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Two left-wing Israeli groups file petition with Supreme Court calling to overturn Defense Minister’s decision not to grant entry permits to Palestinian Arabs for alternative Memorial Day event in Tel Aviv.

By World Israel News Staff

Two left-wing Israeli groups have filed a petition with the High Court of Justice, demanding that Israel allow Palestinian Arabs to enter the country in order to attend a bi-national Memorial Day ceremony in Tel Aviv.

Defense Minister Yoav Gallant decided not to allow Palestinians to enter the country due to security concerns, citing the general closure of Judea and Samaria during the holidays and the recent string of terror attacks.

The two groups, Combatants for Peace and The Parents Circle-Families Forum, argued in their petition that Gallant’s decision violates freedom of expression and democratic values, as it denies families the right to express their grief and impedes the goal of facilitating peace and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.

The 18th annual joint ceremony, titled “Sharing sorrow, Bringing hope,” is set to be held at Ganei Yehoshua Park in Tel Aviv on the eve of Yom Hazikaron – Israel’s memorial day for fallen IDF soldiers and victims of terror.

Both organizations claim that a great deal of time and resources have been invested in the ceremony, which is based on the participation of Palestinians, and that without their involvement, the program would be effectively nullified.

“Although there were those who painted him as the hero of democracy, we see that Gallant continues the line of the extreme government in disdain for the High Court and freedom of expression,” Combatants for Peace said Wednesday.

“It’s a shame that this decision touches on the eve of Memorial Day, in a year when so many of us hope and aspire to unite with the memory of all those who were lost without the involvement of politicians, and at the expense of bereaved Israeli and Palestinian families who are holding a ceremony whose entire purpose is to spread hope and change.”

In their petition Wednesday, the two groups noted that the court intervened in 2018 and 2019 to prevent restrictions barring Palestinian Authority residents from being allowed into the country for the ceremony.

“The High Court’s decision is wrong and disappointing,” PM Netanyahu said in a statement in 2019. “There is no place for a memorial service that compares blood between us and the blood of terrorists. I therefore refused to allow the participants to enter the ceremony, and I believe that there was no room for the High Court’s intervention in this decision.”

Tzachi Wachsman, the brother of Sgt. Nachshon Wachsman who was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists and murdered during a failed rescue attempt in 1994, wrote in 2019 that the court’s decision doubled his grief.

“I am shocked by the holding of an alternative memorial ceremony, with the encouragement of the Supreme Court, in memory of terrorists with the participation of their families,” he posted on Facebook. “This decision makes me feel doubly sad and grieved on the day of remembrance for our holy fallen. I feel frustrated and humiliated that this is my country.”

No ceremony was held in 2017 due to security threats, and the ceremony was held virtually in 2020, 2021, and 2022 due to the COVID pandemic.

The post NGOs fight government to allow families of dead Palestinian terrorists into Israel for memorial ceremony appeared first on World Israel News.

Hamas-Riyadh rapprochement talks look to be in the cards.

By JNS

Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Red Sea city of Jeddah on Tuesday.

The Fatah leader’s visit comes at the same time that a delegation from rival political faction and terrorist group Hamas is also in the country.

According to the P.A.-controlled Wafa news agency, Abbas and the prince discussed “the latest political developments of the Palestinian cause and the situation in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

Hussein al-Sheikh, secretary general of the PLO Executive Committee, and Maj. Gen. Majed Faraj, head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service, also represented the Palestinian side at the meeting.

The Saudi side included Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and Director General of the General Intelligence Directorate Khalid bin Ali Al Humaidan.

Abbas arrived in Saudi Arabia on Monday for the visit where he was also scheduled to meet with King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and participate in an Iftar Ramadan break-fast meal.

Senior Hamas officials were seen making the Umrah pilgrimage to Mecca on Tuesday. Video posted to social media shows Hamas political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, Haniyeh’s predecessor Khaled Mashaal and other officials circling the Kaaba inside the Great Mosque of Mecca.

