Instead of simply announcing that it opposes BDS, which would be a perfectly legitimate stance, the Israeli government is criminalizing the movement and its advocates. The results won’t be pretty.

On March 8 police near Jerusalem picked up an Israeli citizen who was just standing on the street. He was not doing anything illegal. Someone who lived in the neighborhood reported him on suspicion of carrying material related to BDS; and while it is not illegal for Israelis to carry material about BDS in territory under Israel’s control, the police answered the call.

Jeff Halper, the director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) was speaking to a tour group in Maaleh Adumim, a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank. The police detained him in a place that was one of his regular stops with tour groups, he explained.

“I wasn’t talking about BDS or holding a sign that day,” he wrote in an email exchange with +972 Magazine, “but I sometimes do and so do our other guides. So someone called the police. They should have said to the caller: ‘Thanks for letting us know, but this is a democracy and people can talk on the street (even about BDS).’ But they didn’t of course, and detained me for ‘incitement.'”

BDS is the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Its advocates pursue a variety of non-violent tactics aimed at pressuring Israel to apply international law to the Palestinian residents living under its sovereignty.

Last week the Knesset approved a law barring entry to foreigners who support BDS. An earlier anti-BDS law, commonly called the Boycott Law, was passed in 2011. The 2011 law gives Israelis the right to bring civil suit against BDS advocates in cases where they can prove their livelihood has been undermined as a result. Both laws have been widely criticized for violating basic principles of freedom of speech. Both apply to boycotts not only of Israel, but also of its settlements in the West Bank.

Yet it is still not against the law for Israeli citizens to support or even call on others to support BDS. They just have to bear in mind that they might be sued in civil court for their advocacy.

+972 Special Coverage: The Boycott Movement

The police did not arrest Jeff Halper on Monday, but the fact that they detained and questioned him speaks to...

The decision to strip the al-Qunbar family of their right to live in their native city is not only collective punishment, but also raises questions about the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinian residents of Jerusalem.

The family of the Jerusalem man who rammed his truck into a crowd of people on a popular promenade on Monday will be stripped of their residency rights in East Jerusalem, says Interior Minster Aryeh Deri. The driver, Fadi al-Qunbar, plowed his truck into a group of soldiers standing on the East Jerusalem promenade, killing four of them before he was shot dead.

According to reports in Israeli and Palestinian media outlets, if Deri goes ahead with his decision, 13 members of the al-Qunbar family will lose their right to live in the city of their birth. The family, which lives in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, has denied any knowledge of al-Qunbar having planned an attack.

Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are always vulnerable to having their residency revoked if they stay abroad for long periods; this is a common experience for individuals who go overseas to study for postgraduate degrees, for example. But revoking an entire family’s right to live in their home because one of its members committed a crime is unprecedented. It is, obviously, collective punishment. It also begs the question, once again, of what Israel’s policy is toward Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents.

If the policy is that the city is to remain undivided and exclusively under Israeli control, without even a pretense of future status negotiations, then this means Israel has de facto announced its intention to permanently withhold basic rights like due process from half the city’s native-born residents.

The implications of this decision are not on the agenda of the Israeli Jewish mainstream discourse. East Jerusalem is a sprawling chunk of territory that most Jewish Israelis are afraid to drive through (except the settlers who work to evict Palestinians and take over their houses). But when the name of the place is evoked they immediately talk about access to the holy sites — specifically, the Western Wall of the ancient temple, which is located within the tiny (1km square) walled Old City.

There are about 380,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, or close to 40 percent of the population. But they have no political representation and are granted only 10 percent of the city’s budget...

The Secretary of State asked if they really wanted to live with the moral consequences of a one-state reality. He doesn’t understand this isn’t an issue that preoccupies the average Jewish citizen of Israel.

Over the past three decades Israel has seen seven prime ministers (and several more elections), political assassinations, two intifadas, a peace accord, four wars and the withdrawal of the Jewish settlers from Gaza. But amidst all this upheaval, one essential fact has remained a constant: Israel has maintained complete control over the lives of the Palestinians who live in Gaza and the West Bank.

