Portside

Reader Comments: Time for Impeachment - Differing responses from Portside readers; Voting - Gerrymandering, and Racial Segregation - Today; White Working-Class Voters and the Future of Progressive Politics; Chelsea Manning is Free!; News from South Africa -- COSATU Bans Zuma from Speaking at its Events; Jewish Voice for Peace video - Israel Palestine Conflict 101; and more...

Campaigns to silence criticism of Israel don’t protect Jews — they endanger them. A national conversation on what antisemitism is — and what it isn’t — is long overdue. Recent reshuffling among the Trump administration may have Steve Bannon on the outs, but we are only weeks removed from a white supremacist as “the shadow president.”

Left parties and movements have a huge role to play to respond to the call and despair of ordinary people in Southern Europe, North Africa and the Mideast. We need to build a movement for social and climate justice, democratic participation, peace and socialism to oppose austerity, oppression, militarization and a lack of democracy.

Israel must cloak itself in sorrow over what happened since that terrible summer of 1967, when it won a war and lost nearly everything. Israel is to hold lavish celebrations over the coming weeks to mark the 50th anniversary of what it calls the “liberation of Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights” – or what the rest of us describe as the birth of the occupation.

Reader Comments: Syria Catastrophe - Who Benefits?; A Day Without Immigrants - Hundreds Of Thousands Will Strike May 1; Montana Special Election; Trump, McCarthyism, and Russian Hacking; Portside's Culture posts; Resources: Combating climate change; New book - In the Fields of the North; Announcements: Rana Plaza film showings; Sarah Jaffe on American Activists; Women Fight the Islamic State; Marx's Capital-after 150 Years; Journey to Palestine and Israel; and more...

It's time to end US military engagements in the Middle East. Drones, special operations, CIA arms supplies, military advisers, aerial bombings - the whole nine yards. Over and done with. That might seem impossible in the face of ISIS, terrorism, Iranian ballistic missiles, and other US security interests, but a military withdrawal from the Middle East is by far the safest path for the United States and the region. That approach has instructive historical precedents.

Reader Comments: Trump Failure Answer is Single Payer; Gorsuch-"Originalist" Disaster; Israel Segregationist and Apartheid; Left Growth Today - Religious Left, Socialists, Feminists; Censorship and Art - Emmett Till painting; PBS; Maine Fishermen; Job Growth and Worker Injury; Resources: Teachers’ Union Guide for Immigrant and Refugee Children; Announcements: Black Women in the Media; Chicago-April 4; 81st Annual Celebration of the Lincoln Brigade; and more...

`It's exactly what the Old South was in America. Blacks knew where they could go: they could drink from that fountain, they couldn't go over there, they couldn't eat in that place,' the American actor tells an Israeli TV station during a tour of the segregated West Bank city.

Maryland lawmakers are considering a bill that would violate free speech rights in order to continue a culture of impunity for violating Palestinian human rights. Maryland’s first anti-BDS bill had enough co-sponsors that it they had all voted in favor of the bill it would have passed. Yet, thanks to popular mobilization it died in committee. This bill can be defeated as well.