Benjamin Netanyahu’s last-ditch campaign announcement yesterday that if he reelected he will annex West Bank settlements and the Jordan Valley has brought a divided response from American Jewish groups.

Right and center Zionist orgs have said nothing. AIPAC’s twitter feed doesn’t mention the big plan. The American Jewish Committee is praising John Bolton. Even the Democratic Majority for Israel group is quiet about annexation. They all surely approve the policy and don’t want to contribute to the divisiveness over Israel in U.S. politics.

But liberal Zionist groups are very upset about the announcement, as a threat to the “two state solution,” the Oslo dream of establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Liberal Zionists believe they can only preserve Israel by separating Jewish and Palestinian majorities in adjacent states.

Siding with Israel lobby groups, the Canadian government is appealing a federal court ruling that wines produced in Israeli settlements cannot be labeled “Made in Israel.”

Meanwhile, Canadian authorities have bent to the demands of Israel advocates and put a hold on the distribution of Palestinian beer and wine.

Just a few days after Israeli occupation forces expelled a Palestinian family from land in the southern occupied West Bank, an unauthorised settler outpost was established there, reported Haaretz.

Last month, Israeli authorities carried out the eviction of the Cassia family near Beit Jala, demolishing their home and a restaurant they had been operating on the same site.

The land is located in Area C of the occupied West Bank, where Palestinians are systematically denied construction permits by Israeli occupation authorities.

On June 11, the Foundation for Middle East Peace held a panel discussion at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC to discuss the current situation in Israeli-Palestinian relations, with a specific focus on the treatment of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Jafar Farah, the founder and director of the Mossawa Center, the Advocacy Center for Arab Citizens in Israel, launched the conversation with remarks about the inequality Palestinian citizens of Israel encounter in everyday life. Israel’s 2018 Basic Law defines the country as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” a classification that blatantly discriminates against the country’s Palestinian minority. “We cannot live in a reality where we are second-class citizens as a result of a constitutional law that says that Arabic is not the language of the state, and that segregated housing is legal,” Farah stated. He went on to call for a new paradigm in which equality and human rights, rather than nationalism, is stressed.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announced shortly after the attack that their warplane bombed 15 targets belonging to the Palestinian Hamas Movement, including a naval compound and several tunnels.

There were no immediate reports of casualties.

Prior to the bombings, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's, bodyguards rushed him to shelter in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod when the sirens sounded during a Tuesday evening rally, a week ahead of a general election.

Netanyahu was unhurt and several minutes later he continued his speech, which was broadcast live on social media by his right-wing Likud party.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday his plans to annex the Jordan Valley in the West Bank as an election promise if he wins next time.

"Today, I announce my intention, after the establishment of a new government, to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Jordan Valley and the northern Dead Sea," Netanyahu said in a speech broadcast live on Israeli TV channels.

The prime minister said, however, that the move would be done after publication of a long-awaited US peace plan and consultations with US President Donald Trump.

Around 65,000 Palestinians and 11,000 Israeli settlers live in the Jordan Valley, according to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem. The main Palestinian city is Jericho, with around 28 villages and smaller Bedouin communities.

For their part, the EU said they did not recognise any changes made to the pre-1967 borders and called any settlement plans "illegal under international law".

Since the 1948 Nakba when Israel was created in the historic land of Palestine, which resulted in the ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homeland, successive Israeli governments have continued to propose political and demographic plans for the displacement of more Palestinians from the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and from within Israel itself. This is all with the aim of creating an ethnically pure “Jewish state” emptied of its indigenous population.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hinted on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace plan, set to be unveiled after next week’s Israeli election, would give him the green light to annex the Jordan Valley, nearly a quarter of the occupied West Bank.

Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli army during Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza, is borrowing apartheid South Africa’s talking points to boost his election campaign.

Gantz heads the allegedly center-left opposition coalition hoping to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s elections later this month.

In a campaign attack on Israel’s prime minister, Monday, Gantz declared that, unlike Netanyahu, he would have allowed US congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to visit Israel and the occupied territories.

Had they visited, Gantz claimed, they would have seen “with their own eyes” that “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel … and the second best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.”

If Israel annexes parts of the occupied West Bank, all agreements signed with Israel will end, warned the Palestinian president on Tuesday, reports Anadolu Agency.

“All agreements and their resulting obligations would end if the Israeli side annexes the Jordan Valley, the northern Dead Sea, and any part of the Palestinian territories occupied in 1967,” Mahmoud Abbas said in a statement, according to Palestine’s WAFA news agency.

Abbas’ remarks came in response to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement that he would annex the Jordan Valley and a number of settlements if he wins next week’s Israeli election.

Abbas stressed that Palestinians “have the right to defend our rights and achieve our goals by all available means, regardless of the consequences.”

