Let me ask you a question. If you identify as Jewish, what is your reaction when you see a news item such as: ‘Israel settles 50 Ukrainian Jewish families in West Bank settlements’? Do you think, hey, wait a minute? Why is Israel accepting only Jewish war refugees? Or, in another leap, why is Israel “settling” refugees on internationally recognized[Read More…]

I have been trying to normalize anti-Zionist, anti-Israel speech through my writing and social-media activism for many years now. It hasn’t been easy (see my account of suing Quora for muzzling anti-Zionist speech here). In today’s climate of right-wing vigilantism, it has just gotten worse. I am now the target of a campaign to cancel my Medium blog, where I[Read More…]

An Israeli flag flies over the illegally annexed city of Jerusalem from a Jewish settlement. Establishing settlements has been the method through which Israel has Judaized Jerusalem and parts of the West Bank. (DAVID SILVERMAN/Getty Images) Today we are experiencing in the American public space an electric historic occurrence. We are, as a society, finally passing vocal moral judgment on[Read More…]

To me, an American-Palestinian, the world tainted by the corona virus is analogous to Israel tainted by the evil it contains. Every day for the past few days, I have been listening to New York Governor Cuomo give his daily briefing on the virus. His words resonate with me eerily transforming themselves to advice on how to handle Israel’s cruel[Read More…]

For how long will discourse on the plight of the Palestinian people be hostage to the notion that “impartial observers”, i.e., the silent majority on Israel, must be addressed in a manner that accounts for “where they are, not where we’d like them to be”? And who defines where these people are in the first place? According to Robert Cohen,[Read More…]

When Michelle Alexander, a distinguished African-American scholar, wrote her now famous column in The New York Times, ‘Time to Break the Silence on Palestine’,her sympathetic words toward Palestinians received huge attention. Her article became a “watershed moment … with arguably even more impact on mainstream U.S. opinion than Israel’s onslaught last spring against Gaza’s Great March of Return, which left[Read More…]

  Upon hearing the news that Palestinian diplomat Dr. Hanan Ashrawi had been denied entry to the United States on a speaking engagement, my husband wrote an e-mail to Indiana Senator Mike Braun titled, ‘Tell State Dept & Trump to give Ashrawi a visa now!’ His letter was brief and to the point: Dear Senator Braun: The State Department under[Read More…]

The Judaization of Jerusalem. It used to work under cover of darkness, at least in the mainstream media, but now it’s out in the open with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem from the United States. Israel implements its judaization of Jerusalem by directly undermining the sanctity of both Muslim (the Haram al Sharif) and Christian (the Via Dolorosa)[Read More…]

Many wonder why Israel continues to persecute the Palestinians in Gaza with such brutal repression. The answer is simple; Palestinians in Gaza pose a demographic and, indeed, an existential threat to the Jewish state, which created the inferno that is Gaza today in order “to exist” as such. The Russian Zeev Jabotinsky described his position on the Zionist colonization of[Read More…]

Palestine is about to be gang-raped again. It’s been 71 years now, to the day, and the Jewish State of Israel, the bastard progeny of Zionism’s rape of Palestine, is still “thriving” among us as the fictitious “ancestral homeland” of Jews — a deceptive rhetorical ploy Thomas Friedman, among many others, has been spouting, without check — until recently. “The term ‘Jew’ is fuzzy[Read More…]

On this seventy-first annual commemoration of Palestine’s Jewish-state Nakba, let’s resolve not to continue to oversimplify things. Whether you believe the American rabbi and historian Arthur Hertzberg’s assessment of the Zionist idea as “unprecedented … an essential dialogue between the Jew and the nations of the earth”, rather than a matter between Jews and God, or you believe the assessment of[Read More…]

The concept of martyrdom has sustained the Palestinian struggle for decades and continues to be the single most formidable obstacle in the path of the forces that would liquidate (in Arabic, تصفيهtassfiyah) the cause. You don’t hear the term “liquidation” used in the English press in connection with the struggle. There, politically correct terms such as “negotiations” or, until recently,[Read More…]

The West Bank is under threat of annexation by Israel now; the caged Palestinians in Gaza are clamoring, at a grassroots level, for the right to return to their homes and property a few kms away in Israel, as per UN Res 194, and being pushed back with brutality. The “deal of the century” is looming darkly in the horizon. [Read More…]