The Mecca pilgrimage comes ahead of talks expected in Riyadh between Hamas and Saudi officials aiming at rapprochement.

It is the first visit by an official Hamas delegation to Saudi Arabia since 2015, and the first since the Saudis agreed in March to reestablish diplomatic relations with Iran.

Relations between Riyadh and Hamas were strained after the Saudis blamed the terrorist group for the failure of the 2007 Mecca Agreement, which was a Saudi attempt to facilitate reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah.

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On the condemned Aylesbury Estate, one woman’s flat has been transformed to celebrate her community’s resistance

After an April 11 plastics recycling plant fire that spewed toxins and caused mass evacuations in Richmond, Indiana, the Biden administration has failed to take action on regulations that could prevent similar chemical infernos from occurring in the future.

This aerial photo taken on April 13, 2023, shows an industrial site after a fire in Richmond, Indiana. (Shi Lei / Xinhua via Getty Images)

As concerns mount over an April 11 plastics recycling plant fire that spewed toxins and caused mass evacuations in Richmond, Indiana, the Biden administration has failed to take action on regulations proposed in the wake of the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that could prevent similar chemical infernos from occurring in the future.

By refusing to challenge the plastics industry, advocates say the White House is overlooking the dangers of mass production and processing of plastics, beyond just how they contribute to water and land pollution. Only by preventing the creation of plastic waste at the front end, experts say — by reducing the types of production that contributed to the February train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio — can the type of fire that occurred at the Richmond warehouse be averted.

The plastic recycling facility in Richmond had been cited numerous times by city and state officials over the years, but the central cause of the waste buildup was a decision by the Chinese government to stop most imports of plastic waste in 2017, local officials told Indianapolis’s NBC affiliate. Shortly thereafter, additional waste began to build up at the 175,000-square-foot facility.

The owner may have been waiting on a bill sitting on Indiana Republican governor Eric Holcomb’s desk that would make it far easier to incinerate plastic waste in the state.

Meanwhile, days after the February 3 train accident — in which half of the thirty-eight cars that derailed were carrying materials related to plastics production — Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushing for the agency to create new national targets for reducing single-use plastics production, actions they argued “can be implemented by EPA now, without further congressional action.”

Rather than acting on these lawmakers’ recommendations, on February 13, the Biden administration submitted a proposal for a potential United Nations treaty on plastics pollution that failed to address any of the lawmakers’ major concerns about plastics production. Instead, according to InsideClimateNews, the proposal took “positions similar to recommendations from the chemical and plastics industries,” by making the focus on reuse and recycling instead of binding cuts to plastic production.

Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council says that logic doesn’t address the core problem with plastic pollution: production.

“The train derailment in Ohio was carrying chemicals to make plastics. Now we have this toxic fire that showcases the end of the life cycle with plastic waste, which demonstrates the toxic life cycle of plastic from beginning to end,” she said. “The most effective way to manage plastic waste is to not make it in the first place. We need to reduce and eliminate single-use and PVC plastics; it’s a really good starting place to deal with the plastic waste problem.”

Democratic lawmakers’ proposed regulations, which were initially included in the Protecting Communities from Plastics Act last year, have been fiercely opposed by the main lobbyists for the plastics industry.

“I’m disappointed but not surprised by the continued hyperbole contained in this legislation, which only causes divisiveness in the efforts to come to real solutions to the environmental challenges we face,” said Matt Seaholm, a former Koch network operative who now runs the Plastics Industry Association, about the 2022 legislation in a December statement.

Joshua Baca, the vice president for plastics at the American Chemistry Council, called the bill “a raw deal for America.”

The American Chemistry Council was the country’s ninth-highest spender on federal lobbying in 2022, spending $20 million, which represented a nearly 20 percent increase from the year before. The organization’s Washington roster includes Democratic superlobbyist Heather Podesta’s firm Invariant, which it paid $320,000 last year.

Federal records show that the American Chemistry Council lobbied against tighter regulation of plastics, including the Protecting Communities From Plastics Act.