An Israeli tank hit two Hamas military positions in the northern Gaza Strip on Wednesday after three rockets were fired at Israel from the besieged enclave minutes earlier, Israel's military said in a statement.

The Hof Ashkelon Regional Council announced that one of the rockets landed in a greenhouse in one of the communities within its jurisdiction, causing no damage nor injuries, Israel's Haaretz newspaper said.

A second rocket landed in another community within the regional council, with one home damaged lightly by shrapnel, the council's spokesman said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Tuesday that he may annex the Jordan Valley and other parts of the occupied bank "in coordination" with the United States — a move that risks shattering the fragile status quo in the volatile region.

"This is a historic opportunity to apply sovereignty to communities in Judea and Samaria," he told reporters in Jerusalem Tuesday, referring to the West Bank.

"I request a mandate to apply Jewish sovereignty to all communities and I intend to do so in coordination with the United States," he said, adding that the U.S. would present its long-awaited Israel-Palestinian peace plan a few days after the election.

Dozens of Palestinians have forcibly disappeared in Saudi Arabia and their fates remain unknown, according to testimonies by their families given to a Swiss-based rights group.

The Euro-Mediterranean for Human Rights Monitor, an independent, nonprofit rights organization, announced the information in a statement on Saturday.

It said it was unable to give the exact number of the Palestinians who have forcibly disappeared in Saudi Arabia, but said it had the names of some 60 Palestinians who had met that fate.

The Palestinian community in Saudi Arabia believes that the real number of the abductees is far higher.

A senior leader of the Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has warned that Hamas will thwart any plot designed by the Israeli regime to target Palestinian refugees’ right of return to Palestine.

Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, made the remark during a speech at a gathering in the besieged Gaza Strip on Sunday, accusing US and Israeli media of encouraging Palestinians to emigrate from their homeland.

“The issue of refugees has been the target of a conspiracy since the beginning of the first refugee displacement and expulsion,” he said.

“Today, more than any time in the past, we need a clear and national strategic plan in order to face this dangerous plot,” which is “against al-Quds, against the refugees, against our land and against human beings.”

What is the significance of this resignation? Consider these major incidents while Greenblatt was in office, which was only for 2 years.

US severed its diplomatic links with the Palestinians, closed down its consulate in Jerusalem Al Quds, and cut all aid to the Palestinian territories.

And that is a partial listing Hanan Ashrawi, a senior Palestinian official, said she thought that Palestinians as a whole were going to say good riddance.

SOURCE: STRATEGIC-CULTURE.ORG
(SC Op-Ed) — There have been several interesting developments in the United States government’s war on free speech and privacy.

First of all, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP), which is responsible for actual entry of travelers into the country, has now declared that it can legally access phones and computers at ports of entry to determine if there is any subversive content which might impact on national security.

“Subversive content” is, of course, subjective, but those seeking entry can be turned back based on how a border control agent perceives what he is perusing on electronic media.

It’s clear that Ismail Ajjawi will not have the same right to speak out freely as his Harvard classmates enjoy. He will have to be exceedingly cautious about joining student demonstrations in favor of Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), for example.

In short, Ismail Ajjawi will not have the college experience that he deserves. And neither will his classmates

END YOUR SILENCE ON THESE ATROCITIES!

Palestinian women are protesting for women’s rights after a 21-year-old was reportedly killed in a so-called “honor killing.”

Netanyahu also related to the furor caused by the decision to bar entry to US congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

B

Israeli police clash with Palestinian Muslim worshipers in the al-Aqsa Mosque compound on the start of Eid al-Adha (Feast of Sacrifice) festivities.

Palestinians are calling for solidarity with Kashmir following the Indian government’s move to revoke the state’s autonomy while imposing an unprecedented lockdown.

“As Palestinians, we deeply feel the suffering of the people in Kashmir under military repression that in so many cases is similar to Israeli forms of subjugation and control,” the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said on Tuesday.

The BNC is the steering group for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign for Palestinian rights.

What is happening under our very eyes should shame us all, it is the unresolved question that should never be separated from the Holocaust and that the “Jewish state” again and again as a license for their crimes against human rights and international law, robbery, raids and use Zionist propaganda.

Arab Member of the Knesset Ahmad Tibi said he does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over Jerusalem or Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Speaking on Israeli television, Tibi said that he could not accept the presence of any Jew in Al-Aqsa Mosque, adding that Al-Aqsa is exclusive to Muslims, adding that Jerusalem is an occupied city.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing US President Donald Trump to give the go-ahead for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank before the country’s upcoming general election.

Officials in the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office told the Times of Israel’s Hebrew-language site on Sunday that Netanyahu is seeking a public declaration from President Trump in support of Israel’s annexation of “Area C” of the occupied West Bank, where the majority of its some 500 illegal settlements are located.