Photo caption: Welcome to Israeli elections where advocating war crimes gets you votes! Sign reads “No to ceasefire. It’s time for continuous (non-stop) fire.” As Haidar Eid, Associate Professor at al-Aqsa University on the Gaza Strip,put it, If we are to gain anything from this critical moment, we should seize the opportunity offered us by the blatant racism of Israeli[Read More…]

How can historical facts like ethnic cleansing, Apartheid and the Palestinian struggle for justice in general, be subject to “diverse opinions” by 100 liberal rabbis so highly committed to the Jewish tradition? How is that possible? The 100 rabbis who signed a letter in defense of Michelle Alexander published by Tikkun Magazine perplex and confuse me. What exactly do they[Read More…]

I am appalled and angry at the British government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism following pressure by various Jewish Zionist groups for the same reason I am against another document the British government was pressured into adopting – the Balfour Declaration of 1917, “a short letter by Arthur Balfour to arguably one of the[Read More…]

The history behind Palestine and Israel is a history of Jewish European settler-colonialism — i.e., Zionism. And since racism is a symptom and a tool of settler-colonialism, Zionism is also viewed as anti-Semitism, and as ethno-supremacy or Jewish supremacy, Arabophobia and Islamophobia. The triangulation of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the history of Palestine and Israel is part of the settler-colonial movement[Read More…]

Chris Hayes’ incredulous tweet on the killing of Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar in Gaza is being echoed everywhere it seems on social media.Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes, a weekday news and opinion television show on MSNBC. On June 7, 2018 he tweeted: “The wording of that [Israel Defense Forces] IDF video is so bizarre. Hamas “incited” a woman[Read More…]

Despite Israel’s intensive cover-up of its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people, stark images and indisputable facts continue to seep through from the Gaza Strip. The world has never witnessed a braver, more steadfast and resolute people than the en-caged Palestinians of Gaza — and that goes for every man, woman and child, from Hamas down, enduring unspeakable conditions and saying, in a voice[Read More…]

As a Palestinian, I barely raise an eyebrow when I hear Mohammed bin Salman say things like, Palestinians“must accept what US offers or stop complaining.” That’s because I don’t make the mistaken assumption (as many people do) that the ideology of “Arab Nationalism” plays a factor today in politics related to Israel and the Jewish settler-colonial occupation of “mandate” Palestine.[Read More…]

During the time that Palestinians call The Great Rebellion, or Revolt against British pro-Zionist policies in Palestine, 1936 – 1939, things began to go seriously wrong for Palestinian Arabs living in Jaffa and have continued to deteriorate with no reprieve yet. Jaffa, at the time, was a major economic center in Palestine, a port and commercial hub.In the 19th century,[Read More…]

The reaction of Israelis to The Great March of Return depends on the “nationality” of the Israeli being referred to. In Israel, there are Israeli citizens but no Israeli nationality – only “Jewish nationality” or “Palestinian Arab”, etc. (this is intentionally aimed at maintaining Israel as a Jewish State). So, we have Palestinian-Arab MK Haneen Zoabi reacting to Israel’s massacres in Gaza as follows, and in the[Read More…]

Israel’s official mantra to explain and defend its crimes against Palestinians, including massacres, has always been, and continues to be, “security”. For Israel, the word “security” means the security to exist as a Zionist Jewish state on part or all of historic Palestine — to exist as a state meant to be populated by as many Jews from around the world as it[Read More…]

  You can justify what’s happening now to Palestinians in Gaza only if you can justify our Nakba – the violent establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 against the will of Palestinian non-Jewish Arabs, the vast majority at the time. UK Jewish Voice for Labor (JVL) is calling for “an unconditional end to Israel’s inhuman siege of Gaza.” They should be calling[Read More…]

If you have never heard of Umm al-Hiran, don’t blame yourself. What’s happening there is a well-kept secret in the international media, along with Israel’s other ongoing crimes. But within Israel, Umm al-Hiran (and other forced evictions and ethnic-cleansing projects taking place today in the Naqab, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem and elsewhere) is run-of-the-mill news coated with hasbara that doesn’t flinch even at an image[Read More…]

