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NOVANEWS Judith Butler:  You Will Not Be Alone Editor's Note: What follows is the text of a speech Professor Butler will give on Wednesday, April 13, to the students of the University of California, Berkeley. On March 18, Berkeley's Student Senate voted 16-to-4 to divest from General Electric and United Technologies because of their role in harming civilians as part of Israel's illegal occupation and the attack on Gaza. A week later, the Senate president vetoed the bill. The bill's opponents have been waging a fierce campaign of misinformation; student senators have been flooded with letters and Alan Dershowitz may visit the campus. More information about the bill can be found here. As the UC Berkeley Student Senate votes to divest from two companies that profit from Israel's occupation of...

NOVANEWS A minor change in the “special relationship” How the US government knew the Gitmo boys were mostly innocent all along One more nail in the coffin of Israel’s “image” Since when has America had any interest in truly bringing peace to the Middle East? The role of a journalist in a truly free state is to challenge the state A minor change in the “special relationship” A Zionist mailing list sent the following story with the headline, “What next? Yellow armbands?” Yes, the Obama administration is like the Nazis. Seriously (and here’s the yarn via Jeffrey Goldberg): Roger L. Simon usefully posts a translation of a recent article from Ma’ariv, which reports that the U.S. is no longer regularly granting visas to Israeli scientists associated with the Dimona nuclear facility. ...

NOVANEWS Breaking in with intent to terrorise, by Haggai Matar Translation from Hebrew: Dimi Reider A resident of Nilin is trying to restore a room in his house, completely wrecked by soldiers during a 4-day punitive curfew in response to protests, July 2008. The soldiers entered the residence while the owners were locked up in another house. Photo: Activestills.org There was one point that stood out for me in Uri Blau’s recollection of his pursuit by the Shin Bet in the Anat Kamm affair. Blau, Haaretz’s outstanding investigative reporter, recalls how as he was traveling in the Far East he got a call saying his house was broken into. “It looks like they were looking for something,” said the policeman on the phone. Reading this reminded me how they broke into my home, too. It was about 8...

NOVANEWS Expanded Military Powers of Deportation in West Bank; Palestinian Leaders Charge “Ethnic Cleansing” A military order to take effect April 13th so drastically expands the IDF’s power to deport people from the West Bank that it threatens mass arrests and exile, according to Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual in Israel. In a request to the military commander, Hamoked asks that implementation of the order be delayed until there is input from the non-military sector of Israel, including human rights organizations like Hamoked. In order to clarify the extremity of the orders, we shall state at this early point that according to their wording, every living person in the West Bank would become a criminal who faces a penalty of three to seven years imprisonment. Additional...

NOVANEWS A Bedouin Tale By Rebecca Vilkomerson A few nights ago I had dinner at the home of a dear friend, Ra’ed, the director of the Bedouin-Jewish environmental organization BUSTAN.  In the course of the meal, I heard a story that illuminates so many of the overlapping historicaland political factors that contribute to the injustice of the Bedouin story in Israel.  It goes like this: A couple of weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon, a few young men from the Bedouin town of Qasr al-Sir went walking on the hills just outside their village. Without warning, shots were fired from the other side of the hills, and one of the young men was killed, another wounded. The shots were fired by Israeli soldiers, who were practicing within a military firing range.  A simple, unfortunate tragedy?  Not qui...

NOVANEWS The Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism has issued a press release, announcing the total breakdown of intellectual standards within Israeli intellectual life. According to the prize's announcement, 2009 bore witness to a disproportionate and pre-planned onslaught of radical activists from the left and from among Muslim immigrant communities against Jews and against Israel as a Jewish state, using antisemitism and the Holocaust as political tools. The report's press release speaks of the hostile atmosphere generated worldwide by the mass demonstrations and verbal and visual expressions against Israel and the Jews... resulting in a well-coordinated onslaught which employed a range of antisemitic tools, including the equation between Jews and...

NOVANEWS   Yaron London in Yediot: Time to open Israel's nuclear debate Didi Remez | April 12, 2010 at 10:22 | Tags: Nuclear Ambiguity | Categories: Diplomacy | URL: http://wp.me/pHlQV-t2 An end to the age of ambiguity Op-ed, Yaron London, Yediot, April 12 2010 Israel ranks sixth in the world in terms of the number of nuclear weapons it has in its arsenal, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly, the British journal on military affairs. Its researchers, in an article written with a view to the nuclear conference now convened in Washington, stated that we now possess somewhere between 100 and 300 destructive warheads, which we continue to amass still. According to Jane’s we possess the capability to drop these as bombs from airplanes, launch them as missiles, and shoot them from su...

NOVANEWS   Likud power-broker: When Biden "or any other diseased leper" humiliates us, he sows the seeds of another Holocaust Didi Remez | April 12, 2010 at 11:17 | Tags: Joseph Biden | Categories: Diplomacy, Jewish Fundamentalism | URL: http://wp.me/pHlQV-t6 Feiglin Moshe Feiglin heads "Manhighut Yehudit -- The Jewish Leadership Movement" an extremist theocon group, which in recent years has established a strong presence in the Likud. Feiglin-endorsed candidates performed strongly in the 2008 Likud primaries and make up a large part of the party's current Knesset caucus. Vice Premier and Strategic Affairs Ministers Moshe (Bugi) Yaalon famously used the podium at a Manhigut Yehudit conference to call Peace Now "a virus". Writing in Maariv's online edition ahead of Holocaust Remembrance...

NOVANEWS    Facing stone-throwing, the IDF cries "popular terror" and lets slip the dogs of war Didi Remez | April 11, 2010 at 15:34 | Tags: Oketz | Categories: Hasbara, Human Rights and Jewish Values | URL: http://wp.me/pHlQV-sJ An Israeli army dog attacks a Palestinian woman during an army raid in the West Bank village of Obadiyah, near Bethlehem, Wednesday, March 21, 2007. The dog, which was supposed to enter a house with troops searching for a wanted militant attacked the female bystander instead. The woman received medical attention from the troops on the scene. (AP Photo/Kevin Frayer) A minimal sense of sense of history appears to have become an unrealistic expectation when it comes to Israeli policy makers. Some things should not be done, period. No matter how effective they are...

NOVANEWS     New Israeli military order on ‘lawful permits’ would seem to allow expulsion of all West Bank Palestinians IDF to turn dogs loose on Palestinian kids who throw stones 1 out of 4 Israeli scholars work here Tutu: Issue is the same in Palestine as it was in South Africa, ‘equality’ Finkelstein is on the road Eldar summons ‘hundreds’ more Anat Kams to save Israel from itself Obama imposed ‘peace plan’ would deny basic Palestinian rights Now think of all the U.S. synagogues with banners saying, ‘We support Israel in its quest for peace’ Scottish minister is talking BDS Israel is a society in crisis New Israeli military order on ‘lawful permits’ would seem to allow expulsion of all West Bank Palestinians Source files at: http://www.hamoked.org.il/news_main_...