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Category: Politics

A long history of crime without punishment threatens not only Palestinians but also Israel itself

A long history of crime without punishment threatens not only Palestinians but also Israel itself

The New York Times reports: By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made…

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Gantz to Netanyahu: If you don’t change course by June 8 we’ll withdraw from government

Gantz to Netanyahu: If you don’t change course by June 8 we’ll withdraw from government

The Jerusalem Post reports: In a move likely to aggravate political tension at the highest levels of government, Minister-without-portfolio Benny Gantz gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a deadline of June 8 to agree to a comprehensive strategic plan for the “day after” Hamas in Gaza and threatened to leave the government if this did not happen. “Lately, something has gone wrong,” Gantz said. “Essential decisions were not made. Essential leadership decisions to ensure victory were not done. A small minority…

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Armed thugs (aka NYPD) trained by Israelis, attack and punch pro-Palestine protesters in Brooklyn

Armed thugs (aka NYPD) trained by Israelis, attack and punch pro-Palestine protesters in Brooklyn

NOW: As pro-Palestine protesters reached an intersection, officers rushed in and grabbed people out of the crowd seemingly at random Officers tackled multiple protesters to the ground and then proceeded to punch them pic.twitter.com/fyPfA8emyM — katie smith (@probablyreadit) May 18, 2024 The NYPD is seen slamming this protestor to the ground punching his chest with his hand around their neck. They never once resisted. Their head was also bleeding as they were transported to the police van. All for walking…

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Biden claps as Morehouse valedictorian calls for Gaza cease-fire in commencement speech

Biden claps as Morehouse valedictorian calls for Gaza cease-fire in commencement speech

HuffPost reports: Morehouse College valedictorian DeAngelo Fletcher called for a cease-fire in Gaza during his commencement speech on Sunday, receiving applause from both fellow students and guest President Joe Biden as his administration continues to face pushback from college students across the U.S. over his support for Israel. Biden sat behind the valedictorian during the ceremony at the historically Black college in Atlanta, where Fletcher spoke about the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the devastation it’s wrought. Fletcher, who…

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Medical workers evacuated from Gaza, but three Americans refuse to leave

Medical workers evacuated from Gaza, but three Americans refuse to leave

The Intercept reports: Some 20 American and British medical workers who had been unable to leave Gaza were evacuated from the European Hospital in Khan Younis on Friday, though three American members of medical missions refused to evacuate until Israel allows additional humanitarian workers to replace them. They remain at work, along with doctors and staff from separate medical missions, serving a population trapped in Gaza with no escape. The missions, as is often the case, had been scheduled to…

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Zelensky: ‘Our partners fear that Russia will lose this war’

Zelensky: ‘Our partners fear that Russia will lose this war’

The Kyiv Independent reports: President Volodymyr Zelensky believes that Ukraine’s partners “are afraid of Russia losing the war” and would like Kyiv “to win in such a way that Russia does not lose,” Zelensky said in a meeting with journalists attended by the Kyiv Independent. Kyiv’s allies “fear” Russia’s loss in the war against Ukraine because it would involve “unpredictable geopolitics,” according to Zelensky. “I don’t think it works that way. For Ukraine to win, we need to be given…

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The roots of Israeli fascism

The roots of Israeli fascism

Rick Perlstein writes: In 1928, a prominent [Zionist] Revisionist named Abba Ahimeir published a series of articles entitled “From the Diary of a Fascist.” They refer to the founder of their movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (his adopted first name is Hebrew for “wolf”), as “il duce.” In 1935, his comrade Hen Merhavia wrote that Revisionists were doing what Mussolini did: “establish a nucleus of an exemplary life of morality and purity. Like us, the Italian fascists look back to their historical…

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Palestinian political prisoners targeted in Israel’s campaign of vengeance

Palestinian political prisoners targeted in Israel’s campaign of vengeance

The Observer reports: Marwan Barghouti spends his days huddled in a cramped, dark, solitary cell, with no way to tend to his wounds, and a shoulder injury from being dragged with his hands cuffed behind his back. Barghouti holds almost mythic status within Palestinian politics, seen as a figure whose potential to unify different factions has only grown during his 24 years in prison. The books, newspapers and tele­vision that he used to be able to access have been gone…

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Arrested. Injured. Suspended. Six NYC university students say they’ll keep protesting