  Mahmoud Abbas today is in the terrible grip of the second phase of the Oslo accord of 1993, also known as “the peace process”. Many, including myself, have written about the death of this agonizing process, but in reality, it is not dead; it is very much in progress as scripted. The epic tragedy of the “Peace Process” is[Read More…]

Palestinians are in a constant state of rage. And the question that presents itself daily is: Against whom to focus this rage? Today, 19 March 2018, our rage is split, as summed up by KamelHawwash on Twitter: “#Abbas launches stinging attack on #Hamas holding it responsible for the explosion that targeted Prime Minister Hamdallah’s convoy when he visited #Gaza but also calls US Ambassador Friedman a[Read More…]

  Stop the censorship! It is impossible for Palestinians to advocate against Israel without using the words “Jews” And “Jewish”. My answer on Quora to ‘What is the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” movement regarding Israel?’ does not break any Quora rules, certainly not the one meant to keep discourse on Quora civil, even when the question itself was altered[Read More…]

  Regarding the story Al-Jazeera headlines as: ‘Two Israeli soldiers killed in West Bank attack Incident in the West Bank comes amid ‘100 days of rage’ protests by Palestinians against Trump’s #Jerusalem embassy move.’ CNN, which also broke the news, could use the following pointers from a Palestinian reader to improve its presentation of the story to a world-wide audience. FIRST, notice that[Read More…]

  “I am done with you!” This, coupled with an accusation of bigotry, is the reaction by an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew to my questioning of the pro-Palestine speech of another Israeli Jew and assuming he was a liberal-Zionist. This characterization on my part meant that I believed all Jews are Zionists – such was her knee-jerk assumption. All Jews are[Read More…]

How deep is the historical illiteracy of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Party and Donald Trump and his party? It is so deep, they are even immune to déjà vu, also known as “cryptomnesia”, which is where history is forgotten but nevertheless stored in the brain. Consider how AIPAC and the White House and State Department advisers[Read More…]

In breathtaking cognitive dissonance that is impossible to explain, so-called liberal Zionists stand against every wrong known to man except for the wrong meted out by the Zionist movement to Palestinian Arabs. Zionism is, as Dr Gideon Polya put it, “genocidal racism in awful theory and appalling, intentional genocidal practice”. [See Zionist quotes reveal genocidal racism and Palestinian Me Too: 140 Alphabetically-listed Zionist crimes Expose Appalling[Read More…]

  As a Palestinian, I am skeptical about Mahmoud Abbas’s address, billed by the press as “Abbas delivers rare address at UNSC meeting”, which calls for two states. Whereas I believe that BDS goals can be achieved through more than one political accommodation, including a two-state scenario in historic Palestine as a solution to its violent partition in 1948, I am skeptical about[Read More…]

  Facebook is under pressure to chill or suppress speech that delegitimizes theJewish state in the context of the Palestinian national liberation movementand international solidarity for Palestinians. At the same time, speech that delegitimizes Palestinians as a people with fundamental human rights is freely promoted on Facebook, not least by Israeli and U.S. officials themselves. The battle for hearts and minds over Palestine has long been[Read More…]

  Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has come a long way in advocating for Palestinian rights. They now fully embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, seeing it as the most effective method to effect change. JVP is on Israel’s BDS Ban List and is described by another Jewish group in the US (the Anti-Defamation League — ADL) as “the largest[Read More…]

A continuum of oppression is pervasive in Palestinian society, ranging from the matrix of control the Jewish state has imposed on Palestine to the oppression of cultural norms, such as those having to do with patriarchy, gender and class that are common to all societies toone degree or another. Because of the degradation, humiliation and devaluation Palestinians daily encounter, even[Read More…]

The #BDS Movement is a nonviolent grassroots movement originating in the occupied territory of Palestine. Its overriding principles are consistency and commitment to universal human rights, and it has proven to be effective, as a tactic, not least for changing the conversation on Israel. [See What is BDS]. The fact that the BDS Movement is a rights-based, apolitical approach does not mean[Read More…]

  Zionism [see http://state-of-terror.net/] is an insidious ideology. Its ideologues often gain traction by well-placed and oft repeated constructs – in films and TV series, in posts and comments on social media, and even in academia. So, it is no wonder that people end up having ideas about certain things, like the nature of Israel, the Zionist Jewish state, or[Read More…]