On Wednesday, an exhausted-looking John Kerry gave what will probably be his final foreign policy speech. It was perhaps fitting that he focused on one of the Obama administration’s greatest diplomatic failures — the Israel-Palestine issue.

In his speech, Kerry asked Israelis if they understood the implications of continuing their military occupation of the Palestinians indefinitely. Over the course of more than an hour, he tried appealing to Israelis’ values: were they willing to reconcile themselves to living in a de facto apartheid state? This is a question that Israelis have heard so many times, that it has lost its meaning.

When it comes to the Palestinians, the national discourse is so hardwired that even Israeli Jews who identify as liberals consider bedrock principles like humanity, rights and ethics to be lofty luxuries. When liberal and right-wing Israelis debate whether or not the occupation should end, they don’t argue over how the occupation affects Palestinians. They talk about whether the occupation is good or bad for the Jews. Only a tiny minority of Israeli Jews are detached from the nationalist narrative and focused on the human rights of Palestinians, rather than the national well-being of the Jews.

As several analysts have pointed out*, Kerry did not say anything new in his speech. He reiterated the U.S. government’s opposition to the settlements, which are illegal according to international law. This has been the policy of every U.S. administration, without exception, for nearly 50 years. Nor has the Obama administration deviated from the practice of previous administrations in allowing the settlements to multiply and expand while offering toothless criticism or issuing shocked-and-appalled statements.

Kerry also stuck to the tradition of U.S. officials in emphasizing his love of Israel, by offering anecdotes to illustrate his knowledge of the place and his identification with the people. Imagine a U.S. official giving a speech in which he talks about his...

For years, liberal American publications have been generally sympathetic to Israel, even when they are criticizing its governments’ policies. Now, in light of an unprecedented New York Times editorial, that attitude might be about to change.

The New York Times editorial board has realized, about a decade too late, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not care what the Obama administration — or any U.S. administration, for that matter — thinks about his policies regarding the Palestinians.

According to the editorial published Friday, October 7, headlined At the Boiling Point With Israel, the catalyst for this realization was Netanyahu’s decision to approve the building of a new settlement deep in the West Bank, only three weeks after the U.S. finalized a package of military aid for Israel to the tune of an unprecedented $38 billion, spread over 10 years. Israel receives more military aid than any other country, by far: Egypt, which receives $1.31 billion per year, is the second-largest recipient of direct military aid from the United States.

As noted in the editorial, the new settlement will be geographically located so that it is added to a string of existing Israeli housing projects that collectively nearly bifurcate the West Bank.

In response to Israel’s announcement the State Department and the White House released angry statements that referenced broken promises and castigated Israel for not behaving as friends should behave toward one another.

After 50 years of unfettered settlement growth and expansion — which was neither halted nor slowed even during the so-called Oslo Spring — the United States expressed unfiltered anger about Israel’s settlement project, even though it has been the policy of every U.S. administration, without exception, to oppose settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. The principle of a two-state solution is predicated on an Israeli military and civilian withdrawal from most of the West Bank. But Israel has never had to suffer any consequences for flouting international law or ignoring U.S. policy. And that is not going to change.

What has changed, very late in the game, is the attitude of the New York Times. Like most U.S. publications, it has for decades pulled its punches when it comes to Israel’s policy and actions. Not this time. “Mr. Netanyahu,” the editorial’s author notes bluntly, “Obviously doesn’t care what Washington thinks, so it will be up to Mr. Obama to preserve that option [the two-state solution] before he leaves office.”

In other words, the Times is suggesting that Obama instruct his...

With just a few months left in office, the U.S. president made sure to deliver a message to the Israeli people, and more pointed one to its leader.

Nearly every aspect of Friday’s state funeral for Shimon Peres, who died this week at the age of 93, had a subtext, or could be seen as a metaphor.

The passing of the last member of Israel’s founding generation (in Hebrew: Generation of the State / דור המדינה) felt as though someone ended a written sentence with a full stop marked in thick-tipped black marker. The End. The end of the aspirational ideals of the socialist generation; the end of the days of aspiring toward a democratic, fully representative state; the end of looking at history as progressive instead of stagnant.

