2019 – Mondoweiss

Campaign against Sanders on ‘antisemitism’ for his criticism of Israel begins in earnest
Philip Weiss on December 24, 2019 – Mondoweiss
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/12/campaign-against-sanders-on-antisemitism-for-his-criticism-of-israel-beg

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Screen-Shot-2019-10-28-at-4.38.07-PM.png

In recent days, a group calling itself Democrats Against Anti-Semitism has begun an earnest campaign to inject the discourse with the idea that Bernie Sanders, historically the leading Jewish politician ever to run for president, is an antisemite because of his positions on Israel. That group joins New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and others in seizing on the urgent task of vilifying Sanders. They evidently aim to “Corbyn-ize” him, by parroting smears used effectively against the UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

Sanders is a target because he has taken the strongest stances in favor of Palestinian human rights that any major candidate for the presidency has ever adopted. He has denounced the killings of Palestinian protesters in no uncertain terms, he has repeatedly called for the end of the Gaza siege so as to end a humanitarian disaster in the strip, he has said that he would condition military aid to Israel because of its unending settlement project and disrespect for Palestinian human rights, he has called Netanyahu a racist, and, worst of all, called for an “evenhanded” U.S. policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. All this, while saying that he is proudly Jewish, lived on an Israeli kibbutz as a young man, and supports Israel’s existence/favors a two-state solution. (...)

#Corbynisation

Israel destroyed record number of Palestinian homes in Jerusalem in 2019 – Mondoweiss
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/israel-destroyed-record-number-of-palestinian-homes-in-jerusalem-in-2019

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/house-demolition-beit-hanina-east-jerusalem-2014.jpg

Israel has demolished a record number of homes in occupied East Jerusalem in 2019, the most in the past 15 years, Israeli rights group B’Tselem reported on Thursday.

More than 140 Palestinian homes were demolished, resulting in the displacement of 238 Palestinians, 127 of them minors.

Of the homes that were destroyed, 39 were destroyed by the owners themselves after they received demolition orders from Israel, in order to avoid incurring the municipality’s demolition fees.

#palestine #démolition #colonisation #occupation #israël #accaparement #vol_de-terre

Burning trees and beating farmers: Israeli settlers wreak havoc on another olive harvest – Mondoweiss
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/burning-trees-and-beating-farmers-israeli-settlers-wreak-havoc-on-anothe

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/72799796_10156964324154620_1999554047928958976_n.jpg

Every year, without fail, Palestinians mark the beginning of autumn with the olive harvest. A sacred cultural event, families from across the country leave their towns and cities and head for their olive groves, passed down to them from the generations before.

And every year, without fail, much of the harvest is characterized by attacks on Palestinian farmers and families by Israeli settlers and armed soldiers. This year is no different.

Since the harvest began in early October, several incidents of settler attacks on farmers and their crops have been reported by activists and organizations in the occupied West Bank.

#cisjordanie #palestine #israël #colonisation #destruction #violences #humiliation #démolition

Israel prepares to turn Bedouin citizens into refugees in their own country
Jonathan Cook on October 16, 2019 – Mondoweiss
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/10/israel-prepares-to-turn-bedouin-citizens-into-refugees-in-their-own-coun

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/al.arakib.jpg

The decades-long struggle by tens of thousands of Israelis against being uprooted from their homes – some for the second or third time – should be proof enough that Israel is not the western-style liberal democracy it claims to be.

Last week 36,000 Bedouin – all of them Israeli citizens – discovered that their state is about to make them refugees in their own country, driving them into holding camps. These Israelis, it seems, are the wrong kind.

Their treatment has painful echoes of the past. In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled by the Israeli army outside the borders of the newly declared Jewish state established on their homeland – what the Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.(...)

traduction en français : ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/809520

États-Unis
Democratic voters support cutting aid to Israel, so why have only two candidates even mentioned it?
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/09/democratic-candidates-mentioned

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CoPbDvmVIAEDSoZ.jpg

A new report shows that a net majority of Democratic voters support cutting aid to Israel based on the country’s human rights violations. Nonetheless, only two Democratic presidential candidates have floated the idea during this campaign and neither has provided much in way of details.

YouGov Blue conducted a poll for the progressive think tank Data For Progress between August 15th–21st. 1,380 voters were asked a question about reducing U.S. military aid to Israel over its human rights abuses and a broader question about reducing aid to other countries for the same reason. The poll’s accompanying report was authored by Data For Progress Senior Fellow and IfNotNow co-founder Emma Saltzberg.

Saltzberg found that 45% of voters support reducing Israel’s military aid for human rights violations, while 34% oppose such a policy. When that idea is expanded to countries more broadly, the numbers go way up: 61% support it, while only 12% are against it.

