‘We often play the role of being able to say things that the rest of the movement cannot,’ Jewish Voice for Peace director Rebecca Vilkomerson says in a wide-ranging interview about the group’s decision to come out as opposed to Zionism, how to fight the conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and recent attacks on Black-Palestine solidarity.

Jewish Voice for Peace’s announcement that it opposes Zionism, published quietly on its website earlier this month, has thus far come and gone without much fanfare or public attention. It simply wasn’t surprising for many.

“This doesn’t change anything about our focus or our political analysis,” JVP’s executive director, Rebecca Vilkomerson says, explaining that the change is not a huge departure for the organization in either practice or principle. “It just names something that hasn’t been named before.”

Naming, however, can have powerful repercussions. Just a few days after the statement went up on JVP’s website, an umbrella group of Jewish organizations in Boston voted to expel any of its members who partner with anti-Zionist Jewish groups.

In many ways, JVP’s decision to declare and formalize its position on Zionism is reflective of the political moment in the United States at large, but also specifically regarding Israel-Palestine. After years in which its supporters took great pains to try and prevent Israel from becoming a divisive, partisan issue, it seems all sides are drawing lines around each other — and just like a growing number of issues, both sides seem to be embracing those divisions, hardening their positions, and demanding litmus tests of varying degrees from their supporters.

The decision to adopt those lines, however, is not always just about standing on a particular side but also creating space for others to fit within them. While much of the demand to make the change came from within the organization, Vilkomerson says in a telephone interview last week, another part had a lot to do with JVP’s Palestinian partners, helping frustrate attempts to label Palestinian activists as anti-Semitic, and making it easier for JVP chapters to enter into explicitly anti-Zionist coalitions.

At least temporarily, the result has been advancing a small shift in the discourse about Zionism. This week, J Street, one of the only other progressive Jewish political outfits on the national scene, came to the defense of JVP and the Workmen’s Circle, the organization that was threatened with banishment from the Boston...

In an urgent letter to Israeli military officials, three human rights groups demand that Israel immediately stop spraying the dangerous chemicals into Gaza.

The Israeli army is continuing to spray dangerous herbicides on agricultural fields inside the Gaza Strip, three years since +972 Magazine first reported on the practice. This week, three Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups sent a letter to Israeli military officials demanding they immediately cease spraying the dangerous chemicals into Gaza.

The latest instance of spraying herbicides, using a reportedly carcinogenic chemical, took place in early December. A variety of crops inside Gaza were damaged as a result, according to the rights groups.

“The farmers have sustained massive losses in the past as a result of spraying, and been exposed to the health risks associated with the chemical agents used in the spraying,” Al Mezan, Gisha, and Adalah wrote in their letter to Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with the country’s attorney general and military advocate general.

“The spraying is a highly destructive measure, infringing on fundamental human rights and violating both Israeli and international law,” the rights groups added in a joint statement Wednesday.

Israel has for years maintained a unilateral “no-go zone” inside the Gaza Strip, and regularly sends bulldozers and other equipment across the fence to level land and destroy plants and trees in order to maintain a clear line of sight. Since the start of 2015, the Israeli army crossed the fence upwards of 207 times in such operations, an average of more than twice a week.

In December 2015, the Israeli army admitted for the first time, in response to questions from +972 Magazine, that it was also using herbicides inside Gaza. According to follow-up reporting by Amira Hass in Haaretz, close to 3,500 acres (14,000 dunams) of farmland in Gaza have been damaged by the practice. The spraying has also damaged Israeli crops along the fence.

The letter from the three human rights groups further reveals that the chemical being sprayed by Israeli military contractors, Roundup, has been determined by the World Health Organization to be a carcinogen and is not meant for aerial spraying, both due to the health risks and also the risk posed to nearby crops.

In 2016, the farmers demanded the army compensate them for the damage. The army refused.

Despite the IDF’s confirmation to +972, and later to Gisha, that...

Israel is about to hold elections, but not everyone living under Israeli rule gets a vote. A breakdown of who has rights and who doesn’t.

On April 9, 2019, Israel will hold general elections. Israelis will head to the polls to choose their elected leaders and representatives. If they are unhappy with the way things are going, like citizens of democracies around the world, their votes will help shape the ideological and political direction of the government and the institutions it controls.

In a vacuum, that sounds like fairly standard democratic practice. But there is nothing standard about Israel’s democracy.

