Kerry, at contentious U.S.-Israel confab, asks Israel to consider perils of single state

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Written by Ron Kampeas Ron Kampeas

Published: 06 December 2015 06 December 2015

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[By "perils" of a one-state solution, Kerry means either accepting equal rights and democracy for all people or accepting apartheid and segregation in order to ensure Jewish supremacy over Palestinians and other non-Jews]

Kerry’s forceful questioning of Israeli policy as well Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon’s outright derision of U.S. Middle East policy the previous evening underscored the divisions that continue to dog the governments of President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Leading anthropologists group overwhelmingly passes BDS resolution at Denver conference

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Written by Annie Robbins Annie Robbins

Published: 22 November 2015 22 November 2015

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By an overwhelming vote of 1,040 in favor and 136 against (88 percent), the American Anthropological Association (AAA) overwhelmingly approved a historic resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions to honor the call of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS). The association voted at its annual business conference in Denver, Colorado last night, becoming the largest scholarly institution in the United States to endorse the academic boycott of Israel.
The resolution (full text here) is subject to a final vote of the AAA’s 10,000 members in April. It is the largest professional organization for anthropologists.
- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/11/anthropologists-overwhelmingly-conference

Op-Ed on Washington Post: We are lifelong Zionists. Here’s why we’ve chosen to boycott Israel.

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Written by Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl Steven Levitsky and Glen Weyl

Published: 25 October 2015 25 October 2015

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[Even liberal Zionists are understanding that the course Israel is taking cannot be stopped without a concerted campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions]

Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University. Glen Weyl is an assistant professor of economics and law at the University of Chicago.

We are lifelong Zionists. Like other progressive Jews, our support for Israel has been founded on two convictions: first, that a state was necessary to protect our people from future disaster; and second, that any Jewish state would be democratic, embracing the values of universal human rights that many took as a lesson of the Holocaust. Undemocratic measures undertaken in pursuit of Israel’s survival, such as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the denial of basic rights to Palestinians living there, were understood to be temporary.

But we must face reality: The occupation has become permanent. Nearly half a century after the Six-Day War, Israel is settling into the apartheid-like regime against which many of its former leaders warned. The settler population in the West Bank has grown 30-fold, from about 12,000 in 1980 to 389,000 today. The West Bank is increasingly treated as part of Israel, with the green line demarcating the occupied territories erased from many maps. Israeli President Reuven Rivlin declared recently that control over the West Bank is “not a matter of political debate. It is a basic fact of modern Zionism.”

This “basic fact” poses an ethical dilemma for American Jews: Can we continue to embrace a state that permanently denies basic rights to another people? Yet it also poses a problem from a Zionist perspective: Israel has embarked on a path that threatens its very existence.

(Read the rest on the Washington Post)

Fact Check: MSNBC’s Palestinian Loss of Land Map

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Written by IMEU IMEU

Published: 23 October 2015 23 October 2015

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[Note that AUPHR's own version of the map corrects one of the errors noted below:  AUPHR's map shows the Syrian Golan Heights as occupied territory]

Last week, MSNBC aired a map (above) showing loss of Palestinian land to Zionist settlers and then to Israel from 1946 to the present. Following criticism from Israelis and their supporters, MSNBC apologized and stated that the map was incorrect. But was it? The following is a fact check of MSNBC’s map and the criticisms of it.
 

Does the map accurately show the loss of Palestinian land since 1946?
Yes. The map accurately depicts the land that has been forcibly taken from Palestinians since 1946, two years before Israel was established and the accompanying expulsion of between 750,000 and a million Palestinians to make way for a Jewish state.
During and immediately following the state's creation in 1948, Israel expropriated approximately 4,244,776 acres of Palestinian land. In the process, more than 400 Palestinian cities and towns were systematically destroyed by Israeli forces or repopulated with Jews. Most Palestinian population centers, including homes, businesses, houses of worship, and vibrant urban centers, were demolished to prevent the return of their owners, now refugees outside of Israel's pre-1967 borders or internally displaced within them. (See here for interactive map of Palestinian population centers destroyed during Israel's creation.)
Israel’s systematic dispossession of Palestinians is ongoing today, both in the occupied territories and inside Israel’s internationally recognized pre-1967 borders, where Palestinian citizens of the state and those living under occupation continue to be pushed out of their homes and off their lands – including entire towns – to make way for Jewish citizens and settlers. Today, there are approximately 650,000 Jewish settlers living illegally on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Israel’s settlement enterprise covers approximately 42% of the West Bank.

Did the map specify that Palestine was an independent state prior to 1948?
No. Critics have focused on the fact that Palestine was not a sovereign and independent state prior to 1948, however the map did not claim that it was. The map purported to show “Palestinian Loss of Land 1946-present,” and it did precisely that, accurately. While it was not a recognized independent state under British rule in 1946, Palestine as a political entity existed prior to the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, going back to ancient times when it was a province of the Roman empire until more recently when it was British Mandatory Palestine, immediately preceding Israel’s creation.​​

Were there real factual errors in the map?
Yes. There were two factual errors in the map:

• ​It showed the Syrian Golan Heights, which have been under Israeli military occupation since the 1967 War, as part of Israel, although the international community, including the United States, does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over the area.
• The map also shows “Israel” existing in 1946. While British Mandatory Palestine did exist in 1946, there was no political entity called “Israel” until 1948.