It fell to Barack Obama to highlight all the symbols and ironies both in Peres’s life and in the way his funeral was conducted. The U.S. president tied together the threads of the historical events Peres witnessed and participated in over his long life, even as he (Obama) channeled an idealized version of that life to deliver a deeply nuanced lecture to Israelis. At the risk of coarsening his message with reductiveness, it could be parsed down to one sentence: What kind of state do you want to be?

Excerpts from President Obama’s eulogy (watch it here), with my interpretation of the subtext in italics:

Do you want to be the kind of state that is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who just today humiliated President Abbas, the man who is ostensibly his partner for peace, by refusing to even acknowledge him in his own eulogy? Or do you want to be led by someone who is gracious and generous; someone who understands that basic courtesy requires him to express appreciation to Abbas for having come to pay his respects — even though it meant losing yet more respect from his own people, having to request permission from the Israeli army that controls his movements, and sitting through the funeral on Mt. Herzl, named for the founder of Zionism.

Between you and me, I know that Shimon Peres was not an observant Jew. But he did care deeply about the Jewish people (let’s leave aside for a moment that you might not have agreed with his goals or deeds) and, while he was indeed one of the original fathers of the settlement movement (of course I know that), in later life he came...

Long before she walked out on a performance honoring Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev was using hateful, divide-and-conquer rhetoric against the country’s minority groups. 

Miri Regev, Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sport, caused an uproar at last week’s Ophir Awards, the annual red carpet ceremony for the Israeli film industry. First she ostentatiously walked out of the auditorium to protest the performance of a cover version of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish’s most famous poem, “Identity Card.” Then she returned, only to give a speech in which she claimed Darwish’s poem includes a line about eating the flesh of the Jewish nation. To top it off she accused the Israeli film industry of being an elitist institution that excluded Mizrahi actors.

In fact Darwish’s poem does not mention Jews; furthermore, Mizrahi actors are among the country’s most prominent and successful, both in Israel and internationally. One of those Mizrahi actors, Roi Assaf, tried to storm the stage in protest during Regev’s speech, while calling upon fellow audience members to leave in protest, shouting angrily, “Anyone who stays seated is a zero, a loser!” Regev, meanwhile, raised her voice to be heard above the booing from the audience to insist that she would not leave until she had finished her speech.

But her speech was remarkably discordant and false, even by Regev’s standards. This year’s Ophir winners are collectively a panoply of diversity and liberalism. They include Sand Storm, a drama about Bedouin women with a script that is entirely in Arabic and directed by a woman — Elite Zexer. It won for best film and will be Israel’s entry for best foreign film at the Oscars. Ruba Blal Asfour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, won best supporting actress for her role in Sand Storm. Tamer Nafar, the acclaimed Palestinian rap artist from the group DAM, won an award for the musical score of Udi Aloni’s Junction 48, about an aspiring rap musician (played by Nafar himself) in the drug-ridden inner city of Lod/Lydda. Morris Cohen, a Mizrahi Jew, won best actor for his role in Avinu (Our Father) as a nightclub bouncer who is seduced by the money of organized crime.

Regev walked out of a performance given jointly by Tamer Nafar and Yossi Tsabari, a Jewish Yemenite-Israeli who is a spoken word artist. In an angry post-ceremony press conference, she said her objection was to the anti-Jewish sentiments in Darwish’s poem, which she falsely claimed included a line about...

A new cookbook re-imagines traditional Ashkenazi food, a cuisine that for years was rejected by the children and grandchildren of immigrants from central and eastern Europe. This book is a big step toward correcting that injustice.

Jeffrey Yoskowitz, who, together with Liz Alpern, co-authored a new cookbook called The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods, has been on a culinary journey over the past decade. His experience includes a stint in Israel, where he volunteered for a year on a kibbutz that specializes in pig farming. During that period he wrote a witty blog about the conceit of being a vehemently secular American Jewish pig farmer in the holy land who refuses to eat pork for reasons of cultural identity.