La dispartion des villes palestiniennes sur google map...

Palestinian cities are ghost towns between settlements, on Google Maps – Mondoweiss

▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/06/palestinian-between-settlements

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Qalandiya_checkpoint_missing.jpg

In Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith happens upon an old newspaper clipping that proves that Big Brother had framed three men for crimes against the state. All past evidence contradicting the regime’s ever-changing “truth” was supposed to have been destroyed, but this one scrap had been missed. Winston finished the job — though to his ultimate demise, destroying the evidence could not erase the knowledge from his mind.

What Orwell could not have foreseen was a world in which Big Brother did not need to destroy evidence, a world in which evidence did not exist in physical form and could be changed at will without a trace. All “copies” of a virtual newspaper would instantly update to every new “truth”. Thought-criminals might, of course, have saved a copy of the previous virtual file, or even a screen-grab, but all these were nothing but numbers on media. What proof of whose sets of digits were the true ones, when there is no physical, forensic trail? True, false, faked, real, new, old, past, present, cause, effect, and even time-stamps and digital signatures, are ultimately nothing more than sets of ones and zeros with no distinction, because — to rewrite another Orwell novel — all numbers are created equal, none more equal than others. Whoever controls the virtual printing press that creates and rewrites reality as needed, wears the Wagnerian ring of the Nibelung — is granted the power to rule the world.

Welcome to the present. Welcome, for example, to Google Maps.

#palestine #cartographie #manipulation #visualisation #représentation

An ’NY Times report hides the truth: Israel’s airstrikes across the Mideast are arguable intended to sabotage Trump-Iran talks
James North on August 29, 2019
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/airstrikes-designed-sabotage

(...) In Lobelog, the distinguished researcher Sina Toossi did the Times’s work for it. His headline tells the story: “Israeli Strikes Seek to Bait Iran and Scuttle U.S.-Iran Diplomacy.” Toossi points out that “the timing of the Israeli strikes suggests that they are at least partly aimed” at stopping Trump from following up on the peace feelers that French President Emmanuel Macron put out at last weekend’s G7 meeting.

Maybe the Times doesn’t trust Sina Toossi. But what about yesterday’s editorial in Haaretz, the respected Israeli newspaper, which raised the same suspicions about Netanyahu’s true motivations? The paper said simply and clearly:

Now Netanyahu is confronting a change in direction in Trump’s policy, which is reflected in an attempt to arrange a meeting and reach an understanding with the Iranian leadership. . . These circumstances explain Netanyahu’s decision to escalate Israel’s military activity against Iran and its proteges in the region. . .

The Times propaganda article rattled on for 43 paragraphs without a single mention of Netanyahu’s incentive to sabotage the possible Trump-Iran detente. Again, is this deliberate bias — or just incompetence?

Quand Israël créait un groupe terroriste pour semer le chaos au #Liban par Rémi Brulin | 20 juin…
►https://seenthis.net/messages/703285

https://seenthis.net/local/cache-vignettes/L600xH299/666bccdaa2940d6e-edd57.jpg

It’s fine to criticize Israel (so long as you say it’s a vibrant democracy and leave out the oppression of Palestinians) | Donald Johnson
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/democracy-oppression-palestinians

Israel’s defenders explain to Rashida Tlaib that it’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Israel, so long as you say it’s a vibrant democracy. So the oppression of millions of Palestinians is a golden opportunity for Israelis to show off their country. The bigotry is the same as justifying slavery by the fact that Lincoln and Douglas debated it, and Frederick Douglass was able to get in one word edgewise. Source: Mondoweiss

Israeli and US media attack centrist MIFTAH as ’radical’ group in effort to discredit Omar and Tlaib
Yumna Patel on August 21, 2019
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/israeli-centrist-discredit

https://mondoweiss.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/3953682012_4d1e28c9f3_z.jpg

    

Israel and its supporters have set their sights on a new target in part of a concerted effort to discredit US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and their planned delegation to Palestine, after the decision to bar them entry to the country sparked nationwide outrage.

The newest focus of the right-wing media is MIFTAH, the Ramallah-based NGO that was sponsoring the planned delegation, as it has done in the past with US congressional delegations that visited the occupied West Bank.

Founded by PLO Executive Committee Member Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) is largely regarded as a mainstream, “centrist” group in Palestine.

The group’s activities focus primarily on female empowerment and self-sustainability projects, with a mission that “seeks to promote the principles of democracy and good governance within various components of Palestinian society” and “seeks to engage local and international public opinion and official circles on the Palestinian cause.”

