Israel passed a law on today to declare that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid. Racist and discriminatory practices against non-Jews are legal.
Felicia Langer was a Holocaust survivor, a communist, and one of the first Israeli lawyers to defend Palestinian residents of the occupied territories in the Israeli Supreme Court. She died in Germany last week.
Sixty-three Israeli teenagers have published an open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu on Thursday, declaring their refusal to join the Israeli army due to their opposition to the occupation. The group calls itself the "2017 Seniors' Letter," continuing a long tradition of similar letters sent by high school seniors announcing their refusal to join the army, dating back to 1970
All people around the world and across time crave similar things. They want the chance to raise their families within a peaceful and fair environment. Also, one that affords a decent quality of life without fear of one’s fellow man. This was the main take away from our voyage into another world: Middle Eastern, Muslim, working class, rural and “occupied.” (If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?" ~ Hillel)
The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank is intensifying its crackdown on Palestinians exercising their rights to free speech. Meanwhile politicians and activists in France are calling on their government to act on behalf of a Palestinian-French human rights defender arrested by Israel.
What I’m experiencing in this moment is a small example of how the occupation is used to take away agency from the Palestinian people on a daily basis. Each and every day, Palestinians are subjected to arbitrary checkpoints which delay their travel, restricted water which strips them of basic dignity, home demolitions which tear families apart, and constant surveillance that has seeped into every aspect of Palestinian society. I am broken but not finished.
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.
`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.
U.S. generosity, which costs every American taxpayers $300 a year, is detrimental to Israel and will only push it toward more acts of aggression. Hundreds of Israeli intellectuals appeal to world Jewry: `End Occupation for Israel's Sake'. Signatories of letter include seven high-ranking IDF officers, 20 former ambassadors, authors David Grossman, Amos Oz. As long as U.S. aid isn't in question, Israeli settlements are here to stay.
The defiant display of Palestinian flags in Glasgow last week by Scottish fans of the Celtic soccer team raised over $200,000 in donations online, all marked for two Palestinian charitable groups. Activist fans of Scotland's Celtics soccer team - the working-class, historically progressive community already facing punishment for flying Palestinian flags at a recent game against Israel to protest the Occupation - have launched the fundraiser.
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