical division in Israel and the Jewish world is those living in the real world and those living out a Jewish fantasy.
+Or as Barak said: Netanyahu sounds less like a Prime Minister and more like a “fearful rabbi in a shtetl.”
+He accused Netanyahu of “cheapening the Holocaust”. In 2017, Barak warned of an Israeli civil war and said Netanyahu’s government was guilty of inciting and dividing the people:
+“[I]n a dark nationalist regime, there’s use made of existential threats from without and traitors from within. To incite and divide, to sow internal hatred to ensure (the government’s) existence…Bibi is an expert at it, in creating this week’s or this year’s Hitler. Every time there’s a Hitler-de-jour who threatens us with a new Holocaust,”
+Barak further accused Netanyahu of the “Hitlerization of the conflict” with Iran. The Israeli and Jewish discourses surrounding the Iran deal are very instructive. The “leftist” and “Jewish” perspective could not be more different.
+(Now readers might wonder, wasn’t it Barak who infamously uttered “there is no partner for peace.” That sounds exactly like Netanyahu. That doesn’t sound like someone putting themselves in the “shoes of our enemies.” But Barak wasn’t making an ideological statement, he was trying to deflect blame for the Camp David failure. That doesn’t make “there is no partner” less pernicious and insidious. But seeing the damage it’s done I’m convinced Barak if he could, would take it back.)
+In “A Military Coup Coming to Replace Netanyahu,” Carolina Landsmann spells out why the “entire Israeli security establishment” has come out against Netanyahu on Iran. She wrote:
+“And not only the IDF. In recent years it seems the entire security establishment has become a greenhouse for growing Netanyahu opponents. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin came out publicly against Netanyahu, especially over the “Iran” fixation, at the price of becoming “traitors” in the eyes of the right.”
+Real-world experts on Iran don’t use the (supposed) lessons of Jewish history to understanding the Iranian present. They reject that the idea that the “will to destroy the Jewish people hasn’t changed.”
+More Landsmann:
+“David Bitan [a Likud politician] couldn’t have said it better: “Something happens to those who serve as heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet. Along the years they become leftists.” Well, perhaps that “something” is called Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe it isn’t surprising that a system whose task is to fight real enemies rebels against Netanyahu, the expert in inventing imaginary foes.” (My italics.)
+But Netanyahu “knows” that Iran’s number one national and ideological priority is to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. And that’s what makes the security officials above “leftists” and “traitors.”
+Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo explained, “In Israel today, if you don’t think and speak like the prime minister, you are automatically branded a traitor.”
+Netanyahu claims Iran is no different than Nazi Germany in its determination to kill Jews. That’s why according to him and his Jewish ideological allies, no nuclear deal is safe. Because there is no agreement that will deter Iran from its determination to destroy the Jewish state and the Jews. The Iranians are supposedly irrational in their hatred.
+Now listen to Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert:
+“I think that the nuclear agreement improved the situation compared to what existed earlier, which is why we should have supported it instead of fighting against it. Not one of Israel’s official strategic nuclear experts that I spoke with thought that the [Barack] Obama [administration’s] agreement was a bad deal. Some thought that it might have been possible to reach an even better agreement, but they all thought that this agreement was better than what was happening before it.”
+Opponents and supporters of the Iran deal are talking past each other. On one side is the recognition (from considerable evidence) that Iran is pragmatic, and in return for economic relief they’re willing to give up any nuclear ambitions. While the other side is convinced that the leaders of Iran would happily bring about the destruction of their own country and people, if only they could take the state of Israel and the Jews down with them.
+Which begs the question — How much of his own rhetoric does Netanyahu believe? Where does his ideology end and ambition begin? Because as Haaretz reports, he used this discourse for more selfish and less noble reasons than “stopping a second Holocaust.” During his corruption case, it came out that:
+Miriam Adelson, the publisher of free daily Israel Hayom, told police that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara repeatedly contacted her about how they were being covered in the paper . . . Adelson, the wealthiest woman in Israel and wife of American casino magnate Sheldon, said that Sara Netanyahu “once told me that if Iran gets nuclear weapons and Israel is wiped out, I’ll be to blame because I’m not defending Bibi,” referring to Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname.
+In this election we see how successful Netanyahu is in wielding the “leftist” epithet.
+In a piece titled “Where Ben-Gvir won, Israel’s liberal generals failed,” the Israeli journalist Sami Peretz explains how it’s possible that the “benighted” Religious Zionism party received more votes from soldiers than the “National Union” party of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and Gideon Saar, which is run largely by generals and former chiefs of staff. He asked, how can it be that a “benighted, extremist party whose leaders have little to no military background do better than a party led by two former chiefs of staff?” Peretz argued that the question “requires an explanation . . . from all Israeli society.”
+The answer is that Netanyahu turned them into traitors. Just look at Netanyahu’s treatment of the leader of the “National Union” party Benny Gantz. An outsider might consider Gantz and his party to be on the political and ideological right. Yet, Netanyahu accused Gantz of “endangering the lives of . . . soldiers so as not to harm Palestinians.”
+Netanyahu is making the “leftist” accusation against Gantz: Gantz has forgotten what it means to be Jewish. He has more concern for the enemies of the Jews than the Jews.
+The success of Netanyahu’s calumnies was seen when Gantz was confronted by dozens of young men cursing him and calling him a “leftist” when he went to pray at the holy wall.
+Netanyahu will go down as one of the great villains of Jewish history for the dichotomy he has established between the good Jew, Netanyahu, and his self-hating Jewish opponents. This is the destruction that Landsmann was talking about.
+Chaim Levinson of Haaretz reports that Netanyahu pushed for the 2018 Nation State law that gives Jews the exclusive right of self-determination in the land of Israel “not for its own sake” but in order to be able to accuse those opposing it as being leftist and traitors:
+“Netanyahu embraced the nation-state law not for its own sake but to force the left wing to vote with “the Arabs.”
+Now listen to Netanyahu’s invective against those courageous enough to oppose the Nation-State law:
+“The attacks from the left, which calls itself Zionist, reveal how low the left has sunk,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the law’s critics during its passage. “The Israeli left has to do some soul-searching,” he said. “It must ask itself why a basic tenet of Zionism, a Jewish nation-state for the Jewish people in its land, has become a rude concept, a dirty word.”
+Netanyahu has no compunction about tearing Israel apart by the seams if it can help him root out a few more leftists. This is why there is no “left” to speak of in Israel. Netanyahu has made the left and their ideas taboo.
+Netanyahu is a genius at cultivating hate. But Netanyahu could not do this by himself. There is a group of American Jewish journalists who helped turn Netanyahu and his ideas sacred. They were Netanyahu’s allies in enforcing his “Jewish” perspective on the world.
+Just as “leftist” Jews were turned into traitors in Israel so they were here too. Here too Jews were accusing other Jews of “forgetting what it means to be Jews.” Here too there was an ideological battle whether the “the will to destroy the Jewish people hasn’t changed.” And the same method used by Netanyahu to “speak for the Jews” in Israel was seen here as well.
+American foreign policy is now held hostage by the Jewish victimhood perspective. That’s the real power of the Israel Lobby. That’s how AIPAC can continue its poisonous and pernicious war against want-to do-good progressive Democrats. The reason AIPAC is not as taboo inside the Democratic Party as the NRA is, is because AIPAC is acting in defense of the Jews. And when it comes to defending the Jews from their enemies there are no rules.
+Wannabe “spokespeople for the Jews” played the same Jewish role here that Netanyahu plays in Israel. Like Netanyahu, they insist that they speak from sacred Jewish history.
+The scholar W. M. L. Finlay describes these Jewish journalists’ tactics:
+“A simple dichotomy is set up between those who agree with the writer, presented as on the side of the Jews in general, and the ‘enemy,’ … In these accounts there are no legitimate differences of opinion among the Jews, there is simply a hawkish version of Zionism on the one side, representing the authentic Jewish voice, and the enemy on the other. Critics of military actions, advocates of a negotiated settlement, and those who state that the Palestinians have suffered injustice are presented as committing an act of aggression against the Jews by allying themselves with those who would kill the Jews, either the terrorists or the anti-Semites in general.
+I have used “the assault on Peter Beinart” to show how “bad Jews” are confronted here. Because just like the leftists in Israel, the accusation against Beinart is that he has “forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”
+In a 2010 column, Beinart described the reaction from leading journalists to his article calling on American Jewish organizations to finally take sides in Israel’s “domestic struggles between democrats and authoritarians”:
+“It has been a week since my essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” was published in the New York Review of Books, and the responses have largely congealed into a single critique. From Leon Wieseltier to Jonathan Chait to Jeffrey Goldberg to Jamie Kirchick to David Frum, the main complaint is that I didn’t spend enough time discussing the nastiness of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and extremist Muslims in general.”
+Beinart was, and is, trying to speak about Israel, but his critics only want to talk about Israel’s enemies. From the Jewish victimhood perspective Beinart’s sin is that he’s ignoring how evil Israel’s enemies are, that he’s discounting their hatred of the Jews in his analysis, that he is “blaming the victim.”
+“It’s a little odd . . . because my piece never claimed to offer an overview of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Iranian conflict. Rather, it was a plea for American Jewish organizations to take sides in Israel’s domestic struggle between democrats and authoritarians, and thus help save liberal Zionism in the United States. Those American Jewish organizations, of course, don’t need to be encouraged to criticize Iran and the Palestinians. It’s virtually all they do.”
+Beinart told these other Jewish journalists, while you’re all mesmerized by Hamas, Netanyahu is becoming authoritarian and making a two-state solution impossible.
+But the “pro-Israel” Jewish journalists who ambushed Beinart a decade ago are ignoring him and Israel now. Because he predicted the Israel of 2022 and was punished for his honesty.
+The result of this war of ideas among “pro-Israel” Jews is . . . The Israel of 2022.
+Because the same way the Jewish left was defeated in Israel, Beinart and J Street Jews were made taboo in this country. Ideas weren’t debated, they were “ritually defamed.” It’s the same accusation that Netanyahu makes — that these Jews are worse than kapo “stab in the back” Jews, who would rather be on the enemies of the Jews team than on the Jewish team. Being a Jewish heretic is believing the “Arabs can be trusted.” It is only “self-hating” Jews who try to put themselves in the shoes of their enemies.
+The most influential American Jewish journalists are implicated in Netanyahu’s hostile takeover of Israel. They are implicated in Netanyahu’s cultural crimes. And that’s why the last thing these people want to do is call attention to the madness going on in Israel.
+The formerly “Bibi”-obsessed Atlantic magazine has lost all interest in Netanyahu. And Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who once questioned Obama about whether he loves Jews in his “kishkes” or not — has decided that the cultural earthquake that was the last election in Israel is not newsy enough for the Atlantic. And nobody says boo. That is cultural power.
+Israel is heading to a civil war and there’s nothing anybody can do about. Because the most “pro-Israel” journalists in America would prefer Israel implode than have an “embarrassing” public debate about what’s happening in the Jewish state.

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-articleTitle: Israel Fails to Impose Virtual Walls Restricting Advocacy for Palestinian Rights in Europe
-pageTitle: Israel Fails to Impose Virtual Walls Restricting Advocacy for Palestinian Rights in Europe | BDS Movement
-description: Swiss Parliament & Spanish Government Reject Efforts to Criminalize BDS Human Rights Movement June 16, 2017, Ramallah — In a significant...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.394Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/israel-fails-impose-virtual-walls-restricting-advocacy-palestinian-rights-europe
 ---
-Swiss Parliament & Spanish Government Reject Efforts to Criminalize BDS Human Rights Movement
-June 16, 2017, Ramallah — In a significant setback for Israel’s campaign against the global, Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, earlier this week the upper house of the Swiss parliament blocked efforts to criminalize BDS and ban government funding for organizations committed to promoting Palestinian human rights. These failed efforts were led by Swiss right-wing parties lobbying for Israel.
-By refusing to restrict support for the legally protected right to advocate for BDS to end Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights, Switzerland now mirrors similar positions in Europe. In 2016, the European Union and the governments of Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands upheld the right to advocate for BDS to support Palestinian freedom, justice and equality as protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association principles.
-In a historic first for the Spanish central government, on April 27 it similarly and officially affirmed that the right to advocate for BDS in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is protected by laws guaranteeing freedom of expression.
-Spanish foreign minister Alfonso Dastis said,
-The government fully respects the activities and campaigns promoted by civil society within the framework of free expression guaranteed in our political system.
-He made this statement in response to a question about the government’s position on BDS, asked by Pablo Bustinduy, the spokesman of the international affairs committee of the progressive Unidos Podemos alliance in the Spanish parliament.
-Ana Sanchez, International Campaigns Officer with the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), said,
-The Spanish government has made clear that its citizens have the right to act according to their conscience and participate in the BDS movement to advocate for Palestinian human rights. Along with the Swiss parliament, it has dealt another blow to Israel's anti-democratic efforts to impose virtual walls restricting free speech and human rights work in principled solidarity with Palestinians. The recognition of the right to BDS is growing across Europe, the United States and the rest of the world. Boycotting Israel’s military occupation and racist system of apartheid is just as legally protected and morally justified as was the successful international boycott of apartheid South Africa.
-Roman Vonwil, a human rights advocate with BDS Switzerland said,
-This is a victory for human rights defenders and a defeat for the Israeli lobby groups that are pressuring parliaments all over Europe to conflate the anti-racist, nonviolent BDS movement for Palestinian rights with anti-Semitism and to stop funding Palestinian NGOs supporting BDS. It’s a victory for freedom of expression and human rights.
-When Pablo Bustinduy of the Spanish alliance Unidos Podemos endorsed the right to advocate for BDS in March 2017, he said,
-We will continue working to ensure respect for human rights and international law in Palestine, and for the right to free expression, which protects campaigns like the one led by the BDS movement and supports the actions of human rights defenders as legal and legitimate efforts to make visible the continuous violations of the rights of the the Palestinian people.
-Back in December 2016, more than 200 renowned lawyers and legal scholars from 15 European countries, including a former legal expert with the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a former Supreme Court judge in Spain, issued a declaration recognizing BDS as “a lawful exercise of freedom of expression.”
-The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter @BDSmovement

+articleTitle: A tribute to the heroes who told Shireen’s story
+pageTitle: A tribute to the heroes who told Shireen’s story – Mondoweiss
+description: Because of the bravery and heroism of Palestinian journalists, and their refusal to let Shireen Abu Akleh’s story die, Israel’s efforts to impede justice have so far proven futile.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:54.507Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/a-tribute-to-the-heroes-who-told-shireens-story
 ---
+It’s been three weeks since Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh.
+The sequence of events that unfolded following her killing were, like most of Israel’s responses to the Palestinians it kills, both shocking but unsurprising.
+The Israeli propaganda machine kicked into gear, working overtime to discredit the accounts of eyewitnesses, many of them journalists, as to what happened. With every new eyewitness testimony came more statements from Israeli military and government officials, who sought to deflect and reassign blame.
+Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media played along. The picture they painted of Shireen’s killing often aligned with the state’s narrative, and explicitly put into question the accounts of the journalists.
+Those journalists, however, did not waver in their testimony, despite what seemed like the weight of the world working against them, and the fact that their colleague had been killed right in front of their eyes.
+There were five other journalists with Shireen that day: Shatha Hanysha, Mujahed al-Saadi, Ali Samoudi, Majdi Bannoura, and Muhannad Nayroukh. All except Shatha and Mujahed worked with Shireen at Al Jazeera.
+Of the group of six, four came under fire from Israeli bullets: Shatha, Mujahed, Ali, and Shireen. Majdi and the Muhannad were right behind them, with their cameras rolling.
+Shireen was fatally shot in the head, right below her ear, and Samoudi was wounded in the back.
+Shatha, who was right next to Shireen when she was gunned down, managed to take cover behind a tree. She told journalists later that day that the tree saved her life, as it was the only thing shielding her from the bullets coming her way.
+And she continued to talk to journalists, for hours, days, and weeks following the shooting. Most recently, her eyewitness testimony was used in the CNN investigation that revealed what Shatha and her colleagues had been saying all along: it was the Israeli soldiers who shot at them, not Palestinian gunmen.
+Just moments after he was hospitalized for a gunshot wound to the back, Ali was talking to reporters about what happened. He was telling them that the group came under fire by Israeli snipers stationed just down the road from where they were. He gave these accounts while he was in a wheelchair, still wearing his hospital gown.
+In the weeks after Shireen was killed, and in the face of countless efforts to discredit them, their experience, and their testimonies, Shatha, Ali, Mujahid, Majdi, and Muhannad persevered. Amidst all the trauma and grief they were experiencing, from losing a hero and friend, they chose to speak up, and continued telling the truth.
+Their service to journalism, to Palestine, and to Shireen’s legacy is invaluable. And without them, the struggle to achieve justice for Shireen would be that much more difficult.
+Every year, Israel kills hundreds of Palestinians. Over the years, plenty of journalists have made that list. The vast majority of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces goes unnoticed. Their stories remain untold to the world outside Palestine, or simply get swept under the rug.
+For hundreds of Palestinian victims of Israel’s occupations and their families, justice is but a mere dream; something they would never dream of achieving for the loved ones they lost.
+But because of the bravery and heroism of these journalists, and their refusal to let Shireen’s story die, Israel’s efforts to impede justice have so far proven futile. So long as the truth continues to be told, there is hope that  some semblance of justice may be within reach.

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-articleTitle: Palestinians Call For WEF and Global Shapers To Exclude Genocidal Israel From Events or Face Boycott
-pageTitle: Palestinians Call For WEF and Global Shapers To Exclude Genocidal Israel From Events or Face Boycott | BDS Movement
-description: Should WEF and Global Shapers fail to exclude Israel, we call for boycotting all their events and activities in which Israel’s delegates participate.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:06:25.380Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/palestinians-call-for-wef-and-global-shapers-exclude-genocidal-israel-from-events-or-face
 ---
-The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a founding member of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that leads the global BDS movement, calls upon Palestinian and Arab delegates, as well as international delegates standing in solidarity with Palestinian rights, to pressure the World Economic Forum (WEF) to exclude Israel from its upcoming annual meeting in Davos, to be held from 20-24 January 2025, and from its associated Global Shapers events. Should WEF and Global Shapers fail to exclude Israel, we call for boycotting all their events and activities in which Israel’s delegates participate.At a time when Israel, supported by the colonial West, is perpetrating the world’s first live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, and in line with international law, Israel should be isolated and expelled from international fora. The International Court of Justice’s July 2024 determinationthat Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is entirely illegal and that it is violating the prohibition against apartheid makes cutting all links with Israel – including with its complicit institutions – that aid or assist in maintaining its occupation and apartheid regime a legal, not just a moral, duty.Just as apartheid South Africa was excluded from many international fora, so should Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid. This is particularly urgent given Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.The WEF program includes a focus on the “integration of AI,” which is dehumanizing and racist given Israel’s military use of AI, for the first time in history, that enables its “mass assassination factory” and other unspeakable genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza. To speak of “integration of AI” at such a time, while including Israeli delegates, not only whitewashes Israel’s crimes, but places WEF’s program to be genocide-enabling. The Global Shapers Davos50 component of WEF constitutes normalization.Normalization refers to participation in initiatives that bring together Palestinians and/or Arabs and Israelis without:The Israeli side publicly recognizing the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as affirmed by the United Nations and outlined in the 2005 BDS Call.The joint activity constituting a form of co-resistance against Israel's regime of occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid.The Global Shapers acceptance letter explicitly characterizes the Shapers participating in Davos50 as a “delegation,” while the organization’s website clearly states that delegates must “participate in all Shaper-specific events and sessions” and “conduct yourself as a representative for the entire community.” It presents Arab delegates as being part of one “community” with the Israeli delegate, attempting to normalize Israel as a natural part of the region, not a regime of settler-colonialism, apartheid and genocide against the Indigenous Palestinian people. Such normalizing engagements help to perpetuate the oppressive status quo and to create a false premise of symmetry/parity between the oppressors and the oppressed. They undermine the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self-determination as well as the international solidarity movement’s inspiring efforts to cut the links of state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of colonial oppression. Moreover, available public information indicates that the Israeli participant in the Global Shapers delegation has served in the Israeli army between 2016 and 2018 and has publicly endorsed Israel’s crimes, including statements by fugitive war criminal former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Galant, wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. She is therefore reasonably suspected of involvement in Israel’s war crimes and/or crimes against humanity.Individuals reasonably suspected of aiding, assisting, conspiring, or directly and publicly inciting to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, and/or war crimes should be investigated and, if warranted, prosecuted by all states. PACBI calls for investigating Israeli delegates participating in international events, including the World Economic Forum, if they fall under any of the categories of reasonable suspicion for involvement in war crimes. We call on all of the MENA Global Shapers and all conscientious Shapers worldwide to pressure their organization to exclude Israel and to boycott the organization entirely should it fail to do so. We also call for boycotting the upcoming Global Shapers delegation of the 2025 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos event unless Israel is excluded from it. Update, January 8, 2025: This call has been updated to distinguish between the various components of the WEF Annual Meeting in Davos.

+articleTitle: The Americans most culpable for Netanyahu’s ‘Jewish’ revolution are silent as Israel
+pageTitle: The Americans most culpable for Netanyahu’s ‘Jewish’ revolution are silent as Israel implodes – Mondoweiss
+description: The most “pro-Israel” journalists in America would prefer Israel implode than have an embarrassing public debate about what’s happening in the Jewish state.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:54.641Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/the-americans-most-culpable-for-netanyahus-jewish-revolution-are-silent-as-israel-implodes
 ---
+Read more from the Hasbara Culture series here.
+Benjamin Netanyahu is back. And thanks to him, Jewish populist madness has defeated sanity in Israel. Now experts are afraid that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is around the corner.
+For decades Netanyahu has gotten away with behavior that would have taken down any other politician worldwide. Where does Netanyahu’s impunity and immunity come from? How could he name the dangerous, outspokenly racist Itamar Ben-Gvir as police commissioner without a Jewish earthquake in response? What makes Netanyahu different from every Israeli politician who has come before him?
+In his memoir, Barack Obama wrote about Netanyahu that his “vision of himself as the chief defender of the Jewish people against calamity allowed him to justify almost anything that would keep him in power.”
+The Haaretz writer Carolina Landsmann described Netanyahu’s unique motto as “The future is dangerous to the Jews. Only Bibi is good for them.”
+“Bibi is good for the Jews” is what Netanyahu has successfully sold to the Jewish and Israeli public.
+This article will discuss what it means to be a “good Jew” to Netanyahu. And the ideas that he expounded over his career to differentiate himself from “bad for the Jews” politicians. It is part of my exploration of “hasbara culture,” a Jewish victimhood perspective that uses lessons learned from Jewish history to make sense of today’s world.
+In 1996 after losing to Netanyahu, Shimon Peres famously remarked, “The Jews have defeated the Israelis.” And this theme of the Jews vs. the “Israelis” or “leftists” has been the main feature of Netanyahu’s politics and rhetoric. “Bibi is good for the Jews” was the Likud’s slogan in 1996.
+Netanyahu explained the difference between the Jews and the “Israelis” in 1997, when he was famously caught on an open mike whispering to Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a Sephardic kabbalist, that “on the left, they’ve forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”
+What does Netanyahu think is un-Jewish about the left? What is it that Netanyahu believes they have forgotten? Netanyahu continued:
+“They believe they can trust our security in the hands of the Arabs.”
+What Netanyahu is claiming is that if the left were Jewish, they would know from (Jewish) experience that “the Arabs” (or any other enemy of the Jewish state) can’t be trusted.
+Netanyahu has successfully proselytized that being a good Jew means believing that the Jewish people face the threat of elimination.
+In a 2012 Haaretz article: called “Netanyahu: Israel Must Prevent the Elimination of the Jewish People”, Netanyahu expounded on his “Jewish” ideas:
+“There is no lack of bitter enemies today. The will to destroy the Jewish people has not changed. What has changed is our ability to defend ourselves and our determination to do so.”
+While ideas like this have been present in politicians’ rhetoric before him, Netanyahu has undertaken a cultural revolution with them. The ideas that “the will to destroy the Jewish people has not changed,” and that the future is dangerous to the Jews, and only Netanyahu is good for them have transformed Israel.
+Carolina Landsmann describes Netanyahu’s “destruction.”
+We need people who can see the destruction that Netanyahu himself—not the right, not Likud, not his voters, all of whom are his victims no less than the “left”—wreaked here. We need Israelis who detect the retreat of the modern sovereign enterprise of the Jewish people, which Netanyahu brought about when he stuck his hand into the relatively fresh Jewish-Israeli seam and unstitched it. We need Israelis who understand that Netanyahu operated like a Jewish agent from the galut [exile].
+Ironically social scientists find the uber-Zionist Netanyahu’s Jewish victimhood perspective as “Un-Zionist.” Here is Moshe Berent writing in an important new book on the “victimhood discourse” in Israel how Israel’s Jewish self-image has been transformed through time:
+Zionism’s initial position was the rejection of the traditional notion of victimization as a law of history about which nothing can be done: the establishment of a Jewish nation-state was supposed to solve the “Jewish problem” and to put an end to the victimization of the Jews. Yet… it seems the establishment of the Jewish nation-state not only did not solve the Jewish problem but the Jewish state itself has become the successor of the problem and the main object of victimization.
+Let’s contrast Netanyahu with what “Israeli” Prime Ministers sound like. In 1964 former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin said this about hostility towards Israel:
+“Arab hostility is not an eternal factor. Even today, when the situation looks hopeless, we have to remember that nations, hostile to each other for tens of years, found avenues to each other’s heart, when the political circumstances changed.”
+And Rabin was searching for avenues into the Palestinian people’s hearts when he said in 1994:
+“I appeal now to the Palestinian people and say: Our Palestinian neighbors, one hundred years of bloodshed implanted in us hostility toward one another. For one hundred years we lay in wait for you, and you lay in wait for us. We killed you, and you killed us. Today, we stretch out our hands in peace. Today, we are beginning a different reckoning.”
+Whatever one’s opinion about the Oslo accords, it’s crucial to recognize that Rabin was being genuine here:
+“The new hope which we take with us from here is boundless. There is no limit to our goodwill, to our desire to see a historic conciliation between two peoples who have until now lived by the sword in the alleyways of Khan Yunis and the streets of Ramat Gan, in the houses of Gaza and the plazas of Hadera, in Rafah and Afula.
+Now look at another Israeli PM with the Israeli/”Leftist” perspective. “Former Israeli PM Ehud Barak reiterated to me last week that he’d likely have become a terrorist if he had been born Palestinian. He explained how important it is for peace for us to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our enemies,” the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote four years ago.
+This ideological disagreement is what is dividing Israel and the Jewish world.
+Because if like Netanyahu you believe that Israel’s present foes are the same pathological Jew haters from the Jewish past, then it is suicidal for Jews “to try to put ourselves in the shoes of our enemies.” The Jew haters’ perspective is just that they want to kill Jews. So, naturally those Jews who try to see the Palestinian perspective are not only suicidal but traitors to the Jewish people as well.
+This is the hatred Netanyahu has unleashed on the left. This is why the left has been decimated in Israel. Netanyahu has made the left taboo. This ideology is behind the vicious hatred we recently saw from an Israeli occupying soldier toward a Breaking the Silence member who dared to criticize the occupation.
+That’s why these days to be a successful politician in mainstream Israeli politics it’s necessary to show deference to Netanyahu’s worldview. There is nothing politicians in Israeli politics want to avoid more than to be thought a leftist.
+Ehud Barak was the last Israeli politician who confronted Netanyahu’s a-historical “Jewish” ideological agenda.
+The most critical division in Israel and the Jewish world is those living in the real world and those living out a Jewish fantasy.
+Or as Barak said: Netanyahu sounds less like a Prime Minister and more like a “fearful rabbi in a shtetl.”
+He accused Netanyahu of “cheapening the Holocaust”. In 2017, Barak warned of an Israeli civil war and said Netanyahu’s government was guilty of inciting and dividing the people:
+“[I]n a dark nationalist regime, there’s use made of existential threats from without and traitors from within. To incite and divide, to sow internal hatred to ensure (the government’s) existence…Bibi is an expert at it, in creating this week’s or this year’s Hitler. Every time there’s a Hitler-de-jour who threatens us with a new Holocaust,”
+Barak further accused Netanyahu of the “Hitlerization of the conflict” with Iran. The Israeli and Jewish discourses surrounding the Iran deal are very instructive. The “leftist” and “Jewish” perspective could not be more different.
+(Now readers might wonder, wasn’t it Barak who infamously uttered “there is no partner for peace.” That sounds exactly like Netanyahu. That doesn’t sound like someone putting themselves in the “shoes of our enemies.” But Barak wasn’t making an ideological statement, he was trying to deflect blame for the Camp David failure. That doesn’t make “there is no partner” less pernicious and insidious. But seeing the damage it’s done I’m convinced Barak if he could, would take it back.)
+In “A Military Coup Coming to Replace Netanyahu,” Carolina Landsmann spells out why the “entire Israeli security establishment” has come out against Netanyahu on Iran. She wrote:
+“And not only the IDF. In recent years it seems the entire security establishment has become a greenhouse for growing Netanyahu opponents. Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan and Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin came out publicly against Netanyahu, especially over the “Iran” fixation, at the price of becoming “traitors” in the eyes of the right.”
+Real-world experts on Iran don’t use the (supposed) lessons of Jewish history to understanding the Iranian present. They reject that the idea that the “will to destroy the Jewish people hasn’t changed.”
+More Landsmann:
+“David Bitan [a Likud politician] couldn’t have said it better: “Something happens to those who serve as heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet. Along the years they become leftists.” Well, perhaps that “something” is called Benjamin Netanyahu. Maybe it isn’t surprising that a system whose task is to fight real enemies rebels against Netanyahu, the expert in inventing imaginary foes.” (My italics.)
+But Netanyahu “knows” that Iran’s number one national and ideological priority is to annihilate Israel and the Jewish people. And that’s what makes the security officials above “leftists” and “traitors.”
+Former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo explained, “In Israel today, if you don’t think and speak like the prime minister, you are automatically branded a traitor.”
+Netanyahu claims Iran is no different than Nazi Germany in its determination to kill Jews. That’s why according to him and his Jewish ideological allies, no nuclear deal is safe. Because there is no agreement that will deter Iran from its determination to destroy the Jewish state and the Jews. The Iranians are supposedly irrational in their hatred.
+Now listen to Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert:
+“I think that the nuclear agreement improved the situation compared to what existed earlier, which is why we should have supported it instead of fighting against it. Not one of Israel’s official strategic nuclear experts that I spoke with thought that the [Barack] Obama [administration’s] agreement was a bad deal. Some thought that it might have been possible to reach an even better agreement, but they all thought that this agreement was better than what was happening before it.”
+Opponents and supporters of the Iran deal are talking past each other. On one side is the recognition (from considerable evidence) that Iran is pragmatic, and in return for economic relief they’re willing to give up any nuclear ambitions. While the other side is convinced that the leaders of Iran would happily bring about the destruction of their own country and people, if only they could take the state of Israel and the Jews down with them.
+Which begs the question — How much of his own rhetoric does Netanyahu believe? Where does his ideology end and ambition begin? Because as Haaretz reports, he used this discourse for more selfish and less noble reasons than “stopping a second Holocaust.” During his corruption case, it came out that:
+Miriam Adelson, the publisher of free daily Israel Hayom, told police that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara repeatedly contacted her about how they were being covered in the paper . . . Adelson, the wealthiest woman in Israel and wife of American casino magnate Sheldon, said that Sara Netanyahu “once told me that if Iran gets nuclear weapons and Israel is wiped out, I’ll be to blame because I’m not defending Bibi,” referring to Benjamin Netanyahu by his nickname.
+In this election we see how successful Netanyahu is in wielding the “leftist” epithet.
+In a piece titled “Where Ben-Gvir won, Israel’s liberal generals failed,” the Israeli journalist Sami Peretz explains how it’s possible that the “benighted” Religious Zionism party received more votes from soldiers than the “National Union” party of Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot and Gideon Saar, which is run largely by generals and former chiefs of staff. He asked, how can it be that a “benighted, extremist party whose leaders have little to no military background do better than a party led by two former chiefs of staff?” Peretz argued that the question “requires an explanation . . . from all Israeli society.”
+The answer is that Netanyahu turned them into traitors. Just look at Netanyahu’s treatment of the leader of the “National Union” party Benny Gantz. An outsider might consider Gantz and his party to be on the political and ideological right. Yet, Netanyahu accused Gantz of “endangering the lives of . . . soldiers so as not to harm Palestinians.”
+Netanyahu is making the “leftist” accusation against Gantz: Gantz has forgotten what it means to be Jewish. He has more concern for the enemies of the Jews than the Jews.
+The success of Netanyahu’s calumnies was seen when Gantz was confronted by dozens of young men cursing him and calling him a “leftist” when he went to pray at the holy wall.
+Netanyahu will go down as one of the great villains of Jewish history for the dichotomy he has established between the good Jew, Netanyahu, and his self-hating Jewish opponents. This is the destruction that Landsmann was talking about.
+Chaim Levinson of Haaretz reports that Netanyahu pushed for the 2018 Nation State law that gives Jews the exclusive right of self-determination in the land of Israel “not for its own sake” but in order to be able to accuse those opposing it as being leftist and traitors:
+“Netanyahu embraced the nation-state law not for its own sake but to force the left wing to vote with “the Arabs.”
+Now listen to Netanyahu’s invective against those courageous enough to oppose the Nation-State law:
+“The attacks from the left, which calls itself Zionist, reveal how low the left has sunk,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said of the law’s critics during its passage. “The Israeli left has to do some soul-searching,” he said. “It must ask itself why a basic tenet of Zionism, a Jewish nation-state for the Jewish people in its land, has become a rude concept, a dirty word.”
+Netanyahu has no compunction about tearing Israel apart by the seams if it can help him root out a few more leftists. This is why there is no “left” to speak of in Israel. Netanyahu has made the left and their ideas taboo.
+Netanyahu is a genius at cultivating hate. But Netanyahu could not do this by himself. There is a group of American Jewish journalists who helped turn Netanyahu and his ideas sacred. They were Netanyahu’s allies in enforcing his “Jewish” perspective on the world.
+Just as “leftist” Jews were turned into traitors in Israel so they were here too. Here too Jews were accusing other Jews of “forgetting what it means to be Jews.” Here too there was an ideological battle whether the “the will to destroy the Jewish people hasn’t changed.” And the same method used by Netanyahu to “speak for the Jews” in Israel was seen here as well.
+American foreign policy is now held hostage by the Jewish victimhood perspective. That’s the real power of the Israel Lobby. That’s how AIPAC can continue its poisonous and pernicious war against want-to do-good progressive Democrats. The reason AIPAC is not as taboo inside the Democratic Party as the NRA is, is because AIPAC is acting in defense of the Jews. And when it comes to defending the Jews from their enemies there are no rules.
+Wannabe “spokespeople for the Jews” played the same Jewish role here that Netanyahu plays in Israel. Like Netanyahu, they insist that they speak from sacred Jewish history.
+The scholar W. M. L. Finlay describes these Jewish journalists’ tactics:
+“A simple dichotomy is set up between those who agree with the writer, presented as on the side of the Jews in general, and the ‘enemy,’ … In these accounts there are no legitimate differences of opinion among the Jews, there is simply a hawkish version of Zionism on the one side, representing the authentic Jewish voice, and the enemy on the other. Critics of military actions, advocates of a negotiated settlement, and those who state that the Palestinians have suffered injustice are presented as committing an act of aggression against the Jews by allying themselves with those who would kill the Jews, either the terrorists or the anti-Semites in general.
+I have used “the assault on Peter Beinart” to show how “bad Jews” are confronted here. Because just like the leftists in Israel, the accusation against Beinart is that he has “forgotten what it means to be Jewish.”
+In a 2010 column, Beinart described the reaction from leading journalists to his article calling on American Jewish organizations to finally take sides in Israel’s “domestic struggles between democrats and authoritarians”:
+“It has been a week since my essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” was published in the New York Review of Books, and the responses have largely congealed into a single critique. From Leon Wieseltier to Jonathan Chait to Jeffrey Goldberg to Jamie Kirchick to David Frum, the main complaint is that I didn’t spend enough time discussing the nastiness of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and extremist Muslims in general.”
+Beinart was, and is, trying to speak about Israel, but his critics only want to talk about Israel’s enemies. From the Jewish victimhood perspective Beinart’s sin is that he’s ignoring how evil Israel’s enemies are, that he’s discounting their hatred of the Jews in his analysis, that he is “blaming the victim.”
+“It’s a little odd . . . because my piece never claimed to offer an overview of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Iranian conflict. Rather, it was a plea for American Jewish organizations to take sides in Israel’s domestic struggle between democrats and authoritarians, and thus help save liberal Zionism in the United States. Those American Jewish organizations, of course, don’t need to be encouraged to criticize Iran and the Palestinians. It’s virtually all they do.”
+Beinart told these other Jewish journalists, while you’re all mesmerized by Hamas, Netanyahu is becoming authoritarian and making a two-state solution impossible.
+But the “pro-Israel” Jewish journalists who ambushed Beinart a decade ago are ignoring him and Israel now. Because he predicted the Israel of 2022 and was punished for his honesty.
+The result of this war of ideas among “pro-Israel” Jews is . . . The Israel of 2022.
+Because the same way the Jewish left was defeated in Israel, Beinart and J Street Jews were made taboo in this country. Ideas weren’t debated, they were “ritually defamed.” It’s the same accusation that Netanyahu makes — that these Jews are worse than kapo “stab in the back” Jews, who would rather be on the enemies of the Jews team than on the Jewish team. Being a Jewish heretic is believing the “Arabs can be trusted.” It is only “self-hating” Jews who try to put themselves in the shoes of their enemies.
+The most influential American Jewish journalists are implicated in Netanyahu’s hostile takeover of Israel. They are implicated in Netanyahu’s cultural crimes. And that’s why the last thing these people want to do is call attention to the madness going on in Israel.
+The formerly “Bibi”-obsessed Atlantic magazine has lost all interest in Netanyahu. And Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who once questioned Obama about whether he loves Jews in his “kishkes” or not — has decided that the cultural earthquake that was the last election in Israel is not newsy enough for the Atlantic. And nobody says boo. That is cultural power.
+Israel is heading to a civil war and there’s nothing anybody can do about. Because the most “pro-Israel” journalists in America would prefer Israel implode than have an “embarrassing” public debate about what’s happening in the Jewish state.

