A Burglary Motivated by Racism
Haaaretz journalists Gideon Levy and Alex Levac reported on a West Bank burglary case in 2020 in which a small Palestinian business was repeatedly burglarized by Jewish settlers. Was this burglary motivated by racism? Mohammed Mahmadi, 29, left his restaurant job in...
Jerusalem Christian Church Leaders Speak Up
In 2000, the heads of Jerusalem churches wrote a letter to the leaders at Camp David as they decided the status of Jerusalem. In 2017, these patriarchs once again wrote a letter, but this time it was directed to U.S. President Donald Trump. Jerusalem Christian church...
Antisemitism or Anti-Palestinian Racism at Temerty?
Controversy fell upon the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto in 2022 as debate swirled between accusations of antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism. A confidential letter—addressed to Acting Dean Patricia Houston and signed by 45 Faculty...
The Return of the Pogrom in Hawara
On February 26, 2023, more than 400 Jewish settlers terrorized the Palestinian village of Hawara in the Occupied West Bank. For hours, the settlers set buildings and cars on fire and threw stones at inhabitants and their homes. The Israeli police and military forces...
Christians Against Israeli Violence
Christians Against Israeli Violence: Churches Call to End U.S. Military Aid to Israel On March 10, 2023, ten U.S.-based Christian groups published a letter directed to President Biden and Congress calling on the end of U.S. military aid to Israel. The letter reads:...
Amnesty International Apartheid Report on Israel
Amnesty International (AI), the world’s largest human rights organization, released a report in 2022 titled “Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.” The report details AI’s investigation into Israel’s treatment...
Israel Officially Begins Annexing the West Bank
In February 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government transferred civil authorities over the West Bank from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to a new minister within the Ministry of Defense. According to Foreign Affairs, “[t]his administrative change...
Barcelona Suspended Institutional Ties with Israel
In February 2023, the mayor of Barcelona, Spain announced that the city temporarily suspended all institutional ties with Israel. Barcelona equally froze its 25-year-old twinning agreement with the Israeli city of Tel Aviv. Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau wrote a letter to...
Anti-BDS Law: Arkansas’ Pro-Israel Law Prevents Jewish Doctor from Getting Paid
Dr. Steven Feldman, curator of the www.PromisedLandMuseum.org, is an academic dermatologist in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and one of the foremost experts on patients’ adherence to treatment. He gave an invited lecture to the Dermatology Department at the...
Israeli Air Force Pilot Refuses to Commit War Crimes
Yonotan Shapira is a Former Captain of the Israeli Air Force (IAF) who has since become an outspoken activist and supporter of the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. Shapira served in the IAF for 11 years as an officer in the Black Hawk...
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez: Critical or Anti-Semitic?
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has made headlines over numerous issues since being elected in 2018. One of the most controversial stances of this progressive representative has been her perspective on Israel-Palestine. The executive director of...
Columbia University Students Pass Israel Boycott Referendum
The Pursuit of Justice The Columbia College undergraduate student body voted in 2020 to recommend that Columbia University should “divest its stocks, funds, and endowment from companies that profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s acts towards Palestinians...
Rabbinical Students Call on American Jews to Hold Israel Accountable
"An Untenable and Dangerous Reality" Dozens of American rabbinical and cantorial students wrote a public letter in 2021 calling on the Jewish American community to hold Israel accountable for its human rights abuses. The letter begins: “Blood is flowing in the streets...
Theology in the Vineyard
Theology in the Vineyard is a blog for Roman Catholics who have been marginalized by the Church. It began with a meeting on a vineyard in eastern Ontario in 2005, inspired by the Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium (1964), which invited congregants to express their own...
Jewish Voices
The Promised Land Museum highlights Jewish perspectives about the Palestinian experience. Here we have collected profiles of Jewish voices to show the diversity of Jewish thought on Israel and Palestine. These thinkers ground their political philosophy in an...
New Gallup Poll: Increased American Sympathy for Palestinians
On March 16, 2023, Gallup published the results of a poll that measured American sympathy for Palestinians, Israelis, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority. For the first time, more Democrats (49% versus 38%) sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis....
Journalist Gideon Levy: The Most Controversial Reporter in Israel
Gideon Levy is one of the most famous and controversial journalists in Israel. The Independent has described him as both “the most hated man in Israel” and the “most heroic.” Levy, in turn, describes Israelis as living in a “bubble”—unaware of their government’s...
Israel Deadly Racism?: Killing Unarmed Black and Palestinian Civilians
Israeli Journalist Etan Nechin: A double standard for recognizing racism? Anti-Black and Anti-Palestinian Racism in the U.S. and Israel In a 2020 op-ed for Forward, Israeli journalist Etan Nechin asked the question “Why do Jews recognize the racism of George Floyd’s...
Where Is the Palestinian Mandela?
