Top news stories from Israel/Palestine: March 25, 2019

What We’re Reading

US-Israeli/Palestinian relations

Trump’s Pointless Provocation on the Golan,

“President Trump’s proposed reversal of decades of American policy on the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights has more to do with Israeli politics than American interests — or good sense,” write the editors of the New York Times.

Eager to Court Jews (and Fracture Democrats), Republicans Push Bills on Anti-Semitism,

The actions are part of a larger political strategy aimed, in part, at showing that Republicans are more willing to directly tackle anti-Semitic hate speech and anti-Israel language than divided Democrats in the lower chamber, Republican aides and operatives said.

'Tip of the spear': The US Christian movement praying for Trump and Israel,

AIPAC faces noisy scrutiny over its lobbying for Israel, but is it Christian Zionist evangelicals who wield real influence in the White House?

Occupation/Human rights

Talk of Golan annexation leaves out those expelled from it,

The vast majority of Israelis are still unaware that over 130,000 residents of the Golan Heights were expelled from their villages, towns, and cities during the 1967 war.

Israel says six wounded near Tel Aviv in long-range Gaza rocket attack,

A long-range rocket launched from the Gaza Strip struck a house in central Israel on Monday, wounding six people in the first such incident since a 2014 war in the Palestinian enclave, Israeli authorities said.

Israeli soldiers forcibly seize 9-year-old Yazan Idris at his elementary school, Hebron,

On 19 March 2019, at around 12:30 P.M., after school had let out, Yazan Idris (9) and his brother Tayyem (7) came running back to Ziyad Jaber Elementary School, Hebron.

East Jerusalem neighborhood targeted in apparent hate crime,

Israeli police investigated an attack in a Palestinian area of East Jerusalem where over 25 vehicles were graffiti-ed, tires were slashed and a wall was daubed with ‘Jews wake up, Jewish blood is not cheap’.

MKs call on A-G to investigate Breaking the Silence,

Breaking the Silence slammed the letter, calling it a “desperate attempt” of a “discredited far-Right settler organization [Ad Kan] to revive a failed political campaign.”