Along with opposing new safety regulations, the plastics industry is aggressively lobbying to remove plastic waste from federal solid waste regulations so companies can engage in so-called “chemical recycling” — the incineration of plastic waste. The February letter sent by Democratic lawmakers highlighted this move, urging the EPA to “Affirm the Agency’s treatment of plastic waste as ‘waste.’”

The bill sitting on Holcomb’s desk would allow Indiana facilities to use heat and chemical processes to break down plastic waste as part of a process it calls “advanced recycling.” (Holcomb has not announced whether or not he will sign the bill.)

At least twenty-three states have now passed similar bills, which have been backed by the American Chemistry Council.

But Singla at the Natural Resources Defense Council says the Richmond fire is further proof that the Biden administration and state legislatures shouldn’t adjust regulations to make plastic incineration easier.

“The plastics and chemical industry has been looking to change the classification of plastic waste from solid waste so it’s no longer considered solid waste by the EPA,” she said:

This fire really points to why that’s a terrible idea. We need it to be classsified as waste and handled as waste. You can still see that accidents happen under current regulations, but we absolutely don’t need it to be less regulated.

Julie Teel-Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, agrees that the Biden administration should take immediate action to crack down on the $97 billion plastics industry.

“This toxic fire should be the last plastics disaster communities have to suffer,” she said. “It’s long past time for the federal government to crack down on this harmful underregulated industry.” She continued:

There’s so much the Biden administration can do right now under existing law, including denying permits to polluters and making them pay for accidents like the Richmond fire. We have to stop coddling these corporations and start dramatically reducing plastic production. Recycling isn’t the solution and shouldn’t be used to prop up this fossil fuel–based toxic industry.

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The A24 series Beef tells the story of a chance encounter via road rage that blossoms into a modern feud. Director Lee Sung Jin says it’s about “how hard it is to be alive,” but the show’s cross-class fantasy logic hints at something dark and unpleasant.

In Beef, growing alienation erupts in a chance encounter between strangers. (Netflix)

Beef, A24’s new ten-episode Netflix dramedy, has plenty going for it. The premise is compelling, featuring two charismatic leads, Steven Yeun (Minari, The Walking Dead) as financially strapped contractor Danny Cho and Ali Wong (Always Be My Maybe) as rich, type A entrepreneur Amy Lau, locked in an escalating feud after getting embroiled in a Los Angeles road-rage incident.

It seems right that this incident doesn’t even amount to a fender bender — there’s no collision, however slight, between Danny’s overloaded old red pickup truck and Amy’s gleaming white SUV. Distracted by his own misery, Danny tries to back out of a parking space and is honked at with blaring aggression by Amy, as yet unseen behind tinted windows. She flips him off, he tries to chase her down in typically hair-raising LA traffic, and that’s the start of the whole insane rigamarole. It’s a good way to illustrate the way people live now, in such a boiling cauldron of pressure and disparagement that we’re all ready to pop off at the slightest diss.

Initially, class seems like the focus of the antagonism. Certainly, I was Team Danny all the way, because after all, who has plenty of money to soften every rough edge of this god-awful world made of nothing but rough edges? Not Danny.

He’s actually only an aspiring contractor, more like a broke handyman with big, anxious dreams, struggling to make his bills and get any kind of professional traction doing repairs for affluent LA types who openly despise him. (Overheard from the wife of one client: “Just fire him, honey! He’s so annoying!”) He lives in a crappy apartment with his slacker younger brother, Paul (Young Mazino), and has promised to scrape up enough money somehow to bring his aging parents over from South Korea. His life is a nightmare of financial worries and desperate attempts to put up a front of happiness and success, which fools nobody.