Many interested in Israel-Palestine have asked the question: “Where is the Palestinian Mandela?” But Nelson Mandela’s grandson Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela has argued that this question emerges from a distortion of his grandfather’s legacy. Who Was Nelson Mandela?...
Palestine Open Maps
Palestine Open Maps (POM) is a platform that uses mapping technologies in collaboration with researchers to showcase visual stories of the geographical transformation of historic Palestine over the last 70+ years. The project combines 1940s British Mandate of...
“There’s Already Only One State from the River to the Sea”
Dr. Joshua Shanes, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Director of the Arnold Center for Israel Studies at the College of Charleston in South Carolina wrote an article for Haaretz titled “Liberal Zionists, Face the Facts: There’s Already Only One State From the...
Erasing Historic Palestine: The Holy Land: Making the Desert Bloom
Israel was founded on the idea that 20th century Jewish settlers arrived in the Holy Land and, through hard work, transformed its empty swamps into fertile gardens. Early Zionist thinker Israel Zangwill wrote in 1901: “Palestine is a country without a people; the Jews...
Benjamin Moser Travels to Hebron: “The Worst Place in the World”
Benjamin Moser is a world-renown writer: he was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for his book Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his latest book Sontag: Her Life and Work. He’s also a Jewish...
Rabbi Miriam Grossman on Changing Jewish Perspectives
Rabbi Miriam Grossman of the Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives congregation in Brooklyn, New York, is an educator and organizer who leads through Jewish ritual. She teaches that following a Jewish theology means protecting the human rights of all people, including...
Imagine What Life Is Like for Palestinian Children
What is life like for Palestinian children? On the wall of the girls’ school in the Palestinian West Bank village of Luban e-Sharqiyah, there is a drawing of a teacher and students. It reads “teach us arithmetic and not beatings,” in Arabic wordplay. Getting to...
A Land for All: Considering the Two-State Solution
In 1948, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children were forced from their homes as Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. The expelled population became stateless refugees and have not yet been...
Justice for Rachel Corrie: An American’s Fight and Death
American Rachel Corrie was an advocate for poor and underserved populations from an early age. In this video, we see Rachel as a fifth grader imploring for equal treatment for those around us as well as those in third-world countries. We also see images from the...
Israeli and Palestinian Women: Witnessing a Paradigm Shift
Shiri Ourian, Executive Director of American Friends of the Parents Circle Families Forum and friend of the Promised Land Museum, shared with us her powerful experience of witnessing Israeli and Palestinian women practice a role reversal activity with the Parents...
Seth Morrison: Being on the Side of Peace
Retired marketer Seth Morrison used to support and fund Zionist organizations. Now, he is an activist who boycotts them in support of the Palestinian right to return. As a liberal Jew from Long Island who grew up with a desire to help fix the world’s problems,...
An Imam Who Saved Jews from the Holocaust in Nazi-Occupied France
Remembering Muslims Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust Mohammad Mesli barely knew his father--he died in 1961 when Mohammad was only a young boy. But a few years ago, he found a suitcase filled with documentation of his father’s secret life as an...
Is the Israel Defense Forces a Moral Army?
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) website describes its official doctrine of ethics, “The Spirit of the IDF,” as the army’s moral compass, which includes their three core values: The defense of the state, its citizens, and residents; Patriotism and loyalty to the state;...
Jewish Voices Profile: Stephen Zunes Against War
Leading Expert on U.S. Middle East Policy & Strategic Non-Violent Action Zunes Critiques U.S. Policy in Israel-Palestine As one of the country’s leading scholars of U.S. Middle East policy and strategic nonviolent action, Stephen Zunes has consistently argued...
What Happened to Shireen Abu Akleh?
The Tragic Killing of a Palestinian-American Journalist On the morning of May 11, 2022, American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh went to the occupied West Bank town of Jenin with other journalists to film an Israeli military raid. Without warning, Israeli forces shot her...
No Child Should Die Like This: A Boy Shot and Killed
Navigating War Crimes Through a Jewish Lens In December of 2020, a Palestinian boy was killed for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. He was only thirteen years old, and his name was Ali Ayman Abu-Alayya. The Jerusalem Post reported that Ali and four others were...
Inside Palestinian and Israeli Schools: A Roundtable Discussion of K-12 Curricula in the U.S., Palestinian, and Israeli Classrooms
A recent 2020 study at Tel Aviv University found that Palestine and Palestinians are not mentioned in Israeli school textbooks, rendering Palestinians invisible to them. Consequently, many Israeli children do not learn the history of Palestine, and they learn to view...
Arab Americans Support Palestinian Rights and Draw Attention to their Cause
In light of the attacks in Gaza starting May 9, 2021, thousands of Arab-Americans protested in the streets of Dearborn, Michigan, during the same month. The crowd protested in response to President Joe Biden visiting the city to tour a Ford Rouge Plant. The protesters...
