End of occupation

Free speech, but not for Palestine

by Mona Dennaoui and Hammam Farah

On Nov. 20, Israel advocacy group Herut Canada at York University held an event with former soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The IDF has held recruitment drives in Toronto, and it’s illegal for a foreign military to recruit in Canada.

As the Palestine solidarity club on campus, Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA) York, we decided to protest our university administration’s decision to provide space for the event.

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Harvard students walk out en masse from Israeli consul talk (and liberal Zionists are saddened)

In yet another sign that Palestinian solidarity activists are getting room inside mainstream institutions, scores of Harvard students walked out on the Israeli consul general yesterday as he began a talk at Harvard Law School on the settlement project. The students were largely silent and held up signs saying, “Settlements are a War Crime.”

Dani Dayan spoke to a largely-empty room and expressed contempt for the demonstrators as being like kindergartners. (more…)

Sawarka relatives relate hellish destruction of family of 8 in what Israelis call a ‘mistake’

Ahmad Kabariti on November 16, 2019

Abdullah al-Sawarka sounded unconcerned about the Israeli military’s admission of “surprise” and a “mistake” over the killings of his relatives Thursday. The military has said it was “unaware” that his cousin’s Rasmi Sawarka’s two tin shack houses were inhabited when a warplane bombed the dwellings and buried eight family members under the rubble at dawn on Thursday in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp on the central Gaza Strip.

“What investigation could raise the dead?” Abdullah, 45, asks, while standing distraught at the edge of a 50-foot-wide, 20-foot-deep crater where the tin shacks once stood. The “smell of the eight charred bodies” including five children is still stuck to our hands, he said. (more…)

Former Israel commander says Israel’s ‘unjust’ war in Palestine fuels ‘anti-Semitism around the world’

Last week a former Israeli security official urged American Jews to restrain Israel’s “unjust” war in Palestine because it fuels anti-Semitism around the world. The statement is remarkable because that view is generally seen as anathema: saying that Israel’s actions have any role in the growth of anti-Semitism.

Ami Ayalon, a Navy commander and former head of the Shin Bet, spoke at J Street last week and said that Israelis believe they are fighting a just war of defense for their existence, and that the world refuses to acknowledge that. But in fact Israel’s existence is established, and American Jews can see that Israel is engaged in an unjust war (more…)