This week …

News Highlights:

  • On May 11th, six Israeli soldiers killed during yet another invasion of Gaza City; five Palestinians also killed with 88 wounded, including an 11-year-old boy now on life support.
  • On May10th, Israeli troops shoot and kill a 19-year-old Palestinian youth in Abu Dis.
  • More home demolitions in the Gaza Strip leave 1100 Palestinians homeless in 10 days, according to U.N. figures.
  • Palestinians will mark the 56th Al Nakba anniversary with meetings, marches and special publications detailing the dispossession and displacement of the Palestinian people.
  • More than 300 Palestinian teenagers, including 3 under the age of 14, subjected to torture and abuse in Israeli jails, according to Save the Children and Defense of Children Int’l.
  • The U.S. defense firm implicated in torture in Iraqi prisons has close ties to Israel, according to U.S. newspapers; another report suggests Arabic speaking Israelis helped to develop the “interrogation techniques” used at Abu Ghraib prison, techniques similar to those used in Israeli jails.

Feature:

A live interview with Norman Finkelstein, Jewish-American author and professor about his upcoming trip to Vancouver. He spoke about the politics of anti-Semitism and how the charge of anti-Semitism is being used to silence critics of Israel. He also detailed how the distribution of his recent book, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, has been severely limited in the U.S. due to a massive campaign against it.

Focus on Zionism:

May 8th – Highlights of a report on alJazeera.net by Khalid Amayreh about comments by Israeli transportation minister Avigdor Lieberman calling for the expulsion of 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, if a Palestinian state is ever established. He said the Palestinian minority threatened the “ethnic purity” of Israel.