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October 2015

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The recent wave of attacks across the West Bank and East Jerusalem is no doubt born out of a long-accumulated sense of national desperation bred by the occupation. However, disillusionment with the Palestinian Authority must not be overlooked as a factor that turned a summer of grief into the bubbling anger we are now witnessing.  

While Netanyahu’s account of the Mufti-Hitler exchange has been swiftly and almost universally dismissed as fiction, there is one caveat: Though he didn’t mastermind the ‘Final Solution’, the mufti did align himself with axis leaders, including Hitler. But guess who else reached out to the Nazis looking for a partnership? A group known as Lehi, a Zionist militia that is a political antecedent of today’s Likud party.

Amazon and Walmart are selling a “Boy’s Israeli Soldier Costume” this year for Halloween. The description says: “There comes a time when your child wants to save the world the only way he knows how, by dressing as his favorite army man! Have your child step into their Jewish heritage by putting on this Boy’s Israeli Soldier Costume.”

As though the spatial occupation and control of Palestine were not enough, Netanyahu strives to occupy, control, and disfigure time itself, that is to say, the future, which could be qualitatively different from the murderous, violent, and oppressive present. This may well be another stage in the occupation of Palestine: after all the land grabs and unilateral determinations of ghettoized spaces through the euphemistically called “Separation Barrier,” the extremist Israeli government is intent on stealing the others’ future and, ultimately, time as well.

In mid-November, people will gather in Cambridge, Mass, to examine the lessons of the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa in an effort to build more effective political campaign to influence Congress today. A conference organized by Peace Action will examine the current state of US politics and policy regarding Israel-Palestine, assess the growing partisan divide on the issue and take concrete steps to organize on-going efforts based in each Massachusetts Congressional district.