I grew up in a small town in Massachusetts where my parents headed our local synagogue, Hadassah and the United Jewish Appeal. My first trip abroad after university, in 1962, included a week-long visit to Israel, where I was awed by its accomplishments, as well as by its vulnerability. After the Six-Day War in 1967, I basked in the courage and military prowess of my fellow Jews. The eloquence of foreign minister Abba Eban, defending his beleaguered country at the United Nations, still fills me with pride. In the years since, I’ve been a contributor and fundraiser for the UJA-Federation of New York, a governor of the American Jewish Committee, which is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, and a founding director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Yesterday morning, (Tuesday) around 11.30, a convoy of Israeli Army, civil administration, and border police arrived in the Palestinian village of Amniyr accompanying a flat bed truck with a front end loader and a backhoe. Israeli settlers having a picnic at the settlement outpost next to the Susiya archaeological site looked on as the army destroyed nine large tanks of water and a tent.

For the first time in three years, the state has confiscated uncultivated land in the West Bank. The land will be used to legalize a nearby settlement outpost.

Last week, acting on orders from the government, the Civil Administration declared 189 dunams of land belonging to the Palestinian village of Karyut to be state land, so as to retroactively legalize houses and a road in the Hayovel neighborhood of the settlement of Eli. This would seem to violate Israel's long-standing commitment to the United States not to expropriate Palestinian lands for settlement expansion.

Yesterday, Wednesday June 22, Israeli army bulldozers and machinery razed to the ground some twenty facilities for the production of coal in the village of Barta'a which is situated in the northern West Bank. The facilities were destroyed without previous warning and the owners were prevented by the army from extinguishing the flames following the demolition.

In late June 2011, I'm going to be a passenger on "The Audacity of Hope," the USA boat in this summer's international flotilla to break the illegal and deadly Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers, supporters and passengers aim to nonviolently end the brutal collective punishment imposed on Gazan residents since 2006 when the Israeli government began a stringent air, naval and land blockade of the Gaza Strip explicitly to punish Gaza's residents for choosing the Hamas government in a democratic election.

The United Nations Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) on Thursday released it latest monthly figures in which it was registered a record number of children displaced by Israel's demolitions in the West Bank.

The Palestinian leadership is seriously considering a concrete plan to seek membership in the UN. In July the Palestinians would ask the Security Council to recommend a seat for their new nation. Barack Obama keeps on saying that the U.S. will veto the request, and all the experts seem to agree.

Except Gabriela Shalev, who may have more claim to expertise than most. She was Israel's ambassador to the UN from 2008 to 2010. A few weeks ago she told a committee of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, that "the United States is not interested in vetoing the UN's recognition of a Palestinian state."

The Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, Haneen Al Zoabi, has condemned the initiative led by a Jewish member, Yariv Levin, to ban her from traveling outside the country and to prevent her from participating in the Freedom Fleet 2. She described the move as an unparalleled form of racism.

According to the New York Times, a quarter of the passengers on the U.S. Boat to Gaza are Jewish.

What does it mean that the U.S. Boat to Gaza is a quarter Jewish? According to the noted American Jewish commentator Adam Sandler, a quarter Jewish is "not too shabby!" Maybe the U.S. Boat to Gaza will be mentioned in Adam's next Hanukkah song.

What does it mean that the U.S. Boat to Gaza is a quarter Jewish? Maybe it means that the Israeli authorities will have some compunction about shooting up our boat. After all, isn't the official story of Zionism all about making a "safe harbor" for Jews in Palestine?

Occupied Palestine, 1 June 2011 – The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) warmly salutes the Nakba commemoration mass Palestinian marches on 15 May which rekindled a unique spirit of resistance, real hope and heroic initiative in the struggle for the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. These marches, led mostly by young Palestinian refugees, gave new impetus to the Palestinian struggle for self determination, justice, and return of the refugees ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias and later Israel during the 1948 Nakba.

The Arab League says it will seek full UN membership for a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The decision was made at a meeting in Doha attended by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Mr Abbas had reiterated his determination to seek UN recognition in September unless Israel began negotiations on a "substantial basis".

In Washington DC, the pundits are frantically debating the implications of Obama’s recent speeches on the Middle East. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in the of village At-Tuwani, the tiny flowers of spring are pushing up through the dry ground. Palestinian farmers are grazing their sheep on land that has been owned by their families for generations. Children are walking to school. And just a hillside away, Israeli settlers are expanding Ma’on settlement.

