Permission To Narrate

Last month, a group of students at the University of California, Irvine gathered to protest a screening of the film Beneath the Helmet, a documentary about the lives of recruits in the Israeli Defense Forces. Upset about the screening of a film they viewed as propaganda for a foreign military, the students were also protesting the presence of several IDF representatives who were holding a panel discussion at the screening. 

During the past four years, public opinion polling has reaffirmed that the base of the Democratic Party, especially its more progressive wing, is becoming increasingly alienated from Israel’s repressive policies, and is demonstrating increasing support for Palestinian rights. For example, an April 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that liberal Democrats — for the first time — now sympathize more with Palestinians than with Israel by a 40 percent to 33 percent margin.

Occupied West Bank – As temperatures rise and summer months approach, yet again this year, thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are being deprived of their most basic need – access to water – as the Israeli national water company Mekorot restricted the water supply to villages and towns in northern West Bank.

Former prime minister Ehud Barak blasted Israel’s current government on Thursday evening, saying it was putting the country on the path to becoming an ‘apartheid state,’ and should be brought down if it fails to get back on track.

Memory is a powerful thing, as is the absence of it. Recognizing this, Israel has manipulated the phenomenon of forgetting in many ways to try and rewrite its own bloody past and erase the history of the Palestinians. This has created a willful amnesia, in Israel, about the Nakba, or catastrophe, the systematic, violent expulsion and dispossession of native Palestinians by proto-Israeli Zionist forces. It has also facilitated the ongoing violence of the Israeli occupation, which Palestinians must deal with every day.

This Sunday marked the 49th anniversary of the 1967 war, when the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem began. It was on this day, as the occupation entered its 50th year, that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo decided to cast his lot firmly in support of perpetual occupation.