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-articleTitle: SPORTS BOYCOTT
-pageTitle: SPORTS BOYCOTT | BDS Movement
-description: Israel's regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, which has oppressed Indigenous Palestinians since 1948, prevents Palestinians from practicing their sports. During Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, the Israeli military occupied Al Yarmouk stadium, transforming it into a detention, torture, and interrogation center, before completely destroying it.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:06:41.847Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/ban-apartheid-israel-from-sports
 ---
-OVERVIEW Israel's regime of settler colonialism and apartheid, which has oppressed Indigenous Palestinians since 1948, prevents Palestinians from practicing their sports.During Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, the Israeli military occupied Al Yarmouk stadium, transforming it into a detention, torture, and interrogation center before completely destroying it. Palestinian players and athletes are routinely attacked, imprisoned, and killed. Athletes are denied freedom of movement to attend their own matches, competitions, and training. Palestinian stadiums and sports infrastructures have been bombed and destroyed. Israel even prevents sports equipment from being imported and sports facilities from being developed.Racism against Palestinians is institutionalized in Israeli sports – from segregated youth football leagues to anti-Palestinian hate from fan clubs that go routinely unpunished.In addition, Israeli football and basketball clubs based in illegal settlements are allowed to compete in official Israeli leagues, making international governing bodies FIFA and FIBA complicit in Israel’s violations of international law.Despite all this, Western-dominated sports bodies have looked the other way, refusing to take action. More than 300 Palestinian sports clubs and dozens of civil society organizations are calling to #BanIsrael from the Olympics. Join us as we seek to ban Israel from international sports forums, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and FIFA until it ends its grave crimes against Palestinians and its attacks on Palestinian sports.
-WHY?Israel’s decades-long regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid has for decades denied Palestinians their basic rights, including cultural rights. Israel has killed and maimed hundreds of Palestinian athletes, including during its genocidal assault on Gaza that started in October 2023.But well before Israel’s genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, Israel had deliberately and systematically destroyed Palestinian stadiums and sports infrastructures and detained Palestinian players and athletes. It has restricted their freedom of movement, banning Palestinian athletes in the occupied West Bank from training with their counterparts in the Gaza Strip and subjecting them to interrogations at checkpoints when traveling across the West Bank or abroad to take part in international competitions.  Israeli forces have in the past deliberately targeted the feet of teenage Palestinian footballers with live ammunition.Meanwhile, Israel allows football and basketball teams based in its illegal settlements built on stolen Palestinian land to play in its official leagues. FIFA, FIBA, and the IOC have failed to take action against Israel for its inclusion of these illegal teams in its official leagues and its attacks on Palestinian sports. By failing to act, these sporting bodies are allowing Israel to sportswash its forced displacement of Palestinians, its apartheid regime, and its genocidal military assaults on Palestinians. These same sporting bodies immediately imposed sanctions on Russia shortly after its illegal invasion of Ukraine, while not only refusing to hold Israel accountable for its decades-long record of grave crimes against Palestinians, which now include genocide but actively shielding it from accountability as well.Palestinians are calling to #BanIsrael from global sports, just as apartheid South Africa was.
-Israel’s apartheid regime has killed and maimed dozens of Palestinian footballers and athletes, in its repeated military assaults on besieged Gaza, in particular the Gaza Genocide, and its attacks across the occupied West Bank. In 2018, the Palestinian Amputee Football Association was founded in Gaza and consists mainly of players who lost limbs to repeated Israeli military assaults on Palestinians in Gaza and sniper fire at peaceful protests.Palestinians have long complained to sporting bodies such as FIFA and the IOC about Israeli attacks against Palestinian sports, including arrest, torture, denial of movement permits of athletes, the bombing of football stadiums, in addition to routine disruptions of the import of sports equipment.Israel’s illegal wall, colonial settlements, as well as its policy of siege, curfew and military roadblocks have systematically obstructed the practice of sports by Palestinians and denied Palestinian athletes regular training and participation in matches and tournaments, at home and abroad.Moreover, Israel consistently prevents Palestinian athletic teams from traveling and denies entry of international athletes into the occupied Palestinian territory.Israel has routinely arrested Palestinian players before games. In 2012, Israel demolished a community center in Silwan which served two football groups and 300 children.Furthermore, Palestinian football players have been forced to end their sports careers after being shot by Israeli forces in the legs.
-Israeli football teams enact racist policies toward Palestinians. The Israel Football Association has failed to address and sanction its constituent teams for tolerating and perpetuating racism and extremist hate speech. Below are a few examples of these discriminatory strategies.Guy Levi, former coach for the prominent Israeli team, Beitar Jerusalem, said he would not bring a Palestinian citizen of Israel to the team, noting, “Even if there were a player who fit in professionally, I would not bring him in.”  The team’s fans have habitually attacked Palestinians and were witnessed chanting “death to the Arabs” at matches against Palestinian teams. Amit Ben Shushan, a football player with Beitar Jerusalem, also sang with the audience, "I hate Arabs" when they won the Israeli Cup in 2009.The Israel Football Association (IFA) runs segregated youth leagues based on national origin, keeping Palestinian and Israeli youth from playing together.
-While Israel deliberately destroys Palestinian football stadiums and detains Palestinian players, it allows teams based in illegal settlements to play in its football and basketball leagues.Israeli settlements are considered a war crime under international humanitarian law. The UN special adviser on sport for development and peace, 66 members of the European Parliament, 30 members of the Swiss Parliament, more than 40 members of the Danish Parliament, 38 members of the British House of Commons, civil society organizations, football fans, and Human Rights Watch have all urged FIFA to resolve the issue of settlement clubs.An April 2016 report commissioned by FIFA and written by John Ruggie recommends that FIFA implement the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights throughout its activities. These principles outline businesses' human rights responsibilities. This includes excluding Israeli settlement teams or suspending the IFA from FIFA.Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented the grave consequences of Israeli settlements, noting: “They are located on land that has been unlawfully taken from Palestinians, they exploit natural resources that belong to Palestinians but are allocated in a discriminatory manner in favor of Israelis, and they are part of a discriminatory regime that privileges Israeli businesses while blocking Palestinian businesses, social, and cultural institutions and infrastructure from developing.”HRW’s report on Israeli settlement teams highlights the support the IFA provides for the sustainability of the settlements despite contravening international accords. As a result, the IFA “engages in business activity that supports the settlements. Settlement football clubs provide part-time employment and recreational services to settlers, making the settlements more sustainable, thus propping up a system that exists through serious human rights violations.”

+articleTitle: November 2022 – Page 8
+pageTitle: November 2022 – Page 8 – Mondoweiss
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:54.721Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/11/page/8
 ---
+Reporting from the slaughterhouse
+By Mariam Barghouti
+November 1, 2022
+0
+From the slaughterhouse, journalists become phone line operators – taking sound bytes from a wire and switching it to a phone plug. It’s an attempt to bring the distant near as the near seems to fade slowly. Yet as journalists from the slaughterhouse, we can also see that what seems like despair and doom, may only be a glitch in the wire. That, on the other end of the line, life still persists, even if the line is lagging.

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-articleTitle: Italian-Israeli water conference is showcase for international law violations
-pageTitle: Italian-Israeli water conference is showcase for international law violations | BDS Movement
-description: A broad coalition of groups recently mobilized against Watec, the Israeli water technology conference and exhibition, which was held last week...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.841Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/italian-israeli-water-conference-showcase-international-law-violations
 ---
-A broad coalition of groups recently mobilized against Watec, the Israeli water technology conference and exhibition, which was held last week for the first time in Europe, in Venice, Italy.
-Watec Italy 2016 is a creation of the Israeli company Kenes Exhibitions and is held biennially in Tel Aviv, though over the last few years it has expanded to other countries, including India in 2013 and Perú in 2014.
-Dozens of European trade unions and water movements called on the European Commission (EC) to withdraw patronage from Watec due to participation of companies operating in illegal Israeli settlements. The letter (pdf) noted the EC patronage came “at a time when Israel is cutting off water to Palestinian communities, leaving tens of thousands without access to water during the hottest time of the year.”
-The signatories, which included Right2Water in Ireland and the Italian Forum of Water Movements, expressed their disappointment in learning this wasn’t the first time the EC had granted patronage to Watec. Past editions in Tel Aviv also carried EC patronage even though they included as sponsors or participants the settlement-based Ariel University and companies providing services to settlements such as Mekorot, Netafim, Tahal Group International, Hagihon, KKL/JNF and weapons producer Elbit Systems.
-The letter emphasized the EC was “at odds with the European Union’s own official position on settlements” and was legitimizing and encouraging illegal activities “thereby reinforcing Israel’s impunity.”
-Mekorot, Israel’s national water company and the main sponsor of the Tel Aviv editions of Watec, was curiously missing from the Italian event schedule. However, shortly before it was to take place, Mekorot suddenly appeared on the conference program, with a “company presentation” during the session on “Rural and Urban Water Management.” Mekorot has long been an object of protests due to its key role in implementing Israeli policies of water apartheid for Palestinians. Mekorot steals water from Palestinian aquifers, supplies water to illegal settlements and sells Palestinians their own water, often at exorbitant prices.
-The letter to the EC called on European institutions to follow the lead of what has become an impressive list of European companies that have withdrawn from projects and terminated collaboration agreements with Israeli companies violating Palestinian rights.
-Fourteen leading Palestinian agricultural and environment organizations also wrote to their colleagues of the Italian farmers network Coldiretti calling for withdrawal of sponsorship from the event, laying out in great detail Israel’s policies of water apartheid, developed and implemented by the country’s water technology sector.
-From denying access to water sources via military occupation, to the impossible permit system preventing development of Palestinian water infrastructure and the grossly unequal distribution of water resources under Oslo, to the siege and attacks on Gaza and the Apartheid Wall that separates Palestinians from water wells, the organizations noted that Israeli control of water is “one of the main tools of the colonization project and the expulsion of the Palestinian population.”
-Packed house at “H2Occupation: Israeli control and commodification of Palestinian water resources”. Italian Forum of Water Movement’s presentation with Amira Hass (photo: Cinzia Di Napoli)
-Just days before Watec kicked off, local groups together with the Italian Forum of Water Movements organized a talk with Amira Hass, “H2Occupation: Israeli control and commodification of Palestinian water resources.”
-Speaking to a large crowd gathered in a city government hall, Hass talked about the main pillars of Israel’s control of water sources. The fragmentation of the West Bank into Bantustans makes it impossible to treat the territory as a whole and pipe water from one area to another order to serve the entire population. The development of settlement agriculture as a means for occupying Palestinian land has also increased the demand for water.
-Another important component is separating Gaza from the rest of the West Bank. Gaza is treated as a separate entity under the Oslo Accords and its access to water is limited to that of the Coastal Aquifer, which contains far from the amount needed for Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants. Years of over-pumping has led to contamination, and today 95% of water in Gaza is not potable.
-“The logical thing to do would be to erect a huge pipe from Israel to Gaza, to compensate for the water stolen from the West Bank, and to pump in tens of millions of cubic meters of water per year to Gaza to prevent the impending disaster,” Hass said. Instead Israel proposes unfeasible, expensive and energ- intensive desalination plants because connecting Gaza to West Bank water means recognizing Gaza as part of the West Bank.
-“Israel’s control of Palestinian water resources is part and parcel of the general Israeli control of Palestinian life, present and future, which aims to keep them as a weak entity, forced to bargain, plead and beg for a few drops of water,” concluded Hass.
-Renato Di Nicola of the Italian Forum of Water Movements also spoke at the event, reminding the audience of the ongoing international process of not only privatization of water but also its commodification. “Technology transforms water from a resource into a product” and this is something in which Israel excels.
-“Israel coming here to Venice for a conference means they’ve already put things in motion.” In fact, the president of Di Nicola’s home region, Abruzzo, recently led a delegation to Israel and met with Mekorot. The water utilities in Rome and Milan signed cooperation agreements with Mekorot, despite its involvement in clear violations of international law, the same violations that led the Dutch water company to interrupt a similar agreement.
-Considering that Mekorot is a state company, Di Nicola noted that public management of water resources isn’t enough. “We need a participatory approach.”
-That participatory approach was sorely missing at Watec. This was strictly a business-to-business affair. Visitors to Venice would have been hard pressed to find a single poster announcing the event in the city, and entrance to the conference itself was priced at € 100 ($112).
-Interestingly, Israel itself was largely downplayed at Watec Italy, with barely a mention of the country’s name on the web site. This is a sharp contrast to the Tel Aviv editions of Watec which boast Israeli government support, including numerous ministries and Matimop, the government’s R&D center, and to Watec Peru and India, which featured Watec Israel and Israel as a water success story.
-Though dressed up as an international conference, a closer look at the companies and speakers involved, show that Watec Italy was more a bilateral meeting aimed at strengthening ties between Israeli and Italian businesses, and keeping Israel’s foot in the European door.
-Watec Italy 2016 press conference Photo: Stephanie Westbrook
-During the press conference, I asked Prema Zilberman, General Director of Watec, whether the participation of companies operating in illegal settlements didn’t risk turning the conference into a showcase for companies violating international law. Zilberman replied:
-“I don’t want to get into a discussion, we are a multicultural company, we are working for the good of everyone. We don’t want to bring politics into this.”
-When I pointed out that she hadn’t answered my question and the companies themselves had brought politics into the conference, she continued to offer non-responses.
-Lots of empty exposition space at Watec Italy 2016 Photo: Stephanie Westbrook
-Initially planned for mid-May, last spring the dates for Watec were moved to September after its local partner, Expo Venice, went bankrupt. Trouble for Expo Venice started with the flop of Aquae Venice, a side event of the universal exhibition in Milan Expo 2015. Israel was on the scientific committee for Aquae Venice and planned to showcase its water technology. After touting an expected 1 million visitors over a six-month period, the actual number was only 90,000 and exhibitors accused the organizers of inflating even these much lower figures.
-Watec Italy, too, appears to have inflated its numbers. While claiming 40 countriesinvolved, the exhibitors list and conference program show less than ten, with the vast majority being Italian and Israeli. The exhibition space itself was practically empty, with participating companies lamenting “limited participation.” The networking system used to arrange face-to-face meetings during the conference, which organizers claim were 800 in three days, was full of apparently false names, such as Aaron Aaron, Tina Tina, Jeffy Jeffy and Yaw Yaw.
-Israel’s Watec Italy 2016 exhibition plagued by empty booths and corridors. Photo: Stephanie Westbrook
-What Israel is counting on in terms of payback from the conference is the strengthening of business and political ties with Italy.
-As Di Nicola noted, civil society will need to mobilize to defend both Palestinian rights as well as the vital common good that is water.

+articleTitle: A tribute to the heroes who told Shireen’s story
+pageTitle: A tribute to the heroes who told Shireen’s story – Mondoweiss
+description: Because of the bravery and heroism of Palestinian journalists, and their refusal to let Shireen Abu Akleh’s story die, Israel’s efforts to impede justice have so far proven futile.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:55.978Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/a-tribute-to-the-heroes-who-told-shireens-story/
 ---
+It’s been three weeks since Israeli forces killed Shireen Abu Akleh.
+The sequence of events that unfolded following her killing were, like most of Israel’s responses to the Palestinians it kills, both shocking but unsurprising.
+The Israeli propaganda machine kicked into gear, working overtime to discredit the accounts of eyewitnesses, many of them journalists, as to what happened. With every new eyewitness testimony came more statements from Israeli military and government officials, who sought to deflect and reassign blame.
+Unsurprisingly, the mainstream media played along. The picture they painted of Shireen’s killing often aligned with the state’s narrative, and explicitly put into question the accounts of the journalists.
+Those journalists, however, did not waver in their testimony, despite what seemed like the weight of the world working against them, and the fact that their colleague had been killed right in front of their eyes.
+There were five other journalists with Shireen that day: Shatha Hanysha, Mujahed al-Saadi, Ali Samoudi, Majdi Bannoura, and Muhannad Nayroukh. All except Shatha and Mujahed worked with Shireen at Al Jazeera.
+Of the group of six, four came under fire from Israeli bullets: Shatha, Mujahed, Ali, and Shireen. Majdi and the Muhannad were right behind them, with their cameras rolling.
+Shireen was fatally shot in the head, right below her ear, and Samoudi was wounded in the back.
+Shatha, who was right next to Shireen when she was gunned down, managed to take cover behind a tree. She told journalists later that day that the tree saved her life, as it was the only thing shielding her from the bullets coming her way.
+And she continued to talk to journalists, for hours, days, and weeks following the shooting. Most recently, her eyewitness testimony was used in the CNN investigation that revealed what Shatha and her colleagues had been saying all along: it was the Israeli soldiers who shot at them, not Palestinian gunmen.
+Just moments after he was hospitalized for a gunshot wound to the back, Ali was talking to reporters about what happened. He was telling them that the group came under fire by Israeli snipers stationed just down the road from where they were. He gave these accounts while he was in a wheelchair, still wearing his hospital gown.
+In the weeks after Shireen was killed, and in the face of countless efforts to discredit them, their experience, and their testimonies, Shatha, Ali, Mujahid, Majdi, and Muhannad persevered. Amidst all the trauma and grief they were experiencing, from losing a hero and friend, they chose to speak up, and continued telling the truth.
+Their service to journalism, to Palestine, and to Shireen’s legacy is invaluable. And without them, the struggle to achieve justice for Shireen would be that much more difficult.
+Every year, Israel kills hundreds of Palestinians. Over the years, plenty of journalists have made that list. The vast majority of the Palestinians killed by Israeli forces goes unnoticed. Their stories remain untold to the world outside Palestine, or simply get swept under the rug.
+For hundreds of Palestinian victims of Israel’s occupations and their families, justice is but a mere dream; something they would never dream of achieving for the loved ones they lost.
+But because of the bravery and heroism of these journalists, and their refusal to let Shireen’s story die, Israel’s efforts to impede justice have so far proven futile. So long as the truth continues to be told, there is hope that  some semblance of justice may be within reach.

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-articleTitle: U.S. Public Opinion is Changing Dramatically on Apartheid Israel, but Elected Officials Haven’t Received the Memo
-pageTitle: U.S. Public Opinion is Changing Dramatically on Apartheid Israel, but Elected Officials Haven’t Received the Memo | BDS Movement
-description: The Israel lobby in the U.S. must be panicking. A few days ago, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal accurately described Israel as a “racist state,” and...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.871Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/us-public-opinion
 ---
-The Israel lobby in the U.S. must be panicking. A few days ago, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal accurately described Israel as a “racist state,” and the lobby impulsively pushed Congress to pass an unusual statement, with the usual automatic majority, saying Israel “is not a racist or apartheid state.” After 75 years of its regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians, Israel today needs a declaration from U.S. electeds to certify that it is not racist.? This denial actually reinforces the fact. But why have Israel’s anti-Palestinian pressure groups felt the urge to pass such a self-defeating proclamation? There must be more than just one brave Congresswoman saying the truth about Israel.A recent poll by the University of Maryland and IPSOS revealed that if the “two-state solution” proves impossible to reach, 73% of the U.S. public would support “a single democratic state” with equal rights for Jews and Palestinians.In other words, three out of every four in the U.S. support democracy and equality for all, “even if that meant Israel would no longer be a politically Jewish state.” The U.S. public is realizing that Israel is an apartheid state, a “Jewish supremacy.”Yet, with the exception of a handful of progressive Democrats, U.S. politicians remain dogmatically loyal to Israel’s regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid, funding and arming its military violence against Palestinians to the tune of $3.8B a year and shielding it from accountability worldwide.Millions worldwide view the U.S. electoral system as institutionalized, legalized corruption. In no other issue is this more valid than in the unquestioning, criminal support for Israel’s regime of oppression no matter what it does to Indigenous Palestinians.Whose interests are those elected officials really serving? Are they accountable to their constituencies so much less than they’re beholden to political lobby groups (military, fossil fuels, apartheid Israel, big pharma, etc.) bankrolling their campaigns? Is lobbying a sanitized name for acceptable and normalized bribery and corruption?Among the most ardent anti-Palestinian Zionist apologists for Israeli apartheid in the U.S. mainstream media, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times once admitted the “growing tendency by many American lawmakers to do whatever the Israel lobby asks them to do.” When in 2011, Congress looked like a yo-yo, giving countless standing ovations to Israeli PM Netanyahu despite his open hostility to U.S. President Obama, Friedman described those ovations as “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”But the dramatic change in U.S. public opinion over the last decade promises to change all that if strategically channelled. According to an April 2023 poll by the Brookings Institute, 44% of Democrats (excluding the “I don’t know” answers) described Israel as a “state with segregation similar to apartheid.” A 2021 survey showed that 25% of all Jewish Americans believe Israel is “an apartheid state.”The 2023 poll also shows that 41% of Democrats (excluding the “I don’t know” answers) support #BDS! Making elected officials support ending military funding to apartheid Israel is therefore not “dreamy.” It is attainable if we build enough people power.

+articleTitle: ‘A small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation’ and a ‘Jewish mutation’ — ‘
+pageTitle: ‘A small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation’ and a ‘Jewish mutation’ — ‘Haaretz’ prints denunciations of Zionism no U.S. paper would run – Mondoweiss
+description: The “Jew-oids” who dominate Israeli society have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence,” B. Michael writes in Haaretz — words no U.S. paper would run.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:57.325Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/a-small-arrogant-violent-wicked-nation-and-a-jewish-mutation-haaretz-prints-denunciations-of-zionism-no-u-s-paper-would-run/
 ---
+Recent events in Israel have left many American Jews despairing about their community’s adherence to Zionism. The wanton killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh… the mobs of Jewish youths crying “Death to Arabs” in Jerusalem… Jewish government officials threatening Palestinians with “another Nakba” and spouting hateful replacement theory about Arabs…
+And still, American Jewish leaders tell us that to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And our mainstream press is respectful of this position and does not promote anti-Zionist views.
+What a shock then to open ‘Haaretz’ yesterday and today and see two articles attacking Israeli Zionism, and urging the world to take action. The words the authors use about Israel’s unending shifts to the right are scathing. Contemporary Zionism is a “Jewish mutation,” Amira Hass writes in despair. Zionism was a “naive mistake,” writes B. Michael, and it has created a “small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation.”
+The tragedy is that these moral appeals don’t appear in the American press, to galvanize peace-loving Americans including many Jews. Imagine trying to get “Jewish mutation” into an American paper– you couldn’t.
+Hass’s piece today is titled, “Will Someone Finally Say Israel Has Lost It?” She says that the messianic side of Israelis society, nurtured for decades as a violent expansionist tool by the secularist founders of Israel, has now taken over and it’s just a matter of time before they are the majority in the Israeli parliament.
+We saw this in the terrifying flag dance in Jerusalem on Sunday. Today, they are 50,000 wearing white shirts who marched in the heart of Palestinian Jerusalem. Yesterday they marched in Hebron and fulfilled there the vision of emptying it of Palestinians. Tomorrow they will be 100,000.The violent outposts of the shepherds are also a registered patent of this holy white aesthetic. And as was confirmed by their patron, Ze’ev Hever from the colonizing movement Amana, these outposts have taken over a Palestinian space twice as large as the area of the lands the built-up settlements stole. How much will they succeed in stealing tomorrow?…Today it is 2,600 dancing, pious Jews who went up on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. They have managed to expropriate almost completely the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs from the Palestinian public. Tomorrow they will be 7,000. How many of them will sign a petition to build the Third Temple? And when will they have a democratic majority in the Knesset?
+Amira Hass
+Hass calls on the world to act– against the “Jewish mutation” of Israel, in which all Israel’s Jewish citizens are complicit.
+Is there now in all the world’s countries a single responsible adult who will say openly: “The hell with it, this Jewish mutation that is developing there in the Middle East – in other words, the State of Israel – has lost it. Freaked out, lost its mind, gone crazy. Because of its military, nuclear and high-tech power, combined with all the religious fervor, because of its alliance with the United States, this needs to worry us. Very much so.
+Yesterday’s article by B. Michael, “It’s time for us Jews to go back into exile,” is even more anti-Zionist. It says that Jews should not be the majority in a nation and seek to rule others, but resume our traditional role as a minority.
+We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority.
+Michael’s piece is reminiscent of Sylvain Cypel’s 2021 book on the moral and civilizational cost to Jews worldwide of supporting the “thug nation.” Michael:
+[The Jewish nation is] the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.
+Imagine trying to get that phrase into an American newspaper: Israeli “Jew-oids” have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.”
+Or calling Israel “a small, arrogant, violent, wicked ‘nation.'”
+And that’s how we got to where we are – a small, arrogant, violent, wicked “nation.” A little fish in a little pond and an ally to pariahs. The visionary whose efforts led to the state’s creation, were he to rise from his grave and see the results of his vision, would jump back in his coffin and demand that his bones be taken back to Vienna.
+B. Michael is as desperate about the political future as Amira Hass is.
+There is no longer any escape from this morass. Seventy-five years of racism and violence have thoroughly corrupted the Israeli electorate. No sane government will be elected here anymore. Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.
+“No sane government will be elected here anymore.” Yes, ask your liberal Zionist friends what hope they have for the Israeli political future when even their best hope is spouting racist ideology. If you are Jewish, let B. Michael and Amira Hass inspire you with the moral legacy of our tradition, and give you freedom to say what you see before your eyes.
+h/t Robert Herbst.

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-articleTitle: EU High Representative, Federica Mogherini, affirms the right to BDS
-pageTitle: EU High Representative, Federica Mogherini, affirms the right to BDS | BDS Movement
-description: Federica Mogherini, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, condemns attacks on human rights defenders and affirms the rights of European...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.902Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/eu-high-representative-federica-mogherini-affirms-right-bds
 ---
-Federica Mogherini, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, condemns attacks on human rights defenders and affirms the rights of European citizens to freedom of expression and association, including through participation in the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
-In response to a question on whether the EU commission will commit to defending BDS activists’ right to exercise their democratic freedom of expression, put forward by MEP Martina Anderson, the EU High Representative stated:
-"The EU stands firm in protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is applicable on EU Member States’ territory, including with regard to BDS actions carried out on this territory.”
-Mogherini also affirmed that “Freedom of expression, as underlined by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, is also applicable to information or ideas ‘that offend, shock or disturb the State or any sector of the population.”
-Having failed to hinder the growing support and impact of the BDS movement in the mainstream, Israel has launched an unprecedented anti-democratic campaign to silence Palestine rights activism and outlaw BDS.
-The Israeli-induced attacks on the BDS movement include pressure on governments, legislators and officials to fight BDS activity through implementation of repressive measures that pose a threat to civil and political liberties at large.
-When asked about the Commission’s assessment of statements made by Israeli Minister of Intelligence Yisrael Katz that ‘targeted civil elimination’ should be carried out against Palestinian and international leaders for the BDS movement, the EU High Representative stated that “The EU firmly condemns threats and violence against human rights defenders under all circumstances.”
-Riya Hassan, Europe Campaigns Officer of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society that leads the global BDS movement, commented:
-“We welcome the EU’s belated defense of the right of European and other citizens to stand in solidarity with Palestinian rights, including through BDS tactics. But Palestinian civil society expects the EU to respect its obligations under international law and its own principles and laws by, at the very least, imposing a military embargo on Israel, banning products of companies that do business in Israel’s illegal colonies, and suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement until Israel fully complies with the human rights clause of the agreement.”
-A letter signed by more than 30 MEPs had called on Federica Mogherini, to take measures assuring freedom of expression regarding the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for justice and equality and recognising Omar Barghouti, a co-founder of the BDS movement, as a human rights defender.
-This letter echoes growing European political and civil society calls for protecting the freedom of expression of activists and organisations involved in BDS activity for Palestinian rights under international law.
-More than 350 European human rights organizations, trade unions, church groups and political parties, have called on the European Union to defend citizens and organisations right to boycott Israel in response to its occupation and violations of Palestinian rights.
-Representatives of the Swedish, Irish and Dutch governments have publicly defended the right to advocate and campaign for Palestinian rights under international law through BDS.

+articleTitle: Shireen Abu Akleh’s death exposes colonial solidarity
+pageTitle: Shireen Abu Akleh’s death exposes colonial solidarity – Mondoweiss
+description: The scandalous reactions in Germany and the United States to the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh exemplifies colonial solidarity.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:57.434Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/shireen-abu-aklehs-death-exposes-colonial-solidarity/
 ---
+The assassination of world-renowned journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh galvanized protest the world over, with many across the political spectrum taking to the streets in a display of their indignation at the Israeli encroachment of the most basic human rights. However, there was an exception in several Western states, in particular Germany and America. In Berlin, police banned a vigil in memory of Shireen. In the US, while a handful of progressives have spoken out in support of cutting aid to Israel, most Democratic politicians produced their usual ethically lethargic response, and Republicans remained violently silent.
+Anyone following events in Palestine will undoubtedly not be surprised at these reactions. However, with the assassination of Shireen, we get a full display of a new epoch of blatant violence. Shireen was an American citizen, a journalist who worked for the most influential media outlets in the middle east. And while the US prides itself on defending its citizen, from its second amendment to going around the world to ensure the safety of its people by destroying others, when it comes to Abu Akleh, and other Palestinian Americans, Israel is treated differently.
+These grim reactions following Shireen’s killing point to the colonial solidarity between Western, and non-Western, states.
+Colonial solidarity with the U.S. and Germany
+The term colonial solidarity can be understood similar to the ‘special relationship’, that nebulous phrase deployed to end all critique of Israel or justify the indiscriminate cutting down of Palestinians. Colonial solidarity also refers to capitalist states supporting other capitalist states in their absolute drive to extract profit beyond their borders by all means. This leads to the erosion of democratic values (internally and externally) as is typical of colonialism; the marginalization of public wants in favor of self-interest; the deliberate convolution of abhorrent acts of violence and coercion; all to extract profits outside their geographic locations to benefit a few within their geographic locations.
+The idea of colonial solidarity goes back decades if not centuries, a brief look into its history helps us conceptualize these relationships. In the later 19th century, fringe Zionist ideas emerged that suggested antisemitism was absolute and that Jew and gentile cannot live side by side. This idea did not appeal to most Jews and in fact Jewish people were over represented in socialist internationalist movements. Enter Theodor Herzl, a Zionist ideologue who believed that super powers should support in their cause. After WWI, Chaim Weizmann took Herzl’s idea to practice and suggested “a Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England.” Suggesting Zionism would ensure British colonial support in the region. Seeing how British colonialism had important routes in that region, this suggestion was well received. This started the violent history of settlement, occupation, colonialism and apartheid.
+Fast forward decades later, when the US emerged as the super power post WWII, this colonial arrangement was revisited. In reference to Saudi oil, a state department memo read “where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history…” The new superpower, and its capitalist class, eyed out the middle east’s “stupendous” riches. Only, colonial adventurism was not an option due to geopolitical complexity (the Arab nationalist wave at the time and cold war complexities) and the simple fact that it would be expensive. In a Machiavellian maneuver, the US sought to cultivate a ‘special relation’ with Israel; where Israel receives diplomatic cover, military and financial support and in turn, America gets a client state in the region with a fraction of the cost.
+Let’s turn to Germany. Germany’s reasoning for stopping the vigil, and subsequent crack down of protests, is the supposed “antisemitic nature” of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Preemptively trying to quash any antisemitism, which has been legally stretched to encompass a broad array of acts and criticisms as to render the charge disingenuous. Nonetheless, protests did break out, where dozens were arrested, and prominent members of the Palestinian community were brutally attacked.
+Germany should always learn from its past, as every country or indeed any ethical person should, but this introspection can sometimes be toxic when hedonistically guided. The laborious work of Dr. Norman Finkelstein demonstrates just how toxic this guidance has been throughout the latter half of the 20th century, where reparations were demanded without exception or investigations, claiming that Holocaust survivors had only a few years to live, and once the money was paid, instead of going to those survivors, they would go to pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli groups.
+Of course, reparations should be paid to those affected, and are still being affected, by historic crimes, to alleviate the sufferings of those affected, and atone for criminal acts. But this commodification of trauma has extended well beyond reparations, into the through the promotion of Zionist ideas. This coercive pressure has encouraged political disengagement with the suffering of Palestinians, the promoted a lack of accountability for Israeli violence.
+The assassination of Abu Akleh has shined a bright light on this ‘special relationship’; which the US has permeated media and thus politics. In the case of Germany, historical guilt has turned into a pathology, where reality is based on trauma, and in a sinister turn Zionist reparation groups play the role of Germany’s therapists.
+More so Abu Akleh’s murder shows democratic functions are slowly being replaced with oligarchic ones.
+In the U.S. the response to her killing shows how elite interests have been prioritized, to the point where even the basic tenets of democracy, free speech and a free media, is being put to test. The response was to suggest that the testimonies of the journalists with Abu Akleh shouldn’t be taken at face value, and that we should depend on the established media who have been pushing faulty logic. Flooding the media sphere were headlines with “Al Jazeera journalist” as if Abu Akleh is some different species of journalist. Abu Akleh is an American citizen and Al Jazeera is an established media outlet, those two facts show us to which direction this oligarchic practice is heading.
+Or in the case of Germany, traumatically crippled as to prioritize its toxic overcorrection of history as opposed to siding with those being ethnically cleansed. When the Berlin police contested protests because of a minority antisemitic voices that by no means represented the majority, they’ve revealed that they are more cautious about the minute unrepresentative voice more than the assassination of a journalist.
+The reach of colonial solidarity
+Abu Akleh’s murder also exposes how far this ‘special relationship’ goes in non-Western countries, such as Sudan. Being a pro-democracy Marxist activist in Sudan and a psychotherapist, I’ve witnessed first-hand Israel’s help in supporting the 25th October coup leaders, and the psychological trauma suffered by protestors, and citizens in this climate of military fear.
+In Sudan, there has been widespread condemnation of Abu Akleh’s assassination but this condemnation is not displayed in the meaningful way in the media. However, Sudan’s normalization with Israel has been covered extensively and praised almost unanimously. This normalization is being driven by neoliberal politicians looking to financialize the economy while the majority of the public does not support it. The funding Sudan received after normalizing mostly went to the pockets of politicians, IGOs, INGOs and other top down institutions that are pro-financializaton, not the people (with the exception of one program that saw to hand out $5 a month to people, but only if the government bans subsidies which has caused more damage than good). Again, here we see the symptoms of the ‘special relationship’ — a minority of elites making decisions against the will of the majority, and neglecting the suffering of Palestinians.
+In the assassination of Abu Akleh, we see the erosion of democracy in Germany and the US, we see the hindrance of the democratic processes in Sudan (and elsewhere). All this to keep erect and cement the colonial relationship between these countries and continue financialization and commodifying trauma for the sake of profit. These are the products of colonial solidarity.

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-articleTitle: Take action: Pressure FIFA to make this Israel's #LastMatch
-pageTitle: Take action: Pressure FIFA to make this Israel's #LastMatch | BDS Movement
-description: With 0 wins, Israel has already excluded itself, but FIFA should never have allowed Israel to play in the first place. As part of its Gaza genocide, Israel is also committing sporticide–the wanton killing of athletes and deliberate destruction of sports facilities. Among the 43,000 Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza are more than 500 Palestinian athletes, including nearly 100 children.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:22.993Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/take-action-pressure-fifa-make-israels-lastmatch
 ---
-Today is the final Nations League match with genocidal apartheid Israel.With 0 wins, Israel has already excluded itself, but FIFA should never have allowed Israel to play in the first place.As part of its Gaza genocide, Israel is also committing sporticide–the wanton killing of athletes and deliberate destruction of sports facilities. Among the 43,000 Palestinians Israel has killed in Gaza are more than 500 Palestinian athletes, including nearly 100 children.Mobs of violent, racist, genocide-inciting Israeli fans accompanying complicit Israeli teams have attacked people appearing to be Arab on the streets in Amsterdam and in the stadium in Paris.   During today’s Belgium vs Israel match, let’s push FIFA to make this Israel's #LastMatch and #BanIsrael over its Gaza genocide and apartheid regime against Palestinians.