Israeli citizens get to vote in Israeli elections, choosing elected leaders and how they rule the country. But the Israeli government doesn’t just rule over Israeli citizens, or just over Israel, for that matter.

Nearly 14 million people live under Israeli rule. The extent of that control varies, as does the ability of those 14 million people to exercise control over the policies, personalities, and institutions that determine so much about their day-to-day lives.

At the end of 2018, the population of Israel was approximately 8,972,000 people. That includes more than 330,000 Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem who do not have Israeli citizenship and thus do not have the right to vote in national elections. It also includes more than 214,000 Jewish Israeli citizens who live in occupied East Jerusalem and more than 435,000 Jewish Israelis who live in the occupied West Bank.

Ziv spent countless days and nights in the village this year, documenting the nonviolent struggle against the Israel army’s planned demolition and forcible displacement.

+972 Magazine and Local Call* correspondent Oren Ziv won a prize for his photography of the struggle against the demolition and forcible displacement of Khan al-Ahmar this week. Ziv won first prize for a series of photographs in the Society and Community category of the Local Testimony photography exhibition, which opens Thursday in Tel Aviv.

Photo of the year was awarded to Haaretz photographer Olivier Fitoussi for his photograph of Prime Minister Netanyahu and members of his Likud party taking a selfie to celebrate the passage of the Jewish Nation-State Law. The photo was widely circulated, and a long-time Jerusalem Post cartoonist was fired for parodying the photo in the image of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”

The Local Testimony exhibit, in its 16th year, runs concurrently with the World Press Photo exhibition. It features documentary and press photos from Israel and Palestine submitted by professional photographers working in the area.

Ziv, one of the founding members of Activestills, spent countless days and nights photographing and reporting on the Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists who set up camp in Khan al-Ahmar to nonviolently resist Israeli military plans to demolish the village and forcibly displace its residents. Ziv’s reporting on Khan al-Ahmar was conducted on behalf of Hebrew-language site Local Call, where he is a staff writer, and was also published in English on +972 Magazine.

Spending so much time in the village, Ziv wrote in October, showed him “that despite all of its previous losses, the popular struggle in the occupied territories is still alive.”

When Prime Minister Netanyahu, under unprecedented international legal pressure, called off the demolition, “[f]or a moment, it was possible to see how a defiant, popular, nonviolent struggle could accomplish the impossible,” Ziv added.

Another member of Activestills and +972 Magazine contributor, Keren Manor, won the same prize in last year’s competition for her reportage documenting the Israeli police killing of a Bedouin man in the village of Umm al-Hiran.

The Local Testimony photography exhibition is open to the...

There are zero prospects of finding a way out of this situation. Nobody is coming to end the occupation, and there will be no end to the violence until the violence of the occupation ends.

One of the most depressing things about Israel-Palestine is just how predictable and cyclical the violence can be. The almost-war in Gaza, the new wave of shooting, ramming, and stabbing attacks in the West Bank, the nightly Israeli army raids deep into Palestinian cities, the clashes that will soon become a regular feature of the coming months, the vigilante settler violence — it’s almost identical to the year before and the year before and the year before.

Go a little further back and there’s an actual war in Gaza, Israeli military operations in cities jokingly referred to as being under Palestinian control, more settler violence, the inevitable mounting casualties — some combatants but also children and random civilians on both sides.

The violence is inevitable. Three years ago, in a moment of violence that felt identical to this one, I wrote that it is precisely in times of violence that we most need to talk about peace. And yet then, and even more so now, there is no prospect of peace. Talking about peace feels like a delusion — one meant to distract from a reality in which so many people are working to advance the opposite of peace, whatever that might be.

“When people talk about addressing the violence at times like these they are generally referring only to Palestinian violence directed at Israelis, not the structural violence of Israel’s occupation and the deadly physical violence it visits on Palestinians,” I wrote. “Getting back to ‘normal’ is the goal of Israel and Israel alone.”

There is nothing okay about targeting civilians, and the shooting attack that left a pregnant woman in serious condition and killed her then-unborn baby, are nothing short of abhorrent. At no point in the history of the world has there been a single situation in which one population oppressively ruled over another that didn’t result in unpalatable violence.

There is also the palatable violence — the violence of a foreign...

White supremacists were carrying out mass murders in America long before Donald Trump was born, and definitely before he ran for president. That doesn’t mean we can let him off the hook.