Years later, at a cafe in Brooklyn, I asked him why he eschewed pork, since he did not observe any other aspect of Jewish religious law. “Because,” he answered, “Eating pork is for me the red line. After that, I don’t know what defines the identity of a secular Jew.” Jeffrey being Jeffrey — that is to say, a smart and thoughtful listener — he was completely open to a vigorous debate on what defined a secular, or cultural Jew. He was willing to consider that maybe going to Chinatown for moo shoo pork on Christmas Eve was a sort of secular Jewish cultural ritual.

The Gefilte Manifesto is a glorious paean to the cuisine that is such a big part of central European Jewish heritage and identity. It is a re-imagining of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish food, one that is both deeply rooted in the old world and utterly contemporary. Nor is it sentimental. This is not The Fiddler on the Roof Cookbook.

Gently and with humor, Yoskowitz and Alpern present their case for a traditional cuisine that for years was rejected and denigrated, by the children and grandchildren of Jews who emigrated from central and eastern Europe, as unsophisticated, bland, too “brown,” too fatty and generally unhealthy. These characterizations beg the question, of course: how did generations of Ashkenazi Jews survive for centuries on tasteless, unhealthy food? And what in the world were our grandparents nostalgic for?

The answer, of course, is that something got lost in in translation during the process of uprooting themselves from the old country and resettling in the new. Jewish European cuisine got a very bad rap, and this cookbook is a big step toward correcting that injustice.

The Gefilte Manifesto includes several essays by Alpern and...

Black-clad mounted Border Police galloping into and nearly trampling a crowd of unarmed civilians, old men and women lucky enough to meet the army’s criteria to pray in Jerusalem mutely line up to pass through what look like cattle lanes. Notes on one scene of ugliness and occupation.

Today, on the last Friday of Ramadan, thousands of Palestinians who live on the ‘wrong’ side of Israel’s West Bank barrier queued up at Qalandiya Checkpoint near Jerusalem, waiting for hours under the relentless Levantine sun, in temperatures that soared above 32 degrees Celsius (90 degrees Farenheit) for an opportunity to attend Friday noon prayers at al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

Activestills, the cooperative of photojournalists that works in partnership with +972 and Local Call, its Hebrew sister publication, filmed the following video:

These are scenes that I have witnessed many times in real life. And I have seen more videos and still photos of similar scenes than I care to count. I’ve reached a point of avoiding these videos, but for some reason I clicked on this one. And all I could feel while watching it was disgust and despair. Because what’s going on here is disgusting. There’s no other word but disgust. Oh, and revulsion.

Black-clad mounted Border Police galloping into and nearly trampling a crowd of unarmed civilians carrying plastic bags and identity cards. They look like Middle Eastern Cossacks galloping past cowering Jews in an early twentieth century Russian shtetl, except they’re not carrying torches. Arabic-speaking security forces standing on a hill and barking orders through a loudspeaker as they toss stun grenades and shoot tear gas at people who shuffle like sheep past soldiers who insult them and assault them. Old men and women lucky enough to meet the army’s criteria to pray in Jerusalem mutely line up to pass through what look like cattle lanes at an abattoir — or worse.

Everything in this video is ugly and hopeless and disgusting, from the indifferent or angry soldiers to the hopeless shuffling civilians to the physical wasteland of watchtowers, concrete, garbage, filth and despair that is Qalandiya. It is this grinding despair and the indifference it engenders that makes me feel as though there’s almost no point in bringing the attention of readers to this video. There are hundreds like it, stretching back over years and years. Literally.

But the people who care...

A video showing an Israeli Border Police officer demonstrating admirable professionalism and politeness in his interaction with activists has gone viral in recent days. But behind this purportedly exemplary civility is a much grimmer reality.