+articleTitle: We must fight white supremacy with solidarity: Jews respond to the ADL’s harmful campaign
+pageTitle: We must fight white supremacy with solidarity: Jews respond to the ADL’s harmful campaign – Mondoweiss
+description: We are U.S. Jews who are deeply troubled by a recent speech given by the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, in which he defames groups committed to Palestinian justice.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:57.678Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/we-must-fight-white-supremacy-with-solidarity-jews-respond-to-the-adls-harmful-campaign/
 ---
+The following is an open letter from thirty-six members of Jewish communities in the United States that was posted under the byline “Jewish leaders” on Medium on May 26.
+We are U.S. Jews who are deeply troubled by a recent speech given by the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, in which he defames grassroots and civil rights organizations committed to Palestinian justice and falsely conflates anti-Zionism with far right and violent extremism.
+Greenblatt’s attacks on groups that are part of the movement for Palestinian rights and his assertion of an equivalency between anti-Zionists and white nationalists put us all at risk. Especially now, amid the rapid growth of the white nationalist far right, the safety and bodily autonomy of Black and brown people, Jewish people, Arabs, Muslims, queer and trans people, and disabled and immunocompromised people are under threat.
+The struggle against antisemitism must be in partnership with all others targeted by white supremacy. We are committed to working collectively to combat antisemitism the same way we work against racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and ableism.
+The Anti-Defamation League does not speak for us, and we will not allow them to divide and defame our communities and movements, including the movement for Palestinian human rights. Jewish communities must embrace anti-Zionist and non-Zionist voices, along with all other voices for justice. While we may have a range of perspectives on Palestine and Israel, we are all clear that equating anti-Zionist groups to white nationalists is beyond the pale and cannot be tolerated. We are also clear that all people deserve justice, freedom, and safety.
+If you would like to add your name, please go to this link.
+Signatories
+Eva AckermanPeter BeinartEllen BrotskyJudith ButlerChase CarterBarbara DobkinStefanie FoxRachel GilmerIra GlasserJane HirschmannNaomi KleinSandra KornAlan LevineRichard LevyAbby LublinRachel McCulloughNina MehtaMarilyn Kleinberg NeimarkDonna NevelKathleen PeratisRabbi Brant RosenDeborah SagnerAudrey SassonJames SchamusMaya SchenwarRafael ShimunovAlisa SolomonBarry TrachtenbergMark Tseng-PuttermanRebecca VilkomersonRabbi Brian WaltLesley WilliamsRabbi Alissa WiseDorothy ZellnerSimone ZimmermanDave Zirin
+Additional Signatures
+Kenneth BarnesCarlyn CowenKatie UngerRabbi Yosef BermanAlix DavidsonEliana FishmanCarinne LuckRakhel SilvermanSilas GitinEleni ZimilesJenneva ClaussMay YeRebecca LewisJay SchaffnerNatasha GillSeth MorrisonDina AfekClyde LelandDavid L. MandelRuth Silver TaubeMarta GuttenbergRachel PortMartin LevineWendy GreenfieldHoward HorowitzNoel KentCarolyn Toll OppenheimRand ClarkBeth EisenbergSophie Ellman-GolanElsa AuerbachElaine CohenMaya Ward-FinemanEsther CohenDevorah StaviskyRianna LloydMargo HarveyMerry MaiselAlanna DavisLynn GottliebNat El-HaiMatthew HomMelinda SmithCheryl GreenbergCarin MrotzJordan BridgesEzra SteinbergVirginia Avniel SpatzRabbi Aryeh BernsteinCarole LevineAnya AuerbachMarge SussmanDeirdre SilvermanBenjamin BalthaserJack LeffEli IsaacsSarah Anne MinkinPaul KivelDorit Price-LevineMicaela BrodyEva PeskinRon WittonMax SocolKalman Resnickclaire lichtensteinLaurie Izaks MacSweenRabbi Dev NoilyMalkah BirdDoug GertnerNed RoschRobert GelbachShelby HandlerCindy ShambanDiana FalchukStephanie SchamessElisheva GavraJeremy NicholsonSam TarlowAri JahielAbby SaulRosemary CohenMia RybeckNathaniel BaldoAmanda WesselMarni LibbyBrian CarsonJordi CabanasEstee ChandlerJacob ZiontsBarbara S. KaneHaskell MusryBenjamin Fasching-GrayKathy LessuckEmily DixonRabbi Rebecca AlpertRabbi Lynn GottliebRabbi David MivasairRabbi Moti RieberLouisa Solomon (Rabbinical Student)Rabbi Michael RambergSusan TipographTalia LepsonMax ReynoldsYsh SchwartzYvette MeltzerRichard SilversteinDayne SamuelsSagie Tvizer

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-articleTitle: The destructive legacy of Arab liberals
-pageTitle: The destructive legacy of Arab liberals | The Electronic Intifada
-description: Arab liberalism allied itself with US and Israel to impoverish and destroy whole countries.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:44:40.038Z
-url: https://electronicintifada.net/content/destructive-legacy-arab-liberals/14385
 ---
-Arab liberals have allied with Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia to wreak an unparalleled record of destruction.
-APA imagesIt has become commonplace to present Arab Islamists of all political stripes (liberals, conservatives, radicals, neoliberals, moderates, extremists, nonviolent, violent, etc.) as a most, if not the most, dangerous political force in the Arab world since the 1967 War.
-In fact, and as the following will show, it has been a new brand of Arab liberals — secularists and Islamists (though the former have been far more dangerous) — who have been and continue to be a most dangerous and destructive political force in the post-1967 Arab world.
-The Western, Israeli and Saudi war against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and anti-imperialist Arab nationalism required the birth of a new liberal intelligentsia. Their emergence on the scene in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, before the war, was part of the American-sponsored “cultural Cold War,” which financed intellectuals across the world for the anti-communist and anti-socialist liberal imperial crusade that also targeted anti-imperialist Third World nationalisms.
-This was part and parcel of the Eisenhower Doctrine, which the Americans inaugurated in 1957 to intervene militarily and in every other way in the Middle East to fend off Soviet influence. It was in this context that the US intervened in Lebanon in 1958 against Arab nationalism with Saudi- and US-funded Lebanese liberals cheering on in the liberal press.
-Many of these liberal Arab intellectuals were lackeys of US intelligence and they and their newspapers were financed by the US and Gulf regimes, especially the Saudis. They would exalt the virtues of the liberal West against Soviet and non-Soviet forms of communism and socialism and would attack Nasserist Arab nationalism.
-While some would argue that Arab liberals are not true to the liberal tradition, I am less concerned with how well they approximate an imaginary Western liberalism, or whether they are “true” or “false” liberals, than with the fact that they present themselves and are presented by others as adhering to “liberal” principles. These include free parliamentary and executive elections, freedom of expression and of the press, freedom of association, civilian control of government and the military, a capitalist economy and varying degrees of separation between government and religious authorities.
-Out of Egypt
-In the post-1967 War period, the emergence of this new brand of Arab liberals was seen as confined to the Egyptian Sadatist intelligentsia whose main aim was to combat Nasserism in both its socialist and nationalist aspects and promote pro-Americanism. As the new century dawned, the Egyptian example became widely generalized across the entire Arab world.
-The 1970s Egyptian liberals sang the praises of American power and imperialist capitalist penetration of their country and pushed for full surrender to the Israeli Jewish settler-colony under the banner of the “peace” negotiated by Nasser’s successor, President Anwar Sadat.
-They insisted that Israel should be forgiven all its sins and that rendering Egypt its lackey and the lackey of the US would bring about many economic and political benefits to Egyptians. The Muslim Brotherhood, whose liberal transformation in the 1970s allowed them a seat at the Sadatist table, would join the political contest on the side of the liberal secularists against the Nasserist legacy.
-Aside from state intellectuals, prominent litterateurs and artists pushed for this campaign. These extended from writers Yusuf Sibai to Naguib Mahfouz, and lesser figures like playwright Ali Salem, not to mention famous composer and singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab, intellectuals and academics of the ilk of Anis Mansour and Saad Eddin Ibrahim and many others. While Mahfouz and Abdel Wahab belong to an earlier generation of Egyptian liberals that have little in common with the post-1960s liberals, including mediocre state functionaries like Mansour, who edited the state-owned magazine October, they all joined the Sadatist ideological project in one way or another.
-In this context, it should be mentioned that while the earlier generation of Arab liberals that emerged in the early part of the twentieth century and prospered in the 1920s and 1930s were mostly pro-European in their “civilizational” outlooks, they were not always pro-colonial, though a good number of them were. Indeed some, like Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed, the “father of Egyptian liberalism” and anti-Arab Egyptian nationalism, were even friendly to Zionism. Al-Sayed would go as far as attending the celebrations of the opening of Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1925.
-While the Sadatist liberals were condemned and excommunicated across the Arab world (indeed Sibai, who served as minister of culture under Sadat, was assassinated by the Abu Nidal group on account of his visit to Israel and his support for the Sadatist surrender), their alliance with the US and Israel and their promotion of the selling out of Egypt to a new business class would not bring prosperity. Rather, it brought enormous poverty to most Egyptians and destroyed whatever achievements in education and healthcare the pre-liberal Nasserist order had achieved.
-The only thing that increased and became more advanced in this liberal-supported Egypt was the level of political and economic repression for decades to come and the alienation of millions of Egyptians who lost even the possibility of an economic future, except for the hundreds of thousands (later upwards of four million Egyptians) whose employment was subcontracted to neighboring countries — Libya, Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Egyptians languished at home in dire poverty.
-Liberalism spreads to Palestine
-Soon, and by the late 1980s, the political and economic line the Egyptian liberals pushed for, let alone the international alliances they favored, would be adopted wholesale by a new class of Palestinian, Iraqi and, to a much more limited extent, Algerian intellectuals, who had until then been solid anti-imperial leftists and socialists.
-In this vein, West Bank and Gaza-based Palestinian intellectuals pushed for a two-state solution that would grant those territories an independent state at the expense of diaspora Palestinians and Palestinian citizens of Israel.
-It was the rights of the latter two groups of Palestinians that these intellectuals, under the sponsorship of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), wanted to barter for an independent state granted exclusively to the one-third of the Palestinian people that lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Indeed, many began to predict that the US-sponsored “peace process,” which they supported, would turn the West Bank and Gaza into a new “Singapore,” an economic miracle that would transform the lives of these Palestinians at the expense of the rest.
-Once the PLO adopted this line of thinking fully, Palestinian liberal intellectuals became advisors, consultants, negotiators and ministers in the Palestinian Authority and brought about more massive poverty across the West Bank and Gaza, the erosion of international support for Palestinian rights and multiplied the forces of repression of the Palestinians by adding the PA security forces to the Israeli occupation army. This has led to the squandering of Palestinian political and economic achievements during the first intifada.
-Imperial invasions
-Simultaneous with the rise of this liberal intellectual class among Palestinians, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait unleashed a new class of Iraqi liberals who were allied with American imperial geostrategic interests and who immediately called, in the name of democracy and the end of dictatorship, for an imperial invasion of Iraq.
-The US-led invasion in 1991 expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but left Saddam Hussein’s government in place, albeit under sanctions that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives — a price US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright notoriously deemed “worth it” to pursue American aims.
-The 2003 US-led invasion, under the pretext of locating “weapons of mass destruction,” finally granted the liberals’ wish, and as a consequence cost the lives and livelihoods of untold millions and destroyed the entire country while enriching this class of comprador intellectuals and the new and old business classes they serve.
-Indeed, many of them went into service for the US occupation of the country and the ensuing regime it established. While the Iraqi liberals were the first Arab liberals to call openly for an imperial invasion of their country, one could point to the precedent of Gibran Khalil Gibran and pro-French Lebanese liberal expatriates based in New York who had called in 1918 for a French invasion or “protection” of Syria to liberate it from the Turks.
-Concomitant with these developments was the Algerian military coup against the elected Islamists in early 1992, which unleashed a massive civil war and military violence that led to upwards of 200,000 dead Algerians. Some of the extremist liberal secularists, like the Rally for Culture and Democracy party, supported the army’s “eradication” of the Islamists.
-Sectarian incitement
-Ironies abound. Terrified by the popular Arab schadenfreude expressed in massive demonstrations across the Arab world in solidarity with Iraq, demonstrations that did not sympathize with Kuwait and other oil-producing Gulf countries, the illiberal Saudis launched pan-Arab newspapers and satellite channels that bombarded the Arab world with pro-Saudi and pro-US liberal propaganda to reverse this Arab anti-imperial nationalist tide that also opposed the Arab regimes allied with US imperialism.
-Intellectuals from across the Arab world joined the effort, abandoning old leftist, communist, Nasserist and Islamist positions and adopted the much, much more profitable pro-US and pro-Israel liberal line politically, and the neoliberal economic order being globalized. By the dawn of the new century, the Saudis and the Americans issued new orders to their media and agents to spread an unprecedented sectarian campaign against Shiites inside and outside the Arab world.
-The campaign would be first articulated in 2004 by the new and neoliberal King Abdullah of Jordan, a self-styled “liberal” monarch who possesses absolute and unchecked power. The king expressed his and others’ fear of the rise of a “Shiite crescent” in the region.
-It is in this regional context that Syrian liberals joined the fray. Upon the long-awaited death of President Hafez al-Assad in 2000, they launched what they called a “Damascus Spring” from intellectual salons and from the halls of the US embassy in Damascus, whose cultural attaché was a main sponsor of their “Spring.”
-While they would soon be suppressed by the authoritarian regime of Bashar al-Assad, Syrian liberals would re-emerge in 2011 claiming to speak for “revolutionary” forces that have, with the full participation of the repressive Assad regime, caused the death of hundreds of thousands and destroyed the country.
-The US ambassador would also aid in their efforts by making appointments and assigning roles within the Syrian exile opposition. Not unlike their Iraqi counterparts, the Syrian liberals — secularists and Islamists alike — called for imperial intervention in the name of democracy and to end the Syrian dictatorship. They got what they wished for in the form of the draconian Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS — also known as ISIL or just “Islamic State”).
-Not to be outdone, Lebanese liberals and former Lebanese leftists, communists and Arab nationalists would also have their own “Spring” following the assassination of the corrupt and corrupting neoliberal billionaire, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005. They would help launch a local sectarian anti-Shiite campaign in the country and would call for more imperial intervention to save them from their powerful Syrian, but not their more dangerous Israeli, neighbor. They would also relaunch anti-Palestinian campaigns by cheering the Lebanese army’s destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in 2007. While their country was under heavy Israeli bombardment in 2006, many of these liberals cheered on the Israelis privately and publicly and prayed for the destruction of Hizballah fighters to restore a “liberal” Lebanese order that they longed for.
-Liberal extremism
-The proliferation of Arab liberals through the good offices of their US and Saudi patrons would lead to more liberal extremism. Saudi-financed newspapers (both print and electronic, like Asharq Al-Awsat and Elaph) began to espouse openly Zionist and pro-Israeli positions without apology.
-Arab liberals would also abet an anti-democratic Palestinian Authority coup in 2007 against the democratically elected Hamas, a coup that was successful in the West Bank but failed in Gaza. This Palestinian liberal and comprador class of intellectuals also sought to fully submit to US and Israeli political, military and economic diktat (then neoliberal Prime Minister Salam Fayyad best exemplified this submissiveness) and hoped that the 2008-2009, 2012 and the 2014 Israeli invasions of Gaza would finish off Hamas, a hope that would be dashed by the steadfastness of Hamas and other groups committed to military resistance.
-It is with this as background that Arab liberals — secularists and Islamists among them — would emerge during the so-called Arab “Spring” of 2011 as leaders of the revolts of Egypt and Tunisia (and Syria and Libya, Bahrain and Yemen). In the telling case of Tunisia, the liberal Islamists’ (mainly the al-Nahda party) and secularists’ infighting brought about a modus operandi that led to the partial restoration of the ancien régime.
-In Egypt, the secularist liberals were transformed into outright fascists overnight and allied themselves openly with the Mubarakist forces, both in government, the military and the business sector against the liberal and neoliberal Muslim Brotherhood, which was only able, during its brief stint in power, to ally itself with the Mubarakist army, which ended up toppling its government.
-The communists and the Nasserists joined the liberal ranks by transforming themselves, like the liberals, into fascists who fancy their fascism as a form of “liberalism.” They argued tirelessly and still argue that supporting a military coup against the elected and liberal Muslim Brotherhood, and the massive massacres that the coup authorities committed, were the epitome of liberalism and the restoration of a liberal order.
-Arab liberals have gone as far as launching a war against European Muslims and Arabs, demanding that they ought to assimilate into their “host” Christian and secular societies. The liberal Sheikh of al-Azhar, the chief cleric of this central Muslim institution, demanded that French Muslim women abide by French laws and not wear the hijab. Yet it is the same Arab and Muslim liberals who demand that Arab Christians must not be made to submit to the majority Muslim culture of their societies and that respect by Muslims and Muslim states must be accorded to their differing Christian religious traditions.
-One is dumbfounded by what Saudi and US money and political power (and the crucial Israeli role) can do in a short period of time. The proliferation of US- and European-funded nongovernmental organizations across the Arab world since the early 1990s (as is the case elsewhere around the globe) has successfully conscripted whole armies of Arab intellectuals and technicians into US-, Israeli- and Saudi-style liberalism.
-It is these Arab liberals — especially and mostly the secularists among them — who helped bring about and justify such massive levels of destruction across the Arab world. The Islamist liberals in turn called for and cheered NATO intervention in Libya, which took place directly, and in Syria, which took place indirectly through massive infusions of cash and weapons. These levels of destruction are unprecedented in scope even in colonial times.
-Tallying these Arab liberal achievements, we find that the horror they visited or helped visit on the Arab world is enormous. The death and injury of millions from Iraq to Syria, to Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt, to Yemen and Libya, the complete destruction of Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Libya and now Yemen, the massive poverty in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq and Syria, let alone in Lebanon, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, among others, have all been abetted by a majority of Arab liberals.
-In fact, many of these events came about as a direct result of policies that liberals in government service or in the opposition and among intellectuals called for and helped bring about. These liberals continue to work assiduously to justify the destruction and shift the blame for these crimes onto others and to justify all sorts of crimes committed by their patrons.
-Neither the radical and extremist ISIS nor its precursor al-Qaida can lay claim to such a stellar record of destruction and misery. The destruction wrought by and with the backing of liberals has been so immense that even the horrors that the Baath party, in its Iraqi and Syrian versions, has visited on Syria and Iraq and on their neighbors, is smaller in comparison. Yet it is these same liberals who continue to speak of freedom, peace and prosperity while they bring about more repression, war and poverty.
-Arab liberals and Arab liberalism have been a principal enemy of social, political and economic justice across the Arab world during the last half-century. To claim otherwise would be to ignore their criminal record and to remain oblivious to the horrific reality they helped engender.
-Joseph Massad is professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University in New York. He is the author most recently of Islam in Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
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+articleTitle: Israel's new strategy: "sabotage" and "attack" the global justice movement
+pageTitle: Israel's new strategy: "sabotage" and "attack" the global justice movement | The Electronic Intifada
+description: Israel's influential Reut Institute has identified the global movement for justice and peace as an "existential threat" and called on the Israeli government to "attack" and possibly engage in criminal "sabotage" of this movement in what Reut believes are its various international "hubs" in London, Madrid, Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. Ali Abunimah comments
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:22:00.048Z
+url: https://electronicintifada.net/content/israels-new-strategy-sabotage-and-attack-global-justice-movement/8683
 ---
+A Reut Institute presentation calls on Israel to “attack catalysts” — global peace and justice activists.
+An extraordinary series of articles, reports and presentations by Israel’s influential Reut Institute has identified the global movement for justice, equality and peace as an “existential threat” to Israel and called on the Israeli government to direct substantial resources to “attack” and possibly engage in criminal “sabotage” of this movement in what Reut believes are its various international “hubs” in London, Madrid, Toronto, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
+The Reut Institute’s analyses hold that Israel’s traditional strategic doctrine — which views threats to the state’s existence in primarily military terms, to be met with a military response — is badly out of date. Rather, what Israel faces today is a combined threat from a “Resistance Network” and a “Delegitimization Network.”
+The Resistance Network is comprised of political and armed groups such as Hamas and Hizballah who “rel[y] on military means to sabotage every move directed at affecting separation between Israel and the Palestinians or securing a two-state solution” (“The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall, Reut Institute, 14 February 2010).
+Furthermore, the “Resistance Network” allegedly aims to cause Israel’s political “implosion” — a la South Africa, East Germany or the Soviet Union — rather than bring about military defeat through direct confrontation on the battlefield.
+The “Delegitimization Network” — which Reut Institute president and former Israeli government advisor Gidi Grinstein provocatively claims is in an “unholy alliance” with the Resistance Network — is made up of the broad, decentralized and informal movement of peace and justice, human rights, and BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) activists all over the world. Its manifestations include protests against Israeli officials visiting universities, Israeli Apartheid Week, faith-based and trade union-based activism, and “lawfare” — the use of universal jurisdiction to bring legal accountability for alleged Israeli war criminals. The Reut Institute even cited my speech to the student conference on BDS held at Hampshire College last November as a guide to how the “delegitimization” strategy supposedly works (“Eroding Israel’s Legitimacy in the International Arena,” Reut Institute, 28 January 2010).
+The combined “attack” from “resisters” and “delegitimizers,” Reut says, “possesses strategic significance, and may develop into a comprehensive existential threat within a few years.” It further warns that a “harbinger of such a threat would be the collapse of the two-state solution as an agreed framework for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the coalescence behind a ‘one-state solution’ as a new alternative framework.”
+At a basic level, Reut’s analysis represents an advance over the most primitive and hitherto dominant layers of Israeli strategic thinking; it reflects an understanding, as I put it in my speech at Hampshire, that “Zionism simply cannot bomb, kidnap, assassinate, expel, demolish, settle and lie its way to legitimacy and acceptance.”
+But underlying the Reut Institute’s analysis is a complete inability to disentangle cause and effect. It seems to assume that the dramatic erosion in Israel’s international standing since its wars on Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009 is a result of the prowess of the “delegitimization network” to which it imputes wholly nefarious, devious and unwholesome goals — effectively the “destruction of Israel.”
+It blames “delegitimizers” and “resisters” for frustrating the two-state solution but ignores Israel’s relentless and ongoing settlement-building drive — supported by virtually every state organ — calculated and intended to make Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank impossible.
+It never considers for a moment that the mounting criticism of Israel’s actions might be justified, or that the growing ranks of people ready to commit their time and efforts to opposing Israel’s actions are motivated by genuine outrage and a desire to see justice, equality and an end to bloodshed. In other words, Israel is delegitimizing itself.
+Reut does not recommend to the Israeli cabinet — which recently held a special session to hear a presentation of the think tank’s findings — that Israel should actually change its behavior toward Palestinians and Lebanese. It misses the point that apartheid South Africa also once faced a global “delegitimization network” but that this has now completely disappeared. South Africa, however, still exists. Once the cause motivating the movement disappeared — the rank injustice of formal apartheid — people packed up their signs and their BDS campaigns and went home.
+Instead, Reut recommends to the Israeli government an aggressive and possibly criminal counter-offensive. A powerpoint presentation Grinstein made to the recent Herzliya Conference on Israeli national security actually calls on Israel’s “intelligence agencies to focus” on the named and unnamed “hubs” of the “delegitimization network” and to engage in “attacking catalysts” of this network. In its “The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall” document, Reut recommends that “Israel should sabotage network catalysts.”
+The use of the word “sabotage” is particularly striking and should draw the attention of governments, law enforcement agencies and university officials concerned about the safety and welfare of their students and citizens. The only definition of “sabotage” in United States law deems it to be an act of war on a par with treason, when carried out against the United States. In addition, in common usage, the American Heritage Dictionary defines sabotage as “Treacherous action to defeat or hinder a cause or an endeavor; deliberate subversion.” It is difficult to think of a legitimate use of this term in a political or advocacy context.
+At the very least, Reut seems to be calling for Israel’s spy agencies to engage in covert activity to interfere with the exercise of legal free speech, association and advocacy rights in the United States, Canada and European Union countries, and possibly to cause harm to individuals and organizations. These warnings of Israel’s possible intent — especially in light of its long history of criminal activity on foreign soil — should not be taken lightly.
+The Reut Institute, based in Tel Aviv, raises a significant amount of tax-exempt funds in the United States through a nonprofit arm called American Friends of the Reut Institute (AFRI). According to its public filings, AFRI sent almost $2 million to the Reut Institute in 2006 and 2007.
+In addition to a state-sponsored international “sabotage” campaign, Reut also recommends a “soft” policy. This specifically involves better hasbara or state propaganda to greenwash Israel as a high-tech haven for environmental technologies and high culture — what it terms “Brand Israel.”
+Other elements include “maintain[ing] thousands of personal relationships with political, cultural, media and security-related elites and influentials” around the world, and “harnessing Jewish and Israeli diaspora communities” even more tightly to its cause. It even emphasizes that Israel should use “international aid” to boost its image (its perfunctory foray into earthquake-devastated Haiti was an example of this tactic).
+What ties together all these strategies is that they are aimed at frustrating, delaying and distracting attention from the fundamental issue: that Israel — despite its claims to be a liberal and democratic state — is an ultranationalist ethnocracy that relies on the violent suppression of the most fundamental rights of millions of Palestinians, soon to be a demographic majority, to maintain the status quo. There is no “game changer” in Reut’s new strategy.
+Reut is apparently unaware even of the irony of trying to reform “Brand Israel” as something cuddly, while at the same time publicly recommending that Israel’s notorious spies “sabotage” peace groups on foreign soil.
+But there are two lessons we must heed: Reut’s analysis vindicates the effectiveness of the BDS strategy, and as Israeli elites increasingly fear for the long-term prospects of the Zionist project they are likely to be more ruthless, unscrupulous and desperate than ever.
+Editor’s note: Following publication of this article, the Reut Institute appears to have substantially altered one of the documents on its website which EI’s article quotes (“The Delegitimization Challenge: Creating a Political Firewall”). Among other substantial changes, the Reut Institute removed references to “sabotage” and “attack” in an apparent attempt to sanitize the document following widespread publicity in the wake of EI’s expose. EI has therefore appended to this article a PDF copy of the original document which appeared on the Reut website before these alterations were made.
+Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.
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-articleTitle: Spanish Parliament Affirms Right to BDS as Protected Speech
-pageTitle: Spanish Parliament Affirms Right to BDS as Protected Speech | BDS Movement
-description: June 30, 2017 – On Tuesday, the Spanish parliament unanimously passed a motion recognizing the right to advocate for Boycott, Divestment and...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.089Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/spanish-parliament-affirms-right-bds-protected-speech
 ---
-June 30, 2017 – On Tuesday, the Spanish parliament unanimously passed a motion recognizing the right to advocate for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as protected under the right to freedom of expression and association. This bill was introduced by the progressive parliamentary coalition “Unidos Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea.”
-Unidos Podemos said in a statement:
-On June 27th the International Cooperation Committee of the Spanish Congress unanimously approved a motion put forward by our parliamentary group supporting the legitimate defense of Human Rights. The amended motion calls on the Government “to recognize and defend the right of human rights activists from Palestine, Israel and other countries to engage in legal and peaceful activities, protected by the right to freedom of speech and assembly, such as the right to promote boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.”
-This approval means that our Government must uphold those rights and act against the harassment of activists, in Spain and in many other countries, engaged in peaceful, legal and legitimate campaigns against the violation of human rights in Palestine. By doing so, our Congress has joined the many voices that have already recognized the right to BDS as freedom of speech, like Federica Mogherini (EU Vice-President and High Representative), the Governments of Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden, and the Parliament of Navarre.
-Ana Sanchez, International Campaigns Officer with the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said:
-This is a victory for all those acting on their conscience by participating in the BDS movement for Palestinian human rights.
-As boycotts, divestments and sanctions campaigns continue to grow around the world, state institutions in Europe, the United States and beyond are increasingly affirming the right of their citizens to participate in the BDS movement to advance Palestinian human rights. Boycotting all entities complicit with Israel’s military occupation and racist system of apartheid is just as legally protected and morally necessary as was the successful international boycott of apartheid South Africa. In fact, many business operations with Israel are carried out in breach of international law.
-This year marks the 50th anniversary of Israeli military rule and nearly 70 years of Palestinian dispossession and ethnic cleansing. Enough is enough. It is encouraging to see support for Palestinian human rights grow across the Spanish state. This parliamentary ruling is clearly an expression of that growing popular support.
-This is the second time within a short period that Spanish state institutions have affirmed the right to boycott. In late April, the Spanish foreign minister also affirmed that the right to advocate for BDS in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is protected by laws guaranteeing freedom of expression.
-This news also comes on the heels of the Barcelona City Council’s vote to end complicity with Israel’s military occupation and Israel’s construction of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. In addition, dozens of Spanish cities have over the course of the last year declared themselves “Free of Israeli Apartheid,” joining the existing network of more than 70 Spanish public institutions, including provincial councils and a regional parliament, that have long taken a position against Israeli Apartheid.
-In 2016, the European Union and the governments of Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands upheld the right to advocate for BDS to support Palestinian freedom, justice and equality as protected by freedom of speech and freedom of association principles.
-That same year, more than 200 renowned lawyers and legal scholars from 15 European countries, including a former Supreme Court judge in Spain, issued a declaration recognizing BDS as “a lawful exercise of freedom of expression.”
-The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter @BDSmovement

+articleTitle: U.S. security contractor: ‘I saw Israel commit war crimes at Gaza aid sites’
+pageTitle: U.S. contractor: I saw IDF commit war crimes – Mondoweiss
+description: A U.S. security contractor who worked for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says he saw Israeli soldiers commit war crimes at aid distribution sites in Gaza, corroborating months-long reports by Palestinians that the aid sites are ‘death traps’.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:58:19.768Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/u-s-security-contractor-i-saw-israel-commit-war-crimes-at-gaza-aid-sites/
 ---
+A former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says he saw Israeli soldiers commit war crimes at the aid distribution sites being run by the Israeli-backed American agency.
+In a series of interviews, former GHF employee and Green Beret Anthony Aguilar alleged that he saw Israeli soldiers use “indiscriminate” force against civilians at various Gaza aid sites.
+“My most frank assessment — I would say that they are criminal,” said Aguilar. “In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”
+“I have never witnessed that in all the places that I have been deployed to war, until I was in Gaza — at the hands of IDF and U.S. contractors,” he continued.
+In an interview Democracy Now, Aguilar said the aid sites were “designed as death traps.”
+“All four distribution locations were intentionally, deliberately constructed, planned and built in the middle of an active combat zone.
+“Those sites were built in the middle of those areas intentionally. It’s not by accident. That, in and of itself, to designate humanitarian distribution sites to service an unarmed, starving population, to build them deliberately in an active combat zone, is a violation of the Geneva Convention protocols,” he continued. “It’s a violation of humanitarian law. And in my opinion, it’s a violation of humanity in general.”
+In a conversation with the Israeli anti-Netanyahu group UnXeptable, Aguilar told the story of a starving, barefoot boy who thanked him for food before being killed by Israeli soldiers.
+“On May 28, at secure distribution site #2, this young boy, Amir, walks over to me, reaches out and kisses my hand,” explained Aguilar. “This boy is not wearing shoes. His clothes are falling off of him because he is so skinny….He doesn’t have a box, he has half a bag of rice , lentils, and he was thanking us. He walked 12 kilometers to get there … and when he got there he thanked us for the crumbs he got …he kissed me and said ‘thank you.'”
+“[Amir] walked back to the group, and then he was shot at with pepper spray, and tear gas, and stunt grenades, and bullets, and he was shot at, at his feet and in the air, and he runs away…and the IDF were shooting at the crowd…Palestinians, civilians, human beings, are dropping to the ground, and Amir was one of them,” he continued. “Amir walked 12 kilometers to get food, got nothing but scraps, thanked us for it, and died.”
+In response to Aguilar’s assertions, GHF released a statement insisting they have “no basis in reality.”
+“It should be emphasized that Mr. Aguilar was employed as a subcontractor and was fired over a month ago for inappropriate behavior,” claims the foundation. “Following the dismissal, we received threats that unless he was reinstated, action would be taken against us, raising questions regarding the motivation behind his interviews.
+“We also have evidence that he likely forged documents and presented misleading videos to promote his false narrative,” the group added. However, they did not produce any of the alleged evidence.
+This week, a group of U.S. Senators led by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) sent Secretary of State Marco Rubio a letter calling on the Trump administration to stop funding the GHF and resume support for the UN’s food distribution program.
+“Blurring the lines between delivery of aid and security operations shatters well-established norms that have governed distribution of humanitarian aid since the ratification of the Geneva Conventions in 1949,” reads the letter.
+Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed there is no starvation in Gaza, but President Trump acknowledged the severity of the situation in recent remarks to reporters.
+“Based on television, … those children look very hungry,” said Trump. “But we’re giving a lot of money and a lot of food, and other nations are now stepping up.”
+“Some of those kids are — that’s real starvation stuff,” he added.
+Last week U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said Friday that a thousand Palestinians have been killed trying to access food since the end of May.
+“We hold video calls with our own humanitarians who are starving before our eyes,” said Guterres.”We will continue to speak out at every opportunity. But words don’t feed hungry children.”
+Last week, Palestinian women in Gaza told Mondoweiss that they were lured to a GHF site with the promise of aid, only to be beaten and shot at, resulting in at least two women being killed. The testimonies of the women mirrored previous incidents  in which the GHF has been accused of luring people to its distribution points, where Israeli forces then carry out what many describe as “aid massacres” under the guise of humanitarian distribution.
+The number of Palestinians that Israeli forces have targeted in or near the GHF distribution centers has surpassed 1,000 killed, and over 6,011 injured since last May, according to the Government Media Office in Gaza.