I opened up the Daily Stormer this morning. For whatever reason, probably because it was too hard to think about the actual massacre inside that synagogue in Pittsburgh, I did what journalists and analysts across the globe do when tragedy strikes: I set out to learn more.

What I found were things I already knew but didn’t want to fully believe. Perhaps that is why I navigated to the notorious white supremacist website in the first place — out of guilt for some sort of unwillingness to see clearly and acknowledge what we’ve all known all along.

The article I stumbled into — written by the site’s founder and publisher, who seems to write much of its content — was disturbing but not surprising. (I am deliberately not naming the author nor am I linking to the article because I don’t want to amplify their messaging any more than I already am by writing about them.)

Believe it or not, the article actually decried the murderous attack at the Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday. Not because the author is opposed to murdering Jews, quite the opposite, but because doing so is not conducive to advancing the cause of white nationalism in the United States at this particular moment.

“[Y]ou’re not going to fight the Jews and overthrow the system with random terrorist attacks,” the prominent white supremacist explained. “The only time any type of violence-oriented political agenda was ever possible, it was in coordination with a legitimate political party.”

“That means that because we do not presently have political organization, we have to be working on that right now, exclusively,” he continued. “Random people shooting random Jews is completely insane, and only puts us in a worse situation. It is a selfish act that can only bring some temporary satisfaction to the individual, who is choosing to put that personal feeling over the wellbeing of our people.”

Firstly, the article can help us understand a broadly glossed-over part of the last social media post made by the murderer, Robert Bowers: “Screw your optics, I’m going in.”

Bowers ostensibly knew that his white nationalist, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist ilk are playing a long-game. He knew that others who share...

A well-known human rights activist received a call warning that law enforcement will ‘take steps against him’ over any illegal ‘speech, act, or behavior’ in relation to Khan al-Ahmar. Activists are camped out in the village, hoping to stop the imminent demolition, which the ICC warned would be a war crime.

By Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man and Yael Marom

Israeli police appear to have “warned” at least one well-known Israeli human rights activist that law enforcement will “take steps” against him if he says or does anything illegal in relation to the imminent destruction and forced displacement of Khan al-Ahmar.

“You don’t have to speak with me,” the man, who identified himself as a detective serving in the Jerusalem area, said at the start of the call to Guy Hircefeld Wednesday afternoon, emphasizing that the conversation was not an interrogation of any sort.

“As you surely know, there is an eviction at Khan al-Ahmar, are you familiar [with it],” the man asked.

“I want to warn you and inform you that any action, speech, or behavior that violates the law in that context is forbidden,” he continued, adding that “steps will be taken” against Hircefeld.

When Hircefeld asked why he, specifically, was receiving this warning, the response was, “if I’m calling you then there’s likely a reason. I only called to caution you.”

Listen to the full phone call in Hebrew:

Hircefeld, after telling the man that he understood, told him that he had a request of his own. “When you take off your uniform tonight, think about this conversation. And think about [whether] we live in a democracy.”

Asked again whether he understood the message that the detective was delivering, Hircefeld responded, “believe me, in these times, I’m taking it to heart.”

Hircefeld told the detective that he believed the call was meant “to show me that Big Brother is watching me, that you know where I am — I got the message.”

Palestinian, Israeli, and foreign activists have been spending their days and nights in the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar ahead of the imminent demolition.

Israeli army and police forces have shown up every day recently, ostensibly to make preparations on the ground for the demolition and displacement, and police have used force against activists exercising civil disobedience — mostly by standing or sitting in front of bulldozers.

Many of...

Israel’s most-read newspaper deletes crucial explanations from an Associated Press article, leaving its readers with zero understanding of why Palestinians might want the world to boycott Israel.

The Associated Press published a feature article last week discussing the impact that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement has had on the Israeli music scene as of late.

Spurred by a few high-profile cancellations at a recent music festival in Israel, most notably by singer Lana Del Rey, the article did what one would reasonably expect an international wire service covering such a story to do: it explained the phenomenon, gave some subjective views and objective facts, and, of course, explained what the BDS Movement is and what its demands are.

The article was reproduced and published by a typically large number of international news outlets, including the New York Times. One of those publications, however, the English edition of Israel’s most-read newspaper, Israel Hayom, made an interesting change to the AP article in the version it put online for its readers.

