Racism at heart of US media coverage of Middle East, says Marc Lamont Hill — Middle East Eye (10/31/19)

Racism lies at the heart of how US media networks frame their coverage of the Middle East, said professor and activist Marc Lamont Hill, who was sacked by CNN last year after making comments in support of Palestinians. In a keynote address at the Media and Democracy in the Arab World conference on Thursday, Hill said that US outlets continue to frame the region "as a place of anti-democracy". "The Middle East continues to be constructed in ways that define it as the moral, ethical, intellectual opposite of the West," he said at the event, which was hosted by the Arab Center Washington DC. Just last week, critics slammed the New York Times for publishing a column that included the line, "The Middle East could use a decent country", which they said played up anti-Arab tropes. For years, the newspaper and other US media outlets have also been accused of being one-sided in their coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular, and a 2018 study by Canadian research firm 416Labs found that major US newspapers featured "four times more Israeli-centric headlines than Palestinian ones".

Hunger striker Hiba Labadi’s health at critical stage — [Medium] The Palestine Project (10/31/19)

Israeli sniper gets community service over killing of Gaza boy — Electronic Intifada (10/30/19)

An Israeli soldier has been sentenced to a month of the military’s equivalent of community service and his rank downgraded for firing his weapon toward an unarmed boy during protests in Gaza last year. The child, Uthman Rami Hillis, 14, died after he was hit in the chest with a live bullet that exited through his back east of Gaza City on 13 July 2018. Video documenting the fatal shooting shows Hillis climbing a fence along the Gaza-Israel boundary before he falls and other protesters rush to his aid. Another Palestinian, 20-year-old Muhammad Nasir Shurab, was also fatally wounded during protests in southern Gaza that day. The video shows that Hillis “posed no direct or mortal threat at the time he was killed,” Defense for Children International Palestine stated at the time. The soldier’s conviction is the first over the killing of a Palestinian during the ongoing Great March of Return protests launched on 30 March 2018. The unnamed soldier was convicted of “disobeying an order leading to a threat to life or health” as part of a plea bargain reached on Monday, The New York Times reported. 

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Christians that Nobody is Talking about — Palestine Chronicle (10/30/19)

The theme of the J Street conference was conditioning aid to Israel, but where’s the action? — Mondoweiss (10/28/19)

GOP House members say resolution affirming two-state solution contradicts administration’s peace plan — Mondoweiss (10/28/19)

These amendments only made a bad resolution worse. As American Muslims for Palestine noted, the resolution also suffers from a number of other flaws, including its false equivalencies between occupier and occupied, its failure to recognize that Israel has already taken de jure and de facto steps toward annexing Palestinian land, its pigeonholing of Palestinian self-determination to limited statehood in the West Bank and Gaza Strip without addressing the rights of Palestinian refugees and citizens of Israel, and its disconnection from Israeli political realities in which support for Palestinian statehood simply does not exist. Although it remains unclear if Blue and White’s Benny Gantz will succeed in forming a government and becoming Israel’s next prime minister, it is clear that both Likud and his party do not support Palestinian statehood.