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-articleTitle: G4S timeline
-pageTitle: G4S timeline | BDS Movement
-description: G4S is a British security company that helps Israel to operate prisons at which Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture. G4S also provides equipment and services to illegal Israeli settlements, Israel’s apartheid Wall and the Israeli military.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.127Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/g4s-timeline
 ---
-June 15, 2016G4S is a British security company that helps Israel to operate prisons at which Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture. G4S also provides equipment and services to illegal Israeli settlements, Israel’s apartheid Wall and the Israeli military.As this timeline shows, the campaign against G4S is having a real impact.June 2016 - Kuwait’s Public Institution for Social Security (PIFSS) Divests its Funds from Global Security Giant G4S Following Sustained BDS PressureApril 2016 - UNOPS becomes third UN agency in Jordan to drop G4S following campaign. March 2016 – UNICEF in Jordan ends its contract with G4S following campaign pressure.February 2016 – Crepes & Waffles, a major restaurant chain in Colombia, decides to end a contract with G4S after a year-long BDS campaign against the multinational security company in the country.January 2016 – Students at the University of South Florida in Tampa vote to urge the university to divest from G4S.December 2015 – It emerges that UNHCR in Jordan has ended its contract with G4S following an international campaign called #UNdropG4S urging the UN to end all of its contracts with G4S.November 2015 – UK Labour party votes to end its conference security contract with G4S.August 2015 – A declaration signed by more than 1,000 Black activists, artists and scholars in solidarity with Palestinians highlights the role of G4S in Israeli and US prisons.May 2015 – The University of Helsinki in Finland cancels its security contract with G4S over its role in Israel’s prison system.April 2015 – More than 20 businesses in South Africa terminate their contracts with G4S, costing the company more than $500,000.January 2015 – The student union at University College London votes to cancel its contract with G4S as soon as possible. The news follows the confirmation by Essex Student Union, also in the UK, that it has cancelled its contract with G4S.November 2014 – The municipality of Durham County in North Carolina, USA, ends its contract with G4S following a campaign by local Jewish Voice for Peace activists.October 2014 – G4S loses out on a major Irish government contract following a high profile campaign by the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign.June 2014 – G4S announces that it “does not intend” to renew its contract with the Israeli Prison Service when it expires in 2017. Campaigns pledge to continue the campaign until G4S actually ends its support for Israeli apartheid, noting that G4S has not made any written statements on its intended withdrawal from illegal projects.June 2014 –  The US United Methodist Churchdivests all G4S shares from its $20bn investment fund. The largest US Protestant Church made clear that its decision was based on G4S’ role in Israeli violations of international law.June 2014 – The UK OECD National Contact Point, a UK government body, begins an investigation into the activities of G4S in Palestine and Israel following a complaint made by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights.May 2014 – The Bill Gates Foundation sells the entirety of its $170m stake in G4S following aninternational campaign involving a petition launched by 100 organisations from across the world and demonstrations at the Gates Foundation’s Johannesburg, London and Seattle offices.March 2014 – The British Broadcasting Corporation elects not to award G4S an £80m ($133m) contract following a campaign supported by notable figures including film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, and novelist Ahdaf Soueif.January 2014 – The student union at the University of Kent in the southeast of England votes to terminate its contract with G4S following an “outcry” over its role in human rights abuses in Palestine.December 2013 – Abvakabo, a trade union with 350,000 members in the Netherlands, ends its relationship with G4S.November 2013 – King’s College London and Southampton University opt not to award G4S major security contracts following vigorous student campaigns.November 2013 – The University of Bergen becomes the second Norwegian university to boycott with G4S, arguing that it would incur a reputational damage costing $400,000 if it contracted the company to provide campus security services.November 2013 – Cape Town based Trauma Centre cancels its contract with G4S and issues public statement opposing G4S role in Israeli prisons where Palestinians are held without trial and tortured.October 2013 – Norwegian union Industri Energy cancel their contract with G4S while theCongress of South African Trade Unions and UK union UNISON issue statements criticising G4S. Also in the UK, the East London Teachers Association (ELTA) passes a motion condemning G4S’s complicity in Israel’s prison system and calling on a local authority to terminate its contracts with the companyJune 2013 – Protestors protest outside and disrupt the G4S shareholders meeting, pressuring the company further over its role in Israel’s prison system and apartheid policies. April 2013 – As Palestinian political prisoners refuse meals and demonstrations are held across Palestine to mark Palestinian political prisoners day, demonstrations and events areheld in 11 countries to highlight the complicity of G4S. Human rights organisations from across Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon call for a boycott of G4S and the Scottish Trade Union Congress voted to join the campaign.April 2013 – As investment analysts state that the campaign is causing “reputational issues” for G4S, the company repeats earlier pledges to pull out of a limited number of contracts in the West Bank. G4S is yet to terminate any of its operations in the West Bank and, even if it implements the cancellations it has announced, it would continue to assist with the operation of prisons inside Israel, illegal settlements and army bases.February 2013 – the students at Dundee University Students’ Association (DUSA) vote overwhelmingly in their annual general meeting to cancel their contract with G4S.February 2013 – G4S is criticised for its role in the death of Arafat Jaradat. Arafat was tortured in the Al Jalameh interrogation centre, where G4S installed and maintains the security systems. Just seven days after his arrest, he was found dead in a cell in another prison that G4S helps to run with three broken ribs, severe bruising all over his body and blood in his nose and mouth. He left behind a pregnant wife and two children.January 2013 – G4S was nominated by civil society organisations for the Public Eye’s World’s Worst Company Award for its role in Israel’s illegal dentention centers, torture facilities and prisons.January 2013 – the Umeå section of the Church of Sweden announces that it will no longer hire G4S due to its role in the occupation and Israeli prisons.December 2012  – As a result of a vibrant student campaign, the University of Oslo announces that it will terminate its contract with G4S, stating it does not want to “support companies that operate in an ethical grey area”.December 2012 – Two Dutch charities, the Food Bank in Utrecht and Jantje Beton, which promotes free outdoor play for children, announce that they will no longer cooperate with or accept donations from G4S.October 2012 – A report by UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk criticises G4S as a prime example of a company that should be held to account for participation in Israeli violations of international law.August 2012 – Danish bank Merkur terminates its contract with G4S, citing its “involvement in the Israeli occupation of Palestine”. The news was announced during a week of creative action against the company in Denmark.August 2012 – British renewable energy firm Good Energy announces that it will end its business relationship with G4S.July 2012 – Activists stage a rooftop occupation at G4S’ international headquarters in West Sussex in the UK. The activists were later cleared of any criminal wrongdoing.July 2012 – Major NGO Danish Church Aid announces that it will terminate its contract with G4S.April 2012 – On the eve of a historic hunger strike by more than 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners, 13 Palestinian prisoner and human rights organisations call for a campaign to hold G4S accountable for the role it plays in maintaining Israel’s prison system.April 2012 – The European Union decides not to renew a major contract with G4S following concerns raised by a group of 28 members of the European parliament (MEPs) and civil society groups.January 2012 – Amnesty International Denmark announces it is to terminate its contract with G4S due to “because the company’s global activities do not live up to Amnesty International’s requirements for corporate action in relation to human rights”.October 2011 – the Edinburgh University Student Association (EUSA) votes overwhelmingly passed a motion through its Student Council to cancel contract with G4S.March 2011 – Responding to pressure by campaigning groups and politicians in Denmark, G4S announces that it will “aim to exit a number of contracts which involve the servicing of security equipment at…checkpoints, prisons and police stations in the West Bank”. G4S is yet to terminate any of its operations in the West Bank and, even if it implements the cancellations it has announced, it would continue to assist with the operation of prisons inside Israel, illegal settlements and army bases.Danish lawyer Hjalte Rasmussen produces a legal opinion for G4S that argues that the company is not violating international law. Dan Church Aid (DCA) and Amnesty International Denmark expressed their discontent in the Danish press about the poor quality of Rasmussen’s report, the former describing it as “shameful” as it contains so many errors.March 2011 – Research group Who Profits publish a report detailing how G4S helps to maintain Israel’s prison system, checkpoints and illegal Israeli settlements.November 2010 – The Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims (RCT) in Denmark ends its contract with G4S. Pat Nissen of RCT’s explained that “G4S as a company is helping to facilitate torture.”

+articleTitle: New group tries to stop talk of Israel apartheid among Canadian officials
+pageTitle: New group tries to stop talk of Israel apartheid among Canadian officials – Mondoweiss
+description: A new initiative claiming to combat antisemitism in Canada’s federal service is primarily about defending apartheid.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.317Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/new-group-tries-to-stop-talk-of-israel-apartheid-among-canadian-officials
 ---
+A new initiative claiming to combat antisemitism in Canada’s federal service is primarily about defending apartheid.
+In December Canadian diplomats launched an initiative ostensibly designed to oppose anti-Jewishness within the federal government. The Jewish Public Servants’ Network, reported the Canadian Jewish News, “was formed last year in response to a global spike in antisemitism following the most recent Israel-Gaza confrontation.”
+Leading anti-Palestinian activist Irwin Cotler assisted with launching the initiative and participated in the group’s event on May 25. Their webinar, which included ardent Israeli nationalist and former senator Linda Frum, took place on the sidelines of a Canada-Israel conference in Ottawa.
+The new group’s spokesperson is Artur Wilczynski, a recently retired assistant deputy minister and senior adviser for people, equity and inclusion at the Communications Security Establishment (Canada’s NSA). The former Canadian ambassador to Norway previously headed Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and is a vocal proponent of the IHRA’s anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism.
+Wilczynski came to my attention when he commented on a tweet about the upcoming CANSEC arms fair in Ottawa hosting Israeli company Elbit, whose subsidiary, IMI Systems, is the main supplier of bullets to the Israeli military and likely provided the ammunition used to kill Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Wilczynski wrote, “according to the Committee to Protect Journalists 17 journalists were killed so far this year around the world. While Shireen Abu Aqleh’s death is tragic and demands accountability, others deserve it too. All journalists deserve protection.”
+Few would argue that “all journalists deserve protection”. But a Canadian ally engaged in a long-standing occupation murdering the voice of an oppressed nation deserves far greater outrage than say a Mexican cartel murdering a reporter. Wilczynski’s comment was similar to those who responded to Black Lives Matter protests by saying “all lives matter”.
+While he initially feigned concern for all journalists, Wilczynski’s extreme Zionist views emerged quickly in his responses. He wrote, “completely comfortable criticizing Israeli policies. I believe calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state is hyperbolic nonsense. The canard is as much a product of 1960s USSR disinformation and propaganda as ��the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was of Czarist Russia.”
+But Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al Haq, B’tselem and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians have all concluded Israel is committing the crime of apartheid. Wilczynski is directly linking them to Soviet disinformation and indirectly to the famed anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
+In a subsequent tweet Wilczynski wrote, “I know it’s the hope of Soviet apologists that if they repeat a lie often enough it will become the truth. It doesn’t. I will continue to push back against the dystopian hyperbole pushed by those who want to destroy Israel — the country where HALF of the world’s Jews live.”
+Wilczynski is arguing that defending Zionist colonialism and fighting antisemitism are intimately connected. For Wilczynski and the Israel lobby raising the specter of antisemitism in the public service is a way to intimidate government officials uncomfortable with apartheid or concerned about how pro-Israel positions impact Canada’s standing. (Many in Global Affairs were frustrated Canada lost its second consecutive bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council partly due to anti-Palestinian positions.)
+The public servants’ antisemitism initiative is best understood in the context of Israel apologists somewhat paradoxical predicament. The Trudeau government has been strikingly deferential, expanding the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, organizing a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, repeatedly declaring its devotion to an apartheid state, voting against 60 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, suing to block proper labels on wines from settlements, creating a special envoy to deflect criticism of Israeli abuses, etc. But, at the same time, Israel and its supporters influence over informed liberal opinion has never been weaker.
+Human rights groups’ conclusion that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid is dripping into mainstream politics and if not dammed up it could turn into a river of criticism. Referencing Amnesty International’s report, Liberal MP Chandra Arya recently asked Parliament about “Palestinians under Israeli apartheid” while the Hill Times published “Backbench Liberals shift from government in push for tougher response to Israel”. Liberal MPs are under pressure to speak-up within their ridings and the NDP is increasingly referencing apartheid.
+In response to millions of Canadians demanding an end to Israeli apartheid, the Israel lobby is trying to define calls for Palestinian equality as antisemitism. And if that’s not successful, they at least want to change the subject.

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-articleTitle: BDS Activists Score A First Victory In Ecuador
-pageTitle: BDS Activists Score A First Victory In Ecuador | BDS Movement
-description: Contact: media@bdsmovement.net February, 20, 2017, Quito, Ecuador – A Quito-based research institute — the International Center for Advanced...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.163Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/bds-activists-score-first-victory-ecuador
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-Contact: [email protected]
-February, 20, 2017, Quito, Ecuador – A Quito-based research institute — the International Center for Advanced Studies in Communications for Latin America (CIESPAL) — decided against renewing its contract with the British security company G4S after meeting with BDS activists who informed it about G4S’s complicity with Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.
-This is the first victory for BDS activists in Ecuador working to advance Palestinian human rights, and the second loss for G4S in Latin America, due to BDS pressure, in less than a year. In early 2016, another strong BDS campaign for Palestinian human rights led a major restaurant chain in Colombia to announce that it would end its contract with G4S. Notably, CIESPAL cut ties with G4S without laying off any workers.
-G4S, the world’s largest security company, has a history of helping Israel run prisons where Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture and ill-treatment. G4S has also been involved in providing equipment and services to Israeli military checkpoints, illegal settlements and to military and police buildings.
-Under strong pressure from BDS activists participating in the international Stop G4S campaign, G4S has for the last several years been losing major deals and investments around the world. In 2016, the company was forced to sell most of its business in Israel, but still has contracts in training Israeli police and in relation to illegal settlement buildings on stolen Palestinian land. As such, G4S remains complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.
-Ecuador for Palestine Solidarity Committee celebrated CIESPAL’s decision to drop G4S:
-This is the first victory for BDS activists in Ecuador working to advance Palestinian human rights, and we are proud of it. We celebrate CIESPAL’s decision to drop G4S, and congratulate the center for its commitment to human rights, including the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. We also congratulate CIESPAL for its ethical consistency in announcing that it will not lay off any of the guards who previously lent their services to G4S. CIESPAL’s decision shows that it is possible for institutions to break ties with unethical companies like G4S without harming workers.
-Abdulrahman Abu Nahel, Gaza coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), commented on the victory in Ecuador:
-This victory by BDS activists in Ecuador comes at a crucial moment in our campaign against G4S’s complicity with Israel’s regime of apartheid, illegal settlement construction on stolen Palestinian land, and military occupation. The BDS movement forced G4S to sell off almost all its business in Israel, and now it’s critical to increase pressure on the company until it ends all its involvement with Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights.
-Like Palestinians, Ecuadorians also know the violence of colonialism, militarization and ethnic cleansing. It is inspiring to see their solidarity with our Palestinian struggle for justice, equality and freedom grow every day. Our struggles unite!
-The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society that leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit www.bdsmovement.net and follow @BDSmovement

+articleTitle: ‘A small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation’ and a ‘Jewish mutation’ — ‘
+pageTitle: ‘A small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation’ and a ‘Jewish mutation’ — ‘Haaretz’ prints denunciations of Zionism no U.S. paper would run – Mondoweiss
+description: The “Jew-oids” who dominate Israeli society have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence,” B. Michael writes in Haaretz — words no U.S. paper would run.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.733Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/a-small-arrogant-violent-wicked-nation-and-a-jewish-mutation-haaretz-prints-denunciations-of-zionism-no-u-s-paper-would-run
 ---
+Recent events in Israel have left many American Jews despairing about their community’s adherence to Zionism. The wanton killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh… the mobs of Jewish youths crying “Death to Arabs” in Jerusalem… Jewish government officials threatening Palestinians with “another Nakba” and spouting hateful replacement theory about Arabs…
+And still, American Jewish leaders tell us that to be Jewish is to be Zionist, and anti-Zionism is antisemitism. And our mainstream press is respectful of this position and does not promote anti-Zionist views.
+What a shock then to open ‘Haaretz’ yesterday and today and see two articles attacking Israeli Zionism, and urging the world to take action. The words the authors use about Israel’s unending shifts to the right are scathing. Contemporary Zionism is a “Jewish mutation,” Amira Hass writes in despair. Zionism was a “naive mistake,” writes B. Michael, and it has created a “small, arrogant, violent, wicked nation.”
+The tragedy is that these moral appeals don’t appear in the American press, to galvanize peace-loving Americans including many Jews. Imagine trying to get “Jewish mutation” into an American paper– you couldn’t.
+Hass’s piece today is titled, “Will Someone Finally Say Israel Has Lost It?” She says that the messianic side of Israelis society, nurtured for decades as a violent expansionist tool by the secularist founders of Israel, has now taken over and it’s just a matter of time before they are the majority in the Israeli parliament.
+We saw this in the terrifying flag dance in Jerusalem on Sunday. Today, they are 50,000 wearing white shirts who marched in the heart of Palestinian Jerusalem. Yesterday they marched in Hebron and fulfilled there the vision of emptying it of Palestinians. Tomorrow they will be 100,000.The violent outposts of the shepherds are also a registered patent of this holy white aesthetic. And as was confirmed by their patron, Ze’ev Hever from the colonizing movement Amana, these outposts have taken over a Palestinian space twice as large as the area of the lands the built-up settlements stole. How much will they succeed in stealing tomorrow?…Today it is 2,600 dancing, pious Jews who went up on the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount. They have managed to expropriate almost completely the Ibrahim Mosque/Tomb of the Patriarchs from the Palestinian public. Tomorrow they will be 7,000. How many of them will sign a petition to build the Third Temple? And when will they have a democratic majority in the Knesset?
+Amira Hass
+Hass calls on the world to act– against the “Jewish mutation” of Israel, in which all Israel’s Jewish citizens are complicit.
+Is there now in all the world’s countries a single responsible adult who will say openly: “The hell with it, this Jewish mutation that is developing there in the Middle East – in other words, the State of Israel – has lost it. Freaked out, lost its mind, gone crazy. Because of its military, nuclear and high-tech power, combined with all the religious fervor, because of its alliance with the United States, this needs to worry us. Very much so.
+Yesterday’s article by B. Michael, “It’s time for us Jews to go back into exile,” is even more anti-Zionist. It says that Jews should not be the majority in a nation and seek to rule others, but resume our traditional role as a minority.
+We’re really terrible at being a “nation.” We very quickly become as stupid, violent and greedy as most of the other nations of the world, and within a short time we brought destruction and exile on ourselves. Only there, in exile, do we regain the sense we lost and resume being a people that survives.Apparently, being a majority doesn’t suit us – ruling, running an army and a state. We’re good at being a minority.
+Michael’s piece is reminiscent of Sylvain Cypel’s 2021 book on the moral and civilizational cost to Jews worldwide of supporting the “thug nation.” Michael:
+[The Jewish nation is] the growth of another shoot from the Jewish tree that does harm to everyone around it. A rotten, poisonous brother of the Zealots, the Sicarii, Rabbi Akiva’s blind students and Simon bar Kochba’s foolish disciples. They ought to be called Jew-oids. They’re like Jews who took the trivial and wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.
+Imagine trying to get that phrase into an American newspaper: Israeli “Jew-oids” have taken the “wicked parts of Judaism and turned it into the essence.”
+Or calling Israel “a small, arrogant, violent, wicked ‘nation.'”
+And that’s how we got to where we are – a small, arrogant, violent, wicked “nation.” A little fish in a little pond and an ally to pariahs. The visionary whose efforts led to the state’s creation, were he to rise from his grave and see the results of his vision, would jump back in his coffin and demand that his bones be taken back to Vienna.
+B. Michael is as desperate about the political future as Amira Hass is.
+There is no longer any escape from this morass. Seventy-five years of racism and violence have thoroughly corrupted the Israeli electorate. No sane government will be elected here anymore. Consequently, there’s no choice but to admit that Zionism was a naïve mistake and to go into exile again to regain our strength and refresh our values.
+“No sane government will be elected here anymore.” Yes, ask your liberal Zionist friends what hope they have for the Israeli political future when even their best hope is spouting racist ideology. If you are Jewish, let B. Michael and Amira Hass inspire you with the moral legacy of our tradition, and give you freedom to say what you see before your eyes.
+h/t Robert Herbst.

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-articleTitle: Largest Israeli Public Transportation Company Loses Netherlands Contract Worth 190 Million Euros Following Campaign by BDS Activists for Palestinian Rights
-pageTitle: Largest Israeli Public Transportation Company Loses Netherlands Contract Worth 190 Million Euros Following Campaign by BDS Activists for Palestinian Rights | BDS Movement
-description: Last month, Egged Bus Systems (EBS), a subsidiary of Egged Israel Transport Cooperative Society, Israel’s largest public transportation operator,...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.194Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/node/19164
 ---
-Last month, Egged Bus Systems (EBS), a subsidiary of Egged Israel Transport Cooperative Society, Israel’s largest public transportation operator, lost a bid for a decade-long contract to run public transportation in the North-Holland region of the Netherlands. This contract was valued at 19.1 million euros a year, with a total worth of 190.1 million euros.
-Egged Bus Systems lost this lucrative bid after Dutch BDS activists launched a campaign charging its Israeli parent company with facilitating grave violations of Palestinian human rights and international humanitarian law.
-Specifically, Egged Cooperative operates Jewish-only buses to and between almost all of Israel’s illegal settlements built on stolen Palestinian land in the militarily occupied West Bank, including remote outposts and East Jerusalem.
-Egged buses traveling on Israeli settlement bus routes bar access to Palestinians. They use an extensive network of roads built to seamlessly connect illegal settlements on both sides of the illegal Israeli separation Wall to cities within present-day Israel.
-The company thus supports and profits from a racist, segregated bus system that actively facilitates the maintenance and expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements, which are themselves considered war crimes under international law.
-Sonja Zimmermann from the Services and Research Center on Palestine (DocP), a coalition of Dutch BDS activists for Palestinian rights, said,
-We are very happy with this result, with the fact that our regional government rejected Egged’s bid to run North-Holland’s public transportation system.
-People can now step into a bus without helping pay for Israeli apartheid buses that discriminate against Palestinians. Without helping normalize coming and going from Tel Aviv to illegal Jewish-only settlements built on stolen Palestinian land.
-There is nothing normal about the daily oppression faced by Palestinians, and I’m heartened that our Dutch BDS campaigns are growing in popular support and showing results.
-Riya Hassan, Europe’s campaigns officer for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) said:
-Congratulations to all the activists, organizations and collectives in the Netherlands who successfully built on their earlier BDS campaigns to exclude an Israeli transportation company that profits from segregated busing, segregated roads and segregated Israeli settlements illegally built on stolen Palestinian land.
-You have helped ensure that the regional council of North-Holland adheres to its own obligations under international law by not aiding and abetting Israel’s serious violations of Palestinian rights.
-Egged Cooperative has also been accused of putting its Palestinian drivers in harm’s way, and not doing enough to protect them from violent Israeli extremists. In 2014, 100 Palestinian Egged bus drivers resigned fearing attacks by Israeli settlers and after Palestinian Jerusalem-line bus driver Yusuf Hassan al-Ramouni was found dead and hanging in an Egged bus.
-Egged Bus Systems was one of four companies bidding for the lucrative public transportation contract in the Netherlands. The winning company Connexxion, a Dutch public transportation company, will provide buses and run public transportation in North-Holland for the next 10-years, beginning in July 2018.
-Connexxion is itself owned by Veolia, a French corporate giant which was complicit in the Israeli occupation until an extensive BDS campaign cost it tenders around the world estimated to be worth over $20 billion, causing it to exit the Israeli market. Veolia and Connexxion have ended their complicity with Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights, but have yet to pay reparations to the Palestinian communities they harmed, and campaigners are still demanding that they do so.
-The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter @BDSmovement

+articleTitle: Shireen Abu Akleh’s death exposes colonial solidarity
+pageTitle: Shireen Abu Akleh’s death exposes colonial solidarity – Mondoweiss
+description: The scandalous reactions in Germany and the United States to the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh exemplifies colonial solidarity.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.779Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/shireen-abu-aklehs-death-exposes-colonial-solidarity
 ---
+The assassination of world-renowned journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh galvanized protest the world over, with many across the political spectrum taking to the streets in a display of their indignation at the Israeli encroachment of the most basic human rights. However, there was an exception in several Western states, in particular Germany and America. In Berlin, police banned a vigil in memory of Shireen. In the US, while a handful of progressives have spoken out in support of cutting aid to Israel, most Democratic politicians produced their usual ethically lethargic response, and Republicans remained violently silent.
+Anyone following events in Palestine will undoubtedly not be surprised at these reactions. However, with the assassination of Shireen, we get a full display of a new epoch of blatant violence. Shireen was an American citizen, a journalist who worked for the most influential media outlets in the middle east. And while the US prides itself on defending its citizen, from its second amendment to going around the world to ensure the safety of its people by destroying others, when it comes to Abu Akleh, and other Palestinian Americans, Israel is treated differently.
+These grim reactions following Shireen’s killing point to the colonial solidarity between Western, and non-Western, states.
+Colonial solidarity with the U.S. and Germany
+The term colonial solidarity can be understood similar to the ‘special relationship’, that nebulous phrase deployed to end all critique of Israel or justify the indiscriminate cutting down of Palestinians. Colonial solidarity also refers to capitalist states supporting other capitalist states in their absolute drive to extract profit beyond their borders by all means. This leads to the erosion of democratic values (internally and externally) as is typical of colonialism; the marginalization of public wants in favor of self-interest; the deliberate convolution of abhorrent acts of violence and coercion; all to extract profits outside their geographic locations to benefit a few within their geographic locations.
+The idea of colonial solidarity goes back decades if not centuries, a brief look into its history helps us conceptualize these relationships. In the later 19th century, fringe Zionist ideas emerged that suggested antisemitism was absolute and that Jew and gentile cannot live side by side. This idea did not appeal to most Jews and in fact Jewish people were over represented in socialist internationalist movements. Enter Theodor Herzl, a Zionist ideologue who believed that super powers should support in their cause. After WWI, Chaim Weizmann took Herzl’s idea to practice and suggested “a Jewish Palestine would be a safeguard to England.” Suggesting Zionism would ensure British colonial support in the region. Seeing how British colonialism had important routes in that region, this suggestion was well received. This started the violent history of settlement, occupation, colonialism and apartheid.
+Fast forward decades later, when the US emerged as the super power post WWII, this colonial arrangement was revisited. In reference to Saudi oil, a state department memo read “where the oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history…” The new superpower, and its capitalist class, eyed out the middle east’s “stupendous” riches. Only, colonial adventurism was not an option due to geopolitical complexity (the Arab nationalist wave at the time and cold war complexities) and the simple fact that it would be expensive. In a Machiavellian maneuver, the US sought to cultivate a ‘special relation’ with Israel; where Israel receives diplomatic cover, military and financial support and in turn, America gets a client state in the region with a fraction of the cost.
+Let’s turn to Germany. Germany’s reasoning for stopping the vigil, and subsequent crack down of protests, is the supposed “antisemitic nature” of pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Preemptively trying to quash any antisemitism, which has been legally stretched to encompass a broad array of acts and criticisms as to render the charge disingenuous. Nonetheless, protests did break out, where dozens were arrested, and prominent members of the Palestinian community were brutally attacked.
+Germany should always learn from its past, as every country or indeed any ethical person should, but this introspection can sometimes be toxic when hedonistically guided. The laborious work of Dr. Norman Finkelstein demonstrates just how toxic this guidance has been throughout the latter half of the 20th century, where reparations were demanded without exception or investigations, claiming that Holocaust survivors had only a few years to live, and once the money was paid, instead of going to those survivors, they would go to pro-Zionist and pro-Israeli groups.
+Of course, reparations should be paid to those affected, and are still being affected, by historic crimes, to alleviate the sufferings of those affected, and atone for criminal acts. But this commodification of trauma has extended well beyond reparations, into the through the promotion of Zionist ideas. This coercive pressure has encouraged political disengagement with the suffering of Palestinians, the promoted a lack of accountability for Israeli violence.
+The assassination of Abu Akleh has shined a bright light on this ‘special relationship’; which the US has permeated media and thus politics. In the case of Germany, historical guilt has turned into a pathology, where reality is based on trauma, and in a sinister turn Zionist reparation groups play the role of Germany’s therapists.
+More so Abu Akleh’s murder shows democratic functions are slowly being replaced with oligarchic ones.
+In the U.S. the response to her killing shows how elite interests have been prioritized, to the point where even the basic tenets of democracy, free speech and a free media, is being put to test. The response was to suggest that the testimonies of the journalists with Abu Akleh shouldn’t be taken at face value, and that we should depend on the established media who have been pushing faulty logic. Flooding the media sphere were headlines with “Al Jazeera journalist” as if Abu Akleh is some different species of journalist. Abu Akleh is an American citizen and Al Jazeera is an established media outlet, those two facts show us to which direction this oligarchic practice is heading.
+Or in the case of Germany, traumatically crippled as to prioritize its toxic overcorrection of history as opposed to siding with those being ethnically cleansed. When the Berlin police contested protests because of a minority antisemitic voices that by no means represented the majority, they’ve revealed that they are more cautious about the minute unrepresentative voice more than the assassination of a journalist.
+The reach of colonial solidarity
+Abu Akleh’s murder also exposes how far this ‘special relationship’ goes in non-Western countries, such as Sudan. Being a pro-democracy Marxist activist in Sudan and a psychotherapist, I’ve witnessed first-hand Israel’s help in supporting the 25th October coup leaders, and the psychological trauma suffered by protestors, and citizens in this climate of military fear.
+In Sudan, there has been widespread condemnation of Abu Akleh’s assassination but this condemnation is not displayed in the meaningful way in the media. However, Sudan’s normalization with Israel has been covered extensively and praised almost unanimously. This normalization is being driven by neoliberal politicians looking to financialize the economy while the majority of the public does not support it. The funding Sudan received after normalizing mostly went to the pockets of politicians, IGOs, INGOs and other top down institutions that are pro-financializaton, not the people (with the exception of one program that saw to hand out $5 a month to people, but only if the government bans subsidies which has caused more damage than good). Again, here we see the symptoms of the ‘special relationship’ — a minority of elites making decisions against the will of the majority, and neglecting the suffering of Palestinians.
+In the assassination of Abu Akleh, we see the erosion of democracy in Germany and the US, we see the hindrance of the democratic processes in Sudan (and elsewhere). All this to keep erect and cement the colonial relationship between these countries and continue financialization and commodifying trauma for the sake of profit. These are the products of colonial solidarity.

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-articleTitle: Danish Pension Fund Blacklists Four Israeli Companies Linked to Settlements
-pageTitle: Danish Pension Fund Blacklists Four Israeli Companies Linked to Settlements | BDS Movement
-description: Following a report released by Danwatch in January, Denmark’s third largest pension fund, Sampension, moved to exclude four publicly traded...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.226Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/danish-pension-fund-blacklists-four-israeli-companies-linked-settlements
 ---
-Following a report released by Danwatch in January, Denmark’s third largest pension fund, Sampension, moved to exclude four publicly traded companies from their portfolio due to their investments in illegal Israeli settlement activities. The move is a major win for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which has increasingly come under fire in recent years as Israel and its allies have pushed to squash growing popularity with new legislation and political pressure on both public and private institutions.
-Danwatch’s report, Business on Occupied Territory, found that Sampension with $46.1 billion under its management, was the Danish pension fund that had been investing the largest sums of money in companies that do business in or around illegal Israeli settlements.
-Ana Sanchez, speaking on behalf of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest Palestinian coalition that leads the global BDS movement for Palestinian rights, welcomed the move, telling Mondoweiss it represents  “the latest indicator of the mounting pressure on businesses that are deeply complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights to stop profiting from Israel’s military occupation and apartheid.”
-“All pension and investments funds must divest from Israeli and international companies that are involved in Israel’s human rights violations not just in response to the BDS call issued by Palestinian civil society but also in compliance with UN principles and guidelines on business and human rights,” Sanchez said.
-According to Danwatch, Sampension chose to revise its investment guidelines following the report. In accordance to its new guidelines, Sampension excluded four Israeli companies from its portfolio.
-The four companies excluded due to their involvement in settlement activity are all listed as companies targeted by the BDS movement. They were identified as two Israeli banks, Hapoalim and Leumi, the German construction company, HeidelbergCement and Bezeq, Israel’s largest telecommunications company, which owns telecommunications equipment installed within settlements, providing the illegal communities with telephone and data signals.
-Sampension shared a press release after the move, explaining the shift.
-“During 2017, Sampension has expanded its policy and practice for responsible investments in several areas,” the report read. “The focus areas are climate change, human rights and the pursuit of active ownership.”
-Director of Investments in Sampension, Henrik Olejasz Larsen, said the four companies were excluded from their investment portfolios due to “the financing of settlements and for the extraction of natural resources and the establishment of infrastructure for telecommunications in the occupied area.”
-In addition to the four Israeli companies already blacklisted on Sampension’s portfolio, the company has stated it is now “initiating a dialogue” with another six companies about possible business activities in Israel’s settlements, according to the most recent Danwatch report.
-Banking
-Denmark’s largest bank, Danske Bank, also a BDS target, confirmed to Danwatch that it still holds investments in Hapoalim and Leumi, despite reports of the bank’s blacklisting of Hapoalim in 2014.
-Last month Israel’s banks came under fire, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report criticizing Israeli banks for continuing to allow investments and business exchanges with industries that support illegal Israeli settlements, in contravention of international law.
-Israeli banks, such as Leumi, one of the banks that Sampension blacklisted, told HRW they are required by Israeli law to provide services to settlements, since Israeli banking, consumer, and anti-discrimination law, dictates that banks cannot reject customers based on their place of residence.
-However HRW found that Israeli banks “do not have to provide financial services that involve settlements, such as financing construction projects or mortgages for settlement properties, when the grounds for refusal are not the place of residence of the customer but rather the business and human rights considerations stemming from the location of the activities.”
-HRW called on banks to use the legal loophole to divest from any investments involved in settlement activities.
-Natural Resources
-HeidelbergCement, one of the four companies moved to Sampension’s blacklist, is the world’s largest cement producer and a major manufacturer of aggregates and ready-mix concrete, with around $1 billion in revenue, according to Who Profits, a research center dedicated to exposing companies involved in Israeli settlement activity.
-The German cement company owns three plants and one aggregates quarry in the occupied West Bank through Hanson Israel, Heidelberg’s local branch.
-One of the quarries operates on Palestinian land from the village of al-Zawiya.
-“The quarry exploits occupied Palestinian natural resources for the needs of the Israeli construction industry,” Who Profit documented. In addition, once the natural resources, dug up from West Bank land, are turned into building material, they are directly supplied to settlements for building and expanding illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
-“Materials of stone and gravel extracted from Palestinian land have been providing the raw material needed for the Israeli expansionist construction industry,” Who Profits documented. “Without which the construction sector could not have thrived economically, generating profit for many Israeli companies.”
-Last month, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a report revealing that the Palestinian economy was performing “far below potential.”
-The report documented that the primary cause of the problem was the “continuing loss of land and natural resources to settlements and the annexation of land in the West Bank.”
-According a report released by The Rights Forum, a research center focused on Israel and Palestine, natural stone, or “white oil” is one of Palestine’s most important resources, with the industry providing at least 15 to 20 thousand Palestinian jobs, with an annual contribution of $250 million to the Palestinian economy — however the report found that the stone’s potential value was up to $30 billion.
-HRW found that companies such as HeidelbergCement are in direct violation of international humanitarian law “which requires that such natural resources should only be used for the benefit of the (Palestinian) population of the occupied territory.”

+articleTitle: NYC councilwoman pulls CUNY Law School funding over faculty endorsement of BDS
+pageTitle: NYC councilwoman pulls CUNY Law money over BDS – Mondoweiss
+description: GOP councilwoman Inna Vernikov is pulling $50,000 earmarked for CUNY Law School in response to the faculty endorsing a BDS resolution.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.823Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/nyc-councilwoman-pulls-cuny-law-school-funding-over-faculty-endorsement-of-bds
 ---
+Brooklyn councilwoman Inna Vernikov says she will pull $50,000 in funding earmarked for CUNY Law School in response to the faculty endorsing a BDS resolution.
+“It seems as if antisemitism is the only politically acceptable form of racism which exists. We must stop handing out free passes to anti-Semites like candy,” Vernikov told the New York Post. According to the paper, “The money had been set aside for CUNY Law to provide pro-bono services to the needy in her district.”
+Earlier this month faculty at the law school unanimously backed a Student Government resolution that “proudly and unapologetically” embraces the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The resolution, which was put forward by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Jewish Law Students’ Association (JLSA), was passed by the student body in December. Vernikov, and a number of her colleagues, condemned its passage at the time.
+The resolution calls on the school “to cut all ties with organizations that repress Palestinian organizing and end its complicity in the ongoing censorship, harassment, and intimidation of Palestine solidarity activists, including through ending contracts, academic collaborations, and refusing to be complicit in the targeted harassment and silencing of Palestine solidarity activists.”
+Inna Vernikov is a Ukrainian-American attorney and former Democrat who says she jumped to the Republican party over concerns about growing antisemitism. “I’m running as a Republican on principle because I can’t support the Democratic Party, which is no longer the party of John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate while running for office in 2021. “Jews coming from the former Soviet Union are very familiar with communism and socialism, and many of us feel strongly that what today’s Democratic Party is promoting is exactly what we ran from—a place where speech was censored, where we were not allowed to practice religion, where we didn’t have freedom or economic opportunity.”
+This isn’t the first time Vernikov has made headlines for pulling money. Earlier this month she rescinded a $5000 donation to the Museum of Jewish Heritage because the institution allegedly snubbed Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

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-articleTitle: University College London Union votes to support BDS
-pageTitle: University College London Union votes to support BDS | BDS Movement
-description: University College London Union (UCLU) voted Tuesday night to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, in what campus-based...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.257Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/2016/university-college-london-union-votes-to-support-bds-13817
 ---
-University College London Union (UCLU) voted Tuesday night to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, in what campus-based human rights campaigners hailed as a “tremendous victory.”
-The motion to support BDS was passed by a margin of 14-4, with 3 abstentions, at a meeting of UCLU Council, a body made up of democratically elected members, sabbatical officers, part time officers and student faculty representatives. An attempt by a minority of Council members to take the motion to a general assembly vote failed.
-The motion, which can be read in its entirety here, notes that “the Palestinian people continue to face a systematic and institutionalised oppression”, and that “the state of Israel is able to maintain its system of occupation, colonialism and apartheid because of the support of international regime and the complicity of corporations and institutions across the world.”
-The motion also noted how “BDS tactics have been endorsed by the National Union of Students (NUS), National Union of Teachers (NUT) the Trade Union Congress (TUC), Unite the Union, and the University and Colleges Union (UCU), more than 25 UK student unions” and “many other NGOs, trade unions, student unions, political parties and grassroots networks across the world.
-According to the motion, the UCLU will now “publicly endorse, and support the campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” and “explain this decision to students through an email to all students and on the union website.” The Union resolved “to no longer stock any products boycotted by the BDS movement in any union sales outlet, not advertise nor endorse them.”
-The Union will also “work with students to publish a report on academic, corporate and economic links between the university and companies or institutions that participate in or are complicit in Israeli violations of international law.”
-As a result of the motion, the UCLU’s Black & Minority Ethnic Students' Officer will “organise and chair a student working group for BDS”, which will “work with the college to organise and facilitate an academic boycott.” All sabbatical officers are also now mandated to “respect and uphold this boycott”, and UCLU NUS delegates will “vote in favour of any pro-BDS policy at NUS.”
-This is not the first success for Palestine solidarity activists at UCLU. In December 2012, amotion was overwhelmingly passed by referendum (74.5 per cent voted ‘yes’) that mandated UCLU to take “take concrete steps to ensure that UCL and UCLU are not complicit in any way with the occupation of Palestine.” In January 2015, UCLU also passed a motion to cut ties with British security giant G4S.
-UCLU Friends of Palestine tweeted after the meeting: “This is a tremendous victory for BDS at our campus. Well done to our BDS team for the motion!” A student who was present at the Council meeting and spoke in favour of the motion said it was “amazing that the university I go to, is finally taking a stance on the horrible injustice that's happening in Palestine.”
-He added: “We've worked hard to perfect this motion, and I’m so glad the union stood by the side of justice and voted in favour of it.”
-Speaking to the Jewish News, the co-president of the Friends of Israel Society complainedthat “he had only become aware of the motion a few hours before it was debated”, even though he admitted that it had been “mentioned on the union’s website” as per protocol.
-The Union of Jewish Students (UJS), meanwhile, described UCLU Council as “a small and unrepresentative body” and denounced what it called a “completely undemocratic” process. UJS did not elaborate on how a decision made by elected student officers was ‘undemocratic’.
-Click here to download the full motion passed by UCLA
-Ironically, only 24 hours prior to the Council vote, the Israeli embassy in London was celebrating the result of a Debating Society event where attendees narrowly voted against BDS.
-According to Riya Hassan, BDS National Committee (BNC) Europe Campaigns Officer, “the amazing campaigning by students at UCL and across the UK show that the government’s attacks on BDS won’t stop our growing movement.” She added: “As students in Palestine continue to be at the forefront of popular resistance to Israeli apartheid and colonialism, it’s amazing that UK students are taking such concrete steps in solidarity with their struggle.”
-Hassan noted that “the UK student movement has in recent years succeeded in pressuring universities to cut ties with Israeli and international companies such as Ahava, G4S and Veolia that profit from apartheid.” She continued: “We’re really looking forward to working with the student movement to pressure more institutions to take these kinds of steps.”
-In April 2013, Sheffield University decided not to renew a contract with French company Veolia following a campaign by the Palestine society that was supported by the student union. Last year, Veolia withdrew entirely from Israel. Also in 2013, G4S lost out on contracts with King’s College London and the University of Southampton as a result of student BDS campaigns.
-Meanwhile, student unions at Dundee, Edinburgh, Kent, Essex, Birmingham and Keele universities have all voted to cancel contracts the union held with G4S. In August 2014, the national executive of the National Union of Students voted to endorse BDS, while in February 2015, SOAS University in London became the first university in Europe to vote through a referendum for Academic Boycott.