According to the Israel Hayom version of the article, the BDS Movement has absolutely nothing to do with the occupation. The sixth paragraph, which explains the origins and aims of the movement, reads:

The original AP article, as published on dozens of other websites and newspapers around the world, reads (my emphasis):

The bolded parts, which Israel Hayom deleted, represent one of the more balanced and even-handed descriptions of the occupation and Palestinian refugee problem that one can fit into two sentences, and actually veer far closer to the Israeli narrative than the Palestinian one.

So why did Israel Hayom — a free newspaper published...

In theory, the end of Oslo should be a welcome development. In practice, there is little to celebrate.

There is something unsettling about the way the 25-year anniversary since the signing of the Oslo Accords is being marked — neither eulogy nor longing, and without anyone having any clue what lies ahead. There is one thing that is different this year, however. With the exception of Jason Greenblatt, nobody is paying lip service to the illusion of a peace process any more.

In theory, that should be a welcome development. The Oslo process and the legacy it left on the ground has done far more harm than good. By creating the façade of autonomy and the Palestinian Authority, which arguably has grown into little more than a sub-contractor of the Israeli army, the occupation is far more sustainable for Israel today than it was a quarter century ago.

By leaving in its wake decades of peace processes that went nowhere, Oslo also helped Israel stave off international pressure to either end the occupation or grant Palestinians equal rights. In that regard, Oslo provided international legitimacy for the entire second half of Israel’s 51-year military dictatorship over the Palestinians.

In practice, however, there is little to celebrate. The Trump White House’s Mideast policy has been commandeered by John Bolton, who is rapidly working through a checklist designed to dismantle the very idea of Palestine, and even the Palestinian people. (Bolton has long advocated handing large portions of the West Bank to Jordan — allowing Israel to retain whatever pieces it pleases — and the entire Gaza Strip to Egypt.)

Trump is not attempting to create a framework for a negotiated settlement like the previous five administrations did. Trump and his team are trying to lay the groundwork for an imposed resolution to the conflict — one that meets every one of Israel’s demands and undermines and negates nearly every Palestinian position.

In recent months the White House declared that it “took Jerusalem off the table” by recognizing it as Israel’s capital and moving its embassy there. It is attempting to neutralize the entire question of Palestinian refugees by defining them out of existence. Washington is attempting to extort complete compliance and obedience out of the Palestinian leadership by cutting almost all funding for the Palestinian government and UN-provided basic social services. And the Bolton team’s latest move,...

Whether European states follow through on their threats and warnings over the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar will determine a great deal about the EU’s relevance and its ability to influence Israeli policy vis-a-vis the Palestinians.

European powers are going to have to make a crucial choice in the coming week. Two months after five EU states reportedly warned Israel that the demolition and forced displacement of Khan al-Ahmar would “trigger a reaction” from its allies, the Israeli Supreme Court on Wednesday gave its final stamp of approval for the demolition to go ahead.

Along with the southern West Bank hamlet of Susya, the EU has touted Khan al-Ahmar as one of a few, seemingly arbitrary red lines in Israel’s decades-long policy of demolishing Palestinian homes and expanding its settlement enterprise in the occupied territory (for an explanation why, read Edo Konrad’s interview with Jerusalem expert Daniel Seidemann). Diplomats arrive in convoys whenever the small, dilapidated villages in ‘Area C’ are on the verge of being destroyed. Statements of condemnation, and occasional warnings, are fired into the ether.

Up until now, that approach has partially worked. But things have changed in the past two years, the biggest difference being that the current White House – whose Middle East policy is being led by unabashedly right-wing and pro-settler figures like Jared Kushner and David Friedman – is no longer concerned with what Israel does to the Palestinians. And if it does care, it is unwilling to even mutter an indication of disapproval.

This means that the European powers, to put it bluntly, will have to decide whether to put up or shut up about their commitments to Khan al-Ahmar. Even if they were to act, they are unlikely to do so as a united bloc due to Israel’s budding friendships with far-right EU governments, who hold effective veto power in the EU’s consensus-based system of foreign policy. Governments would therefore have to step in individually.

Netanyahu reveals one of the motivations behind the ‘Jewish Nation-State Law’: to stop Palestinians from ‘exploiting’ family unification procedures to join their families in Israel.

