March 2022

9th February 2023 2:38 pm

Israel kills 3 Palestinian young men in one day Yumna Patel Mondoweiss 01/03/22 Israel killed three Palestinians on Tuesday in two separate incidents in the occupied West Bank, bringing the total number of Palestinians killed by Israel since the start of this year to 15.

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Palestine taboo for a UK art gallery Kit Klarenberg EI 03/03/2022 A statement from Forensic Architecture was pinned to a wall beside the exhibition. It saluted the Palestinian liberation struggle and argued it was “inseparable from other global struggles against racism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism and settler-colonial violence.”

In response, UKLFI fired off a threatening screed to Manchester University’s administration, arguing the institution breached its public sector equality duties by not considering the “impact of the inflammatory language and representations” in the exhibition. Whitworth duly removed the statement from the exhibition, prompting Forensic Architecture to close it outright in protest and Palestinian solidarity activists to stage demonstrations outside the gallery.

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Gaza’s largest library reopens doors Taghreed Ali almonitor 06/03/2022

Samir Mansour, 54, owner of the bookstore, recalls the early hours of the bombing of his shop. “I was surprised to watch media reports about the bombing of the Kahil building in the center of Gaza City where the bookstore is located, in addition to other educational and training centers serving thousands of academics, intellectuals, and school and university students,” he told Al-Monitor. . . . . “To date, I still do not know the reason behind the Israeli army’s bombing of my store, as I am not affiliated with any political faction in Gaza. I believe the main motive was to restrict the Palestinian cultural scene and destroy cultural institutions in Gaza,” he added.

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Israel kills three Palestinian youths Tamara Nassar EI 08/03.2022

Israeli forces killed two Palestinian teens the previous day.

The Israeli army was raiding Abu Dis, a village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, that afternoon when it claimed that two people threw Molotov cocktails at a military post. Soldiers fired at 15-year-old Yamen Nafez Mahmoud Khanafseh, killing him. A second person fled the area. “Israeli forces prevented Palestinian paramedics from treating Yamen, firing tear gas canisters at the ambulance as it approached the scene,” according to a field investigation by Defense for Children International-Palestine.

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The Zionist left provides the ‘laundry’ for Israeli apartheid

Philip Weiss Mondoweiss 08/03/2022 “They are the founding fathers for the settlement project. Who started it? Netanyahu, Begin, Sharon? No no no no no! Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin– Nobel Peace Prize winners, peacemakers– they are responsible. They also enable us Israelis to feel so good about ourselves. Because they were always the laundry of any crime. We have this prestigious, world-famous Supreme Court, this castle of liberalism and freedom, part of the Zionist left, and this Supreme Court enabled any crime of war, from the settlements to the tortures, everything went through the Supreme Court and everything was washed there, and it was accepted. If the Supreme Court says there are no torturing or the settlements are legal– so who are we to say or to think different?”

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Racist premier travels to Russia to check out whether Putin is stable Jonathan Ofir Mondoweiss 09/03/2022

Israel is now walking a tightrope above very unpredictable waters of public opinion in the west. The overwhelming wave of opposition to Russian aggression is justifying boycott, divestment and sanctions as well as resistance as responses to the Russian military occupation, measures for which Palestinians have vainly sought western approval. And meanwhile, Israel is playing footsie with Russia so as to maintain its freedom to conduct missile attacks in Syria against Iranian targets.

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Israel doubles down on apartheid Maureen Clare Murphy EI 11/03/2022

Israel is doubling down on its apartheid rule over Palestinians while it and its international accomplices attempt to fend off the label. This week, Israel reinstated a ban on Palestinian family unification as part of its demographic engineering efforts to ensure a Jewish majority in the territory of historic Palestine. Adalah, a group that advocates for the rights of Palestinians in Israel, said that the legislation is “one of the most racist and discriminatory laws in the world, and must immediately be repealed.”

The “Citizenship and Entry into Israel” order prohibits Israel’s interior minister from granting residency or citizenship to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who marry citizens of Israel.

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FIFA’s hypocrisy in Palestine and the Ukraine Ramzy Baroud Mondoweiss 10/03/2022 What took the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa decades to achieve was carried out against Russia in a matter of hours and days– including FIFA adopting measures to punish Russian teams and athletes. Palestinians are baffled, since they have been informed by FIFA, time and again, that “sports and politics don’t mix”. Not only are Israeli athletes welcomed in all international sports events, the mere attempt by individual athletes to register a moral stance in support of Palestinians, by refusing to compete against Israelis, can be very costly.

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UN Special Rapporteur says Israel is committing ‘pitiless’ apartheid in new report Yumna Patel Mondoweiss 24/03/2022

“The political system of entrenched rule in the occupied Palestinian territory which endows one racial-national-ethnic group with substantial rights, benefits and privileges while intentionally subjecting another group to live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule…..satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid,” the report said.

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Social media giants repress Palestinian content Omar Zahzah EI 29/03/2022

On 8 March, Instagram – owned by Facebook’s Meta Platforms – deleted the main account of the organization Within Our Lifetime (WOL), a New York City-based Palestinian community organization. The social media account was removed over a post that highlighted revolutionary Palestinian women in commemoration of International Women’s Day. WOL explained that their account was suspended “after years of online censorship and shadow banning.”

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UK Comment

Smeared by pro-Israel group Kit Klarenberg EI 18/03/2022

On 15 March, rapper and campaigner, Lowkey gave a talk via Zoom arranged by the Palestine Solidarity Society at Cambridge University. The talk – titled “The Israel Lobby’s War Against You” – was supposed to take place on campus a week earlier. The night before it was scheduled, however, Lowkey was contacted by the organizers, who informed him the event had been postponed. The postponement followed pressure exerted by the Cambridge University Jewish Society.

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Israel lobby demands Lowkey be deleted by Spotify Asa Winstanley EI 24/03/2

“The presence of Lowkey’s music is particularly offensive,” anti-Palestinian newspaper The Jewish News reported in an interview with lobbyist Luke Akehurst this week. Akehurst is the director of a group called We Believe in Israel. The paper reported Wednesday that Akehurst’s group “Will be campaigning for Spotify to remove ‘dozens of instances of problematic material,’ including Lowkey’s [2010 track] Long Live Palestine – Part 2.”

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How Glasgow university smeared its own journal as anti-Semitic

David Miller EI 22/03/22

Instead of sending the complaints to the author of the paper for further peer review, the university asked a staff member “close to the [subject] area” to give an informal view.

University documents released under freedom of information rules show it was agreed that the paper – which discussed the Israel lobby in Britain – should also be sent for external review, but this seems not to have been done.

But even this was only agreed after the university had already decided on its response – to endorse the baseless smears of the complainants.The university is still refusing to reveal who complained about the paper. But extremist anti-Palestinian blogger David Collier has been public about his involvement.The original article by Jane Jackman – published by eSharp, a University of Glasgow journal, in 2017 – examined the propaganda activities of the Israel lobby in the UK.

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