Netanyahu is pushing for President Trump to issue such a declaration before Israel’s general election on 17 September in a bid to secure his Likud party’s victory and therefore his re-election as prime minister.

Israeli police injured dozens of Palestinians praying at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on Sunday, the first day of Eid al-Adha or Feast of the Sacrifice.

The Muslim holiday this year coincides with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B’Av, which in Jewish belief commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

The Islamic Waqf – the body responsible for Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem – announced on Friday that only the al-Aqsa mosque would open its doors for prayers in Jerusalem on the first day of the holiday.

Israel initially closed the al-Aqsa mosque compound, which Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, for Jewish worshippers on Sunday, as is the norm, to avoid clashes with Muslim worshippers.

An East London council banned a charity bike ride raising money for Palestinian children from using its public parks, internal emails revealed last week.

The council also secretly sent a list of proposed speakers to the Metropolitan Police asking if they were “extremist,” The Electronic Intifada can reveal.

The emails indicate that Tower Hamlets secretly based their decision on the “furore within the Labour Party over anti-Semitism” and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s discredited definition of anti-Semitism.

Last week, for the 149th time in a row, Israel demolished the Palestinian Bedouin village of al-Araqib in the Negev desert.

Police raided the village and broke the tin homes belonging to the Bedouins. Tin construction material was confiscated to make it harder for them to rebuild their homes, leaving them homeless in temperatures that could reach 40 degrees Celsius this time of the year.

Israeli home demolitions are well publicised. Solidarity campaigns routinely brief the public opinion about them. But often, the focus is on home demolitions in the occupied Palestinian territories, which have been stepped up dramatically this year as Israel prepares to annex the rest of the West Bank.

Hundreds of Jewish settlers on Sunday forced their way into Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, according to a Palestinian official, Anadolu reports.

“Since the morning, over 1,729 Jewish settlers have entered the compound,” Firas al-Dibs, a spokesman for Jerusalem’s Religious Endowments Authority said in a statement.

“The settlers incursions were backed by Israeli police officers,” he said.

Israeli forces attacked Palestinian worshippers in Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa mosque complex on Sunday, injuring at least 65, according to a Palestinian official, Anadolu Agency reports.

“A number of Palestinians were injured during clashes with Israeli forces inside the Al-Aqsa mosque compound,” said Firas al-Dibs, a spokesman for Jerusalem’s Jordan-run Religious Endowments Authority.

“The Palestinians were injured while they were preventing Jewish settlers from storming the holy mosque,” he added.

Israeli forces mapped overnight Sunday the homes of two Palestinians suspected in the West Bank murder of Israeli soldier Dvir Sorek, ahead of a possible demolition, reports Haaretz.

Cousins Nseir Asafra, 24, and Kassem Asafra, 30, were arrested on Saturday in the Palestinian town of Beit Kahil, northwest of Hebron. Kassem’s wife Enas was also arrested, as was a third man, Akrama Asafra, on suspicion of aiding the two suspects.

The area of Wadi Yasul in Silwan, housing over 500 residents, has been slated for demolition by Israeli authorities.

With nowhere to expand over the decades, the residents of Wadi Yasul have had to build without difficult-to-obtain Israeli permits, subjecting them to demolition orders and displacement.

Scores of Palestinians injured amid protests after hundreds of settlers allowed into the compound on Jewish holiday

A prestigious religious institute for Israeli army officer candidates is embroiled again in anti-human rhetoric. A rabbi at the school has been exposed (Hebrew) calling for the enslavement of Palestinians. The text was discovered by blogger/lawyer Yair Nehorai, who’s been documenting the scandalous teaching of the Bnei David religious college rabbis for over a year.

Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel, the head of Bnei David, a military religious college in the settlement of Eli in the occupied West Bank, was lecturing about “slavery and the position of workers according to Judaism”, and offered a justification of Jewish supremacy and the enslavement of Palestinians under occupation:

Israeli police fired rubber bullets and tear gas inside the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem on Sunday after worshipping Muslims objected to around 450 Israeli settlers being allowed into the holy site despite it being the first day of Eid al-Adha.

The Muslim celebrations coincided with the Jewish holiday of Tisha B'av, which sees an increase in Jewish visits to the Al-Aqsa compound.

The Israeli actions broke up the festival atmosphere inside the area as thousands of Muslims worshippers had gathered to celebrate Eid al-Adha.

BDS Malaysia would like to thank Kevin Watkins of Save the Children UK, for elucidating the terrible deprivations now being inflicted on the people of Gaza, especially the children there.

