Portside

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, signed an executive order essentially creating a blacklist of entities that boycott or divest from Israel or encourage others to do so, banning those companies from receiving taxpayer funding. The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as B.D.S., is a strategy intended to combat Israel's nearly 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, a situation akin to apartheid if allowed to continue.

Executive orders are meant to avert imminent or existential crises that cannot await legislation. It's as if we are being asked to believe that BDS is some deplorable enemy endangering our very existence as a free society, and that only those who really care, take action on behalf of the rest of us, who have not yet awoken to the grim reality. For Cuomo, fighting this fight on behalf of Israel is all about "freedom, liberty and democracy".

Bernie Sanders's Democratic Platform Committee picks reflect growing support for Palestine.

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This text describes the discourse on the Nakba - mostly the concept but also the historical event - in Israel. When did it appear? When did it decline and was repressed? What caused these changes? The attempt here is to describe historical moments, a periodization, from the founding of the state until today, in order to describe the relation to the term in each period and the changes it went through. Nakba Day - Solidarity actions across Ireland.

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'It's scary to see horrifying developments that took place in Europe begin to unfold here,' Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan said during a Holocaust Remembrance speech. The lunatics who will now start to scream against him need to know: This is what morality and responsibility sound like. - Israeli opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog.

Sanctions and boycott are the most non-violent, legitimate means there are (Israel constantly preaches to the world to use them against its enemies) and have been proven effective. We have no choice but to recognize that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the only game in town, the last hope for change. This is the only means to stop Israel from persisting in its crimes.

With a budget of nearly $50 million a year, Birthright has taken hundreds of thousands of Jewish youths over the last two decades on its whirlwind trips to Israel. Critics charge that Birthright conflates Judaism and Zionism and encourages unconditional Jewish support for Israel by offering a misleading and blatantly propagandistic narrative of Israeli history that erases Palestinians while glorifying Israeli atrocities.