Support for Palestine independence climbs to 50% for first time since 2012; 62% of Democrats favor an independent state, 33% of Republicans; 34% view Israeli-Palestine conflict as a critical threat to the U.S. (Additional polls show that Americans are far less biased toward Israel than many people think. Most don’t want the US to take sides – which would mean stopping our $10 mill per day to Israel)
A Palestinian committed to peace was supposed to speak at synagogues, churches, & universities across the U.S. about the power of nonviolence and bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had a valid visa and had visited the U.S. before. Instead he was denied entry & sent back to Palestine without explanation.
Gideon Levy writes in Ha’aretz: “The apartheid did not start with him and will not end with his departure; it probably won’t even be dented. One of the most racist nations in the world cannot complain about its prime minister’s racism.”
Netanyahu: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. According to the nation-state law we passed, Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people — and not anyone else.”
Israel “destroyed 244 villages and built-up areas in the Golan and expelled their population, sparing only five villages (Majdal Shams, Buq’ata, Ain Qunya, Mas’ada and al-Ghajar). Not even places of worship, schools and health centres escaped destruction. The underlying aim of the occupation authorities was to eliminate Arab landmarks and obliterate the Arab identity of the Golan, as a result of which anyone who visits the Golan today is able to identify the locations of the former Arab villages only from their ruins…”
Addameer reports that since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory in 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders–approximately 20 percent of the total Palestinian population in the oPt and as much as 40 percent of the total male Palestinian population… 8,000 Palestinian children have been arrested since 2000. Boys and young men are seized in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Every year Israel arrests almost 1,000 Palestinian youngsters, some of them not yet 13.
A FAIR study finds that major US news outlets rarely mention the Right of Return, although it is a primary part of the Israel/Palestine issue. In the last ten years, only 0.01 percent of coverage of Palestinians or Palestine in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post informs its audience about the right of return or even mentions it at all. When they do mention it, they generally imply that it is not a legitimate, UN-conferred right; or they describe the exercise of that right as an act of aggression/national “suicide” for Israel.
In Arkansas, a newspaper publisher is in financial straits after refusing to sign an anti-BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) pledge for Israel. He believes that political dissent is protected speech, and that the Arkansas law violates his constitutional rights and his journalistic ethics.
Belen Fernandez writes in the Jacobin that Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent pact with a far-right, anti-Arab party ahead of April’s elections is in keeping with a state that has racism and exclusion baked into its foundation.
Thousands of Sudanese asylum seekers – most have been in Israel for years – hold no-benefit visas and live in slums or detention centers. Interior Minister Arye Dery has decided to keep them that way, at least until after the elections in April.