Watkins is absolutely right in that the humanitarian crisis engulfing the Gazan population has not received the highlighting it deserves in the world media. It is but one manifestation of the double standards and hypocrisy of the world’s major media outlets which have helped to prolong the agony and suffering of Palestinians to more than seven decades.

Children and mothers are bearing the brunt of the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which includes widespread malnutrition. Allowing the current situation to slide into a full-fledged catastrophe would be an indefensible dereliction of responsibility by the international community.

Just the facts, right? Yet the film’s very existence is enough for some critics to dismiss it offhand as “propaganda” or “manipulative and disingenuous”. That’s a shame because Gaza studiously avoids direct political engagement, It is, rather, a portrait that is in keeping with a taxi driver’s description of Gaza: “Most of the people here are ordinary people like me. They just want to be left alone to live their lives. They just want to take care of their families and educate their children.”

The misleadingly-named Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2019 has been introduced to the US House of Representatives shortly before its summer recess.

Republican lawmaker Doug Collins, who proposed the bill, is portraying it as “an effective tool for investigating whether prohibited discriminatory actions have become a barrier to learning” in universities.

As the legislation notes, however, the Department of Education already is empowered to investigate incidents of anti-Semitism as a form of discrimination.

A careful reading of its text suggests that its real intent is to muzzle students and teachers who oppose Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

Israeli politicians and leaders of the settler movement are calling for annexation of the occupied West Bank after the body of an Israeli soldier was found on the side of the road early Thursday morning in the southern West Bank.

The soldier was identified as 19-year-old Dvir Sorek, a settler from the Ramallah-area Ofra settlement, and was reportedly stabbed to death by Palestinian attackers affiliated with the Hamas movement, Israeli media reported.

Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Thursday to build settlements across the occupied West Bank hours after a young Israeli was found fatally stabbed in the territory.

The Israeli prime minister was speaking at the inauguration of a new neighborhood of 650 housing units in Beit El, a West Bank settlement.

“These despicable terrorists, they come to uproot – we come to plant. They come to destroy – we come to build,” Netanyahu said.

“We will deepen our roots in our homeland, in all of its parts,” he added.

The family became concerned for their safety as soon as Israel began to bomb Gaza in a major offensive during the summer of 2014. On 8 July that year – the first day of the offensive – all 23 people living in the family’s home were evacuated.

Finding temporary refuge in the homes of relatives, they did not bring anything with them, apart from the clothes they were wearing.

On the evening of 29 July, Abdelrahim received the news he had been dreading. A neighbor phoned him to say the house had been bombed.

On 5 August Fordham University students won a landmark legal victory against the university’s unilateral ban of a Students for Justice in Palestine chapter.

“Palestine Legal has documented over 1,000 such incidents as censorship and suppression since 2014, and this is the first time that we fought back and won in the court,” attorney Sainath tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

The legal fight lasted nearly three years.

Earl Blumenauer has represented Oregon’s 3rd congressional district since 1996, but he’ll face two primary challengers in 2020. Charles Rand Barnett, who ran against Blumenauer in 2018, and Albert Lee. Lee is the dean of Portland Community College’s Business and Computing division and running on a progressive platform that includes support for the Green New Deal and Medicare For All. Unlike many Democrats, he also advocates for a progressive foreign policy that aims to challenge the Washington consensus on U.S. hegemony. Lee spoke with Mondoweiss on BDS, the occupation of Palestine, and whether his campaign is pushing Blumenauer to the left on these issues.

The discussion lasted nearly two hours and touched on many issues, but one exchange in particular stood out. At one point, an Israeli man in the audience made a comment that’s familiar from dominant discourses on Israel-Palestine. The man’s narrative – about Palestinians rejecting the U.N. Partition Plan, and Jews’ right to the land based on a two-thousand-year history – represents a generic Zionist Israeli perspective.

Jafar Farah, the only Palestinian panelist, delivered a piercing, comprehensive, and inspiring response. The exchange, translated from Hebrew and lightly edited, is below.

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Religious Endowments has revealed that Israeli occupation forces carried out 75 violations of the sanctity of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron last month alone, Quds Press reported on Tuesday. Changes are being made to Ibrahimi Mosque and access for Muslims on an almost daily basis, it added.

According to a report issued by the ministry, the Israeli forces also raided the Muslim prayer area next to Al-Rahma Gate several times in July, removed everything inside it and arrested or expelled worshippers. It was also noted that the Israelis banned the call to prayer at Ibrahimi Mosque on 46 occasions during the month.

Cable news journalist Jake Tapper is under fire by critics after the CNN anchor on Sunday likened the Palestinian liberation movement to white supremacy.

“It’s cool how Jake Tapper compares occupied Palestinians to white nationalists while he’s actually giving them a platform on his own show (Richard Spencer most recently),” tweeted AJ+ reporter Sana Saeed.