The two-and-a-half minute clip shows a Border Police officer, who introduces himself as Alon Tiff, interrupting a verbal altercation between a security guard and a minivan full of Ta’ayush activists wielding video cameras at a checkpoint near Jerusalem that leads deeper into the West Bank. We don’t know where the activists are going, but it’s reasonable to assume they are on their way to participate in a grassroots political activity in some Palestinian village. Ta’ayush is active on behalf of Palestinian land and farming rights in the Hebron Hills, where they are frequently attacked by extremist settlers.

Tiff walks over to the passengers in the van, who are involved in an argument over whether or not they have the legal right to film at the checkpoint, with one of the security personnel ordering them to stop filming while the activists chorus that they have every right to film him, since he was a public servant carrying out his job in a public place. Angry at having his authority challenged, the young man asserts that he is no one’s servant. At which point Alon Tiff intervenes.

Tiff introduces himself with exaggerated politeness and gives the passengers his full name and ID number at their request, as he is required to do by law. He does not press the passengers when they assert their right to refuse to tell him where they are coming from. Then Tiff shows them what he says is a military order that gives him the authority to decide who goes through the checkpoint. He allows them to photograph the order. Then he informs the minivan passengers that he has decided to exercise his legal right, as described in the very loose wording on the order he reads aloud to them, and refuse to allow them through the checkpoint. He does not give any reason for his refusal; nor is he required to do so.

While the interaction is going on, one of the minivan passengers points to another private car that goes whizzing through the checkpoint, unimpeded, and sarcastically asks Tiff if “blondes” get to go through, since the driver of the private car happened to...

Freedom House has downgraded its ranking of Israel’s media from ‘free’ to ‘partly free,’ citing closer ties to the government and a spike in paid media content. But it has one flagrant omission: Israel’s poor treatment of Palestinian journalists.

By Lisa Goldman

Freedom House, the U.S.-based watchdog NGO that reports on the state of civil liberties around the world, has downgraded its ranking of Israel’s media from “free” to “partly free” in its 2016 Freedom of the Press Report. The authors of the report cite the influence of the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, which is owned and subsidized at a huge loss by American casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is an unabashed patron of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel Hayom pursues an editorial agenda that is overtly partisan toward Netanyahu, which is why it is often referred to as the “Bibiton,” a portmanteau of the Hebrew word for “newspaper” and the Israeli leader’s nickname, Bibi. The report also cites the “unchecked expansion” of paid media content, which is not always clearly identified. It notes that this paid content is sometimes funded by the government.

In 2014 Israel’s media was back up to “free” status, along with the perennial note that it has the freest media in the region, where not one country’s media is ranked “free.”

The free/partly free ranking is a matter of just a few points in their methodology, pointed out Freedom House’s Sarah Repucci, who heads up the publication of the annual Freedom of the Press Report. She added, “We use detailed methodology. Israel shifted only two points this year.”

There was some outrage in right-wing circles over the downgrade, with Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin quoting a couple of DC-based neo-cons to support her claim that the report was an example of anti-Israel bias.

Leaving aside the all-but inevitable expressions of outrage from the Israel advocacy crowd over any criticism of Israeli policy or society, a more detached observer might note that there is no mention in the Freedom House report of Palestinian journalists. On the one hand this makes sense, since Palestinian residents of the occupied territories are not citizens of Israel. But on the other hand, Palestinian journalists work in territory that is controlled by Israel. And they do not have any of the legal protections afforded to their Israeli colleagues working in the same territory.

In tangible terms, this means...

What happened at AIPAC was shameful and frightening. Liberal Jews are horrified and the ones who are not seem pretty smug in their lack of self awareness. Welcome to the schism.

On Monday night 18,000 Israel supporters, mostly Jews, sat in a Washington D.C. stadium and applauded for Donald Trump, a man whose candidacy for president of the United States is supported by neo-Nazis.

Let’s leave aside Trump’s misogyny, his vulgarity, his racism against non whites and his encouragement of violence. Let us leave aside, for a moment, the point that he is unabashedly a spectacularly ignorant man who has the attention span of an adolescent with an  addiction to junk food and first-person shooter video games. Let’s just focus on one salient, astonishing and monumentally shameful fact: a stadium full of Jews sat, (and sometimes stood) and applauded for a man who does not deny that he sleeps with a book of Hitler’s speeches next to his bed, and who refuses to disavow his neo-Nazi supporters.