The outline of such an initiative was presented to President Obama in several letters by former senior officials, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Frank Carlucci, William Fallon, Chuck Hagel, Lee Hamilton, Carla Hills, Nancy Kassebaum-Baker, Thomas Pickering, Brent Scowcroft, James Wolfensohn and Paul Volcker. They proposed that negotiations take place within the following parameters:

At 10:30 on May 15, two battalions of Israeli combat soldiers opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets on hundreds of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators at the Qalandia checkpoint dividing Ramallah from Jerusalem, sending people scrambling into the adjacent refugee camp. These were the opening shots of Israel’s response to protests commemorating the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe, used to define Israel’s creation of 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948. By nightfall Israeli soldiers had killed thirteen Palestinian refugees and wounded hundreds with live fire on its borders with Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and inside the West Bank.

Do you know that our Congress gave 29 standing ovations to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he spoke in the Capital on Tuesday, May 24? I couldn't watch this hero's welcome for a man who supports the continued building of illegal settlements, won't lift the siege of Gaza, and refuses to negotiate with the new Palestinian unity government. During the talk, when Netanyahu was praising young people rising up for democracy in the Middle East, and I took my cue to stand up from my seat in the Capitol Gallery, unfurl a banner, and shout, "No More Occupation! Stop Israeli War Crimes! Equal Rights for Palestinians!"

The Palestinian News and Informational Agency has reported that Israeli officials plan to confiscate 2,000 dunums worth of land in the Salfit area in the Northern West Bank near the city of Nablus.

The confiscated land will go to expanding two settlements in the area, Kiryat Netafim and Revava, according to Abdul Karim Rayyan, the head of Bani Hassan local council.

Jerry Haber, in a mostly sensible comment on Peter Beinart, writes that

Tony Kushner was, in my view, imprecise when he referred to the “ethnic cleansing”  conducted by the Zionists at Israel’s founding. The phrase conjures up mass murder and genocide along racial, ethnic, or religious lines. What we have had in Israel for over sixty years is not so much ethnic “cleansing,” with its implication of blood and destruction, but rather ethnic “dry-cleaning”, ridding the homeland of most of its Palestinian population through legal stratagems that ensure that the natives of Palestine will be effectively barred from full participation in their homeland.

That is the nature of Zionism, a pernicious ideology which is both racist and unjust, an ideology backed by governments across the Western world.

We will probably never really know if, as Israel's Prime Minister claimed, Iran and Syria orchestrated the Nakba demonstrations which led to the deaths of at least 12 Palestinians over the weekend. Accusations and counter-accusations will fill the media for a few days and then life will carry on as abnormal as it does in Israel and the territories it has occupied since 1967.

 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to Washington at what may be the last chance to turn the establishment of a Palestinian state from a global anti-Israel campaign into a joint Israeli, American and European project. The establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state is today a necessity, just as Zionism was a necessity. And about half of Israeli society apparently agrees with Western public opinion and Western governments on the principle that Palestinian Arabs have the same right to independence and sovereignty as do Israeli Jews.

A report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has confirmed that since its occupation in 1967, authorities of the Israeli occupation have confiscated about a third of the territory of East Jerusalem in order to expand settlement construction.

Israel has tried to remain quiet through the democratic revolutionary movements going on surrounding the country. Other than its normal rants more recently against Hamas, now an official part of the Palestinian government like it or not, Netanyahu's government has been silent. Then came Nakba Day when the Palestinians remember the exodus of their people and the loss of a State due to the unilateral declaration of Israel. On that day, Israel found itself in the same position as Syria's Bashar Al-Assad and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi -- firing at peaceful demonstrations and killing unarmed civilians.

The crippling fear of September's UNGA coupled with Israel's continued delegitimization sadly means that, with help from the PM, Barak's self-fulfilling "diplomatic tsunami" prophecy may actually come true.

The Palestinian Authority is calling on Israel to reinstate the rights of up to 140,000 people who lived in the occupied West Bank and lost their residency after travelling abroad.

