Palestinian rights are becoming mainstream, and support for Israel is declining – especially among Democrats. But you’d never guess it from the Democratic Party platform. (If you’re not happy with this, there’s a place you can upload a short video telling the DNC what you want the platform to contain…)
While America struggles with crises in health care, hunger, and homelessness, Congress has found the time to entertain over four dozen bills and resolutions that cater to a wealthy, heavily-armed state: Israel.
Operation Cast Lead (winter 2008-9) is emblematic of everything that is wrong with Israel’s approach to Gaza. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a political conflict to which there is no military solution. Yet Israel persists in shunning diplomacy and relying on brute military force – and not as a last resort but as a first resort.
Operation Cast Lead, the first of several incursions by Israel, killed 1,417 Palestinians and just 13 Israelis. Chillingly, the generals call their repeated bombardments ‘mowing the lawn’
Palestinian poet and Israeli citizen Dareen Tatour was sentenced to 5 months in prison for posting a poem titled ‘Resist, my people resist them’ on social media.
Zionist terrorism has existed since before the founding of Israel – and tolerated, empowered, even glorified. All the while, Palestinians have been condemned for resistance.
While the young woman’s killing was the latest in a long series of tragedies, the description of the attack as terrorism overlooks the fact that she was in East Jerusalem as an armed officer responsible for enforcing Israel’s control over the captive population of an occupied territory. The use of that language by American officials also clashes with U.S. law, which clearly defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents.”