Tapper’s latest anti-Palestinian comments came during a special extended version of CNN‘s Sunday flagship show “State of the Union” to grapple with two mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio that came within 24 hours from midday Saturday to early morning Sunday. The El Paso shooter, Patrick Crusius of Dallas, cited anti-immigrant racism and the president’s rhetoric as motivating factors in an alleged 2,300 word rant posted online [read it here] shortly before the attack. [The Dayton shooter said he was a leftist and supported Elizabeth Warren.]

It’s not that Israel is shy about collective punishment. In 2014 and 2015, when a wave of Palestinian violence shook Jerusalem, Israeli authorities used violent measures that targeted hundreds of thousands of innocent East Jerusalemites. But even then, nothing came close to this.

What more, the term “collective punishment” is probably not applicable to the events in Issawiya: I have found no reports of violence originating from Issawiya that could – according to the logic of the occupation – be the reason for Israel’s violent campaign against the neighborhood.

Which begs the obvious question: why is this happening?

The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, was caught on tape on Wednesday urging four European leaders to help him undermine a provision of a European Union trade agreement that imposes an obligation on Israel to respect the rights of the millions of Palestinians it rules in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In private remarks to the leaders of Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia that were accidentally broadcast to members of the Israeli media outside the room, Netanyahu was overheard calling it “crazy” for the E.U. to insist that Israel honor Article 2 of an association agreement signed in 1995 which makes trade with the bloc conditional on Israel’s “respect for human rights and democratic principles.”

Israel has advanced plans for more than 2,300 illegal settlement homes in the occupied West Bank, the latest in a surge of such approvals since US President Donald Trump took office in 2017, according to an NGO.

Israel's Higher Planning Committee issued the approvals while meeting over the past couple of days, Peace Now said in a statement on Monday.

The 2,304 housing units are at various stages in the approval process, according to Peace Now, an Israeli group closely monitoring settlement building.

After a two year legal battle, a group of students at Fordham University have won a landmark victory and a Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club can now be established on their campus.

Israeli forces installed a huge metal gate on Monday separating two towns in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank.

The gate was installed at the between the town of Jabaa to the southwest of Bethlehem and the town of Surif to the north of the occupied municipality.

Sources told Palestinian Authority's news agency WAFA that Israeli forces removed earth mounds that had been for years preventing Palestinian movement between the two towns and instead upgraded their measures with the metal gate.

In the course of a TV series on the Jerusalem police force, police planted a weapon in the house of an East Jerusalem Palestinian resident and then documented its discovery.

The police later apologized for the incident, and said they will investigate the matter, while the producers said it would "draw conclusions."

Human rights groups have criticized American tech giant Microsoft for funding an Israeli facial recognition company, which is spying on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.

Microsoft’s M12 venture capital arm announced in June that it participated in a $74 million round in funding for the Israeli company AnyVision, whose face-recognition technology is used by the Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. Other European and American investors also joined the funding round.

Haaretz published a report in mid-July that said the Israeli army was using AnyVision’s technology at checkpoints on the way into Israel and across a network of cameras within the West Bank.

Most of the tweets posted by COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, are frankly ridiculous.

The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem filed a suit in an Israeli court yesterday “seeking to overturn a court ruling that three strategically placed properties in the Old City of Jerusalem had been legally sold by the church to Ateret Cohanim”, reported Haaretz.

The suit claims “new evidence shows that the sale of the properties was tainted by corruption on the part of representatives of Ateret Cohanim” – which works to boost the settler presence in occupied East Jerusalem – and that its “conduct was tantamount to that of a criminal organisation”.

The new legal action seeks to have a district court verdict reopened in light of the new evidence, following a June decision by the Israeli Supreme Court which confirmed the earlier ruling.

Two years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu was heard complaining that the European Union was “crazy” for attaching “political conditions” to its relations with Israel. By the prime minister’s yardstick, matters have become less “crazy” since then: the EU has quietly expanded the financial support it gives to Israeli government bodies directly responsible for oppressing Palestinians.

He also saw the revolting video, posted on social media, in which an IDF captain and two policemen exult and embrace to celebrate the demolition. That, he says, was the hardest moment. “When I saw people happy over the explosion – that was harder than seeing my building being blown up,” he said."

One day this week, after midnight, Abu Tair sent a text message: “We think everyone tricked us. The IDF and the High Court were quick to demolish so they could help Netanyahu win more seats in the Knesset. Why? The right is great at screwing the Arab population.”

US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, accompanied by a White House team including Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt and State Department official Brian Hook, began last week a Mideast tour to rally support from Arab leaders for the White House’s Mideast peace plan aimed, they said, to tackle the Palestinian-Israeli long-standing conflict.