Show creator-writer-director-producer Lee Sung Jin (Tucca and Bertie, Dave, Silicon Valley) has stated in interviews that he originally planned to have Korean immigrant Dan run up against a wealthy white American guy, but decided against emphasizing racial hostility. Both lead characters are Asian American, though the series delves into the specifics of their very different backgrounds within that broad category. Amy is Chinese American and so driven and harried by expectations of excellence that she’s in a state of throttled rage most of the time. This is the key thing she has in common with Danny, which will create a twisted bond between them. Both are “so sick of smiling” through their woes, they find forbidden joy in acting on directly expressed hatred.

Amy runs a curated plant empire, including one of those godawful stores that look like museum exhibits, in which each ridiculously expensive, preciously potted plant is presented as a separate work of art. She’s about to put through a multimillion-dollar deal selling the whole business to a vastly wealthy monster named Jordan Forster (Maria Bello). Jumping through hoops trying to persuade Jordan to seal the deal, she’s feeling perpetually guilty about not spending enough time with her beloved daughter, June (Remy Holt), and “nice” but clueless stay-at-home husband Joji “George” Nakai (Joseph Lee), a hopelessly untalented artist always spouting New Age aphorisms. She’s also saddled with a harshly judgmental mother-in-law Fumi (Patti Yasutake). In short, Amy is cracking under the strain. But her anguish is all emerging out of personal relationships and monied career developments, very different from Dan’s basic material hardship underlying family turmoil.

Nevertheless, as the episodes unspool, the series focuses more and more on Danny and Amy’s commonality, even as their raging acts of vengeance spin out of control and drag their families and associates into some luridly bad consequences. Lee Sung Jin seems inclined toward broad humanistic conclusions, saying in interviews that the show is ultimately about “how hard it is to be alive.”

And after all, in the end — class issues aside — aren’t Danny and Amy just flawed human beings trapped in a malfunctioning society that pits them against each other? Sure. Sure, sure, sure. Sure. But sometimes I get pretty weary of the almost inevitable “class issues aside” move in popular entertainment. The series goes out of its way to make it clear that both of them have done very bad things in the past, both of them deceive and betray their families, both of them lead creepy, secret emotional lives, both of them gravitate eagerly — even erotically — toward vengeful violence. This insistent equivalence reminds me of the old “cross-class fantasies” made in the Depression era to help tamp down the entirely justified rage of the ever more impoverished working class against the monied elite.

Screwball comedies like It Happened One Night (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Easy Living (1937), and Bachelor Mother (1939) were wonderfully schematic in pairing off a wealthy person with a struggling working-class person, showing how each had offbeat charm as well as things to teach each other. Aren’t they both — rich person and poor person — eccentric and comedically flawed, yet so lovable? Don’t they go together perfectly to create a more perfect union? No reason for hating one side more than the other, no call for torch-bearing mobs here!

Though Beef has none of the hilarious, upbeat, utopian qualities of screwball comedy, it shares a certain cross-class fantasy logic, only in dark dramedy form. It’s an unpleasant show, really. But then again, we live in a deeply unpleasant culture, and it’s only natural to point it out.

And it’s also a well-made production with a train-wreck fascination that makes it hard to stop watching once you start. I wish the series ran for eight episodes instead of ten — some of the narrative beats start getting predictable as the feud escalates. But still, the show’s erratic momentum holds up well enough to propel you to the much-discussed grand finale of catastrophe, followed by shaky steps toward rapprochement and possible redemption.

A powder keg of growing alienation finally erupting in a chance encounter with a stranger — truly a story for our times.

This year, the average American paid $1,087 in taxes just for Pentagon contractors alone. Imagine the kind of society we could construct with just a fraction of the resources we devote to war.

US Army soldiers sit inside a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) during military drills of Polish and NATO soldiers near the Vistula Spit canal, near Krynica Morska, northern Poland, on April 17, 2023. (Wojtek Radwanski / AFP via Getty Images)

Washington, we are incessantly told, is paralyzed by a climate of brinkmanship and polarization. That has indeed been the case in many areas over the past few years, as was frustratingly clear throughout the Biden administration’s attempts to pass a major domestic spending package after taking office. When it comes to defense spending, however, none of the usual rules of politics seem to apply.

