Image: Winter has arrived in Gaza
This growth of the BDS movement is starting to turn the tide against Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid, even among decision makers. Israel may soon be facing its South Africa moment.
The international surge in condemnation of Israel’s treatment of Palestine, and Gaza in particular, underlines the growing impact of BDS
Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has officially banned Palestinians from traveling on Israeli-run public transportation in the West Bank, according to a new report by Haaretz, Israel’s most prominent newspaper.
The new apartheid law dictates that Palestinians cannot take buses that go from central Israel to the West Bank. They must go out of their way, to the Eyal Crossing, near the city Qalqilyah, “far from populated settler areas.”
Israeli officials were caught in a revealing lie late last month as the country celebrated the Jewish New Year. Shortly after declaring the most popular boy’s name in Israel to be “Yosef”, the interior ministry was forced to concede that the top slot was actually filled by “Mohammed”.
That small deceit coincided with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’ speech at the United Nations. He outraged Israelis by referring to Israel’s slaughter of more than 2,100 Palestinians – most of them civilians – in Gaza over the summer as “genocide”.
Image: An area decimated by Israeli air strikes in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. Despite Israeli claims that the attacks have been targeted, many residential areas have faced widespread destruction.
I need to say again, as a Jew and refugee from Nazi Germany I am ashamed of Israel, a country I once hoped to love. Zionism has succeeded to activate the rise of anti-Semitism, a result in my view of a grisly, brutal agenda of ethnic cleansing, , apartheid and human rights crimes against Palestinians.
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep In America | August 30, 2014 Just like another Israel, by enemies surrounded, lost in the veld, but for another Canaan elected, led forward by God’s plan. - Reverend J.D. du Toit, Potgieter’s Trek (1909) This past May, in a relatively banal column touting the necessity of an impossible […]
The Palestinian enclave known as Gaza is approximately 25 miles long by 5 miles wide. It is about the same area as the East Bay from Oakland in the north to Fremont in the south. To the west is open water; to the east are the hills (heavily-reinforced razor wire fence for Gaza).
What would life be like if the East Bay of San Francisco was Gaza?
‘We die like trees, standing up’. Courtesy of the artist Nidal El Khairy. http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/nidal-el-khairy
Seeing rocket fire from Gaza as a counter-discourse. This method of resistance is less about fatalities than undermining privilege structures in an anti-colonial context.
The arrest of a journalist and several political activists in Israel over the past few weeks has provoked a troubling debate: are laws applied differently depending on whether a citizen is Jewish or not? Particularly controversial was the arrest last month of Majd Kayyal, a journalist from Israel’s Palestinian minority who was seized on his return from Lebanon and interrogated for five days without access to lawyers.