Kushner, the plan’s main architect, made stops at Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Egypt, and Morocco reportedly to address roles of each Arab country in the suggested plan and to strengthen the situation of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the general elections on 17 September as the latter seeks to be the Israeli leader who oversaw Trump plan came to effect, political analysts said.

However, Kushner’s tour included no Palestinian officials.

The devastation is vividly visible through his office window: the scene of an explosion. The remnants of a blasted apartment building, his life’s enterprise, a house of cards that imploded. He had planned to build 13 stories here, and had completed nine, but last week the forces of destruction swept across the site and brought down it and nine other buildings. They left only the bottom two floors intact, but the blast wrought above them by soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, with crates of explosives scattered on every floor that produced a tremendous aftershock, makes it impossible to use the remnant of the bottom floors.

The Israeli military was mocked on social media after announcing that it had foiled a "terror" operation by confiscating boots headed for Gaza.

The unbranded boots, which Israel's Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) claimed were "military shoes", were in a shipment of other goods entering the besieged Gaza Strip.

London Borough of Tower Hamlets refused to host the closing rally of the annual bike ride raising money for Palestinian children in the besieged Gaza over claims it would breach the IHRA’s anti-Semitism criteria, the Guardian reported on Saturday.

The council told the Big Ride for Palestine, which was established on the first anniversary of Israel’s 2014 offensive on Gaza and which has raised nearly £150,000 for sports equipment for children in the enclave, that the event could not go ahead in the borough “without problems”.

However, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign won a Freedom of Information battle in an effort to discover the reasons behind the council’s refusal to host the event. Internal emails revealed that council staff agreed not to make public “anti-Semitism concerns”.

Israeli authorities are set to advance more than 2,400 settlement housing units this week, in parallel to granting retroactive approval to four unauthorised settlement outposts.

According to settlement watchdog Peace Now, the Higher Planning Committee of the Civil Administration – a branch of the Defence Ministry which deals with a number of matters pertaining to the occupation – will convene today and tomorrow to discuss the plans.

The published agenda for the meeting includes at least 2,430 housing units in settlements all over the occupied West Bank. Reports indicate that the vast majority of the housing units set to be advanced are located in settlements outside Israel’s illegal Separation Wall.

Like all settler-colonial ideologies, Zionism has always been obsessed with race. Having emerged at the height of European colonialism and race science, it sought to learn from both.

Zionists understood that making racial claims was foundational and essential for their colonial project, a realisation that still informs Israeli colonial and racial policy today.

Israeli forces have attacked anti-occupation Palestinian protesters gathering near the fence separating the besieged Gaza Strip from the occupied territories, leaving at least 51 people injured.

The Gazan Health Ministry said 24 of the wounded were hit with live bullets during the Friday protests.

Ashraf al-Qedra, the spokesman for the ministry, said two journalists were among those wounded on Friday.

Palestinians have held weekly rallies in the area since last year to protest the siege on the enclave and stress the right to return of the refugees who have fled Israeli aggression since 1948.

Video goes viral showing Israeli forces laugh and cheer as they blow up a Palestinian home in the occupied West Bank.

The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) said Thursday that all the agreements with Israel don't exist anymore after Israel disavowed them.

The PLO executive committee said in a press statement issued following its meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah that "Israel is doing its best to undermine the basics and the references of the peace process."

"The aim of the Palestinian leadership decision not to abide by all the signed agreements with Israel is to move from the status of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the status of the Palestinian state," said the PLO statement.

A Palestinian protester uses a slingshot to hurl stones at Israeli troops during clashes on the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, Aug. 2, 2019. At least 51 Palestinians were injured on Friday afternoon in the weekly anti-Israel protests in the eastern Gaza Strip close to the border with Israel.

When Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley cast her vote in favour of Resolution 246, which condemns the Palestinian call for global solidarity in the form of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS), many activists expressed disappointment, outrage and surprise.

Most had assumed that Pressley, the first-year congresswoman from Massachusetts and a member of the “Squad”, the team of rookie women-of-colour politicians dubbed “the future of the Democratic Party”, would support organising for Palestine.

It was widely assumed that as an African American with a long history of activism, Pressley would support boycotts, which were instrumental in ending segregation in the US.

Israeli forces killed and maimed some 2,800 Palestinian children in 2018, the highest number in years, and yet were not mentioned on an annual United Nations blacklist of armed forces that commit atrocities against youth.

Some 59 Palestinian children were killed last year and 2,756 more were injured — the highest number since 2014, according to a report by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres that will be published this week, an advance copy of which was seen by Mondoweiss.

While Guterres called for a probe into the deaths and blasted Israel for endangering Palestinian youths, the UN chief did not embarrass Israel by naming it on his “list of shame” in the annexes of the survey.

