Middle East

 

Police investigating multiple bomb threats against New York City synagogues

Ajay Skaria, The Wire - In the classes I teach.... students see their opposition to what is happening in Gaza as an extension of the anti-racist movements they have been involved in at least since the George Floyd protests. Even the organizational networks are often the same, and some of the same students are participating in both protests. I have also been struck by how, even as they consider themselves fiercely anti-Zionist, these students come down sharply on positions that bear any whiff of anti-Semitism. The distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is quite simple. As many have pointed out for decades: while anti-Semitism is a hostility directed against Jews because of their religious or cultural identity, anti-Zionism is an opposition to Zionism as an ideology that is racist because it claims the Israeli state and the land of Israel-Palestine exclusively for the Jewish community. Zionism has not always been racist, of course: many early Zionists, such as Martin Buber initially, envisioned co-habiting in equality with the Arab community, rather than creating an exclusively Jewish state. But that Zionist tradition, always peripheral, is by now close to moribund.

CNN -  Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that the operations of Qatar-based news network Al Jazeera will be closed in the country. The decision comes a month after Netanyahu vowed to shut down the television channel in the country following the passage of a sweeping law allowing the government to ban foreign networks perceived as posing a threat to national security.