The organized, actively pro-Israel American Jewish community has been teetering on the edge of a full blown crisis for many years. You can’t vote Democrat, recycle your waste, buy your kids gender-neutral toys, advocate for immigration, and look the other way as the Israeli army kills over 500 children in Gaza — and not be at serious risk for a moral crisis. But, let’s say these Progressives Except for Palestine (PEPs) are just misguided. Because they don’t speak Hebrew and never lived in Israel and are badly informed. For the sake of argument, I will cut them that slack.

But not for those who sat and let Donald Trump speak.

The excuse of ignorance or having been misguided does not work for the educated American Jews who sat and applauded for Donald Trump at the AIPAC conference. And when you suspend not only your liberal social values but also your basic self respect (Jews who sat and listened to a man who won’t disavow his neo-Nazi supporters! Jews who gave a standing ovation to a man whose followers give Nazi salutes and tell opponents “go to fucking Auschwitz!”) — all in the name of nationalism and Zionism, you have at the very least a moral disgrace. But I think what we really have here is a crisis. The “leaders” of the Jewish community have lost their way...

Documents that have already been cited in history books are being re-classified in the State Archives.

Israeli state archive documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified in recent years, according to a recently hired assistant professor at the University of Maryland’s Center for Jewish Studies.

Shay Hazkani, who was Israel Channel 10’s military correspondent from 2004-8 and will soon complete his doctorate at New York University, discusses the background and politics of the state’s decision to re-classify various documents in an interview for the Ottoman History Podcast.

In the interview, which was recorded in July 2014 (I came across it recently by chance), Hazkani estimates that about one-third of documents that were de-classified in the 1980s have been re-classified starting from the late 1990s, when the archives were digitized.

These reclassified documents were used extensively by prominent “new historians” like Benny Morris (“Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem”), Avi Shlaim (“The Iron Wall”), Hillel Cohen (“Good Arabs” and “1929”) and Ilan Pappe (“Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”) and cited in their books.

But even though these books certainly exist in the public domain, and they do cite original documents in the Israeli state archives that note orders given to the nascent Israeli army to expel Palestinians during the 1948 war, the government of Israel continues to promote its official narrative — that the Palestinians left of their own accord. Hence the government and, more specifically, the security establishment attempts to control the discourse by re-classifying these documents.

The 25-minute interview is embedded below and well worth your time. Among other things, Hazkani explains that Israel adopted a law in 1955 that specified documents could be kept classified for a maximum of 50 years. But the Mossad, the army and the Shin Bet, which control very large archives, refused to comply with the law. Petitions to declassify specific documents have been brought before the higher courts, with some pending now.

Toward the end of the interview, Hazkani recounts a fascinating anecdote involving his own experience with re-classified documents, this time connected with an incident reported by Joe Sacco in his graphic novel “Footnotes in Gaza.” Sacco traveled to Gaza in 2002 and 2003 to research the book, which was published in 2009. The...

Can an American politician who was born to Jewish parents just be an American politician who happens to be Jewish? Is Israel becoming less important in American politics?

NEW YORK — Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, won the Democratic primary in the state of New Hampshire on Tuesday night. Sanders, who identifies as a social democrat, is Jewish.

But when he spoke about his background in his victory speech he mentioned only that he was the son of Polish immigrants who were poor and little-educated, making it sound as though they might have been eating kielbasa and pierogi for Sunday lunch instead of challah and tsimmes for Friday night dinner.

He highlighted his own success as an illustration of the national narrative that Sanders called “the promise of America” — the idea that one should be able to achieve one’s goals based on hard work and merit.

“My friends,” said Sanders,

Several Jewish observers on social media were unhappy at Sanders’ failure to emphasize that his parents were Jews, and that he is now the first Jewish American to win a Democratic primary. (Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee in the 1964 election, had a Jewish father but was raised Episcopalian, although he acknowledged his Jewish heritage.)

Read More