According to official documents obtained by an Israeli human rights group, the practice affected Palestinians travelling abroad after the 1967 Six Day War.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, like other Israeli officials, routinely point out that about twenty percent of the population of Israel is Arab. Most often they go on to say that Arabs have significant roles in the Israeli community such as judges and physicians and hold elected seats in the Knesset. Some go on to say that if one were to visit Israel, he or she would find a significant Arab population living in the Jewish state as if to convey a message that Israel is a democracy not unlike Western democracies in Europe and North America.

Editor's note: This Thursday night in New York we're going to be holding an event with a smashing array of speakers, from Laura Flanders to Trudie Styler to Naomi Klein to Noura Erakat to Desmond Travers. And also: our co-editor on the Goldstone Report book, Lizzy Ratner, whose genuineness and presence has moved many audiences throughout our book launch. Last Friday Ratner spoke about the Goldstone Report.at the United Nations, to a gathering hosted by the Egyptian Mission and also by the Palestinian observer mission. Here are some of her remarks:

From coast to coast, the movement to end military aid to Israel has an emerging public face. In Chicago, CJPIP (www.cjpip.org) has launched Phase 2 of our successful public transportation advertising campaign on the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) system.

And in this “End Military Aid to Israel Spring”, we have been joined by activist groups from coast to coast – with new ad campaigns going live in Boston and Washington DC (to coincide with Move Over AIPAC ) over the past couple of weeks.

Zochrot ("Remembering") seeks to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel, who bear a special responsibility to remember and amend the legacy of 1948. The principal victims of the Nakba were the Palestinians, especially the refugees, who lost their entire world. But Jews in Israel also pay a price for their conquest of the land in 1948, living in constant fear and without hope.

In the north-eastern zone of the city, Palestinian youths tell us stories about those infamous days in December 2008, when the Israeli army began its Operation ‘Cast Lead’. The landscape in front of us bears witness to the devastation the Operation left in its wake: buildings turned rubble, destroyed houses, fields which the locals try cultivating, now become arid and contaminated with white phosphorus bombs.

The Knesset approved on Tuesday night the second and third reading of the law which has come to be known as the “Nakba Law”.

The law stipulates that the Minister of Finance may withhold or reduce budgets from government-funded bodies who deny the existence of Israel.

AIC 12 May -- Several thousand Palestinians and their supporters gathered in the Galilee on Israeli Independence Day, 10 May, to mark the Nakba,the forced exodus of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from their homes before and during the creation of Israel in 1948. The 14th annual “March of Return” was held between two Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948, al-Damun and al-Ruways. Participants in the march waved Palestinian flags, chanted for the Palestinian right of return and held signs displaying the names of the over 400 Palestinian villages that were destroyed during the Nakba.

To reply to the Gaza youth Manifesto, and with no additional words to the ones spoken with true heart on this video, we give you, The Manifesto. A simple, true, self-explanatory, expression of what we're sick of.

AJ 11 May -- Lifta faces uncertain future despite Israeli court's ruling against land sale -- In the outskirts of Jerusalem, the village of Lifta is the last deserted Palestinian village still standing in modern day Israel. On Wednesday, the Jerusalem District Court said the lands of Lifta should not be offered for sale to real estate developers, but Israel's land authority could act otherwise. Israel is concerned that allowing Palestinians to return would set a precedent for other refugees to return to their ancestral homes inside Israel. And that – the Israeli government believes - would undermine it as a Jewish state. Nisreen El-Shamayleh reports from Lifta.

Do Israel’s practices in occupied Palestinian territory, namely the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, amount to the crimes of colonialism and apartheid under international law? A summary of a legal study by HSRC of South Africa.

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, in its efforts to eliminate and prevent the kind of suffering the South African and Namibian people suffered under apartheid, commissioned a legal study of the Israel-Palestine situation. “The aim of this project was to scrutinize the situation from the nonpartisan perspective of international law, rather than engage in political discourse and rhetoric.”

The historical background of the Israeli apartheid state-in-the-making that is emerging before our eyes should be sought in 1967. It is part of a process that has been going on for about 44 years: What started as rule over another people has gradually ripened - especially since the latter part of the 1970s - into a colonialism that is nurturing a regime of oppression and discrimination with regard to the Palestinian population. It is robbing that population of its land and of its basic civil rights, and is encouraging a minority group (the settlers ) to develop a crude, violent attitude toward the Arabs in the territories. This was exactly the reality that, after many years, led to the establishment of the apartheid state in South Africa.