State lawmakers and governors across the US have allowed the Israel lobby to write public policy. New laws and executive orders have been crafted by Israel lobbyists, then copied from one state to the next, adopted with virtually identical language. The groundwork for anti-boycott legislation was laid by Israel partisans a decade ago…
Recent news stories reported by the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC), April 26, 2019. Israeli soldiers invade West Bank, abduct children, assault Palestinians, injure a two-month-old baby. Israeli settlers storm archaeological site, Hebron town, etc.
Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange is incarcerated in a UK prison that has been called “Britain’s Guantanamo.” His crime was exposing actions the US government, the media, the Democratic–Clinton machine, Israel, and others wanted kept hidden, including war crimes and torture.
Every day of the year, the International Middle East Media Center (IMEMC) reports on incidents that Palestinians endure. It isn’t hard to detect patterns: home demolitions, land confiscation, abduction, and mistreatment of political prisoners are daily occurrences. Below are just some of the accounts reported by IMEMC for April 10, 2019. Each includes background information on the issue and part of the article.
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.
In Israel, two Palestinian political parties and one Jewish member of a mostly Palestinian party have been banned from running in the April 9th election; meanwhile a radical Jewish candidate stays in, despite the Attorney General’s recommendation to remove him from the ballot.
Alison Weir’s in depth investigation of the new “Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI),” created to counter growing support among Democrats for Palestinian rights (only 19 % of progressive Democrats now support Israel over Palestinians). DMFI plans to use its substantial financial resources & powerful connections to bring Democrats back into the pro-Israel fold and to target Democrats such as Betty McCollum who support Palestinian human rights…
Intellectual honesty is about confronting those things that make us uncomfortable, not ignoring them. Israel arrests Palestinian children; see 7 of the many videos of these actions. The US gives Israel over $10 million per day and Congress is currently considering legislation to give Israel even more. That makes it obligatory for Americans to learn the facts, and act on them.
Pro-Israel and Jewish response to Michelle Alexander’s recent NYT piece, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” was predictably hysterical and demonstrated that “hardline Israeli propagandists are losing their ability to shape political discourse on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” James Zogby examines what this means…