In the wake of the backlash facing Netanyahu and his government for denying the congresswomen, the premiere released a statement alleging that the congresswomen had ulterior motives, referencing MIFTAH as “an avid supporter” of BDS.

#Ilhan_Omar #Rashida_Tlaib #BDS #MIFTAH

Saudi-led forces, Israel among states rapped by U.N. for killing children - Reuters
▻https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-un-rights-children-idUKKCN1UL2SF

A lire les MSM seule l’#Arabie_Saoudite serait « préservée » dans les rapports de l’#ONU sur les #crimes contre les #enfants, alors que l’état sioniste l’est tout autant,

.... though no parties were blacklisted in the annex to the annual Children in Armed Conflict report, seen by Reuters.

#Palestine #sionisme #Guterres #comparse #civils #victimes_civiles

’Music of dead, bombed-out buildings must be heard’ — Gaza artists hold anti-Eurovision concert in building destroyed by Israeli attack
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/05/buildings-eurovision-destroyed

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/5-1.jpg

Beating Israel’s ’But Khamas !’ ploy | Helena Cobban
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/03/beating-israels-khamas

Helena Cobban debunks what she calls Israel’s “But Khamas!” ploy, the maneuver Israelis and their propagandists use to try to shut down any discussion of the actual plight of Gaza’s two million people and Israel’s own responsibility for causing it. Source: Mondoweiss

Rabbins d’une académie pré-militaire : les Arabes sont inférieurs génétiquement | The Times of Israël
▻https://fr.timesofisrael.com/rabbins-dune-academie-pre-militaire-les-arabes-sont-inferieurs-gen

https://static.timesofisrael.com/fr/uploads/2019/04/Eli-rabbi-e1556605977838.jpg

Dans une autre vidéo de la Yeshiva Bnei David diffusée par la Treizième chaîne, le rabbin Giora Redler fait l’éloge de l’idéologie de #Hilter pendant un cours sur la Shoah.

« Commençons par nous demander si Hitler avait raison ou non », a-t-il dit aux étudiants. « C’était la personne la plus correcte qu’il y ait jamais eu, et tout ce qu’il a dit était vrai… il était juste du mauvais côté. »

Redler poursuit en disant que le #pluralisme est le « vrai » #génocide perpétré contre le peuple juif, et non la solution finale de l’Allemagne nazie.

« La véritable Shoah, ce n’est pas quand ils ont assassiné les #Juifs, ce n’est pas ça. Toutes ces raisons, qu’elles soient idéologiques ou systématiques, sont absurdes », a-t-il dit. « L’humanisme et la culture séculière de ‘Nous croyons en l’homme’, c’est ça la Shoah. »

#sionisme

German Jews for Palestinian rights receive a peace prize— and are dismissed as ’the wrong kind of Jews’
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/03/palestinian-receive-dismissed

Last week, the German organization Jewish Voice for a Just peace in the Middle East received a peace prize from the city of Göttingen.

As the organization supports the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, the announcement of its nomination became a battleground, wherein prominent Jewish leaders tarnished its members as anti-Semites, suggesting that they were the ‘wrong kind of Jews’. The mayor and the president of the Göttingen university withdrew their support and cancelled the booking of halls for receptions. Nonetheless the jury stuck to its decision, and crowdfunded a prize of 28,000 Euros, which the organization will donate to human rights organizations in Palestine as well as to the liberal Israeli +972 Magazine.

In a political earthquake, Dems pull bill condemning anti-Semitism after split over Ilhan Omar explodes
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/03/condemning-semitism-explodes

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Ilhan_Omar.jpg

Divides among House Democrats exploded today beginning in a closed door session this morning where lawmakers argued with party leadership over a resolution to denounce anti-Semitism, an apparent move to condemn Rep. Ilhan Omar. 

According to the Washington Post the meeting descended into a “full-scale brawl” when representatives, primarily from the Congressional Black Caucus called to cancel the vote, and in an unexpected turn, was delayed indefinitely by early evening. One source in the room said Rep. Jan Schakowsky demanded (D-IL), “Everyone stop tweeting!” as decorum fell.

Elizabeth Warren warns of ’demographic realities, births and deaths bearing down on Israel’ — racist code for Palestinian babies
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/elizabeth-demographic-palestinian

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Elizabeth-Warren-Headshot.jpg

The Israel lobby is built on the biggest guilt trip in the world – Mondoweiss

▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/israel-lobby-biggest

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/michael-oren-army-uniform-featured.jpg

I’ve been reading Amos Oz’s books since his death, and one of the feelings he leaves me with is: Self-contempt. Many of Oz’s characters look on American Jews with disdain. “To be without power is, in my eyes, both a sin and a catastrophe. It’s the sin of exile, and Diaspora,” says one. Another says that Diaspora Jews “shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of… life.”