Many people have been asking what harm Israel’s “Jewish Nation-State Law” actually causes — what rights it infringes on, and how it changes the current situation in Israel, in which Jews are already a privileged class. I myself, wrote just last week that the law’s power lies more in its declarations than its legal ramifications.

I stand corrected.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained on Sunday exactly how the law harms an untold number of non-Jewish Israeli citizens, specifically, Palestinian citizens of Israel who are married to or who are immediate relatives of Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, Netanyahu said:

In other words, one of Netanyahu’s primary motivations in passing the Jewish Nation-State Law was to prevent Palestinian families from living together.

Family reunification is a procedure by which Israeli citizens can obtain residency and eventually citizenship for their immediate family who are not citizens.

For Jews, the procedure is moot because Jews can already obtain citizenship under the so-called Law of Return. For non-Jewish, non-Palestinian family members of Israeli citizens, family unification can be an arduous process but not all that unlike similar procedures in many other countries.

If your spouse is Palestinian, however, a demographic almost exclusively comprised of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, you are barred from bringing your family member into Israel and obtaining status for them as if they were Russian, Danish, Nigerian, Mexican, American, Egyptian, or virtually any other nationality.

That ban was first put in place 15 years ago and justified as a security measure. Technically, it is an “emergency regulation,” a category of laws that are only valid as long as Israel is in a “state of emergency,” which it has been for the past 70 years. If the state had argued honestly that the point of halting family unification for Palestinians is borne of demographic and not security concerns, the High Court would have struck it down as unconstitutional.

What Netanyahu said on Sunday is that now, with the Jewish Nation-State Law on the books, he and his government can finally be honest about their intentions. Israel does not want more Palestinian citizens — not due to any security concerns...

You can look at the new Jewish Nation-State Law from two angles: the message it sends to Jews, and the message it sends to Palestinians — you don’t belong here.

Arabic was an official language of the State of Israel for 70 years, two months, and five days. As of July 19, 2018, it is no longer.

There is no practical reason for the change, and, in fact, the “Jewish Nation-State Law,” which abolished Arabic as an official language, basically guarantees that Arabic will retain all the benefits of being an official language despite being stripped of the title.

So why upend the status quo of the past 70-plus years? Sometimes what a law says is more important than what it does.

You can look at the Jewish Nation-State law from two perspectives. There is the message it was intended to send to Jews: a positive affirmation of Israel as the Jewish nation-state; as the Jewish homeland; as the state of the Jews; a reassuring and nationalist message that says ‘this country is yours and yours alone.’

The other message, the inverse, meant for Palestinians, is: this is not your land; this country does not belong to you, irrespective of whether you are an Israeli citizen living in the home of your great-grandparents or a refugee yearning to return to the land of your grandparents; your culture, language, and history are at best tolerated — this is not their home, this is not your homeland.

The Jewish Nation-State Law states, implicitly and explicitly, that Israel belongs not to all of its citizens, over 20 percent of whom are not Jewish. Instead, it declares that Israel belongs to the Jewish people, some half of whom are not Israeli citizens.

According to the proposed ‘Jewish Nation-State Law,’ Israel does not belong to Israeli citizens, more than 20 percent of whom are not Jewish. Instead, it is the state of the Jewish people, roughly half of whom are not even Israeli.

There is a form on the Israeli Interior Ministry’s website, where one can order duplicate and translated copies of a birth certificate. On that form is a drop-down menu, above which it is written: “Nationality.”

In that drop-down menu you will find a list of nationalities which — if one were to attempt to deduce from it how Israel defines nationality — defies all logic. The nationalities listed include ethnicities without their own states, states without distinct or exclusive nationalities/ethnicities, and long-defunct “minority rule” colonial constructs.

A small sampling includes: American, South African, Hongkonger, Lebanese, East German, Hebrew, Kabardian, Samarian, Rhodesian, Abkhazian, and Kurdish.

What you won’t find is the one nationality you might most expect to: “Israeli.” As absurd as it may sound, the State of Israel does not actually recognize an Israeli nationality. In fact, the state has on several occasions argued in court that no such a nationality exists.

(To be fair, speaking of things Israel refuses to exist, the Interior Ministry drop-down menu doesn’t include the “Palestinian” nationality either.)

That Israel does not acknowledge an Israeli nationality is crucial for understanding why a “constitutional amendment” currently being proposed by Netanyahu and his government — the Jewish Nation-State law — is so problematic.