+articleTitle: We must fight white supremacy with solidarity: Jews respond to the ADL’s harmful campaign
+pageTitle: We must fight white supremacy with solidarity: Jews respond to the ADL’s harmful campaign – Mondoweiss
+description: We are U.S. Jews who are deeply troubled by a recent speech given by the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, in which he defames groups committed to Palestinian justice.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.862Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/we-must-fight-white-supremacy-with-solidarity-jews-respond-to-the-adls-harmful-campaign
 ---
+The following is an open letter from thirty-six members of Jewish communities in the United States that was posted under the byline “Jewish leaders” on Medium on May 26.
+We are U.S. Jews who are deeply troubled by a recent speech given by the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, in which he defames grassroots and civil rights organizations committed to Palestinian justice and falsely conflates anti-Zionism with far right and violent extremism.
+Greenblatt’s attacks on groups that are part of the movement for Palestinian rights and his assertion of an equivalency between anti-Zionists and white nationalists put us all at risk. Especially now, amid the rapid growth of the white nationalist far right, the safety and bodily autonomy of Black and brown people, Jewish people, Arabs, Muslims, queer and trans people, and disabled and immunocompromised people are under threat.
+The struggle against antisemitism must be in partnership with all others targeted by white supremacy. We are committed to working collectively to combat antisemitism the same way we work against racism, Islamophobia, transphobia, and ableism.
+The Anti-Defamation League does not speak for us, and we will not allow them to divide and defame our communities and movements, including the movement for Palestinian human rights. Jewish communities must embrace anti-Zionist and non-Zionist voices, along with all other voices for justice. While we may have a range of perspectives on Palestine and Israel, we are all clear that equating anti-Zionist groups to white nationalists is beyond the pale and cannot be tolerated. We are also clear that all people deserve justice, freedom, and safety.
+If you would like to add your name, please go to this link.
+Signatories
+Eva AckermanPeter BeinartEllen BrotskyJudith ButlerChase CarterBarbara DobkinStefanie FoxRachel GilmerIra GlasserJane HirschmannNaomi KleinSandra KornAlan LevineRichard LevyAbby LublinRachel McCulloughNina MehtaMarilyn Kleinberg NeimarkDonna NevelKathleen PeratisRabbi Brant RosenDeborah SagnerAudrey SassonJames SchamusMaya SchenwarRafael ShimunovAlisa SolomonBarry TrachtenbergMark Tseng-PuttermanRebecca VilkomersonRabbi Brian WaltLesley WilliamsRabbi Alissa WiseDorothy ZellnerSimone ZimmermanDave Zirin
+Additional Signatures
+Kenneth BarnesCarlyn CowenKatie UngerRabbi Yosef BermanAlix DavidsonEliana FishmanCarinne LuckRakhel SilvermanSilas GitinEleni ZimilesJenneva ClaussMay YeRebecca LewisJay SchaffnerNatasha GillSeth MorrisonDina AfekClyde LelandDavid L. MandelRuth Silver TaubeMarta GuttenbergRachel PortMartin LevineWendy GreenfieldHoward HorowitzNoel KentCarolyn Toll OppenheimRand ClarkBeth EisenbergSophie Ellman-GolanElsa AuerbachElaine CohenMaya Ward-FinemanEsther CohenDevorah StaviskyRianna LloydMargo HarveyMerry MaiselAlanna DavisLynn GottliebNat El-HaiMatthew HomMelinda SmithCheryl GreenbergCarin MrotzJordan BridgesEzra SteinbergVirginia Avniel SpatzRabbi Aryeh BernsteinCarole LevineAnya AuerbachMarge SussmanDeirdre SilvermanBenjamin BalthaserJack LeffEli IsaacsSarah Anne MinkinPaul KivelDorit Price-LevineMicaela BrodyEva PeskinRon WittonMax SocolKalman Resnickclaire lichtensteinLaurie Izaks MacSweenRabbi Dev NoilyMalkah BirdDoug GertnerNed RoschRobert GelbachShelby HandlerCindy ShambanDiana FalchukStephanie SchamessElisheva GavraJeremy NicholsonSam TarlowAri JahielAbby SaulRosemary CohenMia RybeckNathaniel BaldoAmanda WesselMarni LibbyBrian CarsonJordi CabanasEstee ChandlerJacob ZiontsBarbara S. KaneHaskell MusryBenjamin Fasching-GrayKathy LessuckEmily DixonRabbi Rebecca AlpertRabbi Lynn GottliebRabbi David MivasairRabbi Moti RieberLouisa Solomon (Rabbinical Student)Rabbi Michael RambergSusan TipographTalia LepsonMax ReynoldsYsh SchwartzYvette MeltzerRichard SilversteinDayne SamuelsSagie Tvizer

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-articleTitle: SAY NO TO PINKWASHING
-pageTitle: SAY NO TO PINKWASHING | BDS Movement
-description: Pinkwashing is an Israeli government propaganda strategy that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians.  For decades, Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime has robbed, oppressed, ethnically cleansed, impoverished, imprisoned, and killed Palestinians, queer and non-queer alike. As Israel’s far-right government allies itself with homophobic, intolerant, and racist leaders around the world, including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) leader, pastor John Hagee, who combines antisemitism with Islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia, LGBTQIA+ communities are seeing through the pink smokescreen. There is growing awareness that queer and trans liberation cannot be separated from Palestinian liberation. Anti-pinkwashing activists and groups have pushed Palestinian rights to the forefront of Pride events across the world. More than 100 LGBTQIA+ groups supported the call from Palestinian queers to boycott Eurovision 2019 in apartheid Tel Aviv. Dozens of queer filmmakers have withdrawn or opposed screenings of their films at TLVFest, the Israeli government-sponsored LGBT film festival in Tel Aviv.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:06:42.024Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/pinkwashing
 ---
-Pinkwashing is an Israeli government propaganda strategy that cynically exploits LGBTQIA+ rights to project a progressive image while concealing Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies oppressing Palestinians. For decades, Israel’s colonial and apartheid regime has robbed, oppressed, ethnically cleansed, impoverished, imprisoned, and killed Palestinians, queer, and non-queer alike.As Israel’s far-right government allies itself with homophobic, intolerant, and racist leaders around the world, including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Christians United for Israel (CUFI) leader, pastor John Hagee, who combines anti-Semitism with Islamophobia, sexism, and homophobia, LGBTQIA+ communities are seeing through the pink smokescreen. There is growing awareness that queer and trans liberation cannot be separated from Palestinian liberation.Anti-pinkwashing activists and groups have pushed Palestinian rights to the forefront of Pride events across the world. More than 100 LGBTQIA+ groups supported the call from Palestinian queers to boycott Eurovision 2019 in apartheid Tel Aviv. Dozens of queer filmmakers have withdrawn or opposed screenings of their films at TLVFest, the Israeli government-sponsored LGBT film festival in Tel Aviv.
-2024
-2023
-2022
-2021
-2019
-2018
-2017

+articleTitle: Connecticut company built gun that killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh
+pageTitle: Connecticut company built gun that killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – Mondoweiss
+description: A coalition called ‘No Rugers to Israel’ can document over 200 Palestinians killed or injured by Rugers — now including Shireen Abu Akleh — though it believes the true number to be far higher.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:44:58.904Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/connecticut-company-built-gun-that-killed-journalist-shireen-abu-akleh
 ---
+Update: Since this article was published, Al Jazeera has reported that the round that killed Shireen Abu Akleh was fired by an M4 rifle (made in America, not by Ruger). The Palestinian Attorney General earlier asserted the bullet was fired by a Ruger Mini-14, but it is not clear that that particular Ruger is in Israel’s arsenal. We will continue to track developments in the story.
+Al Jazeera and Reuters report that the Palestinian Attorney General has concluded that Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was killed on May 11, 2022 in Jenin on Palestine’s West Bank, was killed with a bullet from a Mini Ruger gun. Palestinian Attorney General Akram Al-Khatib said tests showed that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh was a 5.56 mm round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, which is used by the Israeli military.  The Mini Ruger is produced by Sturm Ruger and Company whose headquarters is in Southport (Fairfield), Connecticut.
+Abu Akleh was a prominent Arab journalist, known all over the Middle East, who worked for Al Jazeera for 25 years.  CNN described her  as “a household name across the Arab world for her coverage of Israel and the Palestinian territories.”  The Palestinian foreign minister announced that the Palestinian Authority had formally asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Abu Akleh’s killing.
+Stanley Heller, head of the Middle East Crisis Committee, said, “For years we’ve been calling attention to sales of Ruger guns and ammunition to the Israeli military which is a serial human rights violator. We’re part of a coalition called “No Rugers to Israel” (website NoRugers2Israel.org ).  We can document over 200 Palestinians killed or injured by Rugers though we believe the true number to be far higher.
+Photos of Ruger Mini-14 rifle of the sort that killed Shireen Abu Akleh, from the armorers’ website.
+“Now Ruger has got its most infamous kill, a reporter doing her job, well-known by the Israeli military, shot while wearing an outfit clearly marked ‘Press’.  We repeat again, Sturm Ruger should not be selling its weapons or ammunition to the Israeli government.
+“Sturm Ruger, the U.S.’ largest firearms company, is known to have given millions of dollars to the National Rifle Association, which after the Uvalde Massacre has itself has come under harsh criticism for its rejection of gun control measures and its promotions of gun sales.
+“We’ve written to town officials of Fairfield calling on the Board of Selectmen to ‘call on Sturm Ruger to break all ties with the National Rifle Association, to stop selling its products to Israel and to make a full public accounting of how its weapons were used by Israel and the times its weapons were used deliberately to kill innocent people in the United States.’”

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-articleTitle: UNICEF in Jordan ends contract with G4S
-pageTitle: UNICEF in Jordan ends contract with G4S | BDS Movement
-description: The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Jordan has ended its contract with G4S following a campaign by BDS activists in the country and across...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.385Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/2016/unicef-jordan-ends-g4s-contract-13786
 ---
-The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Jordan has ended its contract with G4S following a campaign by BDS activists in the country and across the world over the company’s role in Israel’s detention and torture of Palestinian political prisoners and other Israeli human rights violations.
-Guman Mussa, the Arab World campaigns coordinator with the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society leading the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, welcomed the move:
-“UNICEF did the right thing by ending its contract with G4S as the company supports violations of rights of Palestinian children including their routine torture in Israeli jails.
-“This is an important decision in accordance with the values of human and children’s rights espoused by UNICEF. We urge the United Nations, its Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and all UN agencies contracting G4S worldwide to follow the lead of UNICEF and UNHCR in Jordan and immediately end their contracts with G4S.”
-“We welcome this news and congratulate Jordan BDS for their persistence and hard work. We salute all campaigners around the world involved in the Stop G4S campaign.”
-Over the past year, campaigners have been urging the UN and its agencies to end their contracts with G4S over its complicity in  Israel’s regime of settler colonialism, occupation and apartheid.
-G4S provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons, in which thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, children and administrative prisoners, are detained and subjected to inhumane treatment. The firm also provides equipment to checkpoints along the route of the Apartheid wall, the illegal settlements and co-runs the Israeli Police Academy in Jerusalem.
-G4S has provided services to various UN agencies in Jordan including UNICEF and UNHCR, both of whom no longer have contracts with occupation and apartheid profiteer G4S.
-UNICEF’s decision comes after a year-long concerted and creative campaign which included meetings, letters, protests and social media actions that called upon the UN and its agencies both locally and internationally to end its contracts with G4S, worth $22 million globally, due to the firm’s complicity in Israeli human rights abuses. Other UN bodies in Jordan including United Nations Development Program (UNDP), World Food Program (WFP), and United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) still have contracts with the firm.
-Last month, a Jordanian coalition formed to defend the political prisoner, administrative detainee and hunger striker Mohamed Al-Qeeq, demonstrated outside UN offices in Amman. The coalition submitted a statement that was signed by 58 Jordanian organizations, unions and major political parties t demanding the UN to intervene to save the life of Al-Qeeq and as well as to end its contracts with the security firm G4S for its role in the Israeli occupation.
-A report approved by the UN General Assembly in 2012 by the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Richard Falk, urged a boycott of G4S over its role in Israeli human rights violations.
-Yazid Halaseh, member of the Jordan BDS movement, said:
-“We are delighted by this news. We will continue campaigning to demand an end to all UN agency contracts with G4S until the firm stops profiting from occupation and apartheid. The United Nations should simply ban this notorious firm from its procurement process because it is profiting from the Israeli settler-colonial project, ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and apartheid policies. These are all violations of UN resolutions, basic principles of human rights and international law.”

+articleTitle: New group tries to stop talk of Israel apartheid among Canadian officials
+pageTitle: New group tries to stop talk of Israel apartheid among Canadian officials – Mondoweiss
+description: A new initiative claiming to combat antisemitism in Canada’s federal service is primarily about defending apartheid.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:06.574Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/new-group-tries-to-stop-talk-of-israel-apartheid-among-canadian-officials/
 ---
+A new initiative claiming to combat antisemitism in Canada’s federal service is primarily about defending apartheid.
+In December Canadian diplomats launched an initiative ostensibly designed to oppose anti-Jewishness within the federal government. The Jewish Public Servants’ Network, reported the Canadian Jewish News, ���was formed last year in response to a global spike in antisemitism following the most recent Israel-Gaza confrontation.”
+Leading anti-Palestinian activist Irwin Cotler assisted with launching the initiative and participated in the group’s event on May 25. Their webinar, which included ardent Israeli nationalist and former senator Linda Frum, took place on the sidelines of a Canada-Israel conference in Ottawa.
+The new group’s spokesperson is Artur Wilczynski, a recently retired assistant deputy minister and senior adviser for people, equity and inclusion at the Communications Security Establishment (Canada’s NSA). The former Canadian ambassador to Norway previously headed Canada’s delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and is a vocal proponent of the IHRA’s anti-Palestinian definition of antisemitism.
+Wilczynski came to my attention when he commented on a tweet about the upcoming CANSEC arms fair in Ottawa hosting Israeli company Elbit, whose subsidiary, IMI Systems, is the main supplier of bullets to the Israeli military and likely provided the ammunition used to kill Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh. Wilczynski wrote, “according to the Committee to Protect Journalists 17 journalists were killed so far this year around the world. While Shireen Abu Aqleh’s death is tragic and demands accountability, others deserve it too. All journalists deserve protection.”
+Few would argue that “all journalists deserve protection”. But a Canadian ally engaged in a long-standing occupation murdering the voice of an oppressed nation deserves far greater outrage than say a Mexican cartel murdering a reporter. Wilczynski’s comment was similar to those who responded to Black Lives Matter protests by saying “all lives matter”.
+While he initially feigned concern for all journalists, Wilczynski’s extreme Zionist views emerged quickly in his responses. He wrote, “completely comfortable criticizing Israeli policies. I believe calling Israel an ‘apartheid’ state is hyperbolic nonsense. The canard is as much a product of 1960s USSR disinformation and propaganda as ‘the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was of Czarist Russia.”
+But Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Al Haq, B’tselem and the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinians have all concluded Israel is committing the crime of apartheid. Wilczynski is directly linking them to Soviet disinformation and indirectly to the famed anti-Semitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
+In a subsequent tweet Wilczynski wrote, “I know it’s the hope of Soviet apologists that if they repeat a lie often enough it will become the truth. It doesn’t. I will continue to push back against the dystopian hyperbole pushed by those who want to destroy Israel — the country where HALF of the world’s Jews live.”
+Wilczynski is arguing that defending Zionist colonialism and fighting antisemitism are intimately connected. For Wilczynski and the Israel lobby raising the specter of antisemitism in the public service is a way to intimidate government officials uncomfortable with apartheid or concerned about how pro-Israel positions impact Canada’s standing. (Many in Global Affairs were frustrated Canada lost its second consecutive bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council partly due to anti-Palestinian positions.)
+The public servants’ antisemitism initiative is best understood in the context of Israel apologists somewhat paradoxical predicament. The Trudeau government has been strikingly deferential, expanding the Canada-Israel free trade agreement, organizing a pizza party for Canadians fighting in the Israeli military, repeatedly declaring its devotion to an apartheid state, voting against 60 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, suing to block proper labels on wines from settlements, creating a special envoy to deflect criticism of Israeli abuses, etc. But, at the same time, Israel and its supporters influence over informed liberal opinion has never been weaker.
+Human rights groups’ conclusion that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid is dripping into mainstream politics and if not dammed up it could turn into a river of criticism. Referencing Amnesty International’s report, Liberal MP Chandra Arya recently asked Parliament about “Palestinians under Israeli apartheid” while the Hill Times published “Backbench Liberals shift from government in push for tougher response to Israel”. Liberal MPs are under pressure to speak-up within their ridings and the NDP is increasingly referencing apartheid.
+In response to millions of Canadians demanding an end to Israeli apartheid, the Israel lobby is trying to define calls for Palestinian equality as antisemitism. And if that’s not successful, they at least want to change the subject.

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-articleTitle: 200+ Latin American Orgs Urge Mexican Multinational Cemex To End Complicity In Israeli Crimes
-pageTitle: 200+ Latin American Orgs Urge Mexican Multinational Cemex To End Complicity In Israeli Crimes | BDS Movement
-description: July 13, 2017, Occupied Palestine — More than 200 Latin American organizations, coalitions, social movements and personalities published a July 9th...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.430Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/200-latin-american-orgs-urge-mexican-multinational-cemex-end-complicity-israeli-crimes
 ---
-July 13, 2017, Occupied Palestine — More than 200 Latin American organizations, coalitions, social movements and personalities published a July 9th letter addressed to the Board of Directors of the Mexican multinational company Cemex, calling on its members to end the company’s complicity in Israel’s human rights violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
-Cemex is the second largest building materials company in the world and is deeply involved in Israeli policies that contravene international law. The company has already been denounced for its illegal actions in a UN report on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in 2012. Through its Israeli subsidiary Ready-Mix, Cemex has factories in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land. It also supplies Israel with cement and concrete for the construction of its wall, military checkpoints and illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
-The letter says:
-Cemex is directly enabling and profiting from illegal and inhumane Israeli policies, building a future further away from justice, equality and freedom.
-The complicity of companies like Cemex has allowed Israeli policies of occupation, racial segregation and colonization to continue for almost 70 years.
-The letter to Cemex was signed by large social movements from 12 Latin American countries and other parts of the world, including the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the international World March of Women. It was also signed by political parties, including Mexico’s third largest party, the social democratic PRD.
-Signatories also included some of the largest trade unions in Latin America, such as the CTA de los Trabajadores from Argentina, the Bolivian Union of Peasants and Colombia's Unitary Union of Workers. They also included important human rights coalitions like Peru’s National Coordination on Human Rights and Mexico’s League for the Defense of Human Rights. Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and several prominent Mexican artists and academics have also joined the appeal.
-The letter was published as part of the #StopCemex campaign, heeding the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on the 13th anniversary of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) ruling on the illegality of Israel’s apartheid wall. It states:
-The ICJ declared, on July 9, 2004, that the Israeli wall and any type of support for Israel’s violations of international law are illegal.
-Due to this, 13 years later, and heeding the call from Palestinian civil society for effective international solidarity through BDS, we call on Cemex to break its ties of complicity in illegal Israeli policies against the Palestinian people.
-The organizers of the campaign have called on progressive international organizations and movements to endorse the letter by filling in this form.
-Abdulrahman Abunahel, a spokesperson for the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), welcomed the efforts of Latin American movements and organizations on the #StopCemex campaign, saying:
-Palestinians and Latin Americans share many experiences of oppression, but we also share experiences of popular resistance. It's inspiring to see Latin American movements and organizations pressure the huge Mexican building materials company Cemex to end its involvement in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. At the same time, we support their struggles against injustice and walls affecting their own region. Our struggles unite.
-By having factories in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, and by providing materials for the construction of Israel's illegal apartheid wall, checkpoints and settlements, Cemex is profiting from and enabling Israel’s regime of occupation, land theft and apartheid. As a result, Cemex will face a worldwide BDS campaign that will not only expose its complicity in serious violations of international law but will also affect its contracts. Companies like Veolia, CRH, Orange and G4S were impacted by successful global BDS campaigns, and Cemex will face the same unless it ends its complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights.
-The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It leads and supports the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Visit our website and follow us on Twitter @BDSmovement and Facebook.

+articleTitle: NYC councilwoman pulls CUNY Law School funding over faculty endorsement of BDS
+pageTitle: NYC councilwoman pulls CUNY Law money over BDS – Mondoweiss
+description: GOP councilwoman Inna Vernikov is pulling $50,000 earmarked for CUNY Law School in response to the faculty endorsing a BDS resolution.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:06.617Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/nyc-councilwoman-pulls-cuny-law-school-funding-over-faculty-endorsement-of-bds/
 ---
+Brooklyn councilwoman Inna Vernikov says she will pull $50,000 in funding earmarked for CUNY Law School in response to the faculty endorsing a BDS resolution.
+“It seems as if antisemitism is the only politically acceptable form of racism which exists. We must stop handing out free passes to anti-Semites like candy,” Vernikov told the New York Post. According to the paper, “The money had been set aside for CUNY Law to provide pro-bono services to the needy in her district.”
+Earlier this month faculty at the law school unanimously backed a Student Government resolution that “proudly and unapologetically” embraces the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The resolution, which was put forward by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Jewish Law Students’ Association (JLSA), was passed by the student body in December. Vernikov, and a number of her colleagues, condemned its passage at the time.
+The resolution calls on the school “to cut all ties with organizations that repress Palestinian organizing and end its complicity in the ongoing censorship, harassment, and intimidation of Palestine solidarity activists, including through ending contracts, academic collaborations, and refusing to be complicit in the targeted harassment and silencing of Palestine solidarity activists.”
+Inna Vernikov is a Ukrainian-American attorney and former Democrat who says she jumped to the Republican party over concerns about growing antisemitism. “I’m running as a Republican on principle because I can’t support the Democratic Party, which is no longer the party of John F. Kennedy or Bill Clinton,” she told the Jewish News Syndicate while running for office in 2021. “Jews coming from the former Soviet Union are very familiar with communism and socialism, and many of us feel strongly that what today’s Democratic Party is promoting is exactly what we ran from—a place where speech was censored, where we were not allowed to practice religion, where we didn’t have freedom or economic opportunity.”
+This isn’t the first time Vernikov has made headlines for pulling money. Earlier this month she rescinded a $5000 donation to the Museum of Jewish Heritage because the institution allegedly snubbed Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

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-articleTitle: We can end this.
-pageTitle: We can end this. | BDS Movement
-description: No, the ICC will “not end Israel’s genocide,” let alone “liberate Palestine.” Nor can the ICJ or even the UN, and I do not know any sane adult who has claimed otherwise. This does not mean, however, to dismiss the piling, unprecedented, far-reaching legal and diplomatic blows to Israel as “nothing” or as “merely symbolic.” Doing so would reflect a serious misreading of history or utter ignorance.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.467Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/We-Can-End-This
 ---
-No, the ICC will “not end Israel’s genocide,” let alone “liberate Palestine.” Nor can the ICJ or even the UN, and I do not know any sane adult who has claimed otherwise. This does not mean, however, to dismiss the piling, unprecedented, far-reaching legal and diplomatic blows to Israel as “nothing” or as “merely symbolic.” Doing so would reflect a serious misreading of history or utter ignorance. Justice is always won, not gifted. In all liberation struggles, human agency and revolutionary movements are the driving force. Only with seemingly endless organizing, planning, mobilizing, resisting, disrupting, coalescing, connecting struggles, and always learning can the oppressed ultimately prevail.All these massive legal wins against apartheid Israel are making the ground so much more fertile than ever, finally allowing our long-planted seeds of liberation to grow into fruitful trees of freedom, justice, equality and comprehensive emancipation.
-But first we must stop the US-Israeli genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. No one act, battle, campaign, demonstration, disruptive action, book, or song alone can end the genocide or significantly weaken Israel’s 76-year-old regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid. But each one of them, if strategic, principled and persistent, invigorates and contributes to the vibrant stream that can eventually breach the daunting, overbearing walls of Israeli oppression. When the BDS movement first called for a comprehensive military embargo on Israel, for instance, States were too terrified of US wrath to consider it. Now, the global majority at the UN General Assembly supports it. Multiple ports across continents have been blocked for Israel-bound military supplies, and more port workers are refusing to handle such illegal supplies. Major European and Latin American universities are cutting ties with complicit Israel universities, and thousands of writers and artists have joined those supporting the cultural boycott of apartheid Israel. Major funds have divested from Israel Bonds, and massive US tech and energy projects have been canceled in apartheid Israel. The tide is turning. Israel is fast becoming an isolated, rogue state, and BDS is showing what our collective power can do and has indeed done.Still, like all streams, our stream of liberation is not straightforward, nor is its flow uniformly strong all the time. It ebbs and flows, twists around natural and artificial obstacles of all kinds, but it keeps going and growing no matter what. Only when a critical mass of people power converges and feeds into our liberation stream, can it sweep away those decades-old, seemingly immovable rocks of US-Israeli colonial violence and their “might makes right” depravity. Let’s keep organizing, peacefully disrupting, forming intersectional coalitions and fighting like never before.We absolutely must end this genocide and underlying apartheid. And we really can. Let’s.

+articleTitle: Confronting Antony Blinken over Palestine
+pageTitle: Confronting Antony Blinken over Palestine – Mondoweiss
+description: Hear from one of the graduates who confronted Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Georgetown University commencement ceremony over U.S. support for Israel.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:07.961Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/confronting-anthony-blinken-over-palestine/
 ---
+In this episode I talk to Nooran Alhamdan, a recent Masters graduate of Georgetown University about the action she and other graduates took to confront Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, over U.S. support for Israel.
+The audio in this episode is a bit choppy, so thanks for your patience.
+Support our work
+Help us continue our critical independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
+Blinken congratulated me on graduating. I confronted him about Shireen Abu Akleh, Nooran AlhamdanStatement: Arab Studies Georgetown Graduates Protest Blinken, Honor Shireen Abu AklehStudents protest Blinken and honor Shireen Abu Akleh at Georgetown graduation, Michael ArriaSubscribe to our free email newsletters.
+Share this podcast
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter. Click here to post a tweet!If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser and leave us a review and follow the show!
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-articleTitle: 🤥 “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is proof of anti-Semitism and a call for genocide.
-pageTitle: 🤥 “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is proof of anti-Semitism and a call for genocide. – Pali Answers
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:13:05.360Z
-url: https://palianswers.com/rebuttal/%f0%9f%a4%a5-from-the-river-to-the-sea-palestine-will-be-free-is-proof-of-anti-semitism-and-a-call-for-genocide
 ---
-Answer 1This slogan is a call for freedom for Palestinians and an end of apartheid in historic Palestine. It is neither a call for genocide nor anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it represents the hope of creating a single secular, democratic state where all people are equal and free from discrimination.Answer 2Anti-Semitism is not to be confused with anti-Zionism. Judaism is a religion and anti-Semitism is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. Zionism is an ideology founded in the expansionist concept of a Greater Israel to be built from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, Zionism was the movement that first coined the phrase “from the river to the sea.” Anti-Zionism is a movement responding to the plan to create a Greater Israel on the ashes of historic Palestine from the river to the sea, without Palestinians in it.Answer 3The only genocide that has been committed on the territories between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has been carried out by the State of Israel. There are also ample examples of ethnic cleansing committed by Zionists since 1948 in the same territory (i.e. from the river to the sea).Answer 4To suggest that freedom for Palestinians can only come at the expense of Israelis is to suggest that the existence of Israel can only come at the expense of Palestinians’ freedom. This is an absurd contention, as there is room for coexistence of all people in the land of historic Palestine, in freedom and equality.Answer 5Misrepresenting and weaponizing the slogan as a call for a genocide has led to a McCarthyist response to the call to end a ruthless occupation and for the freedom of the Palestinians living under this occupation. The right to protest, the freedom to have an opinion and livelihoods have been curtailed, threatened, or destroyed because this slogan has been hijacked by a political agenda to continue supporting Israel and its war in Gaza.Answer 6It’s wild that we’re being sucked into massive, deflective  arguments over the “nuances” of protest slogans while Israeli officials are straight up, without metaphor or obscurity, stating that the intention  of the 2023-2024 onslaught in Gaza  is to erase all signs of Palestinian existence, including the Palestinians.Answer 7Is this a better slogan? From parts of area A to parts of area B Palestine will be a non-contiguous, non sovereign unviable non-state with no control of borders or access to the sea, all pending final status negotiations which will never take place and Gaza remains an isolated ghetto.Answer 8“From the river to the sea” is also interpreted as a death knell to the unviable two-state solution, and a call for one state for all peoples between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Zionists fear this not because it will result in the displacement of Jews, but rather it would mark the demise of the Jewish ethno-state and would require the equal treatment of Palestinians. That’s what they are truly afraid of. Answer 9We must differentiate Judaism from Zionism. Judaism is a religion, while Zionism is a nationalist, supremacist movement with racist ideologies. Until the 1990s, the UN classified Zionism as a racist movement, a designation that shifted primarily due to political pressure from the U.S.

+articleTitle: 🤥 Palestinians and Arabs want to throw all Jews into the sea.
+pageTitle: 🤥 Palestinians and Arabs want to throw all Jews into the sea. – Pali Answers
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T18:38:56.192Z
+url: https://palianswers.com/rebuttal/%f0%9f%a4%a5-palestinians-and-arabs-want-to-throw-all-jews-into-the-sea
 ---
+Answer 1Palestinians have for decades found common cause with anti-Zionist Jews – whether in the occupied territories, in Israel or in the diaspora – critical of Israeli apartheid. They have worked together towards the dismantling of oppressive systems in pursuit of either two states or one with equal rights for all regardless of race or ethnicity. This is yet more proof that Palestinian grievances are with the Zionist project as opposed to Judaism itself.Answer 2Palestinians do not resist Israeli occupation and apartheid because of some inveterate hatred of Jewish people. If their occupiers today were French or Chinese or even from a Muslim country, Palestinians would surely resist just the same. The aim of Palestinian resistance is freedom.Answer 3The Palestinian struggle is not and has never been based on anti-Semitism, but rather liberation from a settler colonial apartheid regime, and the call for the rightful (and legally mandated) return of Palestinian refugees originally displaced by force and en masse in 1948.Answer 4It’s interesting how much Israel likes to project its own sentiments and actions and ascribe them to the Palestinians. The only entity that has been explicitly calling for a single-religion ethno-state and actively displacing a population is Israel.

