Support for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) targeting Israel is growing, generating great angst and solution-searching amongst Israel supporters – including pro-peace progressives – in the United States and elsewhere in the world. From the Adelson-Saban summit earlier this year, which gave birth to a new anti-BDS organization (to be led by someone who for years headed a far right-wing, pro-Israel, Evangelical Christian operation), to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s letter to Jewish leaders, BDS is now being treated even by many pro-peace progressives as the new “existential” threat to Israel, despite the fact that the actual track record of the BDS movement, in terms of concrete impact, is thus far mixed.
--Peace Now Secretary General, Yariv Oppenheimer, writes in Yedioth that the attempt by the right-wing to gain a political profit at the expense of the dead and wounded in Paris is “nothing less than cheap demagogy.”
You Must Be Kidding:
The evictions were conducted on the basis of a lawsuit asserting the land on which the homes were built was consecrated in the Jewish religion over a century earlier.
--Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson reported on the methods the settler organization, Ateret HaCohanim, employs to evict Palestinian families from their homes in Silwan neighborhood of E. Jerusalem. Ateret HaCohanim took Haaretz to court.
--In a revealing analysis of the current situation, Yedioth's chief military analyst writes that Israel's planned gestures to the Palestinian Authority this week should have been made before a crisis broke out and, now, Israel must either make a real peace move or re-occupy the West Bank, because the violence will only get worse.
This week, Alpher discusses whether the two territorial issues PM Netanyahu’s raised in his recent Washington visit - recognition of Israel’s annexation of the Golan, and a unilateral withdrawal on the West Bank - are serious; if the Netanyahu government's decision to ban the so-called Northern Branch of the Israeli Islamist movement because of incitement there is also related; and whether this approach plays into the hands of people like the Swedish foreign minister, who recently argued that there is a link between ISIS’s terrorism and the plight of the Palestinians.
Tuesday, December 1st
5:30pm to 7pm
Room 407 of the Marvin Center (800 21st Street NW)
Join us for an event on Yitzhak Rabin's legacy, which will include a brief overview of Rabin's life and his assassination, followed by Ori Nir speaking about his experience as a journalist on the ground during the Rabin era, the importance of the Rabin legacy, and getting to two states.
Click here for the Facebook invitation
--Roy Isacowitz writes in Haaretz+ about the Schadenfreude Israelis are enjoying towards Europe.
Warren Spielberg is an associate teaching professor at the New School for Public Engagement in New York and a fellow at the Child Institute at al-Quds University in the West Bank. On November 24, we talked to him about his recent study on young Palestinian men in East Jerusalem. We focused on the causes for frustration and anger among them in order to better understand some of the background causes for the current violence in Jerusalem. Prof. Spielberg also spoke about his newly published book, a study of young African-American men, and about the parallels between that demographic and young Palestinian men in East Jerusalem.
--Ahmed Asmar, Arab owner of a shop at the gas station complex on a West Bank highway where a soldier was stabbed to death this week.
--Senior IDF commander says, "We learned a lesson from both intifadas – Palestinian deaths cause outbursts of violence.”
You Must Be Kidding:
A Palestinian shop owner in E. Jerusalem village of Issawiya was reportedly fined by the Jerusalem municipality on the grounds that the sign above his storefront did not accurately describe the store’s contents. He is one of a number of shop owners in the village who have recently been heavily and repeatedly fined for arbitrary reasons.