Between Dome of the Rock and a Hard Place
This is not a current event, but then again the Israeli effort to erase Palestinians from history and contemporary life make the article forever relevant. According to a doctoral dissertation prepared at Ben-Gurion University using Israeli government archives, Israel “plundered and destroyed” 27,000 Palestinian books as part of its effort to “Judaize the country,” which [...]
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The only thing that distinguished this event from an endless stream of similar incidents was the fact it was recorded on video. Thankfully, a Palestinian held in hand one of B’Tselem’s video cameras and thereby managed to generate a massive quantity of evidence, which yielded an infinitesimal amount of accountability. To make a long story [...]
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The last few blog posts have focused on the contradictions—that is, fabrications—coming out of the “IDF” Press Office and Israeli Foreign Ministry about the flotilla massacre. Here, I focus again on the IDF effort to paint the humanitarian activists as terrorists. The point is not new; it has been making the rounds on the blogosphere, [...]
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The Israeli government is very rapidly losing control of its own hasbara efforts. As documented in recent posts, Israel’s Consulate in New York first claimed no commandos were detained by activists, then Israel’s navy said there were, and just now the consulate wrote me again (@HybridStates) to say no IDF troops were captured at any [...]
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Yesterday Yuli Edelstein at the Israel Consulate in New York fielded questions via Twitter about the flotilla massacre. I asked directly: “Were IDF commandos detained by flotilla activists? If so, for how long? How were they released?” The Israeli Consulate responded: “Not true. Its a rumor.” About 30 hours later the world is informed that [...]
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It’s difficult to say precisely when the Gaza siege became a formal naval blockade (Update: a commenter, Marian Houk, points out that the IDF Spokesperson announced the blockade on Jan 3, 2009, a fact that raises an additional question of how the IDF views the siege from 2006 to 2009.) But in the language of [...]
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Today is the anniversary of the establishment of Israel on May 15th, 1948. It is also the day that Palestinians commemorate as the Nakba (“the catastrophe”). Here are two excellent documentaries on the establishment of Israel and the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Spend some time today thinking about the history conveyed in these [...]
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I hate hyperbole when things are already so bad that no exaggeration is needed. So I am going to keep things as rational and methodical as possible, with a nice and healthy smattering of caveats wherever needed. Still, I have no doubt what I am about to say would disturb my family members who slowly [...]
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After what presumably amounted to months of desperate searching, Judge Goldstone’s detractors finally found the “smoking gun” to forever lay to rest his damaging—and still unrebutted—report on Israeli and Hamas-orchestrated war crimes in Gaza. It turns out that he is a judge, a white man, from South Africa, of sufficient age and experience to have [...]
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Concerned citizens from around the world will begin observance this week of Israeli Apartheid Week. This is an excellent opportunity to spend some time thinking about the system of institutionalized and violent discrimination in place in Israel/Palestine, about your personal role in the conflict (we are almost all parties to Palestinian oppression either through political, [...]
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