Jewish

An American student of Palestinian descent detained in Israel’s airport for nearly a fortnight has become an unexpected cause celebre. Lara Alqasem was refused entry under legislation passed last year against boycott activists, and Israeli courts are now deciding whether allowing her to study human rights at an Israeli university threatens public order.
Usually, those held at the border are swiftly deported, but Ms. Alqasem appealed against the decision, becoming in the process an improbable “prisoner of conscience” for the boycott cause.

JERUSALEM — (Analysis) According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, anti-Semitism is defined as “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group.” This is also how anti-Semitism is understood by people in general. However, the state of Israel and Zionist organizations around the world do not want the term to be defined as only racism against Jewish people but also to include criticism and rejection of Zionism.
 

The latest “scandal” gripping Britain – or to be more accurate, British elites – is over the use of the term “Zionist” by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposition and possibly the country’s next prime minister.
Yet again, Corbyn has found himself ensnared in what a small group of Jewish leadership organisations, which claim improbably to represent Britain’s “Jewish community”, and a small group of corporate journalists, who improbably claim to represent British public opinion, like to call Labour’s “anti-semitism problem”.

WASHINGTON — In honor of the shared values between the State of Israel and the United States of America, and the recently passed “Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People” Basic Law, the following bill has been proposed to the U.S. House of Representatives (with an identical bill proposed in the U.S. Senate).

JERUSALEM — After several days of rushing and intense debates, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had his wish come true. He urgently wanted to get the Nation State bill passed into law before the Knesset goes into summer recess on July 22, and for several days now the Knesset committee charged with ironing out the bill was delaying the process with long discussions.  Now the law passed 62 to 55 and 2 abstentions.

Op-Ed — God never spoke to an Arab.”

Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians are also being criticized by prominent Israeli politicians. The below comments are from the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, on systemic racism in Israeli society and published in The Times of Israel.1

This month, the Israeli government announced that activists affiliated with 20 organizations, including my organization Codepink, would be banned from entering Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories because of our support for the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Originally appeared at RussiaFeed.com

Going After Jews Instead of Neo-Liberals

Charles Bausman, the editor-in-chief of Russia Insider, has chosen a path well-trodden: he decided to woo his audience by discovering the “Jewish origin” of today’s wars and tensions.

BEIRUT, LEBANON (Analysis) — On Monday, pictures of Israeli journalist Ben Tzion, posing inside Prophet Muhammad’s mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia, inundated Arab news outlets and social media. Tzion held a bag with Hebrew script on it, publicly posing at several sites in Saudi Arabia. The scenes signal an unprecedented improvement in Saudi-Israeli relations.