Arrested. Injured. Suspended. Six NYC university students say they’ll keep protesting

NPR reports: At Columbia University, word was spreading among the student protesters who’d defied the university’s order to take down their pro-Palestinian encampment on a central lawn. Police were gathering outside the school’s locked gates. Arrests seemed imminent. It was the evening of April 30. Allie Wong, a doctoral student, was off campus when she heard what was happening. She rushed there and found a way to sneak in. Before the night was over, Wong would be one among nearly…

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Pro-Israel Jewish billionaires caught secretly plotting to crackdown student protests

Pro-Israel Jewish billionaires caught secretly plotting to crackdown student protests

Middle East Monitor reports: A group of prominent American Jewish billionaires and business leaders have been privately pressuring New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, to deploy the police against pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University, and even offered to pay for private investigators to assist the New York Police Department in handling the protests, according to a report by The Washington Post. The revelations, based on a WhatsApp chat log obtained by the newspaper, shed light on the group’s efforts…

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Ukraine can still beat Russia. It just comes down to receiving enough Western aid

Ukraine can still beat Russia. It just comes down to receiving enough Western aid

Business Insider reports: With 14 to 21 well-equipped brigades, Ukraine could eject Russian forces from all Ukrainian territory, according to an American expert. The question is whether Ukraine can find the manpower, and whether Ukraine’s allies are willing to spend the money to arm them properly. Yet what is remarkable is that despite Ukraine being outnumbered and outgunned by Russia, Kyiv still has a genuine chance of winning the war. “What has really kind of disturbed me is that we’re…

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How a Jewish desire for revenge against the Nazis turned into an Israeli justification for killing Palestinians

How a Jewish desire for revenge against the Nazis turned into an Israeli justification for killing Palestinians

76 years after, we are still in 1948. — Shachar Pinsker (@spinsker) May 14, 2024 Shachar Pinsker writes: By the end of the Second World War, writing about vengeance in Hebrew had taken on a new significance. A million and a half Jews fought in the armies of the Allied Powers. Writing in Hebrew, however, focused on the 30,000 Jews from the Yishuv [the Jewish community in pre-state Palestine] who volunteered to fight alongside the British army, especially the Jewish Brigade, numbering…

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UN says it has no more food or tents for nearly 2 million people in Gaza

UN says it has no more food or tents for nearly 2 million people in Gaza

The Guardian reports: The UN has run out of tents and food to distribute to almost 2 million people in Gaza, the majority displaced from their homes and dependent on aid to stave off looming famine. UN officials told the Guardian on Wednesday afternoon that their warehouses were now completely empty south of the river dividing the northern third of the Gaza from the south, with no likelihood of resupply as long as the main entry points into the territory…

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‘Resist the normalization of evil’: Israeli reporter Amira Hass on Palestine and journalism

‘Resist the normalization of evil’: Israeli reporter Amira Hass on Palestine and journalism

  Our guest is the Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass, the only Israeli Jewish journalist to have spent 30 years living in and reporting from Gaza and the West Bank. She is the recipient of the 2024 Columbia Journalism Award, and on Wednesday she addressed the graduating class of the Columbia Journalism School in New York City. Hass discusses the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza, why journalists should “resist the normalization of evil and injustice,” Israel’s recent censorship of Al Jazeera,…

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Apparently NYU has administrators schooled in the Soviet Union

Apparently NYU has administrators schooled in the Soviet Union

Ginia Bellafante writes: At one point during the demonstrations at Columbia University in 1968, protesters took the acting dean of the liberal arts college hostage. Barricading his office door with furniture, they kept Henry Simmons Coleman, a former Navy man, locked up for 26 hours. When he was finally released, he seemed unfazed; there had been plenty to eat. Retaliation was not on his agenda. So little did it interest him, apparently, that he went on to write letters of…

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Interview: Putin has not given up on erasing Ukraine ‘as a state, a concept, and a people’

Interview: Putin has not given up on erasing Ukraine ‘as a state, a concept, and a people’

Nataliya Bugayova, a nonresident fellow at the Institute for the Study of War, interviewed by RFE/RL: RFE/RL: In a recent ISW backgrounder that you co-authored, you wrote in the very first sentence that “Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West — and will likely lose — if the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin.” How big is that “if,” and how big a step in that direction is the recently approved U.S. aid? Nataliya Bugayova: Thank you for…

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