November 1st, 20210Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett agreed with French President Emmanuel Macron that the alleged misuse of spyware developed by an Israeli company, including against Macron, would be handled "discreetly", an Israeli official said on Monday.
Israel says it has been investigating whether cyber firm NSO Group's Pegasus software,...
October 31st, 20210When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the U.S. elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time.
Hence, unsurprisingly, Palestinian Authority President...
October 29th, 20211PALESTINE — Despite objections from the otherwise-aligned U.S. government, and condemnation from Palestine-rights groups, Israel moved forward on Wednesday with plans to build some 3,000 homes for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The move does stand in defiance of the Biden administration's strongest criticism to date of...
October 26th, 20210JERUSALEM — Jerusalem's mayor dismissed media speculation on Tuesday that a U.S. consulate for Palestinians in the city would be denied municipal services if the Biden administration reopens it despite Israeli opposition.
The rightist mayor, Moshe Lion, also said Washington's plan to reverse the Trump administration's subsuming of...
October 20th, 20210The pro-Israel crowd on social media was quick to pounce on award-winning Irish novelist Sally Rooney as soon as she declared that she had “chosen not to sell… translation rights of her best-selling novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You to an Israeli-based publishing house.”
Expectedly, the accusations centered on the standard...
October 13th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. will push ahead with the reopening of its Palestinian diplomatic mission in Jerusalem, despite repeated objections from top Israeli officials over the development.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday that the reopening, which is opposed by Israel’s new cross-party power-sharing...
October 7th, 20210There is an unmistakable shift in American politics regarding Palestine and Israel, a change that is inspired by the way in which many Americans, especially the youth, view the Palestinian struggle and the Israeli occupation. While this shift is yet to translate into tangibly diminishing Israel’s stronghold over the U.S. Congress, it...
October 3rd, 20210The political division in Palestinian society is deep-rooted and must not be reduced to convenient claims about the “Hamas-Fatah split”, elections, the Oslo accords and subsequent disagreements. The division is linked to events that preceded all of these, and not even the death or incapacitation of the octogenarian Mahmoud Abbas will...
September 23rd, 20211WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved $1 billion for Israel’s Iron Dome "missile defense system" on Thursday. The vote came days after some Democrats successfully managed to get it removed from a stopgap spending bill, but then was introduced as stand-alone bill by another Democrat.
The...
September 19th, 20210Twenty-five years before Israel was established on the ruins of historic Palestine, a Russian Jewish Zionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, argued that a Jewish state in Palestine could only survive if it exists “behind an iron wall” of defense.
Jabotinsky was speaking figuratively. However, future Zionist leaders, who embraced...
September 16th, 20210Apple users were alerted this week of a serious security flaw that was being exploited by an Israeli spyware company. The flaw allowed Apple devices to be hacked using technology developed by the Israeli spyware company, which infect phones by sending an image without needing the user to actually click on anything, making it particularly...
September 13th, 20210CAIRO — Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Monday for talks on Israeli-Palestinian relations and bilateral issues, Egypt's presidency said, in the first official trip by an Israeli head of government to Egypt in a decade.
Bennett, the head of a far-right party who took office...
August 27th, 20210The killing of four young Palestinians by Israeli occupation soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank, on Aug. 16, is a consequential event, the repercussions of which are sure to be felt in the coming weeks and months.
The four Palestinians — Saleh Mohammed Ammar, 19, Raed Ziad Abu Seif, 21, Nour Jarrar, 19 and...
August 25th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — Overshadowed by events in Afghanistan, the first White House meeting between President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was postponed until Friday. The Israeli leader is expected to push Biden to harden his approach to Iran, with few prospects their talks will lead to renewed movement on peace talks...
August 20th, 20210A unique but critical conversation on Israel and Palestine is taking place outside the traditional discourse of Israeli colonialism and the Palestinian quest for liberation. It is an awkward and difficult — but overdue — discussion concerning American Jews’ relation to Israel and their commitment to its Zionist ideology.
For...
August 13th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — National civil rights groups have condemned the recent actions of a group of Republican senators who are "concerned" by a Biden administration Muslim nominee over his membership in an organization they say has demonstrated "anti-Israel" prejudice.
On Wednesday, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights,...
August 12th, 20210JERUSALEM — U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns held talks in Israel on Wednesday with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, with Iran high on their agenda, an Israeli statement said.
Regional tensions have risen over an attack on July 29 on an Israeli-managed tanker off the coast of Oman that Israel, the U.S. and...
August 12th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — The American Zionist lobby AIPAC recently took out a paid advertisement on Facebook displaying a darkened image of U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) with text reading “For Ilhan Omar, there is no difference between America and the Taliban, between Israel and Hamas, between democracies and terrorism.”
The...
August 10th, 20210BEIRUT — On Tuesday, President Michel Aoun condemned criticism of Lebanon's Christian Maronite patriarch after he expressed opposition to the Iran-backed Shi'a group Hezbollah, warning that insults must be avoided to safeguard national unity.
Following a cross-border salvo between Israel and Hezbollah, Patriarch Bechara Boutros...
August 6th, 20210The Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah fired barrages of rockets towards Israeli forces on Friday, drawing fire from Israel into south Lebanon, in a third day of cross-border salvoes amid wider regional tensions with Iran.
Suggesting its attack was calibrated to avoid further escalation, Hezbollah said it had targeted open ground...
August 5th, 20210Israel’s defense minister warned Thursday that his country is prepared to strike Iran, issuing the threat against the Islamic Republic after a fatal drone strike on a oil tanker at sea that his nation blamed on Tehran.
The comments by Benny Gantz come as Israel lobbies countries for action at the U.N. over last week’s attack on...
July 27th, 20210A report by the independent human rights agency Human Rights Watch (HRW) says its investigations show that Israeli air strikes had targeted areas where there was no evident military presence and that its action amount to war crimes under international law.
Israel insisted throughout its latest multi-week bombardment of Gaza, on which...
July 21st, 20210The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has released a mid-year report documenting the state of anti-Muslim hate incidents in 2021.
The national Muslim civil rights and advocacy group says that since the start of the year, it has received hundreds of complaints from chapters across the country, and more than 500 at its...
July 20th, 20210After years of efforts by anti-occupation activists, the popular American ice cream company Ben & Jerry's has halted sales of its products in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Activists in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other pro-Palestine and anti-Israeli apartheid activists praised the decision,...
July 19th, 20210WASHINGTON, D.C. — An Israeli company's spyware was used in attempted and successful hacks of 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, government officials and human rights activists around the world, according to an investigation by 17 media organizations published on Sunday.
One of the organizations, The Washington Post, said the...
July 15th, 20210When the Israeli Knesset (parliament) failed to renew what is commonly referred to as the Family Reunification Law, news reports and analyses misrepresented the story altogether. The even split of 59 MKs voting in favor of the law and 59 against it gave the erroneous impression that Israeli lawmakers are equally divided over the right of...
July 8th, 20210“The Palestinian Authority’s days are numbered.” This assertion has been oft repeated recently, especially after the torture to death on June 24 of a popular Palestinian activist, Nizar Banat, 42, at the hands of PA security goons in Hebron (Al-Khalil).
The killing — or “assassination” as some Palestinian rights groups...
July 2nd, 20210CONNECTICUT — The Yale College Council (YCC) voted to endorse a statement condemning “the injustice, genocide and ethnic cleansing occurring in Palestine” on Sunday, June 27.
The statement was introduced in May by Yalies 4 Palestine, a student-led campaign to raise Palestinian voices and end the culture of silence around...
