Palestinians show solidarity with Kashmir at protest outside Indian Embassy in Washington DC — Mondoweiss (8/20/19)

India’s treatment of Kashmir is eerily similar to Israel’s treatment of Palestine, and those that are fighting for Palestinian rights have taken notice. Activist group American Muslims for Palestine worked alongside the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations to hold a demonstration for Kashmiri sovereignty in front of the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. last Friday, showing solidarity for Kashmir. Taher Herzallah, the Associate Director of Outreach & Grassroots Organizing at AMP, was the main organizer of the event. He has deep roots in Palestinian activism and sprung into action when the Indian government revoked Article 370. “We are working with our friends in the Kashmiri community to see what plan of action to take next. We figured that a protest in front of the Indian embassy was a good first step,” Herzallah told Mondoweiss about the work AMP is doing, “However, we plan on working with them to do more and hopefully in the coming weeks we will devise a better plan to come up with strategy to approach this issue either in congress or at the UN.” Herzallah estimates that over 100 people showed up to protest in front of the embassy.

Number of Palestinians displaced by Israel in 2019 already exceeds 2018 total — Middle East Monitor (8/23/19)

‘Anti-Semitism’ vs. ‘Islamophobia’: How language creates hierarchies of discrimination and whitewashes bigotry — Mondoweiss (8/22/19)

One such example of strategic linguistic flexibility, taken straight from our fiction-turned-fact and prophesy-fulfilled Orwellian times: someone who hates Jews is known as an “anti-Semite”, but someone who hates Muslims is merely an “Islamophobe”, a person afraid of Islam? With a suffix borrowed from medical jargon and pinned to the name of a religious denomination, the latter term seems lackadaisically artificial and somehow comes off as rather less harmful than any compound word with the threatening prefix anti preceding its root (as a kid I always thought antipasti was Italian for “someone who hates pasta”, regardless of the fact that the language of a country in which the staple food is pasta would most probably not have a word for hating it in its vocabulary). So my question is: why is an anti-Semite not called a “Semitophobe?” And an Islamophobe not an “anti-Muslim?” And what is that even supposed to mean, “afraid of Islam?” As if the organized heterogeneous beliefs of 1.8 billion people were a Freddy Krueger-like serial killer coming to murder you in your sleep.

Why won’t Israel lobby groups condemn Trump’s anti-Semitism? — Electronic Intifada (8/21/19)

Trump’s game: bring on the Democratic Party’s ‘crisis’ over Israel — Mondoweiss (8/22/19)

Are new Palestinian construction permits paving the way for annexation? — Middle East Eye (8/19/19)

From 2009 to 2016, Israeli occupation authorities approved just 66 construction permits for Palestinians in Area C – a mere two percent of total applications. Over the same time period, there were 12,763 housing unit construction starts in Israeli settlements in Area C. However, while the new construction permits barely scratch the surface of the needs resulting from an intentionally discriminatory system, it is still an unusual development. Why would a hard-right government – in the run up to elections – take such a step? One vital piece of context is the White House “peace plan”; Haaretz cited unnamed “political sources” who believe the move “could be due to American pressure”. The approvals came ahead of a visit by a US delegation led by White House adviser Jared Kushner, part of a regional tour promoting the plan. This possibility was a cause for concern for some in the settler movement; two senior leaders described the Palestinian construction permits as “particularly worrying”, given what they described as the Palestinian Authority’s “clear goal of establishing a terrorist state in the heart of the country”.