Although little known outside Israel, Mizrahim — the descendants of Palestine’s indigenous Jewish community as well as Jews brought to Israel from the Arab World and non-European countries— form the majority population among Israeli Jews. Long discriminated against by Israel’s European Jewish Ashkenazi elite, Mizrahim have paid a high price for European Zionism’s war against the Palestinians. In this contribution to EI, two important Mizrahi voices, Reuven Abarjel, a founder of the Israeli Black Panther movement representing Mizrahim, and Smadar Lavie, call on Mizrahim to stand against their co-optation into Zionist militarism. Read more about Another Act in the Mizrahi-Palestinian Tragedy 

In less than four weeks, the civil infrastructure of two emerging Middle Eastern democracies has been laid to waste, and over 400 Palestinians and Lebanese, mostly civilians, have been killed by Israeli forces. The urgency of finding a just solution to the Israeli- Palestinian dispute has never been more compelling. But if calm is to be restored, the international community must convince Israel that security comes not through warfare but through peace. While Israel enjoys the security rewards of peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, it has been strangely reluctant to pursue the same with Lebanon or the PLO. Instead, at the heart of Israeli policymaking today lies a deluded faith in the benefits of unilateral action over diplomatic engagement. Read more about The failure of Israeli unilateralism 

As Israel destroys Lebanon, the words of right-wing pundits, however indicting, crude or inhumane, do not necessarily warrant the most concern. They hail from a realm intellectual poverty, hatred and from the most unimaginative strain of racism. What is more concerning are those who purport to represent a liberal pacifist left, but who exploit catastrophes to advance subtle agendas; those who recoil at the words of Likud party hawks, then meet them for lunch an hour later. If the name Yossi Beilin comes to mind, then read no further. Read more about Dovetailing violence 

I write these words as the Israeli aggression against Lebanon enters its seventh day, following military operation by the Islamic Resistance which resulted in the capture of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of seven more. I flip through the television channels and the newspaper pages. It all makes me say, “What a pity, Lebanon.” Yet, I do not say this because I see Lebanon “stuck in a war created by the machinations of the Syrian-Iranian axis.” Such is the claim made by those who either neutralize Lebanon from the Israeli-Arab conflict, among them the February 14th bloc, or make its participation in that conflict contingent on the participation of all other Arab countries. Read more about Lebanon...What I Pity 

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin — 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified — and there are many — cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring. Read more about Atrocities in the Promised Land 

In much of the Western media, the Palestinians are written-off as a gang of unruly terrorists. However, the numbers give a different account. Since September of 2000, six out of every seven children killed in this decades-long conflict have been Palestinian. Terrorism constitutes acts of violence against civilians in furtherance of political objectives. Terrorism is a Palestinian suicide-bomber attacking a bus or a pizza parlor in Tel Aviv. Terrorism is also an Israeli warplane deliberately targeting the civilian infrastructure in Gaza and Lebanon. We lose all credibility when we rightfully condemn acts of terror carried out by individuals or groups, but offer support to a state that also targets the innocent. Read more about Tax dollars sent to Israel buy enemies for US 

Here we go again — another “serious escalation” has begun in the Middle East, or so BBC World was telling audiences throughout Sunday. So what prompted the BBC’s judgment that the crisis was escalating once more? You can be sure it had nothing to do with the more than 130 Lebanese dead after five days of savage aerial bombardment from at least 2,000 sorties by Israeli war planes that are making the country’s south a disaster zone and turning Beirut into a crumbling ghost town. Those dead, most civilians and many of them women and children, hardly get a mention, their lives apparently empty of meaning or significance in this confrontation. Read more about Israelis are dying: it must be an escalation 

They say that when one loses an appendage, the sensation never leaves. One is visited by a “referred pain”. Since 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza, approximately one third of all Palestinians have, at one time or another, languished in Israeli prisons, contributing to a vacuum in family life. Today, as Israel and the United States use the capture of three Israeli soldiers to justify civilian massacres in Gaza and Lebanon, nearly 9,000 Palestinians are held in Israel’s detention facilities. Read more about Ghost World, Palestine