New York Times - On the evening of Feb. 10, the living room of Bassem Tamimi’s house in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh was filled with friends and relatives smoking and sipping coffee, waiting for Bassem to return from prison. His oldest son, Waed, 16, was curled on the couch with his 6-year-old brother, Salam, playing video games on the iPhone that the prime minister of Turkey had given their sister, Ahed. She…

Mondoweiss - I was at my home in Olympia, Washington, on the morning of Sunday, March 16, 2003, when I received a call from Will, a friend who had traveled to Rafah. It was a pleasant surprise. I had already heard from Rachel Corrie, whom he had gone to Palestine with, but not from him, so my enthusiasm was pronounced when I asked him how he was doing. “Um ... really bad,” he said. “Rachel’s…

Al-Monitor - Less than a week before the important visit that the US president will make to Israel, Palestine and Jordan, there are some mysteries as to the Palestinian leg of his visit. While the most repeated itinerary lists Ramallah as a city where the US president will be spending a few hours, some sources are giving a different story. More than one Palestinian news site has claimed that President Barack Obama will visit Bethlehem…

Haaretz - The British Jewish "defense" organizations are coming off a double victory in the cause of shutting down deservedly harsh criticism of Israeli tyranny over the Palestinians.

Mondoweiss - Benjamin Netanyahu has finally put the finishing touches on the new Israeli government as President Obama prepares to visit to Israel/Palestine next week. Although there are some new faces and parties in the ruling bloc, the situation on the ground will look like more of the same for Palestinians. The government will reportedly be made up four parties: Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah, Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid, Naftali Bennett's Bayit HaYehudi and the combined Likud/Yisrael Beiteinu party, with…

Antiwar - The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has just completed its annual gala in Washington. A reported thirteen thousand AIPAC supporters reportedly cheered the latest efforts to make Israel America’s most favored nation. A small group of demonstrators was generally ignored though Scott McConnell reports that some protesters were spat upon by those filing in to celebrate Israel. It must be a habit they picked up in Jerusalem where spitting on Christian clergymen is considered de rigueur. There…

The Electronic Intifada - In the last few days, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee has been attacked by various outlets of the right-wing Zionist press spreading a vicious lie that we have targeted Jewish students at Harvard with fake eviction notices (see “Jewish Harvard students receive mock eviction notices,” Arutz Sheva (Israel National News), 7 March 2013). The claim is not only baseless and slanderous, it also carries echoes of last year’soutrageous accusation against Florida Atlantic University…

The New York Times - What should Barack Obama, who is to visit Israel next Wednesday for the first time in his presidency, do about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? First, he must abandon the stale conventional wisdom offered by the New York-Washington foreign-policy establishment, which clings to the crumbling remnants of a so-called peace process that, in the 34 years since the Camp David accords, has actually helped make peace less attainable than ever. When the…

No one has stood up. Neither the president of Israel nor the prime minister. Neither the minister of education nor the minister of justice. Neither chairmen of political parties nor mayors. Haaretz - A young man from Tel Aviv who was injured in a road accident last week wrote on Facebook: “In the emergency room at Ichilov, on the bed next to mine, lay the waiter who was beaten by a mob because he is…

AUPHR - The recent struggle over the nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary is highly  instructive and demands some attention from every responsible American citizen.  Hagel is a Republican, but members of his own party, operating on the principle that they must oppose everything Obama does, savaged Hagel. Their excuse was primarily that Hagel has been "soft on supporting Israel."

Wallwritings - More than 13,000 delegates to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) descended on Washington this week. AIPAC, a lobby organization with no equal in American politics, had assembled its usual list of high-profile political leaders to address the delegates. US President Barak Obama was not among the speakers. He had a good excuse. The president is up to his neck in what Washington calls,"sequestration", a federal budget agreement…

Despite his disappointing results at the ballot box, Netanyahu has successfully leveraged his negotiating position to create a right-wing government that is outwardly aggressive and inwardly nationalistic.

Counterpunch - This does not happen every day: a Minister of Culture publicly rejoices because a film from her country has not been awarded an Oscar. And not just one film, but two. It happened this week. Limor Livnat, still Minister of Culture in the outgoing government, told Israeli TV she was happy that Israel’s two entries for Oscars in the category of documentary films, which made it to the final four, did lose in the end.…

The same society that was so upset by the fate of a single prisoner, Gilad Shalit, does not even begin to grasp the depth of distress the Palestinians feel over the thousands of their people who are in prison.

The New York Times - I was raised in a religious Jewish environment, and though we were not strongly Zionist, I always took it to be self-evident that “Israel has a right to exist.” Now anyone who has debated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have encountered this phrase often. Defenders of Israeli policies routinely accuse Israel’s critics of denying her right to exist, while the critics (outside of a small group on the left, where I…

The American Conservative - A great deal of reporting on the political unrest in Egypt offers simple explanations fully comprehensible to readers in London, Paris, or New York, couched in the political expressions that those audiences are accustomed to hearing. Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi has been depicted as an Islamist with an Islamist agenda who is also an inept leader unable to solve any of Egypt’s manifold problems, most particularly its shrinking economy. This in turn…

The Electronic Intifada - As protests continue across Palestine in support of thousands of prisoners languishing in Israeli jails, local organizations say that the Israeli authorities have increased their pressure on Palestinian human rights defenders. “This is a way to [break] the principle of solidarity between the Palestinian people and the Palestinian prisoners, and the case of the Palestinian prisoners in the conscience of the Palestinian people,” said Mourad Jadallah, a legal researcher with Addameer, aRamallah-based prisoners support…

Antiwar - Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is in trouble again with Washington and Tel Aviv because he dared to equate Zionism with fascism and anti-Semitism as an ideology or political movement that has brought oppression. Erdogan was speaking at a United Nations sponsored Alliance of Civilizations conference in Vienna dealing with instilling tolerance. He spoke in Turkish, but his words as translated into English were "It is necessary that we must consider – just like…

Mondoweiss - Editor's Note: The following report is from February 28, 2013. Although it was reported that Israel would begin segregating bus service in the West Bank starting March 4, the practice has been in effect for much longer. Yeshua-Lyth explained in an email: "The practice of banning Palestinians from public buses has been in evidence for months. News of plans for 'Palestinian only' buses were in the Israeli press already in November. It seems that…