Jewish identity politics complicate the Palestinian response to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Sometimes it seems impossible to address the crux of the matter, the Jewish state Nakba in Palestine, without being subjected to attacks one way or another. On the last day of 2017, I posted a meme on my Facebook wall that provoked a long and heated argument. The meme[Read More…]

The detention of Ahed Tamimi of the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, along with her human rights activist mother Nariman Tamimi, for “lightly slapping” an Israeli soldier, as Amira Hass put it in Haaretz, is remarkable only because of the high profile, courage and sumoud (steadfastness) of the Tamimi family, who were featured on the cover of The New[Read More…]

Since 1897, the first Zionist Congress, Judaism has been entangled with Zionism. It’s time to disengage the two – no easy matter. When Zionist Jewish terrorist gangs in Palestine were transformed into Israel’s Defense Forces, they continued systematically practicing sociocide, politicide, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide on the Palestinian people under the banner of a bastardized Star of David. “The[Read More…]

  As Richard Falk points out, “anti-Semitism, and its links to Nazism and Fascism, and now to Trumpism, are genuinely menacing”, but Jews who call Trump himself an anti-Semite (in the sense of having an animus against Jews) are being false and so are those who perceive that the Labour Party in the U.K. is “too tolerant of anti-Semitism”. Consider these[Read More…]

  Look at me. Look at me as I am — a fellow human being. Look at me independently from your Jewish identity and your Jewish suffering. Are you offended? Does your worldview need wrenching out of a life-long schooling in a painful collective memory? Does it need, as a Jewish friend explained, an “internal revolution” to coax you out into a[Read More…]

Seasons six and seven of The Good Wife, an otherwise smart, sophisticated TV series with inspired acting, does a pretty good hatchet job on Palestine and Palestinians by hardly mentioning them and whitewashing Israel. This series, written by Robert and Michelle King, has attracted millions of viewers all over the world. The accumulation of bits and pieces about Israel and[Read More…]

I first heard of Ariel Gold through a Haaretz article that described her in the headline like this: Jewish Mother and BDS Activist: Code Pink’s Ariel Gold vs. Israel’s Travel Ban: The pro-Palestinian provocateur is under attack after a newspaper alleged that she ‘tricked’ her way into Israel last month. She says she will be ‘heartbroken’ if the authorities ban[Read More…]

  Few people know that, as a condition for admission to the UN in 1949, Israel accepted UN Resolution 194, which stipulates that Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the Jewish takeover of 1947-49 in Palestine, have the right of return. As with every other legitimate claim that Palestinians have made about their situation over the long years since[Read More…]

Anti-Semitism should not be used as an issue in discussions and debates over the struggle for the liberation of Palestine.  Ever since the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and all throughout the unfolding of Zionist policy, Jews like Chaim Weizmann have expressed the idea that Zionist crimes in Palestine are to be deplored, not so much because of[Read More…]

  When I write about the Jewish state, I am forced to write about Jews.  Although there is controversy among Jews themselves about Jewish identity, the fact remains that Israel manifests itself in Palestine as Jewish, both in the sense of “Jewish nationality”, an invention of political Zionism whose early leaders were atheists, as well as in the religious sense[Read More…]

I view Saudi Arabia as a dysfunctional manifestation of Islam.  In the same way, I view Israel as a dysfunctional manifestation of Judaism.  This is not to mean, I hasten to say, that either Judaism or Islam is inherently at odds with the social, cultural or political lives of its adherents or with universal moral values. The point I am[Read More…]

  The new Israeli law giving police power to block websites that purportedly publish “criminal” or “offensive” content follows a similar blockade of various websites in Palestine by the 13-year president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas – all in the name of “law and order”, “peace” and “fighting terrorism”. The equation is simple and has long been propagated by[Read More…]

East Jerusalem is occupied by Israel. It is also illegally annexed. It is also illegally separated from the rest of the West Bank by an illegal wall. In Jerusalem, Israel boasts of 220,000 illegal Jewish settlers settled on land confiscated from 300,000 Palestinian residents who are now landless. It boasts of 50,000 illegally displaced Palestinian Arabs and 685 illegally demolished Palestinian homes that have rendered 2,500[Read More…]