“I am extremely concerned by the significant rise in the maiming of and injuries caused to children across Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory, including by tear gas inhalation requiring medical treatment,” Guterres said in the report.

Israeli occupation forces shot and killed two Palestinians in Gaza during the month of July.

Hamas fighter Mahmoud al-Adham, 28, was killed in Beit Hanoun, in the north of the territory, on 11 July in what Israel said was a “misidentification.” Occupation forces opened fire on al-Adham as he attempted to prevent two Palestinians from approaching the Gaza-Israel boundary fence.

Ahmad Muhammad Abdallah al-Qarra, 23, died after being shot in the stomach during Great March of Return protests east of Khan Younis, southern Gaza, on 26 July.

More than 200 Palestinians have been killed during the protests along Gaza’s eastern and northern boundaries since their launch last year.

There were two Democratic debates this week with the 20 candidates split between back-to-back nights. The debates lasted two and a half hours each and featured a variety of questions on important subjects like health care, climate change, and criminal justice. However, none of the candidates were asked about Israel or Palestine.

In 2016, the United States government signed an agreement to give $38 billion in military assistance to Israel over the next decade. This fact should presumably generate at least one debate question on the subject (especially since both featured discussions about how to pay for social programs) but the omission feels especially egregious occurring at this specific time.

Six Palestinians died in July as a result of Israel’s aggression, while 414 were detained, the Jerusalem Centre for Studies said in a reported.

Of those killed, one died in prison. While five of those detained were women, with the majority of those held captured in Jerusalem.

The report monitored 364 Israeli violations, including permanent and temporary military checkpoints, theft of property during the storming of Palestinian homes, in addition to demolitions.

Hundreds of Jewish settlers stormed historic and archaeological sites in the village of Awarta, southeast of occupied Nablus, today.

According to local Palestinian sources, Israeli buses evacuated hundreds of Jewish settlers to the western area of ??Awarta village, accompanied by dozens of military vehicles.

In the same context, news site 0404 reported: “About 350 Jewish settlers; stormed the shrine of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, west of the village of the Palestinian village of Awarta, and performed religious rituals, under the guard of the army and border guards.”

Local residents in the village of Awarta said: “The Israeli occupation forces closed the entrances of the village, and imposed a siege on its roads, in preparation for the entry of settlers who arrived on foot, and carried out barbaric and provocative actions in the streets of the village.”

Various Israeli politicians over the years have justified settlement expansion as being necessary for peace. The Oslo Accords facilitated this propaganda with an interminable “interim” period during which settlement construction has continued unhindered. The definition of “peace”, meanwhile, has largely been left to Israel and the US, with the UN following tacitly behind, despite its multitude of resolutions declaring settlements to be illegal under international law.

The Palestinian Authority’s adherence to the Oslo Accords, essential to safeguard its structure and existence, is also a key component, to the ongoing detriment of the Palestinian people.

Aiming to expose and loosen the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. campuses, Palestinian-born professor Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi has sued San Francisco State University (SFSU) in federal court for illegal retaliation for her political speech, and in state court for breach of contract and employment discrimination. Her supporters have issued a call for donations to a fund to cover necessary expenses of the litigation.

Speaking to supporters on a conference call, Behnam (Ben) Gharagozli, one of Abdulhadi’s lawyers, said the case “will send a positive message to everyone engaged in campus activism and in researching, teaching and speaking up for justice in/for Palestine. It will change the dynamics at universities across America where people will no longer have to be afraid of criticizing Israel.”

Israeli police have summoned a Palestinian resident of the occupied East Jerusalem al-Quds neighborhood of al-Isawiyah on allegations that his young son had thrown stones at Israeli military forces – marking the second such incident in recent days.

Firas Obaid received a warrant on Tuesday asked him to come to an Israeli police station for interrogation, after his six-year-old son Qais was accused of throwing stones at Israeli officers patrolling Isawiyah.

The Palestinian father showed up at the police station on Wednesday morning, and was allowed to leave after questioning.

The only member of the delegation identified by local media was Saudi student and activist Mohammed Saud, who regularly tweets in support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Saud was chased out by Palestinians and worshippers from the al-Aqsa mosque compound in the Old City of Jerusalem on 22 July when they realized he was a member of the delegation.

Local media circulated videos showing Palestinians calling him “cheap,” telling him to “go pray in the Knesset,” spitting on him and throwing chairs and objects at him:

Last week it was revealed that the Israeli military has decided to change its open-fire regulations, acknowledging it killed dozens of protesters without justification.

Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, reported that the regulations were changed “after it emerged that firing at the lower limbs above the knee led, in most cases, to death, despite the fact that this was not the objective.”