The message is clear. Jews in the west are half-made because they never had to fight. They haven’t served in the Israeli army, at the front line of reborn Jewish sovereignty. But those exiled Jews derive pride and strength from the armed Jewish nation; Israel has given them international prestige. Because once Jews went like sheep to slaughter, we formed lines to get on the cattle cars. Now we are a proud nation.

But those exiled Jews have no skin in the game. They are living comfortable idle existences. Getting up like me this morning and going to my desk.

’Combating BDS Act’ passes Senate, 77-23, as Dem presidential hopefuls vote No, and Paul slams ’paranoia’ of ’the lobby’
US Politics Philip Weiss on February 5, 2019

▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/02/combating-presidential-paranoia

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/rubio-marco.jpg

     

This afternoon the Senate by a vote of 77-23 passed S.1, which contains the Combating BDS Act, encouraging states to pass laws that authorize economic punishments against those who support boycott of Israel. Faiz Shakir, national political director of the ACLU, says:

The Senate just passed a bill that tramples on the 1st Amendment rights of Americans. The House should refuse to take it up.

The ACLU led opposition to the bill and is already moving on to the House. It reports:

Should the House take up similar legislation, we urge members to remove the Combating BDS Act from the package of bills due to the threat it poses to all Americans’ First Amendment right to boycott…

Senators who voted for the bill: we encourage you to read the Constitution, which protects against the McCarthy-era tactics this bill endorses.

I am told there is real hope that the Democratic House will reject the measure.

The 23 Senators who voted against include all likely or announced presidential candidates with the exception of Amy Klobuchar — who reportedly said she opposed the BDS provision but approved other parts of the bill. All the Nays were Democrats except for one Republican, Rand Paul, who warned that the majority is “paranoid” about the Israel lobby. The roll of honor:

Tammy Baldwin, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Tom Carper, Dick Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Martin Heinrich, Mazie Hirono, Tim Kaine, Patrick Leahy, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Chris Murphy, Rand Paul, Jack Reed, Bernie Sanders, Brian Schatz, Jeanne Shaheen, Tom Udall, Chris Van Hollen, Elizabeth Warren

The bill is a landmark in anti-Palestinianism. The IMEU relates: “‘It’s disappointing that the Senate has voted to undermine the free speech rights of advocates for Palestinian freedom.’ – Rebecca Vilkomerson, Executive Director of Jewish Voice for Peace.”

J Herbert Nelson II of the Presbyterian Church’s Israel Palestine Mission Network called the bill “unjust” for limiting what more and more people wish to do for Palestinian rights:

A growing number of churches and other faith groups, including the Presbyterian Church (USA), have endorsed time-honored tools like boycotts to avoid profiting from Israel’s abuses of Palestinian rights. In passing the CBA, the Senate is condoning attempts by politicians at the state level to suppress our efforts to be true to our faith and avoid being complicit in the suffering of others.

There was an upside to the vote. “Ugly day for the Senate, but something important happened here: All serious 2020 candidates (Harris, Sanders, Warren, Gillibrand and Booker) bucked AIPAC and voted against this anti-BDS bill,” Ryan Grim tweets. “That tells you a LOT about the politics of Israel in the Democratic Party.”

The Jewish establishment was all for this bill. AIPAC urged its passage. So did Jewish Federations, the leading Jewish philanthropic organizations:

Every day brings another sign that Democrats are dividing over Israel
Mondoweiss – Philip Weiss on January 17, 2019
▻https://mondoweiss.net/2019/01/another-democrats-dividing

https://s19453.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/justice-dems.jpg

Every day brings another sign that there is at last going to be a wide-open debate about American support for Israel in US politics, as the old Democratic Party consensus disintegrates.

We chronicled the efforts of Senate Republicans to push anti-boycott legislation and paint the Democrats as the anti-Israel party. The Women’s March is now riven by the Israel issue, with the Democratic establishment distancing itself from the organizers.

The Democratic leadership is also plainly stunned that two new congresswomen, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, are both BDS supporters, and that star NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is critical of Israel. Tlaib tells the Intercept today that she wants to withhold American aid to Israel so long as it denies equality and dignity to her grandmother in Palestine.

Several mainstream figures are warning the Democratic Party not to let Israel divide them. Though Nancy Pelosi pooh-poohs the anti’s as a mere fringe: Don’t pay “attention to a few people who may want to go their own way,” she said last month.

A couple more signs. Buzzfeed has an article up by Emily Tamkin and Alexis Levinson titled, “Israel Will Be The Great Foreign Policy Debate Of The Democratic Primary.” It begins bracingly. (...)