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-articleTitle: Qatar welcomes head of Zionist Organization of America
-pageTitle: Qatar welcomes head of Zionist Organization of America | The Electronic Intifada
-description: The Qatari government has been sponsoring numerous trips for prominent right-wing American Zionists.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:44:40.733Z
-url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/qatar-welcomes-head-zionist-organization-america
 ---
-US Defense Secretary James Mattis meets with the emir of Qatar Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani at the Sea Palace in Doha, Qatar, 22 April 2017. (Brigitte N. Brantley)Morton Klein, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, visited Doha earlier this month at the invite of Qatar’s leader.
-News of the trip comes as Qatar’s foreign minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said on Thursday that Doha welcomes such visits and has a “strong alliance” with the US and the Trump administration.
-Klein said he used the opportunity of  the visit to tell Qatar’s emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani that his “speech on Jerusalem before the United Nations was wrong” and that “Jerusalem has been a Jewish city for thousands of years,” assuring The Jerusalem Post that he was “tough, very tough” with the emir.
-The emir “listened” as Klein criticized Qatari leaders for “anti-Israel speeches” and their stance on Jerusalem, The Jerusalem Post reported.
-The visit comes amid a public relations campaign by Qatar to salvage itself from regional isolation by reaching out to right-wing Americans and staunch supporters of Israel.
-Klein also told the emir that the Arab Peace Initiative, which Doha supports, “would be a total disaster.” But the emir said they’d have to disagree on this issue, according to Klein, citing the support for the proposal by some Israelis, including the late Shimon Peres, a former Israeli president, architect of the Oslo process and champion of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied territory.
-Klein said he was asked to speak to members of US Congress, but said he wouldn’t until he sees change.
-Klein met a number of government officials during his visit, he said, and some told him that if the US asked Doha to expel Hamas members from the emirate, they would “throw them out in a minute.”
-They also stressed that they no longer provide funds for the Muslim Brotherhood in hopes of being “part of the civilized world,” according to Klein.
-“Everyone is already going”
-In an apparent attempt to escape its regional isolation, Qatar hired a Washington lobbying firm to arrange meetings with major American Jewish groups for the emir while he was in the US for the annual United Nations General Assembly last September.
-Klein told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Qatar invited him to visit every month since then, but he refused every time because of the Gulf state’s “support for Hamas and the anti-Semitism being broadcast on Al Jazeera television.”
-He said he changed his mind when he saw other influential American Jewish individuals visiting, realizing that “they won’t be able to to use me for propaganda because everyone is already going, but I might use the visit to push them on these issues.”
-The Qatari government has been sponsoring numerous trips for right-wing American Zionists.
-These include Israel apologist and Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, Christian Zionist and former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, conservative radio host and Israel supporter John Batchelor, former Republican congressman Thaddeus McCotter, CEO of the Orthodox Union Kosher Division Rabbi Menachem Genack, the executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations Malcolm Hoenlein, president of the American Jewish Congress Jack Rosen and the president of the Religious Zionists of America Martin Oliner.
-Most of these trips were paid for by the Qatari government.
-Documentary release still pending
-When asked about those visits, Qatar’s foreign minister told Haaretz that “all of them are welcome and we are building good relations with them.”
-He also talked about concerns regarding Al Jazeera – the Qatari broadcaster – and its coverage of Israel.
-“There were some complaints filed against Al Jazeera in the United Kingdom,” the foreign minister told Haaretz, referring to an investigative documentary exposing the extent of the Israel lobby’s influence on the UK government and Labour party.
-The complaints were all rejected by the UK’s broadcasting regulator in October, he noted.
-Al Jazeera has produced a similar investigation into the pro-Israel lobby in the US, but initially said it held up on broadcasting pending the UK complaints process.
-That the documentary still hasn’t aired has prompted some to speculate that politics is interfering, specifically Qatar’s push to burnish its image in the US and Israel.
-Israel rejects Qatar’s efforts
-Dershowitz, one of the Israel lobby’s most prominent US figures, wrote an article upon his return in which he reflected on numerous meetings with Qatari officials.
-He suggested, among other things, that Qatari-Israeli normalization is on the horizon.
-“I heard a lot of positive statements regarding Israel from Qatari leaders, as well as hints of commercial relationships between these isolated nations.”
-Meanwhile, a spokesperson at Israel’s embassy to the US told Haaretz that it does not support Qatar’s campaign to burnish its image through American supporters of Israel, even though Haaretz reported that some of those claimed to have received the blessing of Israeli officials.
-Klein claims he spoke to Israeli officials before his trip to Doha, telling The Jerusalem Post that “one said I shouldn’t go, but others said I should.”
-On 30 January, the first Inaugural US-Qatar Strategic Dialogue was held in Washington.
-US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and US Defense Secretary James Mattis co-hosted Qatari foreign minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and Qatari defense minister Khalid bin Mohammad al-Attiyah at the event.
-Mattis celebrated “excellent military-to-military relations” between the US and the emirate and both expressed their concern at the gulf crisis and isolation of Qatar.
-“As the Gulf dispute nears the eight-month mark, the United States remains as concerned today as we were at its outset,” Tillerson said.
-“This dispute has had direct negative consequences economically and militarily for those involved, as well as the United States.”
-The US, Tillerson continued, is keen that Gulf Cooperation Council countries present a united front that “bolsters our effectiveness on many fronts,” specifically counterterrorism as well as countering Iran’s “malign influence.”
-Bahrain has also reached out to Israel, while Saudi Arabia is reported to be looking to improve relations. Gulf countries appear motivated by an enmity toward Iran they share with Israel.
 Tags

+articleTitle: Israel attacks West Bank college twice in one week
+pageTitle: Israel attacks West Bank college twice in one week | The Electronic Intifada
+description: An Israeli military base has been set up on the campus of the Palestine Technical University in Tulkarem.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:22:00.090Z
+url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israel-attacks-west-bank-college-twice-one-week
 ---
+Israeli forces detain a Palestinian protester in Tulkarem last month.
+APA imagesThe Israeli army attacked the Palestine Technical University in the occupied West Bank city of Tulkarem twice this week.
+Nine Palestinians were shot Thursday as Israeli soldiers tried to suppress a protest on the campus. On Monday, five students had to be hospitalized for gunshot wounds.
+Known as Kadoorie, the university has been subject to a series of such attacks since early October, when students began organizing marches against the Israeli occupation.
+Live ammunition, rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas have all been fired by Israel during the attacks.
+Twenty students have been detained so far, the International Solidarity Movement stated last week.
+None of the students has been released.
+Military camp
+The university is located next to the massive wall that Israel is building in the West Bank. According to the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, Israel confiscated 200 dunums (50 acres) from Kadoorie to build the wall and another 23 dunums (5.5 acres) for a military training camp within the campus.
+Israel has also established a military checkpoint at the university’s entrance. The attacks have been so severe that the university has had to close on occasions.
+Students have also reported that Israeli soldiers have pointed their guns directly at them, giving the impression that the soldiers were about to open fire.
+When a number of students responded to such threatening behavior in October by throwing stones and fireworks at the military training area, the Israeli soldiers fired large quantities of tear gas into the university.
+Al-Haq has produced a video about the attacks (see above). The group contends that the Israeli army’s presence in Kadoorie amounts to a violation of the 1993 Oslo accords.
+As a result of these accords, Kadoorie was placed in Area A of the West Bank, which is supposed to be under full Palestinian control for administrative and security purposes.
+Al-Quds University in Abu Dis, an area on the outskirts of occupied East Jerusalem, has also been a target for repeated Israeli incursions.
+During October, 513 people suffered from tear gas inhalation on that campus, Al-Haq has calculated.
+Live ammunition was also used by Israeli forces, who have broken doors, gates and windows at the university.
+The right to education is guaranteed by a number of United Nations’ agreements.
+Yet Israel denies that right to Palestinians at all levels of education.
+In East Jerusalem, Israel has been increasing its intimidation of schoolchildren lately. Around 5,000 children have to pass through a military checkpoint each morning in order to reach schools in the Ras al-Amud neighborhood. Israel erected the checkpointed in mid-October.
+Asma Abasi, who heads a committee for parents with children in the area’s schools, said that the experience means pupils are “agitated” when they eventually make it to their classrooms.
+And once they make it past the checkpoints, Israeli forces often raid their schools, Abasi told The Electronic Intifada.
+Settler harassment
+Meanwhile, Israeli settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron blocked pupils from reaching class on Thursday.
+The Palestinian Authority’s education ministry has stated that settlers wish to have the Qortoba school in Hebron, which serves pupils between the ages of 7 and 16, closed down. The school is located beside an Israeli settlement.
+One settler, Anat Cohen, regularly harasses Palestinians in Hebron. Seen in the video above, she was reportedly the first settler to obstruct the children from reaching Qortoba yesterday. She was then joined by other settlers, who subjected the pupils to verbal abuse.
+Another video from the scene shows her breaking through a group of soldiers and shouting into the faces of children.
 Tags

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-articleTitle: Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) statement on BDS movement
-pageTitle: Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) statement on BDS movement | BDS Movement
-description: Read the full statement here: http://alhaq.ps/publications/papers/Phroc-BDS-8-2-2016.pdf Summary: For decades, Israel has failed to uphold its...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.497Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/palestinian-human-rights-organizations-council-phroc-statement-bds-movement
 ---
-Read the full statement here: http://alhaq.ps/publications/papers/Phroc-BDS-8-2-2016.pdf
-Summary:
-For decades, Israel has failed to uphold its duties as Occupying Power and has instead deepened its occupation and regime of colonialism and apartheid. Human rights violations rising to the level of international crimes, including unlawful killings, torture, forced transfer, and other forms of collective punishment have become the norm. Rather than uphold their responsibilities under international law and take measures to hold Israel accountable, third states have largely turned a blind eye.
-Although world governments and international and regional bodies, like the United Nations and the European Union, still lack the political will to hold Israel accountable, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has grown to provide an important nonviolent counter-narrative and alternative for achieving the enjoyment and exercise of freedom, dignity, and justice for Palestinians.
-The 2005 BDS call, issued by Palestinian civil society, and the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), which leads the global movement, both affirm that BDS is inclusive, rejects all forms of racism and discrimination, and does not target any person or entity based on their respective identity. Rather, the movement targets Israel’s occupation and oppression of Palestinians. Corporations and institutions that aid, abet, or profit from Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights also fall within the purview of the movement.
-As the impact of BDS grows, so too do efforts by Israel, its lobby groups, and supporters to vilify, smear, and attempt to criminalize the movement. Many attempt to falsely associate the nonviolent movement with discrimination or anti-Semitism; such claims are not only baseless, but also unjustly trample on the rights to freedom of expression and protest, amongst others.
-Accordingly, it has become imperative for the Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC) to reiterate the universality of these human rights. PHROC affirms the right of all individuals to participate in and advocate for boycott, divestment, and sanction actions, and calls on states and businesses to uphold their related legal responsibilities.

+articleTitle: AIPAC’s new tactic to unseat Rashida Tlaib
+pageTitle: AIPAC’s new tactic to unseat Rashida Tlaib – Mondoweiss
+description: A new Super PAC aligned with AIPAC is making no secret of its first target: Rashida Tlaib.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:08.003Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/aipacs-new-tactic-to-unseat-rashida-tlaib/
 ---
+A new Super PAC has reared its head and it’s made no secret of its first target: Rashida Tlaib.
+It comes as no surprise that Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American woman and the only Palestinian Democrat ever in Congress, is coming under severe attack ahead of her primary two months from now. But the nature of that attack is a particularly dangerous and pernicious one, and its nature is one that constitutes a unique and serious threat to not only advocates of Palestinian rights and freedom, but to progressives across the board.
+The Urban Empowerment Action PAC (UEA) says its “supporters include a broad coalition of African American business, political and civic leaders, working alongside peers in the Jewish community.” Its stated mission is to “narrow the wealth gap between Black and white Americans.”
+They explicitly stated that ousting Tlaib was their focus, and they planned to spend over $1 million to support Janice Winfrey, a centrist African-American and the Detroit City Clerk since 2005, against Tlaib.
+UEA squares its thin anti-racist rhetoric with targeting one of the most progressive members of Congress by implicitly accusing Tlaib of ignoring the needs of the Black community. To carry that case, UEA is employing activist and CNN commentator Bakari Sellers, who has long been one of the leading spokespeople for AIPAC in the Black community.
+In 2016, Sellers was a key figure in the fight between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps over how to address Israel and the Palestinians in the Democratic Party platform. Sanders’ camp led an effort to draft wording that called for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements,” which clearly aligned with stated U.S. policy in 2016.
+Sellers wrote a letter opposing the mention of occupation or settlements and got dozens of other African-American leaders to sign on. A compromise was eventually reached where the Democratic platform expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians for the first time, but there was no mention of occupation or settlements. There is little doubt that Sellers’ efforts were an important factor in staving off what was a popular proposal during the 2016 race.
+A photo posted to Twitter by Bakaki Sellers of him meeting Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.
+Sellers was hardly subtle in his attacks on Tlaib. “Congresswoman Tlaib, I’m sure, serves admirably,” he told POLITICO. “However, we were hoping that we can have a candidate that doesn’t have varying distractions…we want someone, particularly in these Black communities, that does not get distracted by shiny things or media opportunities but is focused on the uplift of our communities and does right by them.
+“I don’t have a beef with her directly,” Sellers continued. “I just think that there are individuals who will have the interest of their district, first and foremost, and not their brand. And will do things in the interest of uplift of that community. It’s not as much of a knock on her as it is that somebody else can do the job better because they’re focused on these particular issues.”
+Sellers characterizes Tlaib as being self-centered, an odd charge considering that her politics are not well-suited to upward mobility and she has remained closely connected to the grassroots in her district. He makes no secret of what he means by “distractions,” noting that her criticisms of Israel are “high on the list” of his concerns about Tlaib.
+Sellers focuses on Tlaib’s “no” vote on Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill to make the case that she is not serving the interests of the Black community but is grandstanding in Congress instead. Tlaib voted “no,” along with five other progressive Democrats, because Democratic leadership had vowed not to vote on that bill unless it stayed together with Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, which had far more social spending than the infrastructure bill, which was largely a corporate giveaway. She knew the bill would pass regardless of her vote so her “no” vote was aimed at getting more for marginalized communities while risking nothing.
+Moreover, UEA is not targeting the other five Democrats who voted against the infrastructure bill, only the one Palestinian-American. Sellers is arguing that Tlaib is not representing the Black community and its issues, but her record contradicts this contention.
+So, it’s hard to escape the idea that Tlaib is being targeted because she is a Palestinian-American. She is bringing an American face to Palestine, and she is not afraid to speak on behalf of and as a Palestinian on the floor of the House of Representatives.
+It’s even harder to escape the fact that Sellers is trying to counter the growing sense of solidarity between African-Americans and Palestinians. That solidarity, which has existed for a long time, has been much more visible since the protests and violent police response in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. That event, which happened in close proximity to one of Israel’s bloodier campaigns in Gaza, both brought forth and enhanced Black-Palestinian solidarity, and it has been notably visible ever since.
+Bakari Sellers knows exactly what he’s saying and who his audience is when he implies that Rashida Tlaib is too wrapped up in both her personal ambition and her focus on Palestine to do good works for other marginalized communities in her district. Her legislative record, which reflects a great deal of attention to issues of racial justice, health care equity, and poverty, belies this accusation as well.
+But with Michigan having just lost a seat in the House after the 2020 census, and having undergone significant redistricting as a result, there is concern in the African-American community that Detroit will not have a Black representative for the first time in decades, and that the entire state may not have a single Black representative in Congress. While chances are this will not be the case, the other Detroit race, which mostly features African-American candidates, does include one Indian-American Democrat, state Rep. Shri Thanedar, who has deep pockets and is financing much of his own campaign. Yet it is not Thanedar that UEA is working to defeat.
+This fear is one that Sellers is addressing when he says “We want people who are elected to Congress that have keen focus and understanding on the plight of African Americans and the uplift thereof.” Sellers is a very experienced politician, and he has been shilling for AIPAC for many years. He has also worked on civil rights issues for a long time, and he knows that AIPAC, and supporters of Israel in general, are now widely (and correctly) perceived as standing against progressives and for conservative, even reactionary politics.
+So, when he was asked why he and UEA were trying to cannibalize Tlaib’s, an incumbent’s, seat instead of targeting an open seat, like the one Thanedar is contesting, he was quick to deny that he and UEA were standing against progressives.
+“We’re not cannibalizing,” Sellers said. “We’re not trying to replace a progressive member with a nonprogressive member. That’s just not the case.
+“You do bring up a good point. But right now, we’re just laser focused where we can make sure that our impact is felt, and it’s going to be felt in Detroit.”
+That is as blatant a non-answer as you’ll ever see, and it provides solid evidence that Sellers and UEA’s coalition of “African American business, political and civic leaders, working alongside peers in the Jewish community” are going after Tlaib precisely because she is on the cutting edge of progressivism, ad is especially powerful on Palestine, as a Palestinian.
+Whatever the outcome, this attack on the only Palestinian Democrat ever elected to Congress represents a broader effort to attack the Palestinian-American community and, crucially, to diminish the growing support and sense of empathy between Palestinians in Palestine and African-Americans struggling against racism in the United States. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of people like Bakari Sellers who will do the dirty work for AIPAC. It makes strengthening the bonds of solidarity in every way even more important.

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-articleTitle: Major Chilean Universities Heed BDS Call, Cancel Events Sponsored by Israeli Embassy
-pageTitle: Major Chilean Universities Heed BDS Call, Cancel Events Sponsored by Israeli Embassy | BDS Movement
-description: Student-led BDS campaigns resulted in two major Chilean universities canceling events co-sponsored by the Israeli embassy and featuring Joe Uziel, a...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:23.607Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/major-chilean-universities-heed-bds-call-cancel-events-sponsored-israeli-embassy
 ---
-Student-led BDS campaigns resulted in two major Chilean universities canceling events co-sponsored by the Israeli embassy and featuring Joe Uziel, a director of the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA). On Monday, Alberto Hurtado University's Anthropology Department announced the cancellation of the event, and yesterday the University of Chile's Social Sciences Faculty did the same.
-BDS Chile highlighted the reasons behind the campaign to cancel the event:
-Universities cannot be passive accomplices in grave human rights violations. The State of Israel maintains an illegal occupation, colonization and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli Embassy is this regime’s representative in Chile. In addition, the Israel Antiquities Authority is a government entity illegally based in occupied East Jerusalem that carries out illegal excavations in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Some of these illegal excavations are directed by the invited speaker, Joe Uziel.
-The confiscation and theft of Palestinian cultural heritage are part of Israel’s attempts to erase Palestinian memory and cultural identity. Since 1967, the IAA has been deeply involved in cultural crimes and serious violations of international law, such as illegally removing and plundering hundreds of thousands of precious artifacts from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including East Jerusalem. Fearing BDS campaigns, Israel has been trying to prevent information about archeological work in the OPT from being made public and to whitewash these violations by promoting events like these abroad.
-Sharaf Qutaifan, from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) said:
-Through the Israel Antiquities Authority, Israel attempts to bury the history of the indigenous people of Palestine, which was always home to groups with diverse cultures and religions. This is an extension of Israel’s policies of expulsion and cultural theft that it has carried out against Palestinians since its establishment. Israel has a troubling record of systematically looting Palestinian lands and properties, cultural treasures and even books and artworks, which continues until today.
-We salute the Chilean students for pressuring the Anthropology Department of Alberto Hurtado University and the Social Sciences Faculty of University of Chile to take principled positions. Academic institutions should not lend their good names to Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights. We hope to see all Chilean universities fully free of Israeli apartheid.
-BDS Chile celebrated the victory:
-We welcome the decisions of Alberto Hurtado University and the University of Chile. The Palestinian people expect principled acts of solidarity in support of their human rights and the respect of international law. These cancellations demonstrate Chilean students’ determination to denounce Israel’s oppression and to work towards interrupting our universities’ ties with institutions complicit in Israeli apartheid.
-This latest news is another stride in the growing academic boycott of Israel in Chile. Last year, law faculty students at the University of Chile overwhelmingly voted in support of BDS, as did more than 90% of the social sciences students. At the Catholic University of Chile, the Student Council also passed a BDS resolution by a large majority.
-The cancellations are also another strike against the Israel Antiquities Authority. At the end of 2016, the 8th World Archaeological Congress published a resolution condemning Israel’s excavations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and called on international academic publishers to refuse publishing works related to archaeological research in those areas.
-The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) was initiated in 2004 to contribute to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality. PACBI advocates for the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions, given their deep and persistent complicity in Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law. Visit PACBI at https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi and follow us on Twitter @PACBI

+articleTitle: The Israeli Knesset passed a motion supporting the annexation of the West Bank. Here’s what that means.
+pageTitle: The Israeli Knesset passed a motion supporting the annexation of the West Bank. Here’s what that means. – Mondoweiss
+description: The Knesset’s motion supporting the annexation of the West Bank signals Israel’s intention of formalizing what it has already been doing at an accelerated pace since October 7 — establishing total Israeli control over Palestinian land.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:58:19.997Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2025/07/the-israeli-knesset-passed-a-motion-supporting-the-annexation-of-the-west-bank-heres-what-that-means/
 ---
+The Israeli Knesset passed a resolution on Wednesday supporting Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. The motion, which passed with 71 votes out of 170 in favor, is a non-binding resolution that is considered more of a “declaration of intent” that supports the Israeli government’s ongoing actions to further annexation. The actual authority to carry out the political and legal annexation of the West Bank, however, remains an executive power in the hands of the government.
+The vote came a few weeks before the Knesset left for summer recess and a few days before an international conference at the UN to discuss the two-state solution. It also comes a year after the Knesset passed a resolution rejecting a Palestinian state anywhere in historic Palestine.
+The annexation of the West Bank has been on the Israeli Knesset and government’s table for years. In 2015, current Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich proposed his so-called “decisive plan” for “ending the conflict” by preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state once and for all through the extension of “Israeli sovereignty” over the West Bank.
+Smotrich’s plan relies on expanding Israeli illegal settlements and their infrastructure to accommodate one million more Israelis in the West Bank. It also relies on previous Israeli plans for controlling broad swathes of the West Bank, such as the 1971 Allon Plan, the 1983 Drobles Plan, and former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2002 separation plan.
+The “decisive plan” is based on the same strategy as all previous Israeli settlement and colonization plans — the expansion of settlements in rural and non-urbanized areas, limiting Palestinian urban growth, segregation, and interrupting Palestinian geographic and demographic continuity. The Jordan Valley has a central part in Smotrich’s vision: it wants to lay claim to the entirety of the territory in line with the geographic demarcations the 1971 Allon Plan had placed to ensure a “security” buffer between Israel proper and the border with Jordan.
+It’s also based on a plan articulated by Netanyahu in 2019, who proposed to annex the Jordan Valley, also following the Allon demarcations.
+All this makes one thing clear: the project of annexing the West Bank is not the product of one government or ideological trend in Israeli politics — it is the product of a decades-long settler colonization policy that has been consistently advocated for by different Israeli governments.
+Annexation is already happening
+While annexation has not yet been enshrined into Israeli law, Israeli policy on the ground has led to what amounts to a de fact annexation of the West Bank. After October 7, 2023, Israel accelerated its settlement expansion in the West Bank at unprecedented rates, approving in July 2024 the largest land grab for Israeli colonization in three decades. It later approved 22 settlements, many of them new, while legalizing settler outposts. Israeli settler violence also skyrocketed, displacing dozens of Palestinian rural communities and imposing de facto Israeli control over large parts of the West Bank, especially in the Jordan Valley’s strategic areas.
+Palestinian cartographer and expert on settlements Khalil Tafakji says that “annexation is already happening.
+“The vote in the Knesset doesn’t change much on the ground,” Tafakji told Mondoweiss. “The end-game of annexation on the ground would not include the Palestinian population, but a maximum amount of land with a minimum number of Palestinians on it.”
+Also read: Israel is changing the legal system governing the West Bank to accelerate annexation: report.
+Tafakji explains that what Israeli annexation will probably look like is that the main demographic concentrations of Palestinians would be isolated to the West Bank’s major cities, turning them into crowded reserves with no space for growth or geographic contiguity. The rest of the Palestinian land in the West Bank — such as rural areas and Area C, which comprises over 60 percent of the territory — would be taken over by Israel. “This means emptying and destroying the Palestinian countryside,” Tafakji says.
+According to Tafakji, this policy “is already being implemented on a daily basis and at an accelerated rate.”
+“What the vote at the Knesset is meant to be, in my opinion, is a way of gauging the international reaction, as advance preparation for advancing annexation up to the point that it is made official by the Israeli government,” Tafakji adds.
+Tafakji believes that the West Bank is “central in the Zionist ideological paradigm,” which remains consistent across the Israeli political spectrum. “It is true for the right, the center, and the so-called left,” he says. “This is evident in the fact that the motion received 71 votes in favor, while the right-wing coalition only has 61, which means that ten votes came from the other parties.”
+Jamal Jumaa, the coordinator of the grassroots Stop the Wall campaign against Israeli settlements, believes Israel doesn’t need to gauge the international community’s reactions.  “If the international community is allowing mass starvation in Gaza, there is no reason to believe that it would oppose an annexation vote in the Knesset,” Jumaa says. “This is another step in the gradual consecration of the idea of annexation in the minds of Palestinians.”
+Jumaa explains that Israel wants annexation to normalize the reality of annexation for Palestinians. “They want Palestinians to get gradually accustomed to it, and maybe to instill defeatism and resignation among Palestinians due to the lack of an international response.”
+“Annexation is a daily process that is violent and aggressive,” Jumaa adds. “It is happening before the eyes of the entire world. Palestinians know it, yet they resist and remain on their land to the last breath.”
+“Palestinians do everything they can, but it is upon the rest of the world to respond and take a concrete stand to reject and stop Israeli annexation,” Jumaa stresses.

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-articleTitle: UK Government Defeated in Court by BDS Activists for Palestinian Human Rights
-pageTitle: UK Government Defeated in Court by BDS Activists for Palestinian Human Rights | BDS Movement
-description: The UK government has acted unlawfully by attempting to restrict local councils from pursuing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:24.129Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/uk-government-defeated-court-bds-activists-palestinian-human-rights
 ---
-The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has won a key victory for the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the UK government today. War on Want, Campaign Against Arms Trade and the Quakers supported the legal challenge with witness statements.  PSC was represented in the proceedings by Bindmans LLP, Nigel Giffin QC and Zac Sammour.
-The embattled minority Tory government suffered a new blow as parts of its Guidance governing investment by Local Government Pension Schemes (LGPS) were struck down as unlawful.
-The Guidance was announced by the Department for Communities and Local Government in September 2016 specifically to curtail divestment campaigns against Israeli and international firms implicated in Israel’s violations of international law, as well as to protect the UK defence industry. This occurred despite a public consultation indicating that 98% of respondents thought this was the wrong thing to do. Pension holders would have been forced into investing in companies that are complicit in human rights abuses contrary to their conscience and beliefs.
-The Administrative Court today held that the Government had acted for an improper purpose by seeking to use pension law to pursue its own foreign and defence policy.  Accordingly the relevant parts of the Guidance were held to be unlawful and no longer restrict LGPS in their pension decisions.
-In 2005 Palestinian civil society called for a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions measures until Israel adheres to its obligations under international law. It is modelled on the successful South African anti-apartheid boycott of the 1980s. Various local councils responded to the Palestinian call by passing motions to boycott goods from illegal Israeli settlements. Campaigners have been calling for councils to consider divesting from companies complicit in human rights violations in the occupied West Bank, such as Hewlett Packard (HP).
-Hugh Lanning, Chair of the PSC said:
-Today is a victory for Palestine, for local democracy, and for the rule of law. Absolutely everyone has a right to peacefully protest Israel’s violation of Palestinian human rights. This ruling upholds the right of local councils and their pension funds to invest ethically without political interference from the government of the day.
-Ben Jamal, Director of PSC said:
-Our recent YouGov polling shows 43% of the public think BDS is reasonable. We couldn’t be happier that this right has been upheld by the Court in the month the illegal occupation of Palestine turns fifty years old. PSC will take forward its campaign for justice for the Palestinian people with renewed vigour.
-Jamie Potter, Partner in the Public Law and Human Rights team at Bindmans LLP said:
-This outcome is a reminder to the Government that it cannot improperly interfere in the exercise of freedom of conscience and protest in order to pursue its own agenda.
-Notes for Editors:

+articleTitle: Confronting Antony Blinken over Palestine
+pageTitle: Confronting Antony Blinken over Palestine – Mondoweiss
+description: Hear from one of the graduates who confronted Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Georgetown University commencement ceremony over U.S. support for Israel.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:08.254Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/confronting-anthony-blinken-over-palestine
 ---
+In this episode I talk to Nooran Alhamdan, a recent Masters graduate of Georgetown University about the action she and other graduates took to confront Antony Blinken, the U.S. Secretary of State, over U.S. support for Israel.
+The audio in this episode is a bit choppy, so thanks for your patience.
+Support our work
+Help us continue our critical independent coverage of events in Palestine, Israel, and related U.S. politics. Donate today at https://mondoweiss.net/donate
+Articles and Links mentioned in the show
+Blinken congratulated me on graduating. I confronted him about Shireen Abu Akleh, Nooran AlhamdanStatement: Arab Studies Georgetown Graduates Protest Blinken, Honor Shireen Abu AklehStudents protest Blinken and honor Shireen Abu Akleh at Georgetown graduation, Michael ArriaSubscribe to our free email newsletters.
+Share this podcast
+Share The Mondoweiss Podcast with your followers on Twitter. Click here to post a tweet!If you enjoyed this episode, head over to Podchaser and leave us a review and follow the show!
+Follow The Mondoweiss Podcast wherever you listen
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-articleTitle: Irish corporation CRH becomes latest big European firm to exit Israel
-pageTitle: Irish corporation CRH becomes latest big European firm to exit Israel | BDS Movement
-description:   Activists in Palestine calling for CRH to end its complicity with the construction of Israel's Wall and settlements[/caption]...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:24.757Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/2016/crh-divests-israel-nesher-13656
 ---
-Activists in Palestine calling for CRH to end its complicity with the construction of Israel's Wall and settlements[/caption]
-Irish building materials corporation CRH has become the second major European corporation to exit the Israeli market in the space of a week after it announced it has sold off its 25% equity stake in its Israeli operation Nesher Cement.
-The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has been campaigning for CRH to sell its stake in Nesher Cement because it supplies cement used in the construction of Israel’s apartheid Wall and settlements on occupied Palestinian land, both of which have been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.
-The decision mirrors the January 5 announcement by French corporation Orange that it it was to end its franchise agreement with Israeli telecoms company Partner following a high profile international BDS campaign protesting Partner’s support to the Israeli military and its involvement in illegal Israeli settlements.
-In March, the Irish Independent newspaper reported that CRH had placed its holdings in Nesher under review, seemingly in response to public pressure.
-More than 10,000 people signed a petition urging CRH to divest from Nesher and the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign repeatedly demonstrated at CRH annual general meetings in Dublin as part of a widely supported mass campaign.
-Campaigners made an official complaint about CRH to the OECD in 2012.
-Jamal Juma’, the general coordinator for Stop the Wall, the grassroots Palestinian campaign against the apartheid wall, which is a member organisation of the BDS National Committee, said:
-“This decision strikes a blow to Israel’s current escalation of forcible transfer  of Palestinian communities in the West Bank and its construction of the infrastructure of settler colonialism and apartheid.”
-“Companies such as Nesher make huge profits from being involved in the construction of Israel’s illegal Wall and settlements that confine Palestinians in ever smaller patches of land. Companies that participate inthis Israeli crime  must be held to account.”
-“Since October, tens of thousands of Palestinians have taken to the streets to protest Israel’s accelerating ethnic cleansing and apartheid policies.”
-“Thanks to the global BDS movement, we are seeing the strengthening of a trend where major corporations and investors are realising that being associated with Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism is bad for business.”
-“We warmly thank and congratulate the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and all those involved in the campaign that through their effective solidarity are strengthening our struggle for justice, equality and freedom.”
-IPSC Chairperson Martin O’Quigley said:
-“This is an important victory for Palestinians whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by the unceasing construction of the Apartheid Wall, which steals Palestinian lands, divides communities, destroys the social fabric and makes normal life impossible.
-“It is disappointing that it has taken CRH so long to divest itself from its shameful investment in these toxic Israeli assets and to stop profiting from the occupation of Palestine, but it is better late than never.”
-In September 2015, French corporate giant Veolia sold off all of its businesses in Israel. This was a direct result of a 7-year campaign against its role in infrastructure projects for illegal Israeli settlements that cost it more than $20 billion in lost tenders and contracts.
-A leading France-based Israeli businessman recently told the Israeli media that the growing strength of the BDS movement means that most major European companies now avoid investing in Israel.
-Foreign direct investment in Israel dropped by 46% in 2014 as compared to 2013, according to a UN report, partially due to the impressive growth of the BDS impact, as stated by one of the report’s authors.
-The Israel Export Institute has revealed that Israel’s exports in 2015 have dropped by 7% over 2014.
-Moody’s, a leading credit ratings agency, has warned that “the Israeli economy could suffer should BDS gain greater traction.
-NOTES TO EDITORS
-1. To organise interviews with Palestinian and Irish activists involved in the campaign against CRH, contact [email protected]
-2. Further information available in a press statement from the Irish Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://crh.com/docs/press-releases-2016/dev-strat-update-07012016_2.pdf?sfvrsn=2
-3. For more information regarding the recent successes of the BDS movement, see
-http://bdsmovement.net/2015/7-ways-our-movement-broke-new-ground-13634
-4. In a January 8 statement, CRH stated that it had “completed 13 divestments in 2015, the largest of which was the disposal of CRH’s 25% equity stake in its Israeli operation.”  That 25% stake was held in the Mashav group, the holding company for Nesher Cement, the sole producer of cement in Israel. The CRH statement is available in full at http://crh.com/docs/press-releases-2016/dev-strat-update-07012016_2.pdf?sfvrsn=2
-5. In 2004, CRH management admitted in 2004 that "in all probability" Nesher cement is being used in the construction of the wall. For more information regarding the complicity of CRH in Israeli violations of international law, see the following report from the Who Profits research centre http://www.whoprofits.org/company/crh-formerly-cement-roadstone-holdings

+articleTitle: AIPAC’s new tactic to unseat Rashida Tlaib
+pageTitle: AIPAC’s new tactic to unseat Rashida Tlaib – Mondoweiss
+description: A new Super PAC aligned with AIPAC is making no secret of its first target: Rashida Tlaib.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:09.213Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/aipacs-new-tactic-to-unseat-rashida-tlaib
 ---
+A new Super PAC has reared its head and it’s made no secret of its first target: Rashida Tlaib.
+It comes as no surprise that Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American woman and the only Palestinian Democrat ever in Congress, is coming under severe attack ahead of her primary two months from now. But the nature of that attack is a particularly dangerous and pernicious one, and its nature is one that constitutes a unique and serious threat to not only advocates of Palestinian rights and freedom, but to progressives across the board.
+The Urban Empowerment Action PAC (UEA) says its “supporters include a broad coalition of African American business, political and civic leaders, working alongside peers in the Jewish community.” Its stated mission is to “narrow the wealth gap between Black and white Americans.”
+They explicitly stated that ousting Tlaib was their focus, and they planned to spend over $1 million to support Janice Winfrey, a centrist African-American and the Detroit City Clerk since 2005, against Tlaib.
+UEA squares its thin anti-racist rhetoric with targeting one of the most progressive members of Congress by implicitly accusing Tlaib of ignoring the needs of the Black community. To carry that case, UEA is employing activist and CNN commentator Bakari Sellers, who has long been one of the leading spokespeople for AIPAC in the Black community.
+In 2016, Sellers was a key figure in the fight between the Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders camps over how to address Israel and the Palestinians in the Democratic Party platform. Sanders’ camp led an effort to draft wording that called for “an end to occupation and illegal settlements,” which clearly aligned with stated U.S. policy in 2016.
+Sellers wrote a letter opposing the mention of occupation or settlements and got dozens of other African-American leaders to sign on. A compromise was eventually reached where the Democratic platform expressed some sympathy for the Palestinians for the first time, but there was no mention of occupation or settlements. There is little doubt that Sellers’ efforts were an important factor in staving off what was a popular proposal during the 2016 race.
+A photo posted to Twitter by Bakaki Sellers of him meeting Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.
+Sellers was hardly subtle in his attacks on Tlaib. “Congresswoman Tlaib, I’m sure, serves admirably,” he told POLITICO. “However, we were hoping that we can have a candidate that doesn’t have varying distractions…we want someone, particularly in these Black communities, that does not get distracted by shiny things or media opportunities but is focused on the uplift of our communities and does right by them.
+“I don’t have a beef with her directly,” Sellers continued. “I just think that there are individuals who will have the interest of their district, first and foremost, and not their brand. And will do things in the interest of uplift of that community. It’s not as much of a knock on her as it is that somebody else can do the job better because they’re focused on these particular issues.”
+Sellers characterizes Tlaib as being self-centered, an odd charge considering that her politics are not well-suited to upward mobility and she has remained closely connected to the grassroots in her district. He makes no secret of what he means by “distractions,” noting that her criticisms of Israel are “high on the list” of his concerns about Tlaib.
+Sellers focuses on Tlaib’s “no” vote on Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill to make the case that she is not serving the interests of the Black community but is grandstanding in Congress instead. Tlaib voted “no,” along with five other progressive Democrats, because Democratic leadership had vowed not to vote on that bill unless it stayed together with Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, which had far more social spending than the infrastructure bill, which was largely a corporate giveaway. She knew the bill would pass regardless of her vote so her “no” vote was aimed at getting more for marginalized communities while risking nothing.
+Moreover, UEA is not targeting the other five Democrats who voted against the infrastructure bill, only the one Palestinian-American. Sellers is arguing that Tlaib is not representing the Black community and its issues, but her record contradicts this contention.
+So, it’s hard to escape the idea that Tlaib is being targeted because she is a Palestinian-American. She is bringing an American face to Palestine, and she is not afraid to speak on behalf of and as a Palestinian on the floor of the House of Representatives.
+It’s even harder to escape the fact that Sellers is trying to counter the growing sense of solidarity between African-Americans and Palestinians. That solidarity, which has existed for a long time, has been much more visible since the protests and violent police response in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. That event, which happened in close proximity to one of Israel’s bloodier campaigns in Gaza, both brought forth and enhanced Black-Palestinian solidarity, and it has been notably visible ever since.
+Bakari Sellers knows exactly what he’s saying and who his audience is when he implies that Rashida Tlaib is too wrapped up in both her personal ambition and her focus on Palestine to do good works for other marginalized communities in her district. Her legislative record, which reflects a great deal of attention to issues of racial justice, health care equity, and poverty, belies this accusation as well.
+But with Michigan having just lost a seat in the House after the 2020 census, and having undergone significant redistricting as a result, there is concern in the African-American community that Detroit will not have a Black representative for the first time in decades, and that the entire state may not have a single Black representative in Congress. While chances are this will not be the case, the other Detroit race, which mostly features African-American candidates, does include one Indian-American Democrat, state Rep. Shri Thanedar, who has deep pockets and is financing much of his own campaign. Yet it is not Thanedar that UEA is working to defeat.
+This fear is one that Sellers is addressing when he says “We want people who are elected to Congress that have keen focus and understanding on the plight of African Americans and the uplift thereof.” Sellers is a very experienced politician, and he has been shilling for AIPAC for many years. He has also worked on civil rights issues for a long time, and he knows that AIPAC, and supporters of Israel in general, are now widely (and correctly) perceived as standing against progressives and for conservative, even reactionary politics.
+So, when he was asked why he and UEA were trying to cannibalize Tlaib’s, an incumbent’s, seat instead of targeting an open seat, like the one Thanedar is contesting, he was quick to deny that he and UEA were standing against progressives.
+“We’re not cannibalizing,” Sellers said. “We’re not trying to replace a progressive member with a nonprogressive member. That’s just not the case.
+“You do bring up a good point. But right now, we’re just laser focused where we can make sure that our impact is felt, and it’s going to be felt in Detroit.”
+That is as blatant a non-answer as you’ll ever see, and it provides solid evidence that Sellers and UEA’s coalition of “African American business, political and civic leaders, working alongside peers in the Jewish community” are going after Tlaib precisely because she is on the cutting edge of progressivism, ad is especially powerful on Palestine, as a Palestinian.
+Whatever the outcome, this attack on the only Palestinian Democrat ever elected to Congress represents a broader effort to attack the Palestinian-American community and, crucially, to diminish the growing support and sense of empathy between Palestinians in Palestine and African-Americans struggling against racism in the United States. There is, unfortunately, no shortage of people like Bakari Sellers who will do the dirty work for AIPAC. It makes strengthening the bonds of solidarity in every way even more important.