Soldiers are now instructed to shoot below the knee “and then at the ankle,” according to the report.

A senior Israeli military officer told Kan: “At first, we told them to shoot at the leg. We saw that this can result in fatalities, so we told them to shoot below the knee, then we fine-tuned the regulations to shooting at the ankle.”

Israeli occupation forces have killed 54 Palestinians in Gaza, including 12 children and four women since the start of 2019, Al-Mezan Centre for Human Rights reported yesterday.

The centre also said that the Israeli occupation forces injured 3,723 Palestinians in Gaza during the same period, including 1,226 children and 179 women.

The centre accused occupation forces of using “lethal force” to cause as many casualties as possible mainly when they crackdown on peaceful protesters at the Great March of Return, which have been organised every Friday since 30 March 2018 along the eastern borders of Gaza.

At the same time, the Israeli occupation arrested 88 Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, including 22 children.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israeli Jewish settlements will remain in the occupied West Bank forever.

Israeli TV Channel 12 reported Netanyahu saying during the inauguration of settlement project in the settlement of Efrat yesterday: “None of the settlers or the settlements are to be uprooted.”

“This issue has ended and settlements are to remain forever.”

This is not the first time Netanyahu has made such remarks. In 2017 he said: “We are here to stay, forever.”

An Israeli court sentenced the lawyer of the PLO’s Prisoners’ Committee to 13 years, six months in prison on Tuesday, Quds Press has reported. Tariq Barghouth was arrested by the Israeli occupation forces on 27 February this year before undergoing harsh interrogation.

To put pressure on him in order to give what are said to be false confessions, the Israelis also arrested his wife and sister. The two women were released later.

Barghouth is one of the most prominent lawyers known for defending Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. He is currently in Nafha Prison in the south of Israel.

Palestinian Authority (PA) said yesterday that there is no need for Palestinian to obtain permission from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to build homes in “Area C” of the occupied Palestinian territories.

This came in response to the latest leaks about the Israeli government’s discussion to approve 6,000 new settlement units in the occupied territories along with 700 Palestinian homes in Area C.

Area C is a region of the occupied West Bank which is under Israeli military and administrative control following the signing of the Oslo Accords.

In a landmark defeat for Israel, the Federal Court of Canada ruled on Monday that wines produced in settlements on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law cannot be labeled “Made in Israel.”

This decision comes just days after the Vancouver city council rejected an attempt to label Palestine rights organizing as anti-Semitism.

Judge Anne Mactavish ruled that “labeling the settlement wines as ‘Products of Israel’ is both inaccurate and misleading.”

In an affirmation of the right of citizens to engage in boycotts, the court found that people who wish to express their political views through their purchasing decisions “have to be provided with accurate information as to the source of the products in question.”

Human rights defenders are slamming UN Secretary-General António Guterres for leaving Israel off an official list of the world’s worst abusers of children’s rights.

On Tuesday, the UN released the secretary-general’s annual report on children in armed conflict.

It finds that a record 12,000 children were killed or maimed in wars around the world in 2018.

But Human Rights Watch notes that Guterres “omitted countries responsible for grave violations against children in armed conflict in his new ‘list of shame.’”

This has not been a good week for Democrats, especially those who wish to cast their party as the progressive alternative to the Trump-McConnell regime. As the feckless party leadership continued to avoid taking any action against Donald Trump for his numerous crimes—which go well beyond the Russia questions—they managed to find time to pass a bill opposing the right of U.S. citizens to use economic leverage to press for change in Israel-Palestine.

H. Res. 246, a nameless bill which declares the House of Representatives’ opposition to the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, passed with 398 in favor and only 17 (16 Democrats and one Republican) representatives voting against it. The bill was considerably weaker than the sort of legislation the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) had hoped to pass to criminalize BDS at the federal level. Those efforts ran afoul of free speech concerns among a wide variety of Congress members.

What politicians don’t say is often as important as what they do. In his foreign policy speech on Thursday at The City University of New York, Joe Biden warned about the “Rapid advance of authoritarianism, nationalism and illiberal tendencies around the world — not just in Russia and China but among our allies, in places like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary.”

Notice what’s missing here. Biden is right that the governments of Turkey, the Philippines and Hungary are increasingly contemptuous of human rights and the rule of law. He could have added India, Poland, Brazil and even Italy to the list.

But the most glaring exception is Israel.

Last Tuesday, the House voted overwhelmingly to pass an anti-BDS bill with the strong support of progressive democrats (including “squad” member Ayanna Pressley). I know there are many who are asking how and why did this happen? As I see it, the answer, as always, is pure politics.

For the first time in years, Israeli government approves construction for Palestinians living in West Bank’s area under full Israeli civil and security control as part of a broader plan which includes 6,000 housing units for Israeli settlers