This week’s postings@JfJfP.com
This week, October 24th-30th, 2016, the stand-out issue was the reverberation from the speech by B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad. The right is demanding he be stripped of his citizenship:
Take away that man’s citizenship!
Whether this was because of El-Ad’s detailing of how the Israeli state goes about crushing a coherent Palestinian community (for the Israeli right, which has convinced itself that European antisemitism is the sole and sufficient cause of criticism of Israeli policy these details may indeed have been news) or because of his urgent demand for foreign intervention on the side of Palestinians is not clear.
Haaretz was deeply impressed and stated that his argument against the Occupation and for Palestinian rights should become the basic platform for all pro-democracy parties:
Haaretz backs B’tselem’s opposition platform
Akiva Eldar gives these assailants short shrift. Israel came into being and has been sustained throughout its life by outside intervention. Without it, Israel cannot move:
Paralysed Israel rejects all help
The reverberations of the report on antisemitism by the Home Affairs Select Committee also continue. JfJfP signatory Richard Kuper analyses the report and finds its writers are seriously lacking inquiring minds and the ability to collect evidence:
Chuck facts, go with the flow
Not so much presenting facts as putting forward an argument that antisemitism increases when Israel pounds Gaza and that Jews in the UK should not be seen as responsible for Israel’s actions comes from three lecturers including JfJfP signatory Keith Kahn-Harris. It offers a definition of antisemitism and has various practical proposals for getting the highly varied and often fragmented nature of Jewish life recognised as reality:
All Jews are not responsible for Israel’s actions
The very things which alienate many British Jews from Israeli policies is what right-wing Americans most envy and admire about Israel. Its military will, in Trump’s words, ‘bomb the shit’ out of all opponents unlike the weaselly appeasers filling the White House just now:
The US wants what Israel’s got
Apart from Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Palestinians are almost invisible in western culture. Robert Cohen interviews one of the three-man folk group Coope Boyes and Simpson who have taken up the Palestinian cause in their new song, Children of Palestine:
Telling Palestine’s story through song’s magic dance
Political analyst Marzuq Al-Halabi surveys different currents in Palestinian/Israeli thought. He praises the work of Emil Habibi, Palestinian Israeli, and his neologism ‘opsimist’. He urges Palestinians, in the face of a bellicose Israeli right wing, to come together on the side of Israel’s beleaguered democratic forces:
Palestinians in Israel must join the democratic forces
In order to give the context for this word we post a 2006 article about Habibi. It is charming and insightful:
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
The decision by the management of Habima, the national theatre company, to put on performances in one of the most hard-line settlements in the West Bank has been met with widespread condemnation (to Haaretz it is a ‘moral stain’). Most see the hand of the censorious culture minister, Miri Regev, in this decision:
Habima theatre heads into cul-de-sac
Over at MoSA (Ministry of Strategic Affairs) they are discussing the best use of their anti-BDS pot of money. One way seems to be to get pro-Israel students at British universities to wave the flag for Israel. This seems very stupid and quite contrary to any spirit of open and civil discourse between Jewish and other students:
Hunting anti-Israel ‘bias’ on UK campuses
Supporters of the boycott tactic (BDS) in the UK, France and many American states have found themselves facing a range of manoeuvres to block their influence. These include a deliberate denial of free speech. The EU’s high representative for foreign affairs, Federica Mogherini, has stated to the EU parliament that arguing or demonstrating for BDS is ‘protected speech’, that is, it is illegal to try to silence those who support, and those who try to enact, any of the BDS demands.
Mogherini asserts right to boycott
Right-wing MKs and the land-theft far-right group Regavim want to extend Israel’s terrain so that the illegal settlement Ma’ale Adumim will no longer be a settlement but a neighbourhood of Israel:
Far right push to grab settlement for Israel proper
Little has been heard of (because it’s not taken seriously) the comment by defence minister Lieberman that if Palestinians would give up all military weapons and actions he would lift the siege of Gaza (does he have the power?):
Disarm and we’ll lift the siege – Lieberman