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-articleTitle: Orange drops Israel affiliate following inspiring BDS campaign
-pageTitle: Orange drops Israel affiliate following inspiring BDS campaign | BDS Movement
-description:   French telecoms giant Orange has announced the termination of its franchise relationship with Israeli company Partner Communications...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:25.216Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/2016/orange-drops-israel-affiliate-13648
 ---
-French telecoms giant Orange has announced the termination of its franchise relationship with Israeli company Partner Communications, confirming the BDS movement’s announcement last year that this was likely to happen.
-In June 2015, the Orange CEO stated his desire to end the relationship with Partner after campaigners in Egypt began to organise a mass boycott of Orange-owned operator Mobinil and after campaigners in France took action to shine a spotlight on Partner’s deep complicity in Israeli war crimes.
-Partner provided telecommunication support, subscription fee waivers and entertainment services to Israeli soldiers during the summer 2014 genocidal war on Gaza. A statement signed by dozens of French organisations condemned Partner’ provision of services to illegal Israeli settlements.
-The campaign pressuring Orange to cut its ties with Partner began in 2010. A broad range of unions and campaign groups in France, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt were all part of the six-year long campaign.
-Guman Mussa, the Arab World campaigns officer with the the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the broadest Palestinian coalition that leads the global BDS movement, said:
-“This news is a significant success for the BDS movement and shows that international companies and investors are waking up to the fact that being linked to Israel’s regime of colonisation, occupation and apartheid is bad for business.”
-“We congratulate and thank all of the activists and organisations involved in this inspiring 6 year international campaign.”
-“Pressure shall continue until the termination agreement is fully implemented and we further urge Orange to end its complicity with Israeli violations of international law as quickly as is feasible.”
-Abdulrahman Abou Salem, a member of BDS Egypt coalition of trade unions, political parties and campaign groups, said:
-“The termination of Orange’s relationship with Partner is a significant victory for the BDS movement. Even if Orange claims that its decision is not related to the pressure of boycott campaigns that would be hard to believe, because just few months prior to announcing its intention to terminate this relationship with Partner, an announcement which followed campaign pressure, the parties had signed a 10-year term agreement.”
-Abou Salem further added that: “Indeed, when threatened by the mass boycott which BDS Egypt called for against the 30-million-subscriber Orange subsidiary operating under the name Mobinil in Egypt, Orange had no choice but to realise that investing in occupation, profiteering from Israel’s colonisation of Palestinian land and involvement in violations against Palestinian rights is a commercially bad investment.”
-A report outlining Orange’s complicity was co-published by the CGT and Solidaires unions, French human rights organisations CCFD, Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and FIDH, the Association France-Palestine solidarité, and Palestinian organisation Al Haq.
-Creative protest actions, gathering huge numbers of signatures on petitions, lobbying of Orange officials and the publication of articles in the mainstream media all helped to pile the pressure on Orange.
-The trade union Solidaires and the Orange Sud PTT Federation, which represents Orange workers, have welcomed the end of Orange’s relationship with Partner.
-Taoufiq Tahani, President of the Association France-Palestine solidarité, said:
-“I welcome this announcement, which has finalized the agreement to sever ties between Partner and Orange. Their decision to end their relationship followed the mobilization, over several years, of numerous organizations committed to solidarity with Palestine.”
-A spokesperson for BDS France said:
-“This is undoubtedly the result of mobilizations in France and Egypt against this shameful agreement between Orange and Partner.”
-“BDS France which, together with other partners, has waged this battle for years, celebrates this victory for ethics and for international law against a state that respects neither. We will continue to diligently follow this case until Orange ends all its engagement with Partner”
-When the termination of the relationship is completed, the Orange Israel brand will no longer exist, nor will the familiar “Orange Shalom tune” that Israeli users hear when their call goes unanswered.
-Orange is not be the first French company to exit the Israeli market under boycott pressure. Another French company, Veolia, was also involved in Israeli violations of international law and colonisation of Palestine, especially in occupied Jerusalem, but was compelled to end all its illegal operations in Israel in 2015 after losing billions of dollars in tenders due to BDS pressure.
-A leading France-based Israeli businessman recently told the Israeli media that the growing strength of the BDS movement means that most major European companies now avoid investing in Israel.
-Foreign direct investment in Israel dropped by 46% in 2014 as compared to 2013, according to a UN report, partially due to the impressive growth of the BDS impact, as admitted by one of the report’s authors.
-The Israel Export Institute has revealed that Israel’s exports in 2015 have dropped by 7% over 2014.
-Moody’s, a leading credit ratings agency, has warned that “the Israeli economy could suffer should BDS gain greater traction.

+articleTitle: Connecticut company built gun that killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh
+pageTitle: Connecticut company built gun that killed journalist Shireen Abu Akleh – Mondoweiss
+description: A coalition called ‘No Rugers to Israel’ can document over 200 Palestinians killed or injured by Rugers — now including Shireen Abu Akleh — though it believes the true number to be far higher.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:10.428Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/connecticut-company-built-gun-that-killed-journalist-shireen-abu-akleh/
 ---
+Update: Since this article was published, Al Jazeera has reported that the round that killed Shireen Abu Akleh was fired by an M4 rifle (made in America, not by Ruger). The Palestinian Attorney General earlier asserted the bullet was fired by a Ruger Mini-14, but it is not clear that that particular Ruger is in Israel’s arsenal. We will continue to track developments in the story.
+Al Jazeera and Reuters report that the Palestinian Attorney General has concluded that Shireen Abu Akleh, the reporter who was killed on May 11, 2022 in Jenin on Palestine’s West Bank, was killed with a bullet from a Mini Ruger gun. Palestinian Attorney General Akram Al-Khatib said tests showed that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh was a 5.56 mm round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, which is used by the Israeli military.  The Mini Ruger is produced by Sturm Ruger and Company whose headquarters is in Southport (Fairfield), Connecticut.
+Abu Akleh was a prominent Arab journalist, known all over the Middle East, who worked for Al Jazeera for 25 years.  CNN described her  as “a household name across the Arab world for her coverage of Israel and the Palestinian territories.”  The Palestinian foreign minister announced that the Palestinian Authority had formally asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Abu Akleh’s killing.
+Stanley Heller, head of the Middle East Crisis Committee, said, “For years we’ve been calling attention to sales of Ruger guns and ammunition to the Israeli military which is a serial human rights violator. We’re part of a coalition called “No Rugers to Israel” (website NoRugers2Israel.org ).  We can document over 200 Palestinians killed or injured by Rugers though we believe the true number to be far higher.
+Photos of Ruger Mini-14 rifle of the sort that killed Shireen Abu Akleh, from the armorers’ website.
+“Now Ruger has got its most infamous kill, a reporter doing her job, well-known by the Israeli military, shot while wearing an outfit clearly marked ‘Press’.  We repeat again, Sturm Ruger should not be selling its weapons or ammunition to the Israeli government.
+“Sturm Ruger, the U.S.’ largest firearms company, is known to have given millions of dollars to the National Rifle Association, which after the Uvalde Massacre has itself has come under harsh criticism for its rejection of gun control measures and its promotions of gun sales.
+“We’ve written to town officials of Fairfield calling on the Board of Selectmen to ‘call on Sturm Ruger to break all ties with the National Rifle Association, to stop selling its products to Israel and to make a full public accounting of how its weapons were used by Israel and the times its weapons were used deliberately to kill innocent people in the United States.’”

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-articleTitle: G4S loses major contract in Colombia after BDS campaign
-pageTitle: G4S loses major contract in Colombia after BDS campaign | BDS Movement
-description: Crepes & Waffles, a major restaurant chain in Colombia, has decided to end a contract with G4S after a year-long BDS campaign against the...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:25.256Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/2016/g4s-loses-major-contract-in-colombia-13754
 ---
-Crepes & Waffles, a major restaurant chain in Colombia, has decided to end a contract with G4S after a year-long BDS campaign against the multinational security company in the country. More than 1,400 people signed a petition and hundreds of the chain’s clients delivered it by hand to the managers of the chain’s restaurants in various locations, prompting Crepes & Waffles to inform BDS Colombia of their decision to drop the G4S contract for securing the transit of cash and valuables.
-A prominent Colombian restaurant chain, Crepes & Waffles has branches in 6 other countries in Latin America and in Spain. The company has a good reputation for hiring people usually outside the labor market. BDS Colombia has argued that contracting G4S contradicted the chain’s ethical principles and offended many of its loyal clients. Crepes & Waffles says they are dropping the contract because of business issues.
-G4S is a large British security company that provides equipment and services to Israeli prisons at which Palestinian political prisoners are held without trial and subjected to torture. By helping Israel to run prisons and “interrogation centres”, G4S is participating in Israel’s use of torture and mass incarceration of more than 6,000 Palestinians as a way to discourage Palestinians from resisting Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid.
-G4S also has contracts with the Israeli government to provide equipment and services to checkpoints and the apartheid wall, as well as crossings that enforce the siege of Gaza. It was also involved in the construction  of a 23 hectares Training Center for the Israeli Police, which it will help to run.
-In 2012, at the height of a historic hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners, Palestinian organisations called for boycotting G4S for its role in Israel’s prisons.
-“G4S faces the end of a contract with an important company in Colombia, and the BDS campaign considers this to be the result of the rejection generated by its repressive actions in Palestine”, says BDS Colombia’s announcement.
-Abdulrahman Abu Nahel, Gaza coordinator of the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the broadest coalition that leads the global BDS movement, commented: “This latest victory against G4S, in Colombia, is a welcome contribution to our struggle for freedom, justice and equality. G4S is involved in gross violations of human rights through its involvement in and profiting from mass incarceration of Palestinians, blacks and migrants in the US and other oppressed communities around the world. The cross-movement boycott campaigns against G4S are growing fast to hold the company accountable for this complicity.”
-The Palestinian journalist Mohammed al-Qeeq has completed 3 months in an ongoing hunger strike that attracted international attention over his arrest without charge by the Israeli occupation authorities. Another 6,900 Palestinian political prisoner are being held by Israel.
-Zoe Pepper-Cunningham, a member of the Colombian BDS campaign, stated: "This victory means the end of our campaign targeting Crepes & Waffles, but the struggle continues. Aside from other G4S contracts that we shall continue to campaign against, we are also mobilizing pressure to derail the ratification of Colombia’s Free Trade Agreement with Israel as well as the military links. For decades, Israel has supported Latin American dictatorships and trained death squads; we should impose a military embargo on it, as was done against apartheid South Africa."

+articleTitle: Weekly Briefing: Americans are sold a lie about Israel, but more and more are catching on
+pageTitle: Weekly Briefing: Americans are sold a lie about Israel, but more and more are catching on – Mondoweiss
+description: Shireen Abu Akleh’s killing is changing American’s image of Israel.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:11.575Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/weekly-briefing-americans-are-sold-a-lie-about-israel-but-more-and-more-are-catching-on/
 ---
+Since the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11 by an Israeli sniper in Jenin, many of us have thought of other Americans Israel has killed with no consequences. Rachel Corrie, of course, in 2003 — no one in the Israeli force was ever held to account. Just last January, Omar Assad, a 78-year-old American, was blindfolded, handcuffed, and killed by Israeli forces at a West Bank checkpoint, with a slap on the wrist for the officers who directed the attack. And 55 years ago, 34 crewmen on the USS Liberty were killed by an Israeli air attack in the Mediterranean– and Lyndon Johnson simply accepted it as the price of maintaining the “special relationship” with Israel.
+And still we hope the narrative will be different this time! CNN and AP and Bellingcat have all done forensic investigations of the popular journalist’s killing showing that an Israeli sniper shot her — there were no “clashes,” as Israeli propagandists maintain, just seven shots aimed at Shireen’s head. Some 57 congresspeople, supported by liberal Zionist organizations, have urged the U.S. to investigate the killing, and though the State Department has refused to do so, claiming that the Israelis can do it fine on their own, Tony Blinken has been pushing the Israelis for an accounting.
+The truth is that there is simply no will in Israeli society to follow through. It really is the Jewish state, where Jews are sovereign and Palestinians are at best second class citizens. Holding anyone to account for Abu Akleh’s killing would cause a political crisis for a rightwing government that tries to hold on to power by promoting “replacement theory” conspiracies — the Defense Minister lately saying Arabs are planning to take over the country and reduce Jews to a small stretch of land on the sea. The crazed Defense Minister’s political opponents are just as depraved: a high official of the Likud party just gave a speech threatening Palestinians with “another Nakba” if they dare to fly their flag.
+The real miracle of Israel continues to be the fact that Americans don’t know anything about that minister’s speech. No, we are sold a dreamcastle vision of a militantly ethnonationalist society.
+I’m proud that we’re doing our part at Mondoweiss to break the spell, by telling the truth. Read Jonathan Ofir’s exposes of those hateful speeches. Read Yumna Patel’s coverage of Israel’s annual flag march through Jerusalem for mobs of Jews to shout “Death to Arabs.” Read about the 83 Congresspeople who are protesting Israel’s latest ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. And read about the Connecticut company that produced the gun that killed Shireen Abu Akleh and now faces activist protest.
+Some Americans are catching a clue. Let’s build that movement!

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-articleTitle: Irish and Dutch governments join Sweden in speaking out for right to call for BDS
-pageTitle: Irish and Dutch governments join Sweden in speaking out for right to call for BDS | BDS Movement
-description: Dutch foreign minister says BDS “protected by the freedom of expression” Irish foreign minister says BDS is a “legitimate political viewpoint” and...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:36.962Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/irish-and-dutch-governments-join-sweden-speaking-out-right-call-bds
 ---
-The Dutch and Irish governments have publicly stated that calls for a boycott of Israel are legitimate, with the Dutch foreign minister saying that advocating and campaigning for Palestinian rights through the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel are “protected by the freedom of expression”.
-The statements dealt a serious blow to Israel’s relentless war of repression that has led governments in the UK, France, Canada and state legislatures across the US to introduce anti-democratic legislation and taking other repressive measures to undermine the BDS movement. Israel has also admitted that it is using its intelligence services to spy on BDS activists overseas.
-Irish foreign minister Charles Flanagan responded to a parliamentary question by Deputy Paul Murphy on Israel’s attacks on the movement saying that BDS is not supported by the Irish government but that it is a “a legitimate political viewpoint”.
-In response to a question regarding Israel’s travel ban and attempts to revoke the residency of BDS movement co-founder and human rights defender Omar Barghouti, Flanagan said that the Irish foreign ministry “will monitor the ongoing developments” and that “I do not agree with attempts to demonise those who advocate this [BDS] policy”. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions had called on the Irish government to pressure Israel to respect the rights of Palestinian human rights defenders.
-Israel has imposed a travel ban on Omar Barghouti, who lives in Acre in present day Israel with his family, and seems intent on revoking his residency to punish him for his BDS advocacy.
-In response to a similar question by Green Left MP Rik Grashoff, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bert Koenders, said that "Statements or meetings concerning BDS are protected by the freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, as enshrined in the Dutch Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.”
-Revealing that Israel regularly raises the topic of BDS in bilateral meetings with the Dutch government, Koenders reiterated his government’s opposition to the boycott of Israel but insisted that “endorsing BDS falls under freedom of expression.”
-Riya Hassan, Europe coordinator for the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the broadest coalition in Palestinian civil society that is leading the global BDS movement, said:
-“With the Netherlands and Ireland joining Sweden in defending the right to advocate and campaign for Palestinian rights under international law through BDS, Israel’s attempt to get BDS outlawed in Europe and to bully its supporters into silence have been dealt a serious blow.”
-In March 2016, the Swedish foreign ministry reaffirmed basic democratic principles by stating that BDS “is a civil society movement” and that “governments should not interfere in civil society organization views.”
-More than 350 European human rights organizations, trade unions, church groups and political parties, some of whom do not yet endorse BDS, have called on the European Union to support the right to boycott Israel in response to its occupation and violations of Palestinian rights. Similar statements have been made by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
-Riya Hassan added:
-“Israel’s attacks on our movement appear to be backfiring as they have led to European governments and some of the world’s most famous human rights organisations and political organisations across Europe and the world speaking out in defence of our right to advocate BDS.”
-“Across European civil society, there is a fast spreading recognition of the BDS movement as a legitimate form of nonviolent, grassroots human rights advocacy for the UN-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
-More than 23,000 people have signed an appeal urging the UN to take measures to uphold and protect the rights of Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights defenders who campaign nonviolently for Palestinian rights, including through the BDS movement. The appeal will be sent to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in the coming few days.
-Hassan added: “We’re hugely grateful to each of the 23,000 people who signed our appeal urging the UN to protect our right to campaign for Palestinian rights, and we’re more optimistic than ever that Israel’s desperate legal, spying and propaganda war on our human rights movement will ultimately fail.”
-The impressive growth in recent years of support for the BDS movement in mainstream trade unions, churches and pension funds, as well as among student governments, academic associations, anti-racist movements, LGBTQ groups and artists across the world, has prompted the Israeli establishment to admit the strategic impact of BDS.
-The fact that large European companies such as Veolia, Orange and G4S are abandoning or announcing plans to leave the Israeli market following BDS campaigns is also particularly worrying for Israel.
-Israeli-induced attacks on free speech and civil rights in Europe, the US and Canada, among others, are seen by BDS campaigners as fostering an “ominous environment of bullying, intimidation and repression that has all the hallmarks of the era of McCarthyism in the US and the worst days of the apartheid regime in South Africa”.
-Fatin Al Tamimi, chairperson of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign welcomed the government statement. Ms. Tamimi said:
-"At a time when our colleagues are being attacked in Britain, France, the US and elsewhere via anti-democratic legislation, it is refreshing that the BDS campaign has been recognised by the Irish Government as a legitimate and democratic movement for justice in Palestine.
-"It is, of course, disappointing that the government itself doesn't actively support the BDS campaign at the moment, but nevertheless we will continue campaigning for sanctions, including an arms embargo, to be imposed on Israel until it complies with its intentional law and human rights obligations."
-More information: bdsmovement.net/righttoboycott
-https://bdsmovement.net/2016/briefing-bds-a-legitimate-human-rights-movement-14056

+articleTitle: ‘We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate’: Dem lawmakers question Syria air strike
+pageTitle: ‘We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate’: Dem lawmakers question Syria air strike – Mondoweiss
+description: Biden is 7th president to order strikes in Middle East. Rep. Ro Khanna: “I spoke against endless war with Trump. I will speak out when we have a Democrat.”
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.021Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2021/02/we-need-to-extricate-from-the-middle-east-not-escalate-dem-lawmakers-question-syria-air-strike/
 ---
+The Biden administration has carried out its first military action, bombing facilities in eastern Syria. A war monitor reported that 22 people or more were killed. The Pentagon says the strike targeted Iran-backed militias and came in response to a rocket attack on US-led forces in Iraq earlier this month.
+A number of congressional Democrats have expressed concern over the strike and have called for a legal briefing.
+“The American people deserve to hear the Administration’s rationale for these strikes and its legal justification for acting without coming to Congress,” Virginia Senator Tim Kaine told Politico. “Offensive military action without congressional approval is not constitutional absent extraordinary circumstances,” he added. “Congress must be fully briefed on this matter expeditiously.”
+Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy told the website: “Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action.”
+California Rep. Ro Khanna put out a statement connecting Biden’s actions to the foreign policy of his predecessors.
+“This makes President Biden the seventh consecutive US president to order strikes in the Middle East.” said Khanna. “There is absolutely no justification for a president to authorize a military strike that is not in self-defense against an imminent threat without congressional authorization. We need to extricate from the Middle East, not escalate. The President should not be taking these actions without seeking explicit authorization…I spoke against endless war with Trump, and I will speak out against it when we have a Democratic President.”
+“I am very concerned that last night’s air strike by U.S. forces in Syria puts our country on the path of continuing the Forever War instead of ending it,” said Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in a statement. “This is the same path we’ve been on for almost two decades. For far too long administrations of both parties have interpreted the authorities in an extremely expansive way to continue military intervention across the Middle East region and elsewhere. This must end.”
+Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar shared a 2017 tweet from White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who was then a commentator at CNN, that ended up being quite ironic.
+“Also what is the legal authority for strikes?” Psaki had asked when Trump attacked Syria. “Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country.”
+“Great question,” tweeted Omar.

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-articleTitle: Palestinians condemn violent, racist rampage and incitement to genocide by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam
-pageTitle: Palestinians condemn violent, racist rampage and incitement to genocide by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam | BDS Movement
-description: The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemns the vile, violent, and blatantly racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab rampage and incitement to genocide by fans of Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv before, during and after the Europa League match against Ajax in Amsterdam.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:06:42.055Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/palestinians-condemn-violent-racist-rampage-and-incitement-genocide-by-maccabi-tel-aviv-fans
 ---
-The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) condemns the vile, violent, and blatantly racist anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab rampage and incitement to genocide by fans of Israeli football team Maccabi Tel Aviv before, during and after the Europa League match against Ajax in Amsterdam. We join the many organizations and human rights activists in the Netherlands and worldwide that are calling for a transparent and professional investigation and full accountability. The Dutch government, the Amsterdam City Council, and other entities must be held to account.Marauding gangs of Maccabi Tel Aviv hooligans, which included Israeli soldiers who served in Israel’s Gaza genocide, sang genocidal chants, including “Let the IDF win and f*ck the Arabs” and “Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there.” Israel’s Gaza genocide has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 14,000 children, and destroyed hundreds of schools, including UN schools sheltering the nearly 2 million Palestinians forced from their homes. Not only does incitement to racial violence constitute criminal behavior, but also incitement to genocide is a violation of the Genocide Convention, no less, as the racist and anti-democratic Dutch authorities are expected to know, particularly given that the two world courts are based in the Hague.The Maccabi Tel Aviv football team has repeatedly and proudly sent “care packages” to Israeli soldiers committing genocide in Gaza and organized videos of its many club employees serving as soldiers in Gaza as motivation ahead of matches.The gangs of Israeli thugs threw rocks at and scaled homes and businesses in Amsterdam displaying Palestinian flags, ripping them down and burning them, attacked a taxi cab driven by an Arab man, armed themselves with pipes, chains and construction material, and beat people presumed to be Arab on the streets. They behaved in Amsterdam as they regularly do in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, giving the Dutch public a mere glimpse of the level of depravity and criminality that Palestinians must resist every day.Inside the match, Israeli fans obscenely interrupted a minute of silence for flood victims in Valencia over the Spanish state’s recent actions to block arms sales and shipments to Israel.The malevolent erasure of this context by racist Western media and colonial leaders presenting the genocide inciting violent Israeli thugs as victims not only turns the truth on its head. It also mirrors the deliberate amnesia of Israel’s 76-year apartheid regime in Western media propaganda that has allowed Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza for over a year, expand its massacres to Lebanon, and escalate violent ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.  The ultimate responsibility here lies with corrupt world football bodies UEFA and FIFA, which have for years actively shielded Israel from accountability for its illegal military occupation and settlement teams, its apartheid regime and, more recently, its genocide.We applaud BDS Netherlands and other groups in Amsterdam that organized peaceful protests against the match, refusing to allow football-as-usual to whitewash genocide and apartheid.We further applaud the peaceful protests organized following the match to reclaim streets and squares for dissent and continue to call for an end to Israel’s Gaza atrocities.We reiterate our call for peaceful disruption of UEFA and FIFA matches until they meet their obligations established by International Court of Justice rulings to end all complicity in Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by banning apartheid Israel from world football just as apartheid South Africa was banned. All Israeli soldiers traveling outside of Israel should face legal questioning over their role in Israel’s genocide and other atrocity crimes committed against Palestinians and subsequent prosecution, not be allowed to travel freely, let alone wreak havoc in cities around the world.

+articleTitle: Biden’s air strike plays into the hands of Iran’s hardliners, Israel, and Saudi Arabia
+pageTitle: Biden’s air strike plays into the hands of Iran’s hardliners, Israel, and Saudi Arabia – Mondoweiss
+description: ‘NYT’ says U.S. strike in Syria targeted “network of militias backed by Iran and committed to subverting the interests of the U.S. and its allies.” Really?
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.221Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2021/02/bidens-air-strike-plays-into-the-hands-of-irans-hardliners-israel-and-saudi-arabia/
 ---
+Benjamin Netanyahu and his government were not the only people who jumped for joy after Joe Biden ordered the air strike on the Syria/Iraq border yesterday. Hardliners in Iran were also pleased, because the U.S. attack may slow down the restoration of the Iran nuclear agreement, and relaxation of U.S./Iran tensions could weaken the hardliners in upcoming Iranian elections.
+The invaluable Sina Toossi explains in detail how and why the hardliners “should be expected to play more of a spoiler role as the Iranian presidential election in June gets closer.”
+That view was nowhere represented in mainstream U.S. media coverage of Biden’s attack, which served mainly as cheerleader and stenographer for the American military.  The first New York Times report quoted “American officials” calling the attack “a relatively small, carefully calibrated military response,” which killed only a “handful” of the allegedly “Iranian-backed militias.” Buried in the paper’s 11th paragraph was a stunning admission: “Little is known about the [militia] group, including whether it is backed by Iran. . .”
+Hold on. The British Independent did some actual reporting, and cited a respected independent monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, as saying the U.S. air attack may have killed “at least 22 people.” The Times, to its credit, did include the Observatory’s figure in a follow up report a day later. But the Washington Post stuck with the “handful” estimate.
+That Post report also quoted Charles Lister, a notorious hawk who directs the “Countering Terrorism & Extremism program” at the Middle East Institute, but it couldn’t find telephone numbers for Sina Toossi, Trita Parsi, or other respected Iranian-American experts.
+The Times follow-up report did include one revealing sentence, right in its second paragraph. It said that “one of the greatest security concerns of American partners in the region [is] the network of militias that are backed by Iran and committed to subverting the interests of the United States and its allies.”
+Nowhere does the U.S. media question precisely what direct “interests of the United States” are threatened in Syria. The reason is: none are.
+The U.S. confronts Iran because Israel and Saudi Arabia want it to. Benjamin Netanyahu has for more than a decade tried to instigate a U.S. conflict with Iran, and he came close during Donald Trump’s final months. And why should American service men and women be asked to risk their lives to do the bidding of Saudi Arabia, a nation whose de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed, has just been found responsible for ordering the murder of the brave journalist Jamal Khashoggi?

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-articleTitle: Letter from Palestinian Film Professionals on Euromed Funding Initiative
-pageTitle: Letter from Palestinian Film Professionals on Euromed Funding Initiative | BDS Movement
-description: Last month, forty Palestinian filmmakers and cultural workers signed a letter addressed to Ms. Catherine Colomb-Nancy at the Europeaid Office in...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:37.017Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/letter-palestinian-film-professionals-euromed-funding-initiative
 ---
-Last month, forty Palestinian filmmakers and cultural workers signed a letter addressed to Ms. Catherine Colomb-Nancy at the Europeaid Office in Brussels regarding their concerns about the Euromed Audiovisual II Project. They suggested a meeting to exchange views about the proposal. The letter was sent via fax and email, and a hard copy was sent via regular mail. Alarmingly, no one from Euromed responded to the letter, let alone acknowledged it.The primary concerns outlined in the letter were twofold:1) That this entity calling itself the "Ramallah Film Institute" is, in fact, not registered in Palestine: Euromed lists the partners of the project to be the "New Foundation for Cinema and Television (Israel) and the Ramallah Film Institute (Palestinian Authority)". Attached is an official letter from the Palestinian Ministry stating that the Ramallah Film Institute is not registered anywhere within the Palestinian Authority. The Ramallah Film Institute, aside from having no relationship with the local Palestinian cultural community, is, in fact, an Israeli-registered organization.2) The fact that the Israeli partner is a government organization (established by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Sport with the assistance of The Israel Film Council) - a government that continues its illegal and harsh occupation of Palestine and continues to deny Palestinians their rights. In addition, the New Foundation for Cinema and Television has refused to reject occupation nor work actively for its removal openly. (Our objections are not with individual Israelis nor with organizations that work towards Palestinian freedom but rather with government organizations such as the New Foundation for Cinema & Television who refuse to recognize our rights).A follow-up letter was sent to the E.U. office three weeks later and was also subsequently ignored. Clearly, the concerns of forty of Palestine's preeminent artists, including those we have defined as Palestinian cinema itself internationally, including Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu Assad, Rashid Masharawi, and Mai Masri, mean nothing to the Euromed Project. The fact that the former board members of the Ramallah Film Festival, like George Khleifi, quit because financial reports were not given to the board when requested appears to be meaningless to Euromed. The interests and concerns of Palestine's numerous community and cultural organizations have no value.Two months ago, in December, when rumors first emerged that this project was forming, Adam Zuabi himself was requested to provide more information about the project to an e-mail list of filmmakers. He chose not to respond and, to this day, has not addressed us nor provided any information about the project, including its upcoming launch at the Berlinale.The question is, why was this letter disregarded? Why were the concerns of Palestinian individuals working in the cultural scene, many of whom have previous experience working with the Ramallah Film Festival in the past, thrown to the side?We are forty Palestinians: we are from here, we live here, we work here, we are part of this community. We refuse to be ignored. We do not want well-funded projects imposed upon us from the outside without regard for our concerns. It is a slap in the face of Palestinian filmmakers, intellectuals and cultural workers who have been working for decades to be seen as independent, respected artists. We have contacted Euromed professionally and openly. We demand acknowledgement.Adam Zoabi (and his "Ramallah Film Institute") is free to do whatever he wants. That is his right. Euromed is free to support whoever it chooses. We are very aware that joint Israeli-Palestinian projects are "sexy" and "lucrative," especially in Europe.However, Palestine is not a "jungle", and there are people in this community who are working very hard to better our situation. Financial transparency and accountability are vital to this. We are working against organizations that believe that financial records are private rather than public. We ask organizations who claim to serve the community actually to have a relationship with that community. And organizations who wish to publicly claim they are registered within the Palestinian Authority actually to be registered. Throwing funding and/or projects at less wealthy countries that are struggling with corruption and supporting projects that are not rooted within the community nor taking into consideration the concerns of the local community they purport to be helping, hurt the Palestinian community considerably.We demand that Euromed immediately correct its statement and all publicity and other materials which falsely claim that this project ("Greenhouse") is a partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority before the grand launch at the Berlinale in Germany. This is not a partnership between an "Israeli" organization and a "Palestinian Authority" organization. Euromed's Greenhouse Project is a partnership between two Israeli-registered organizations and we demand that this be amended in their publications and that the name of Palestine is not used to promote a partnership which actually does not exist and which only serves to benefit a few individuals rather than the community it claims to be serving.We challenge David Fisher and the New Foundation for Cinema and Television to openly reject occupation and the illegal actions of their government and come out in support of the full rights of Palestinians to be free and equal. We call on those who can pressure Israel from within, especially artists and cultural institutions, who have mostly stood silent for years in the face of wanton destruction, oppression and injustice and perhaps even benefited from occupation, to make their voices heard. We ask that Israelis no longer stand silent in the face of terrible injustices taking place. We believe that it is high time that Israeli institutions wake up to realities and fulfil their moral obligation to resist occupation and begin to protest the actions of their state. It is time for the international and Israeli communities to wake up to the challenge.We ask the international community and fellow artists to consider carefully the implications of participating in the "Greenhouse" Project (Euromed Audiovisual II, proposal Nr. 15). We hope that considering that we live under a harsh military occupation and an apartheid system, it is understandable why we would not want to work with organizations that are part of the same government that imposes this system on us.Cultural support cannot come in the form of "charity" or "to make oneself feel better" without addressing the root causes of the problems and ignoring the concerns of the Palestinian community. To us, this is not only undesirable but also objectionable. We have worked and will continue to work with those who have struggled with us to change political realities, to help us improve our lives, and who have been mutually respectful.Attached: -Original Letter to Europeaid Office-Follow-up letter to Europeaid Office-Official Letter from the Palestinian Ministry of Interior & Civil Affairs stating that the Ramallah Film Institute is not registered-Translation of letter from Ministry of Interior & Civil Affairs (Original letter to Europeaid Office)Jan. 2, 2006Catherine COLOMB-NANCYEuropeaid Office de Cooopération ARue de la Loi, 200B-1049 BruxellesBelgiqueDear Ms. Catherine Colomb-NancyWe, the undersigned, a group of Palestinian filmmakers and cultural workers, are writing to you to kindly request your attention to a matter of some importance.We have just learned of your Short List for the Euromed Audiovisual II, for the development of documentary film. Among the short-listed recipients are the Ramallah Film Institute (Palestinian Authority) & The New Foundation for Cinema and Television (Israel) (proposal Nr. 15).We realize how important this funding can be for the development of documentary film practices in the region and especially in Palestine. However, in order for Palestinian filmmakers to benefit from such an opportunity to develop their film careers, we believe this funding must be channeled in an acceptable framework, that is transparent, trusted, and rooted in the community.We have two major concerns about this proposal. First, we would hope that the Euromed funding would be directed to a reputable and trustworthy Palestinian institution. This is not how most who work in the Palestinian film and arts community feel towards what is termed the Ramallah Film Institute, a project administered by Mr. Adam Zuabi. Second, we have great many reservations regarding the partnership of the aforementioned institute with the New Foundation in Israel, a government-funded organization.On the latter issue, we would like to note that partnering or collaborating with Israeli government sponsored institutions is a very sensitive issue here in Palestine â€“ due to such a partnership assuming an equal relationship between two such partners when in fact one is supported by a government that occupies the other. A great many promising projects have failed to achieve their goals because they failed to take into consideration the complexities involved and thus alienated the majority of the communities targeted. We wish not to see the Euromed project end as a failure. On the contrary, we believe that such an opportunity for funding can play a major rule in nurturing documentary film practices in Palestine - but money alone cannot achieve this. In order for this to happen we need the community of filmmakers to believe in the project and to trust in it enough to participate in it.The main issue at hand is that we Palestinian filmmakers, many of us based in Ramallah, have never even heard of the Ramallah Film Institute. We do not know who they are, what their purpose is, and seriously question the legitimacy of such an institution as it seems not to be registered in Palestine, either as a school, an organization, or a company.We also have many reservations stemming from previous activities carried out by Mr. Zuabi in the name of Palestinian cinema and Palestinian filmmakers. In particular, his work as the director of the Ramallah Film Festival has significantly alienated the local community and many cultural organizations in Palestine. One example is that after requesting of him to provide financial reports following last year's Ramallah Film Festival, his entire board of directors resigned as they were never provided with this important data involving the project. Therefore, we would like to raise these concerns and to signal the reservations of a great many established cultural figures here towards any project involving Mr. Zuabi, before the Euromed fund decisions are finalized.We are writing to you kindly asking that you take these concerns into account before you arrive at a decision. We would be grateful for the opportunity to meet with you or any other official in charge of this project in the organization. We believe such a meeting or exchange of views and concerns can greatly assist in ensuring that the Euromed project will succeed in achieving its goals.Sincerely yours,1. Sobhi al-Zobaidi, Filmmaker & Academic. Ramallah, Palestine2. Annemarie Jacir, Filmmaker & Curator, Ramallah, Palestine3. Najwa Najjar, Filmmaker, Ramallah, Palestine4. Elia Sulieman, Filmmaker, Paris/Nazareth, Palestine5. Hany Abu Assad, Director, Netherlands/Nazareth, Palestine6. Rashid Masharawi, Palestinian Filmmaker7. Mai Masri, Filmmaker, Nablus/Beirut9. Raed Al-Helou, Filmmaker, Ramallah10. Ismail Habbash, Filmmaker, Ramallah11. Rowan Faqih, Filmmaker, Ramallah12. Ahmad Habash, Director/Animator, Ramallah13. Nizar Hasan, Filmmaker, Nazareth14. Raed Andoni, Producer, Ramallah15. Hanna Elias, Director, Los Angeles /Ramallah16. Dr. Alia Arasoughly, Filmmaker, Sociologist of Culture (Cinema)17. Hanna Atallah,Filmmaker, Ramallah,Palestine18. Abdel Salam Shehada, Filmmaker, Gaza19. Emily Jacir, Artist, Rome/Ramallah20. Dima Abu Ghoush, Filmmaker, Ramallah21. Fatin Farhat, Director, Sakakini Cultural Center, Ramallah22. Adania Shibli, Writer, London/Jerusalem23. Shadi Zmorrod, Theater actor and Director, Palestine24. Liana Badr, Minstry of Culture, Palestine25. Hicham Kayed, Filmmaker, Lebanon26. Khaled Katamish, Director, El-Funon Dance Troupe27. Noora Baker, Activity Coordinator, Popular Art Center, Palestine28. Mohammed Atta, Director, Wishah Dance Troupe, Palestine29. Iman Hammouri, Director, Popular Art Center, Palestine30. Tareq Abu-Lughod, Filmmaker, Amman31. Issa Freij, D.P., Filmmaker, Jerusalem32. Azza Al Hassan, Filmmaker, Amman, Jordan33. Nahed Awwad, Filmmaker, Ramallah34. Saed Andoni, Producer/Director, Ramallah35. Ghada Terawi, Filmmaker, Palestine36. Rawan Sharaf, Production Designer, Jerusalem, Palestine37. George Khleifi, Filmmaker & Academic, Ramallah38. Kamal Aljafari, Cologne/Ramle, Palestine39. Reem Fadda, Director, Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art (PACA)40. Khaled Elayyan, Alkasaba Theater, Ramallah (follow up letter to EU)Jan. 29th, 2006Dear Ms. Carla MontesiWe sent a letter to Ms. Catherine Colomb-Nancy three weeks ago but have not received a response or acknowledgement of our letter. We have also tried calling her office but have not received an answer.The attached letter is a petition from 40 Palestinian filmmakers who are very concerned about the shortlisting of a partnership proposal between the Ramallah Film Institute and the New Foundation for Cinema and Television (Israel).We have voiced our reasons for our concerns, in addition to the fact that the Ramallah Film Institute is only an Israeli-registered Institution in Jerusalem and is not registered with the Palestinian Authority, as noted in the Euromed proposal. This means that it is not eligible for funds allocated to the Palestinian territories, which is also misleading on the part of both the Ramallah Film Institute and Euromed.We would very much like to discuss this matter further with you. Our letter from three weeks ago was sent to Ms. Catherine Colomb-Nancy via fax, email, and regular mail. We would be very appreciative if there were some kind of acknowledgement of our correspondence.Looking forward to hearing from you.Sincerely,Sobhi Zobaidi, Najwa Najjar, and Annemarie Jaciron behalf of the Filmmakers and Cultural Institutionscc'd: Catherine Colomb-Nancy translation of official documentPalestine Liberation OrganizationThe Palestinian National AuthorityMinistry of Interior & Civil Affairs(December 31st, 2005)To : Mr. Falah Abu Al-RobDirector of Licensing Department - Ministry of CultureSubject: Ramallah Film InstituteRegarding the above-mentioned subject, we inform you that the Ramallah Film Institute is not officially registered with the Ministry of Interior & Civil Affairs, and we support that you will not deal with the Institute until they officially register.With thanks,Fadwa Al-Sha'arGeneral Administrator for Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)Palestinian National Authority