Remembering Palestinian Rights Activist Tanya Reinhart and Her Legacy
Israeli linguist and Palestinian rights activist Tanya Reinhart passed away in 2007. In light of the 2021 U.S. protests calling for the support of Palestinian rights and the February 2022 rallies in support of Ukraine, Reinhart’s work is as timely as ever. Reinhart...
Are Palestinian Voices Being Represented in U.S. Media?
U.S. Media Coverage of Israel-Palestine Conflict Is Changing In a recent article in The Washington Post in May 2021, Eva Najjar, a UX designer currently based in Haifa but from the Palestinian village of Rama, wrote about the attacks in Gaza that started on May 9th....
Dispelling Lies about Palestine
John Minto’s 2020 David Wakim Memorial Lecture The David Wakim Memorial Lecture, a Pax Christi event, took place in September 2020. Pax Christi International is a Catholic peace movement with 120 member organizations worldwide. Its goals are to support peace, respect...
Imprisoned for Refusing Israeli Military Conscription
Since 2003, Israeli photojournalist and founding member of photography collective Activestills, Oren Ziv, has documented social and political issues concerning Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. His reportage has mostly focused on popular protests...
A Voice of Reason in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
U.S. Representative Marc Pocan Visits the West Bank During his time in Congress, U.S. representative Marc Pocan has been vocal about the Israel-Palestine conflict. In June 2017, he was the only congressional sponsor of a briefing on Capitol Hill about “life for...
Promoting Interreligious Exchange in the Israel-Palestine Conflict
A Grassroots Organization with Both Israeli and Palestinian Members While vociferous organizations from one side of the Israel-Palestine conflict or the other may be highly visible, organizations that have members from both sides working together may be missed. Roots...
Dispelling Myths about Israel
Ten Myths about Israel: A Book Review "Historical disinformation, even of the most recent past, can do tremendous harm," Israeli historian and University of Exeter professor Ilan Pappé writes in his latest book, Ten Myths About Israel, published by Verso Books in...
Do West Bank Policies Amount to Apartheid in Israel?
Former Ambassadors Call It Like They See It Apartheid in Israel is controversial when it comes to contemporary discussions of the country. Apartheid is a system of rule that is inherently unequal and discriminatory anathema to a free and democratic society. Systematic...
Claims of Antisemitism at Duke University
A letter in a college newspaper discussed recent claims of antisemitism. Visit the Promised Land Museum to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Brennan Urges Biden to Pursue Two-State Solution for Israel-Palestine
What Does Brennan’s Letter to Biden Mean for Palestinian Statehood? It isn’t every day that a past director of the C.I.A personally writes a letter to the President. In Joe Brennan’s recent article in The New York Times, he asks Joe Biden to help facilitate...
Is Israel Committing War Crimes?
Who Can Be Trusted to Tell? Top Israeli Intellectuals Urge Human Rights Groups to Investigate War Crimes Last May, more than 180 Israeli scientists and intellectuals wrote a letter to the International Crime Court (ICC) urging it not to accept the state’s rejection of...
Gain a Better Understanding of Palestine with These Top Resources
Have you felt challenged when understanding Palestine and the history of occupation? Perhaps you don’t know where to look. In today’s world – with so much information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – it’s difficult to know where to start. So, where do...
The Reality of Palestine
Throughout history, Palestine was home to people of many religions including Christians, Muslims and Jews. They lived in peace. However, even though the first Zionist congress took place in 1897, the State of Israel was not declared until 1948. What is the...
Perspectives Magazine – Winter 2022
A balanced perspective of the Israel-Palestine conflict, focused on the Creation of State, current events, and an evolving view.
Gabor Maté and Justifying Violence
In his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Dr.Gabor Maté writes that “no society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.” Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté is a Holocaust survivor, addiction expert, speaker,...
Perspectives on the One State
Voices for Justice in Palestine (VJP) hosted a webinar entitled "Perspectives on the One State." Palestinian-American writer and political analyst Yousef Munayyer and American Jewish journalist Peter Beinart described their perspectives and responded to questions. See...
From Lebanon to Palestine
Dr. Rania Masri is a political activist, scholar and professor with decades of grassroots organizing experience. She teaches at the Lebanese American University. Dr. Masri spoke on October 24, 2020 at 2PM EDT. To see the recorded webinar, click here:...
Anna Baltzer, a Witness in Palestine
Anna Baltzer is a Jewish American who has been advocating for Palestinian rights since visiting the West Bank in 2005. She described her observations in a book Witness in Palestine: a Jewish Woman in the Occupied Territories and has toured the world presenting her...
Khirbet Khizeh and Israel’s National Identity
Khirbet Khizeh is a brief, fictional, 1949 novella by Israeli writer S. Yizhar about the violent expulsion of Palestinian villagers by the Israeli army. Considered a high point in Hebrew literature, it was published just months the author fought in the 1948...