I have bookmarked the site but cannot spend time there today as I am already angry enough.

How did we arrive at blind support of Israel? Guilt about our refusal to accept Jews after the war, or the money and power of the Jewish elite here in the US?

When I watch kids throwing rocks at tanks and being shot, my sympathy is with the kids. Really what is with our blind support? I use to think it was to have a toehold in oil rich ME, but that seems passe' today.

I was somewhat ignorant about the plight of the Palestinians until about 20 years ago, when a student born in Palestine showed me a book that was a pictorial account of the struggle. I was shocked. He told me about his family in Palestine. Wow. Horrible stuff.

The weirdly sympathetic view of Israel held in the country comes in large part from apocalyptic fundamentalist evangelical right wing groups. Israel is supposed to play a part in the "end times" . . . so evangelicals are supposed to protect Israel now . . . but ultimately Israel gets fucked. That is the narrative. So evangelicals really don't give a shit about the people of Israel - or Palestine. They just play a part in the game.

After the 1967 war, Tzabar began publishing a satirical magazine, Israel Imperial News.

The commotion that the publication caused had driven Israeli students in London to demand that the Israeli Embassy call a meeting and invite me to explain my activities. At first I was told that the Embassy was reluctant, but pressure grew and finally the meeting was arranged at the student club in Beit Hilel, in Swiss Cottage. The house was packed. I talked about my motives for launching the Israel Imperial News and also about the letter I sent to The Times [of London]. My main argument was that I did exactly what I was urged to do by my Zionist upbringing. I was brought up to fight injustice and that was what I did. I quoted a line from a poem by Bialik, the Hebrew national poet which he wrote after the pogrom of Jews in Kishinev, Russia in 1905. In a free translation the line reads

The revenge for the blood of a young child, the Devil has not envisaged yet.

I added:

“What is true about the blood of a young Jewish boy, ought to be true of the blood of all children and not only Jewish. What I was doing ought to be done by everybody. If anyone in this house can convince me that I was wrong and that I should only fight for injustice committed against Jews, I am ready to listen.”

After I had finished, there were questions from the floor. From these questions from students and correspondents of the Israeli press stationed in London, I gathered that few people had understood what I said or if they had, they had chosen to block it out. The questions were of the “Who paid you to do this filthy work?” sort.

Michelin Guides Sue Israeli Satirist over Spoof:
MUCH BETTER THAN THE OFFICIAL Michelin Guide to Israeli Prisons, Jails, Concentration Camps, and Torture Chambers

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Back to the future (and present). There’s a new comedy web series about college activism:

Jewschool is proud to launch Ac’tiv•ist, a brand new webseries written by Josh Wofsun and produced by Josh Wolfsun, Alaa Abuadaas, Amelia Dornbush and a bunch of other folks. More info about the show here. Enjoy the first episode, and tell us what you think in the comments

Aspiring student organizer Samantha Rushbad grapples with the simultaneously inspiring, mind-numbingly banal, infuriatingly stupid, and downright absurd nature of campus activism as she starts a campaign to force her college to divest from Israel. As Sam steps ever-further into the labyrinthine world of activism, she must also deal with her mother, love interest, teachers, and friends who fail to understand her activist life.

In the pilot episode, aspiring student organizer Samantha Rushbad tries to launch a campaign on her campus to end the Israeli occupation.

An Israeli book deconstructs the mythology surrounding the building of Tel Aviv

Mr Rotbard chips away at the façade of his birthplace. He describes how Tel Aviv supplanted Jaffa’s Arab-owned orange groves, and goes on to explain how, in the violent birth of Israel in 1947–48, Jewish paramilitary fighters overpowered and subsequently largely levelled the city from which it had sprung. His tale of Tel Aviv’s growth from a Jaffa suburb founded in 1909 to a metropolis whose population grew 20-fold in the 1920s is gripping.

Its inhabitants, he writes, were for the most part adolescent Jewish men who were no less ideological than today’s settlers. Even their methods were often the same. Their fortified outposts interrupted Arab contiguity. Their first bypass, Allenby Street, today a spine through the city, ran around Jaffa’s perimeter. It gave Tel Aviv access to the sea, but also reduced Jaffa to an enclave that was in effect cut off from its Palestinian hinterland.

In November 1947 the UN published its plan for dividing Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Jaffa was made a Palestinian island within Jewish boundaries. In the fighting that followed, paramilitaries commanded by Menachem Begin, a Tel Avivan who later became Israel’s prime minister, rolled barrel bombs down the alleyways into Jaffa’s cafés and fired mortars into residential districts. By the time Israel declared independence on May 14th 1948, prompting Arab armies to move in, Jews had chased Jaffa’s Arabs out of the city, leaving less than a 20th of the population behind. Many were forced to escape by sea. For the first time in 5,000 years, Mr Rotbard goes on, Jaffa “ceased to exist as an urban and cultural entity”. Much of the Arab medina was bulldozed and grassed over. Some monuments, including mosques and Crusader-era buildings, were preserved, but walking through Jaffa today you would never know that it had once been Palestine’s Arab economic and cultural centre.