Israel/ Palestine

By Danielle K. Brown, Michigan State University | – Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively. For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To […]

censorship

Israel Bans Al Jazeera Journalists, Network, Joining Syria and Iran as Repressive Regime

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Committee to Protect Journalists on Sunday condemned the Israeli cabinet’s decision to ban the Al Jazeera news network in Israel. The network’s office was closed and its equipment was confiscated. Israeli cable channels were forced to delete Al Jazeera from their offerings, and even its website has been blocked […]

censorship

Israeli Violations against Journalists in Palestinian West Bank Multiply

Global Voices

Written by Natacha Danon More than 100 journalists in Gaza have been killed by Israel since it launched its deadly war on the strip, following Hamas’s incursion into Israeli soil on October 7, 2023. Reporters Without Borders has filed multiple complaints with the International Criminal Court to investigate “intentional homicides” of several Gazan journalists. But […]

Featured

Tens of Thousands of Israelis Demonstrate against Netanyahu, Demand Hostage Exchange Deal, New Elections

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that tens of thousands of Israelis rallied Saturday night against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv and other cities, including Jerusalem, Beersheba and Haifa. The protesters were responding in part to dueling news releases about the possibility of a breakthrough […]

Displaced and Refugees

Why Scapegoating the UN Relief and Works Agency — Which Helps Palestinians — Must Stop

Al-Shabaka

( Al-Shabakah ) – Shatha Abdulsamad· Informed by the understanding that Palestinian displacement is a combined effect of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and the creation of the State of Israel, to which the UN bore responsibility, the international community recognized that the question of Palestine and the plight of Palestinians refugees warranted special […]

Children

Netanyahu as Lord of the Flies: He has wounded, sickened or starved all 600K Palestinian Children in Rafah

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Catherine Russell, the head of UNICEF, said this week that of the 600,000 children in Rafah, southern Gaza, all of them are either injured, or sick, or malnourished. Much of the Gaza population has been forced south to Rafah by the Israeli military, which had promised them it was a […]

Dissent

Columbia Students are Sick at Heart, just as we were in ’68

Waging Nonviolence

Mark Rudd ( Waging Nonviolence ) – What is the ethical response to witnessing a great moral crime? Turn away and allow oneself to be distracted? Pretend it doesn’t exist? Or acknowledge the crime for what it is, and take some sort of action to try to stop it? Students at Columbia in 1968 understood […]

Donald Trump

Top Ways MAGA and Right Wing Zionism Converge, and Why Smotrich is Embracing Trump

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Going back to the late nineteenth century, Zionism has had a complex and storied history, and there have been many strains of the ideology. Some early Zionists did not insist on colonizing Palestine, while others did (and colonizing it was the word they used). All agreed that the Jewish religion […]