Noam Chomsky’s critique of the boycott/divestment/sanctions movement against Israel, which is in solidarity with the Palestinian people, has attracted wide attention.1 The Nation, where his article appeared, published five responses, to which Chomsky responded, and at least five appeared independently.2 Chomsky’s views were not new, but were first expressed during a BDS initiative in 2002, at Harvard and MIT.
After providing days of Holocaust coverage the BBC is slammed for inviting ‘anti-Israel MP’ George Galloway to a chat show
BBC TV are being bad-mouthed for inviting MP George Galloway onto the Question Time panel in the Finchley and Golders Green constituency next week.
If you fingerprint them, they will not come. One the biggest annual festivals in West Virginia may go splat if the organizers go ahead with their plan to fingerprint the BASE jumpers at Bridge Day. The pushback from the participants now has the committee giving it a second thought.
The balance sheet for 2014 and the prospects for 2015 provide us with a complex panorama of negative and positive outcomes. In most cases the advances, are not earth-shattering but open possibilities for further progress. The negative developments, however, have greater and more threatening systemic outcomes.
A stinging defeat for Abbas, but no great victory for Israel … Netanyahu persuaded Nigeria to abstain as UN Security Council rejected Palestinian statehood, but could only muster US and Australian opposition, and the French let Israel down.
— Times of Israel
It’s been a year of fervent activism on police accountability, living wages, climate change, personal freedoms, immigrant rights, an open internet and diplomacy over war. The electoral beating the Democrats received has prompted both the Administration and some spineless congresspeople to realize that support for progressive issues could reinvigorate their base —a realization that has already led to Obama’s executive action on immigration and the opening to Cuba.
So here are some of the 2014 highlights.
In terms of losses in human lives, 2014 has been a horrific year for Palestinians, surpassing the horrors of both 2008 and 2009, when an Israeli war against the Gaza Strip killed and wounded thousands.
While some aspects of the conflict are stagnating between a corrupt, ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA), and the criminality of Israeli wars and occupation, it would also be fair to argue that 2014 was also a game changer to some degree – and it is not all bad news.
The Israeli government’s recent announcement that it had authorized the building of another 1,000 settlement homes in East Jerusalem left the US government seeing red, with State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki calling the settlement
A Palestinian university’s decision to bar from its campus an Israeli journalist and outspoken critic of the occupation has exposed a growing rift among Palestinian activists about the merits of contact with Jewish Israelis.
Staff at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah in the West Bank, ordered Amira Hass, a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz newspaper, to leave a public conference late last month. She was told it was for her own “safety” in case students protested against her presence.