+articleTitle: Imagining Palestine: Barghouti, Darwish, Kanafani and the language of exile
+pageTitle: Imagining Palestine: Barghouti, Darwish, Kanafani and the language of exile – Mondoweiss
+description: Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti died earlier this month in Amman at the age of 76. He was an intellectual whose work has intrinsically been linked to exile.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.501Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2021/02/imagining-palestine-barghouti-darwish-kanafani-and-the-language-of-exile/
 ---
+For Palestinians, exile is not simply the physical act of being removed from their homes and their inability to return. It is not a casual topic pertaining to politics and international law, either. Nor is it an ethereal notion, a sentiment, a poetic verse. It is all of this, combined.
+Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti died earlier this month in Amman at the age of 76. He was an intellectual whose work has intrinsically been linked to exile and his writings brought to the surface many existential questions: are Palestinians destined to be exiled? Can there be a remedy for this perpetual torment? Is justice a tangible, achievable goal?
+Barghouti was born in 1944 in Deir Ghassana, near Ramallah. His journey in exile began in 1967, and ended, however temporarily, 30 years later. His memoir “I Saw Ramallah,” published in 1997, was an exiled man’s attempt to make sense of his identity, one that has been formulated within many different physical spaces, conflicts and airports. While, in some way, the Palestinian in Barghouti remained intact, his was a unique identity that can only be fathomed by those who have experienced, to some degree, the pressing feelings of ghurba – estrangement and alienation – or shataat – dislocation and diaspora.
+In his memoir, translated into English in 2000 by acclaimed Egyptian author, Ahdaf Soueif, he wrote, “I tried to put the displacement between parenthesis, to put a last period in a long sentence of the sadness of history … But I see nothing except commas. I want to sew the times together. I want to attach one moment to another, to attach childhood to age, to attach the present to the absent and all the presents to all absences, attach exiles to the homeland and to attach what I have imagined to what I see now.”
+Those familiar with the rich and complex Palestinian literature of exile can relate Barghouti’s reference – what one imagines versus what one sees – to the writing of other intellectuals who have suffered the pain of exile as well. Ghassan Kanafani and Majed Abu Sharar – and numerous others – wrote about that same conflict. Their death – or, rather, assassination – in exile brought their philosophical journeys to an abrupt end.
+In Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal poem, “Who Am I, Without Exile,” the late Palestinian poet asked, knowing that there can never be a compelling answer: “What will we do without exile?”
+It is as if Ghurba has been so integral to the collective character of a nation, and is now a permanent tattoo on the heart and soul of the Palestinian people everywhere. “A stranger on the riverbank, like the river … water binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing makes me enter the gospels. Not a thing …,” Darwish wrote.
+The impossibility of becoming a whole again in Darwish and Barghouti’s verses were reverberations of Kanafani’s own depiction of a Palestine that was as agonizingly near as it was far.
+“What is a homeland?” Kanafani asks in “Returning to Haifa”: “Is it these two chairs that remained in this room for twenty years? The table? Peacock feathers? The picture of Jerusalem on the wall? The copper-lock? The oak tree? The balcony? What is a homeland? Is it the picture of his brother hanging on the wall? I’m only asking.”
+But there can be no answers, because when exile exceeds a certain rational point of waiting for some kind of justice that would facilitate one’s return, it can no longer be articulated, relayed or even fully comprehended. It is the metaphorical precipice between life and death, ‘life’ as in the burning desire to be reunited with one’s previous self, and ‘death’ as in knowing that without a homeland one is a perpetual outcast – physically, politically, legally, intellectually and every other form.
+“In my despair I remember; that there is life after death … But I ask: Oh my God, is there life before death?” Barghouti wrote in his poem “I Have No Problem.”
+While the crushing weight of exile is not unique to Palestinians, the Palestinian exile is unique. Throughout the entire episode of Palestinian ghurba, from the early days of the Nakba – the destruction of the Palestinian homeland – till today, the world remains divided between inaction, obliviousness, and refusal to even acknowledge the injustice that has befallen the Palestinian people.
+Despite or, perhaps, because of his decades-long exile, Barghouti did not engage in ineffectual discussions about the rightful owners of Palestine “because we did not lose Palestine to a debate, we lost it to force.”
+He wrote in his memoir “When we were Palestine, we were not afraid of the Jews. We did not hate them, we did not make an enemy of them. Europe of the Middle Ages hated them, but not us. Ferdinand and Isabella hated them, but not us. Hitler hated them, but not us. But when they took our entire space and exiled us from it they put both us and themselves outside the law of equality.”
+In fact, hate rarely factors in the work of Barghouti – or Darwish, Kanafani, Abu Sharar and many others – because the pain of exile, so powerful, so omnipresent – required one to re-evaluate his relationship to the homeland through emotional rapport that can only be sustained through positive energy, of love, of deep sadness, of longing.
+“Palestine is something worthy of a man bearing arms for, dying for,” wrote Kanafani. “For us, for you and me, it’s only a search for something buried beneath the dust of memories. And look what we found beneath that dust. Yet more dust. We were mistaken when we thought the homeland was only the past.”
+Millions of Palestinians continue to live in exile, generation after generation, painstakingly negotiating their individual and collective identities, neither able to return, nor feeling truly whole. These millions deserve to exercise their Right of Return, for their voices to be heard and to be included.
+But even when Palestinians are able to end their physical exile, chances are, for generations they will remain attached to it. “I don’t know what I want. Exile is so strong within me, I may bring it to the land,” wrote Darwish.
+In Barghouti too, exile was so strong. Despite the fact that he fought to end it, it became him. It became us.

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-articleTitle: French labour union backs BDS
-pageTitle: French labour union backs BDS | BDS Movement
-description: Far from seeking a just and peaceful solution with the Palestinians, the State of Israel, through its successive governments, engages ever more in...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:37.046Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/french-labour-union-backs-bds
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-Far from seeking a just and peaceful solution with the Palestinians, the State of Israel, through its successive governments, engages ever more in the violence of the occupation and colonisation and in the violation of human rights.
-Faced with the State of Israel's impunity, with its violations of the law and with the collusion of the major powers, starting with that of our own government, CGT‐INRA decides to join the appeal launched in 2005 by 172 Palestinian civil‐society organisations for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the State of Israel as long as it does not respect human rights in Palestine. Because we are firmy rooted in the camp of justice and peace, because our unionism has no borders, we resolve to act within the BDS France campaign in order to achieve a just and lasting peace, which requires:
-‐  the end of the occupation and colonisation of Palestinian lands and the dismantlement of the Wall;
-‐ the recognition of the fundamental right of the Arab citizens of Israel to absolute equality;
-‐ the respect of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their lands and their homes.
-The 27th Congress of CGT‐INRA, held on 11, 12 and 13 October 2016 in Lyon, once again calls for an end to the prosecution of BDS activists in France. It also demands the abrogation of the Alliot‐Marie and Mercier circulars which curtail the freedom of expression and the exercise of peaceful activism.

+articleTitle: May 2022 – Page 13
+pageTitle: May 2022 – Page 13 – Mondoweiss
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.578Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/page/13
 ---
+Covid data differences in Israel/East Jerusalem reflect ‘medical apartheid’
+By Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council
+May 2, 2022
+1
+Data collection for Covid-19 rates in Palestine has continued to be challenging and contradictory; numbers out of East Jerusalem have been intermittently available “from local sources,” once again highlighting the differences in public health for East Jerusalemites versus the population in ’48 Israel. Occupied Palestinians, even those with residency permits, lack well-resourced, well-organized health and public health systems focused on their needs.

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-articleTitle: Israel backs Saudi Arabia in confrontation with Qatar
-pageTitle: Israel backs Saudi Arabia in confrontation with Qatar | The Electronic Intifada
-description: Riyadh-led bloc cooperating with Israel to target Palestinian resistance, Iran.
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T19:44:40.984Z
-url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-backs-saudi-arabia-confrontation-qatar
 ---
-President Donald Trump and King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia in Riyadh, 20 May. Trump’s endorsement of Saudi-led anti-Iran alliance may have emboldened Saudi Arabia’s move to isolate Qatar.
-White House PhotoIsraeli officials have gleefully endorsed the position of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a growing confrontation with Qatar, the most public acknowledgment yet of the deepening alliance between certain Gulf states and Tel Aviv over their common enmity towards Iran.
-Meanwhile, evidence has emerged of close cooperation between the United Arab Emirates and a key Israel lobby group to pressure Qatar over its support for the Palestinian resistance organization Hamas.
-On Monday, Saudi Arabia and several of its satellite states, including the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, broke off diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a blockade, cutting land, sea and air links to the country.
-Regional media reported that shelves in stores in Qatar, whose only land border is with Saudi Arabia, were quickly emptied as residents feared a prolonged closure could lead to food shortages.
-Justifying its decision, Saudi Arabia has accused Doha of “grave violations” such as “adopting various terrorist and sectarian groups aimed at destabilizing the region,” including the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and al-Qaida.
-Israel’s “opportunity”
-Israeli officials were quick to offer their support to Saudi Arabia.
-“New line drawn in the Middle Eastern sand,” Michael Oren, Israel’s deputy minister for diplomacy, proclaimed on Twitter. “No longer Israel against Arabs but Israel and Arabs against Qatar-financed terror.”
-Israeli defense minister Avigdor Lieberman declared that the crisis was an “opportunity for cooperation” between Israel and certain Gulf states.
-“It is clear to everyone, even in the Arab countries, that the real danger to the entire region is terrorism,” Lieberman claimed. He added that the Saudi-led bloc had cut ties with Qatar “not because of Israel, not because of the Jews, not because of Zionism,” but “rather from fears of terrorism.”
-Chagai Tzuriel, a top official in Israel’s intelligence ministry, told The Times of Israel that Qatar was a “pain in the ass” to other “Sunni” Arab states allied with Israel.
-Israel’s former defense minister Moshe Yaalon also expressed backing for the Saudi-led sectarian coalition. “The Sunni Arab countries, apart from Qatar, are largely in the same boat with us since we all see a nuclear Iran as the number one threat against all of us,” he said at a ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syria’s Golan Heights.
-On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia continued to escalate the situation, suspending the license of Qatar Airways and ordering its banks to sell the Qatari currency.
-Who supports “terror”?
-While Saudi Arabia offered no evidence for its charges against Qatar, the accusations are rich coming from a regime that has been one of the biggest sources of funding to so-called jihadi groups going back decades.
-But like Saudi Arabia, Qatar too has been accused of financing or allowing money to flow to ISIS and al-Qaida-affiliated groups in Syria.
-Israel has also had no problem with al-Qaida linked groups, and even ISIS, in Syria, offering them various kinds of cooperation and material support.
-So the source of Saudi ire must lie elsewhere. Qatar has for years, along with Saudi Arabia, been part of the counterrevolution to thwart or reverse the so-called Arab Spring uprisings.
-Qatar was taking part in the Saudi-led war on Yemen, before being kicked out of the coalition this week.
-The two-year bombing campaign in Yemen has killed thousands of civilians and brought the impoverished country to the brink of famine.
-But Qatar has often found itself backing different horses: Doha supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while Riyadh has backed the regime of Abdulfattah al-Sisi, the army chief who led the 2013 military coup that overthrew the elected Muslim Brotherhood president in Cairo.
-These differences had soured relations between Qatar and Saudi Arabia for years.
-But Saudi Arabia may have been emboldened to act now, after US President Donald Trump gave full endorsement to strengthening a Saudi-led anti-Iran alliance during his visit to Riyadh last month.
-Targeting Hamas and Iran
-Qatar has continued to host the leaders of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas and has been under pressure to expel the group’s officials – Israeli media claims that Qatar did expel two officials are unconfirmed.
-But the biggest difference appears to be that Qatar has not been willing to fully sign up to the Saudi-Israeli alliance against Iran.
-A deal in April in which Qatar allegedly paid about $700 million in ransom to release members of its royal family abducted by an Iran-affiliated group in Iraq reportedly enraged officials in other Gulf states.
-Qatar also reportedly paid about $300 million in ransom to several al-Qaida linked groups in Syria, according to The Financial Times.
-Also in April, Qatar lifted a self-imposed ban on developing a major maritime natural gas field it shares with Iran, which would necessitate cooperation between the two countries, according to the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz.
-Things came to a head around the time of Trump’s visit and his summit with regional leaders.
-Qatar’s national news agency published comments attributed to the country’s leader Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, calling Iran “a regional and Islamic power that cannot be ignored” and asserting that “it is unwise to face up against it.”
-Tamim also purportedly said his country’s relations with Israel were “good.” Qatar has flatly denied the statements are real, claiming that the news agency’s website and social media accounts were hacked.
-Qatar has historically maintained relations with Israel, even welcoming its then foreign minister Tzipi Livni to Doha in 2008.
-But the Qatar-based network Al Jazeera has cited the fake comments as a trigger for the crisis, accusing Saudi Arabia and its allies of using them as a pretext to move against Qatar.
-UAE embraces Israel
-Another factor is the close relationship between the United Arab Emirates and Israel.
-Hacked emails published by The Intercept reveal coordination between the Emirates ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al-Otaiba, and the neoconservative pro-Israel think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
-The emails reveal “a remarkable level of backchannel cooperation” between the Emirates and the think tank, which is funded by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to The Intercept.
-The email exchanges included complaints from the Israel lobby group about Qatar’s support for Hamas “terrorists.”
-An agenda for a meeting between leaders of the Israel lobby group and Emirates ambassador al-Otaiba scheduled for this month includes such items as “Qatar support for radical Islamists” including Hamas, Qatar’s “destabilizing role in Egypt, Syria, Libya and the Gulf” and the role of the Qatar-backed Al Jazeera network.
-It also includes ways to reduce the influence Qatar gains from hosting a major US air base.
-One of the items on the agenda is “Political, economic, security sanctions.”
-The agenda is evidence that the Foundation for Defense of Democracies – a key player in Israel’s anti-Palestinian propaganda – was gearing up to deliver in Washington the anti-Qatar message coming from Riyadh and the United Arab Emirates.
-US role
-The leaked documents reveal that the Saudi-led bloc is troubled by the influence Qatar gains by hosting the massive American al-Udeid air base.
-But this is precisely why the US, the overall imperial power, has no interest in a squabble among states that it views as vassals.
-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson affirmed the importance of US ties with all the states involved and offered to mediate, urging the feuding rulers to “remain unified.”
-The US military lauded Qatar for its “enduring commitment to regional security” and affirmed it had “no plans to change our posture in Qatar.”
-Qatar has taken these messages as signs of strong US support, but as ever Trump was quick to throw everything into doubt.
-“During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar - look!” Trump tweeted on Tuesday, appearing to directly endorse the Saudi-led campaign against Doha.
-“So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off,” he added. “They said they would take a hard line on funding extremism and all reference was pointing to Qatar.”
-“Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism,” the president asserted. More likely, Trump is pouring gasoline on an already burning region.
-A long-term goal of Israel has long been to divide Arab powers against each other, to “let them bleed,” as the official Israeli doctrine on Syria goes.
-Whatever happens next, Israel will continue to benefit from the chaos and divisions that only strengthen its hand.
 Tags

+articleTitle: Israel revokes citizenship of Palestinian for disloyalty
+pageTitle: Israel revokes citizenship of Palestinian for disloyalty | The Electronic Intifada
+description: Draconian and discriminatory punishment was not even applied to Jewish assassin of Yitzhak Rabin.
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T19:22:00.165Z
+url: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israel-revokes-citizenship-palestinian-disloyalty
 ---
+Alaa Zayoud
+AdalahIn an unprecedented step, an Israeli court has revoked the citizenship of 23-year-old Alaa Zayoud for “breach of loyalty.”
+The human rights groups that will appeal the decision to Israel’s high court warn the move is a violation of international law.
+In June 2016, Zayoud, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for four counts of attempted murder, for driving a car into a soldier and then stabbing three civilians in October 2015, causing them light to moderate injuries.
+Following Zayoud’s sentencing, Israel’s interior minister Aryeh Deri asked a court in Haifa to revoke his citizenship.
+In 2008, Israel amended its law to allow courts to approve such requests for “breach of loyalty.”
+Zayoud’s case is the first time the 2008 law has been applied.
+On 6 August, a judge in Haifa granted Deri’s request, describing the revocation of Zayoud’s citizenship as “suitable and proportional,” according to The Times of Israel.
+“For every citizen, alongside his rights, there are commitments,” the judge stated. “One of them is the significant and important commitment to maintain loyalty to the state, which is given expression also in the commitment to not carry out terror acts to harm its residents and their security.”
+Citizenship of Rabin’s assassin not revoked
+Zayoud, from the Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm in Israel, only holds Israeli citizenship, which means he will become stateless if the decision is upheld.
+This is the first time that an Israeli court has revoked the citizenship of a Palestinian citizen of Israel for “breach of loyalty,” attorney Sawsan Zaher, from the Haifa-based human and civil rights group Adalah, told Ma’an News Agency.
+“The court hasn’t even provided an in-depth argument to justify the revocation of Zayoud’s citizenship,” Zaher said. “They are just confirming that this is just about getting revenge. None of it is rational.”
+Zaher and attorney Oded Feller, from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, had argued against the revocation, saying the 2008 law was exclusively invoked against Arab citizens of Israel.
+“There has never been a request to revoke the citizenship of a Jewish citizen, even when Jewish citizens were involved in serious and grave crimes,” the attorneys said in a statement.
+Zaher and Feller note that in 1996 Israel’s high court refused to revoke the citizenship of Yigal Amir, the man who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
+“Second generation” threat
+In fact, the ruling in Zayoud’s case explicitly states that it is meant to target a certain group of Palestinian citizens of Israel.
+Zayoud’s mother is an Israeli citizen and his father, from the occupied West Bank, is a permanent resident of Israel.
+According to the Israeli publication +972, the ruling describes Zayoud as a “second-generation child of family unification,” a category devised by the Shin Bet – Israel’s secret police.
+“Intelligence gathered in interrogations of ‘second-generation children of family unification’ shows that despite being born and raised as Israeli citizens, they still retain a Palestinian identity and they see the State of Israel as an enemy state that is in conflict with their people,” the judge wrote, according to +972.
+The judge claims that such citizens live with an “identity tension” that “leads to Palestinian loyalty and nationalist triggers which increase their willingness to carry out acts of terror.”
+The ruling explicitly states that revoking Zayoud’s citizenship is “aimed exclusively at so-called ‘second-generation children of family unification’ – to be used exclusively against them and to deter others within that group.”
+Against international law
+Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel will appeal the decision.
+As well arguing that the law is being applied in a discriminatory manner, they say that international law explicitly bars revoking the citizenship of a person if that will leave them stateless.
+Meanwhile, Deri has also said that the interior ministry will not renew the residency permit of Zayoud’s father – an apparent act of collective punishment against his family.
+In January 2016, Deri revoked the residency status of four Palestinians from Jerusalem for “breach of loyalty.”
+Israel has also revoked the residencies of more than 14,000 Palestinian Jerusalemites over the decades on various technical pretexts never applied to Jewish residents of the city.
 Tags

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-articleTitle: International Federation of Human Rights declaration in support of right to BDS
-pageTitle: International Federation of Human Rights declaration in support of right to BDS | BDS Movement
-description: La FIDH, à l’occasion de son Bureau international tenu à Paris du 25 au 27 mars 2016, a tenu à formellement reconnaître et réaffirmer le droit des...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:37.090Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/international-federation-human-rights-declaration-support-right-bds
 ---
-La FIDH, à l’occasion de son Bureau international tenu à Paris du 25 au 27 mars 2016, a tenu à formellement reconnaître et réaffirmer le droit des personnes à participer pacifiquement et à appeler à des mesures de boycott-désinvestissement-sanctions (BDS) pour protester contre les politiques d’occupation et de discrimination du gouvernement israélien, et demande instamment aux États de respecter et de défendre les droits connexes de liberté d’expression, d’opinion, d’association et d’assemblée.
-En 2005, la société civile palestinienne a appelé les personnes et les organisations de la société civile à appliquer des mesures BDS tant qu’Israël ne se conformera pas à ses obligations en vertu du droit international. Devant le manque de volonté politique d’obliger Israël à être comptable de ses obligations internationales, les militants palestiniens se sont tournés vers les actions BDS prises pour mettre fin à l’apartheid en Afrique du Sud et s’en sont inspirés pour faire bouger les choses. Le mouvement était donc, et est encore, une réponse politique à un manque d’action politique.
-Liberté d’expression et d’opinion
-Alors que le mouvement BDS prend de l’ampleur, il est de plus en plus attaqué et accusé, afin de le discréditer, de promouvoir la discrimination ou l’antisémitisme. Les attaques de ce genre ne font que s’intensifier [1].
-En réponse à ces mises en cause de la légitimité du mouvement, le Rapporteur spécial des Nations unies sur la liberté d’opinion et d’expression, lorsqu’il s’est rendu en Israël, après les avoir analysés, a considéré que les boycotts étaient des actions « pacifiques, légitimes et acceptées sur la scène internationale », et que ces actions étaient protégées par la liberté d’expression. En tant que telles, des manifestations d’opinion critiquant le gouvernement d’Israël pour ses manquements ne relèvent pas des exceptions, limitées, à la liberté d’expression reconnues par l’article 19 du Pacte international relatif aux droits civils et politiques [2]. Une telle acceptation internationale de boycotts est démontrée et confortée par l’existence de boycotts tout au long de l’histoire, dans le but de manifester une opposition politique ou pour promouvoir des changements politiques [3].
-Aux yeux du Bureau International, le mouvement BDS vise les politiques d’occupation illégale et de discrimination à l’encontre des Palestiniens menées depuis longtemps par le gouvernement d’Israël, notamment en soutenant l’occupation et en s’en rendant complice. Dans ces conditions, des personnes doivent avoir le droit de participer pacifiquement et d’appeler à des mesures BDS pour protester contre de telles politiques. Ces droits sont tout aussi légitimes, légaux et valides que dans le cas des exemples historiques de boycotts ; il convient donc de mettre en garde contre des efforts ou des initiatives visant à restreindre les droits à la liberté d’expression, d’opinion, d’association et d’assemblée, notamment en criminalisant l’exercice de ces droits pour des raisons discriminatoires, portant notamment sur des opinions, politiques ou autres.
-Il est clair que la logique des mesures BDS repose sur l’opposition à l’occupation militaire par Israël et ses politiques mises en œuvre dans les territoires palestiniens occupés. Dans ces conditions, nous exprimons notre soutien au droit de participer et à appeler à des activités BDS dès lors qu’elles sont conformes à l’interdiction du racisme et de la discrimination sous toutes ses formes, notamment pour des raisons de race, couleur, origine nationale ou sociale, langue, religion, opinion politique, sexe, identité de genre, orientation sexuelle ou handicap.
-Une pratique reconnue par les Nations unies
-Les sanctions économiques sont également conformes à l’esprit et aux objectifs de la Charte des Nations unies, et ont été appliquées dans de nombreuses situations, notamment par le Conseil de Sécurité. Une telle pratique est admise en droit international des droits humains, à condition que les sanctions ‘exercent une pression politique et économique sur l’élite dirigeante du pays visé pour l’amener à se conformer au droit international’, en ayant conscience de ‘leurs effets indirects, à savoir les souffrances infligées aux groupes les plus vulnérables de ce pays’, et le cas échéant en prenant des mesures pour les atténuer, comme reconnu par le Comité des droits économiques, sociaux et culturels des Nations unies [4].
-Le Bureau International souligne le soutien historique apporté dans d’autres contextes par les Nations unies et la communauté internationale aux mesures BDS, et exprime sa grave préoccupation devant la multiplication de mesures législatives nationales visant à criminaliser et à réduire au silence des militants BDS. Les droits humains universels, comme la liberté d’expression, doivent être respectés en toute impartialité ; une application partiale et partielle des normes du droit international ne fera que perpétuer le statu quo, en Israël comme en Palestine, et en d’autres zones de conflit.
-Les Défenseurs des droits humains

+articleTitle: May 2022 – Page 3
+pageTitle: May 2022 – Page 3 – Mondoweiss
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.714Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/page/3
 ---
+Right of Return, Nakba are back on the Palestinian agenda
+By Ramzy Baroud
+May 26, 2022
+25
+For nearly three decades, Palestinians were told, even by their leaders, that the Nakba is a thing of the past. However, with Palestinian reality worsening under the deepening system of Israeli settler colonialism and apartheid, Palestinians now understand that they have no possible alternative but their unity, their resistance and the return to the fundamentals of their struggle.
+Democrats and the young favor Palestinians over Israelis– new Pew poll
+By Philip Weiss
+May 26, 2022
+1
+New Pew survey shows growing support for Palestinians among Democrats. More Democrats hold favorable views of Palestinians than of Israelis by 64 to 60 percent. Compare to Republicans: 78 to 37 favorability ratings for Israelis over Palestinians. And while most people don’t know what BDS is, 7 percent of Democrats support BDS while 2 percent oppose it, and the ratio is 8 percent to 4 percent among those under 30.
+Pressure builds on Biden to investigate Israel over Abu Akleh killing
+By Mitchell Plitnick
+May 26, 2022
+8
+Pressure is building on the Biden administration from Congress and the media to investigate the killing of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. One fourth of the House Democratic caucus signed a letter calling on the U.S. to investigate the killing, and recent investigations by CNN and the Associated Press have debunked Israeli talking points. The U.S. has a history of accepting Israel’s explanations for the deaths of Americans, but pushing for an investigation makes sense as it would be a small step toward eroding Israeli impunity.
+Israeli forces kill 16-year-old Palestinian in Nablus
+By Yumna Patel
+May 25, 2022
+6
+Israeli forces killed 16-year-old Ghaith Yameen in Nablus during a raid early Wednesday morning. The killing comes just days after Israeli forces killed 16-year-old Amjad Walid Hussein Fayed in Jenin.
+AIPAC declares victory in Texas, where they spent almost $2 million on an anti-choice, NRA-backed Democrat
+By Michael Arria
+May 25, 2022
+6
+Rep. Henry Cuellar has declared victory in Texas’s 28th congressional district despite the fact that the runoff was too close to call on Wednesday morning. AIPAC spent nearly $2 million on the anti-choice, NRA-backed Democrat in Texas’s 28th district. It looks like it narrowly paid off.
+Israeli lawmaker warns Palestinians of another ‘Nakba’ if they fly Palestinian flag
+By Jonathan Ofir
+May 24, 2022
+29
+In yet another threat by an Israeli official to revisit the “Nakba” on Palestinians, lawmaker Israel Katz, a former minister of finance, warns Palestinian youth who fly the Palestinian flag to ask their parents about “your Nakba” — and warns, “If you don’t calm down, we’ll teach you a lesson that won’t be forgotten”.
+Students protest Blinken and honor Shireen Abu Akleh at Georgetown graduation
+By Michael Arria
+May 24, 2022
+4
+During graduation ceremonies at Georgetown University, students protested Secretary of State Antony Blinken and demanded accountability for slain Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
+Berkeley’s progressive mayor parties in apartheid state
+By Barbara Erickson, Hassan Fouda, Henry Norr and Carol Sanders
+May 24, 2022
+3
+By taking off on a nine-day junket to Israel, Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguin not only shirked his responsibilities to city residents, but also made a mockery of his own progressive pretensions and the city’s proud tradition of opposition to apartheid. Arreguin didn’t dare mention the trip on twitter, though others on the Israel lobby-sponsored junket said they “danced till our feet hurt.”
+Shireen Abu Akleh was ‘shot dead in targeted attack’ by Israel, CNN investigation concludes
+By Philip Weiss
+May 24, 2022
+0
+CNN published its own investigation of the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on May 11, and it says that new eyewitnesses, videos and ballistic analysis bear out what Abu Akleh’s colleagues said that day: The AlJazeera correspondent was targeted by an Israeli sniper positioned about 600 feet away from her with a clear line of sight.
+Israeli forces kill Palestinian teen days after using girl as human shield in Jenin
+By Yumna Patel
+May 23, 2022
+11
+Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager during a raid on the northern occupied West Bank city of Jenin over the weekend, just days after they used a Palestinian girl as a human shield in the city.

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-articleTitle: Canada's Green Party adopts Israel BDS into its platform
-pageTitle: Canada's Green Party adopts Israel BDS into its platform | BDS Movement
-description: TORONTO, Canada – The Green Party of Canada has adopted a policy of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel into its official platform...
-dataScrapedDate: 2025-03-23T22:09:37.147Z
-url: https://bdsmovement.net/news/canadas-green-party-adopts-israel-bds-its-platform
 ---
-TORONTO, Canada – The Green Party of Canada has adopted a policy of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel into its official platform after a hard-fought resolution successfully passed at the party’s annual convention over the weekend.
-Despite pressure from pro-Israel lobby groups, supporters of the BDS resolution within the party say they hope it will break down the stigma in Canada around using BDS to fight for Palestinian human rights.
-“We are, I think, raising serious questions in the minds of the public and we’re breaking down that taboo,” said Dimitri Lascaris, the Green Party’s justice spokesman and the sponsor of the resolution.
-Launched in 2005, over 170 Palestinian organisations have called on supporters to use boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel to conform to international law, end discriminatory practices against its Palestinian citizens, and stop the occupation.
-The resolution states that the Green Party will support using BDS to target sectors of the Israeli economy and society that profit from the occupation, until such time that Israel stops building settlements in the occupied territories and enters into negotiations with the Palestinians for a solution to the conflict.
-It also says the Greens will oppose efforts to prohibit or punish support for BDS.
-Lascaris said that successfully passing the resolution constitutes “an extraordinary moment in the battle for Palestinian human rights” in Canada, especially given recent attempts to demonise the BDS movement.
-Canada’s parliament passed a non-binding resolution condemning BDS earlier this year.
-That motion, supported by the Liberal Party of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, described BDS as “anti-Israel” and “a form of discrimination” and called for the government to condemn any individuals or groups that promote it within Canada.
-“I think people are going to stand up and take notice,” Lascaris told Middle East Eye.
-“They’re going to ask this question: ‘Why is this party, in the face of all of these attacks and despite the opposition of its own leader, adopting this resolution?’ …This is adding to the impetus for citizens in the West to inquire about what is really happening.”
-Party leader opposed
-Green Party leader Elizabeth May, who holds the party’s only seat in parliament, said she was “pretty devastated” that the BDS resolution was passed.
-May had come out against the BDS resolution and another Green Party motion debated during the convention that sought to strip the Canadian branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) of its charitable status.
-But while May was personally opposed to the initiatives, she said she understood the motivations other party members had in bringing them forward. “I’m allowed to say I agree with our party’s policies 99 percent. I don’t have to agree 100 percent,” she said.
-Pro-Israel lobby groups in Canada came out forcefully against the Green Party for even considering the resolutions ahead of the convention.
-Shimon Koffler Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, condemned the BDS resolution after it passed, saying the movement “seeks to censor and blacklist Israelis” and “is fundamentally discriminatory and utterly at odds with Canadian values”.
-“We are appalled that the Green Party has endorsed BDS against the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and a country that is a world leader in environmental technology and solutions,” added JNF Canada CEO Josh Cooper in a joint statement.
-But in a letter published last week in Canada’s right-wing National Post newspaper, May criticised Cooper for painting the Greens as anti-Israel for debating these ideas.
-“Our convention next weekend will be the first time in decades that any Canadian political party has permitted a discussion on Israel’s foreign policy. This is not a sign that we are anti-Israel. Rather, it is proof that we have faith in respectful democratic discourse and free speech,” May wrote.
-“What has been sorely lacking in Canadian political discourse is an acceptance of the plight of the Palestinian people. Why is it taboo for Canadians to discuss foreign policy in the Middle East unless they omit certain aspects of Israeli policy? We can criticise any other country’s decisions respectfully and diplomatically, why not Israel’s?”
-Jewish National Fund resolution amended
-The second resolution, proposed by Green Party member Corey Levine, sought to strip the Canadian branch of the JNF of its charitable status “for contravening public policy against discrimination and for its failure to comply with international human rights law”.
-Founded in 1901 before the State of Israel was created, the JNF’s mandate was to secure land in British-mandate Palestine for exclusive Jewish use. The group has a main body in Israel, known as Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael (JNF-KKL), and branches in various countries abroad, including Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States.
-“The JNF was the principal Zionist tool for the colonisation of Palestine,” Israeli historian Ilan Pappe wrote in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. “It served as the agency the Zionist movement used to buy Palestinian land upon which it then settled Jewish immigrants.”
-At the party convention, the resolution was only passed after the explicit reference to the JNF was removed. The updated version called on the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) to strip the status of any charitable organisation found to be in violation of Canadian or international law.
-“I’m obviously feeling a bit disappointed,” Levine told Middle East Eye about the amendment, “but I recognise that it has been a victory overall because this issue was raised and discussed and debated in a public forum.”
-Levine also said that May, the party leader, promised publicly to write to the CRA about the JNF’s status specifically, and she intends “to hold her to account to that”.
-“I ultimately consider it an absolute victory,” Levine said.
-The JNF-KKL currently enjoys quasi-governmental status in Israel. It controls approximately 13 percent of the land under the umbrella of the Israel Land Administration, which it continues to only lease to Jews. As of 2014, its land holdings were worth approximately $2 billion.
-By leasing land only to Jews, the JNF-KKL’s policies ensure that Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of the population, are denied access to 13 percent of the land.
-“This discriminatory policy contributes to the institutionalisation of racially segregated towns and villages throughout the state,” wrote Adalah, the legal centre for Palestinian citizens of Israel, in a 2006 submission to the United Nations.
-The JNF has also been involved in forestation projects that Palestinians say aim to cover up Israeli human rights abuses.
-In the 1970s, for example, JNF Canada donated funds to build a park over three Palestinian villages in the Latrun area near Jerusalem (Imwas, Yalu and Beit Nuba) whose residents were forcibly displaced by the Israeli army in 1967. Plaques erected near the entrance to the park – known as Ayalon Canada Park – display the names of JNF-Canada donors from cities and towns across Canada.
-The JNF-KKL is also presently involved in the destruction of the Bedouin village of al-Araqib. Located in Israel’s southern Negev desert, al-Araqib has been demolished over 100 times since July 2010 to make way for a JNF-KKL forest.
-“The JNF is using environmentalism and the fact that they are reforesting lands to cover up human rights violations and dispossession of people from their land. And given that the Green Party does have the environment as a central platform, I thought it appropriate for the Green Party to take this on,” Levine said.
-Setting an example
-Meanwhile, Lascaris said that by adopting BDS into its official policy, the Green Party might influence other Canadian political parties to pass similar measures, especially the left-leaning New Democrats (NDP).
-Under the influence of leader Thomas Mulcair, the NDP has adopted a more pro-Israel stance than it traditionally espoused.
-“I think that the leadership of the NDP does not reflect the views of the grassroots, and the grassroots is now going to be asking some very tough questions of the leadership,” Lascaris said.
-“That hopefully will lead to their adoption of a resolution of a similar nature and the snowball effect, we will build on it from there.”

+articleTitle: May 2022 – Page 2
+pageTitle: May 2022 – Page 2 – Mondoweiss
+dataScrapedDate: 2025-10-25T20:45:12.829Z
+url: https://mondoweiss.net/2022/05/page/2
 ---
+Their flag, like their state, will fall
+By Omar Zahzah
+May 28, 2022
+25
+On May 29th, fascist Zionist settlers held a flag march throughout Palestinian areas of Jerusalem’s Old City. Rotted to the core with colonial racism, this march was intended to celebrate Zionist forces’ seizure of East Jerusalem in 1967. But in the seeming surety of escalating violence, an anxiety about belonging lurks. A state defined by and through the negation of the native, through sanctioned racism and supremacy, is a state running on borrowed time. The settlers may have marched on Sunday. And they may have waved their flags. But their flag, like their state, will fall.