Though unable to find common ground elsewhere, Democratic and Republican lawmakers invariably forget their differences whenever the Pentagon is involved. Despite preaching fiscal restraint on social expenditure, the economic conservatives who dominate both parties have never met a military budget they consider too large or demanded that cruise missiles be subject to a work requirement before they vote Yea. As Stephen Semler of the Security Policy Reform Institute put it back in 2021: “Roll call votes on military spending reveal that there are considerably fewer ‘deficit hawks’ or ‘fiscal conservatives’ in Congress than reported by mainstream media outlets, if any at all.”

The Pentagon’s bloated and ever-expanding budget undermines American democracy, not only because it never receives the same scrutiny as other government spending, but because it ultimately funnels so much money away from essential social and public goods — as a new report released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) makes vividly clear. Published annually on Tax Day in collaboration with the National Priorities Project, the institute’s analysis examines Americans’ incomes taxes in relation to military and security spending to show just how much of the average person’s tax bill is going to the likes of cluster bombs rather than hospitals or schools. Its findings are staggering.

(Institute for Policy Studies / National Priorities Project)

This year, the average American taxpayer paid $1,087 just for Pentagon contractors alone — a sum representing twenty-one days of work for the average person and four times what they contributed to K-12 education ($270). They also paid approximately $74 for the maintenance of nuclear weapons, while just $43 went to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An average taxpayer gave $298 to the five largest military contractors, while only $19 went to programs concerned with mental health and substance abuse. Lockheed Martin, incidentally a major air polluter, received $106 from the average person’s income tax contribution, while a mere $6 went to renewable energy.

The Pentagon’s bloated and ever-expanding budget undermines American democracy and funnels money away from essential social and public goods.

The institute has long tracked the wider growth of spending related to domestic policing and securitization. Here the numbers are no less striking: $20 per taxpayer for federal prisons and just $11 for anti-homelessness programs; $70 for deportations and border control versus just $19 for refugee assistance, and on and on it goes.

As part of the study, the IPS also offers an interactive tool showing how money currently going to the military might otherwise be spent. These results are also staggering. For just 10 percent of what America spent on militarization in 2021, it could have funded 660,631 registered nurses, 8.8 million units of public housing, or 1.69 million jobs paying $15 per hour with benefits for an entire year. A mere 1 percent could have funded four-year scholarships for nearly 200,000 students, powered 18.7 million homes with wind or 21 million with solar energy, or salaried approximately 81,000 elementary school teachers over the next twelve months.

(Institute for Policy Studies / National Priorities Project)

Faced with numbers like these, it’s hard to not think about the more generous and humane society that might exist if the institutions of America’s government were less captured by the military-industrial complex. The United States currently spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined (the majority of which are allies), and even a 10 percent cut to its military budget would leave it far ahead of all other countries in total military expenditure.

Since the late 1970s, American politics have been dominated by a strand of fiscal conservatism that views taxes as evil and the state as a quasi-illegitimate body that skims from the wealth ordinary citizens earn. There are many problems with this argument, but it’s especially difficult to take seriously given that its proponents always seem to exclude military spending from the equation. Considering how little scrutiny such spending receives, and considering that it continues to increase regardless of who’s in power, ordinary Americans are effectively being forced to subsidize a bloated military bureaucracy to the tune of hundreds of billions every year — all while having zero say in the matter.

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The three protesters said a prison sentence would not stop them raising awareness of the climate crisis

Charges have been dropped against Frank Allison, a 44-year-old father from Georgia, after a road rage incident resulted in the shooting of both his and another dad’s daughter.

On October 8, 2022, Allison and 36-year-old William Hale were involved in a heated confrontation while driving Highway 1 with their families in Nassau County, Florida. According to witnesses, the two men were engaged in a “cat and mouse” game, and one witness feared something terrible would happen and called 911 shortly before the shooting.

Hale reportedly told investigators that both he and Allison were taking turns “brake checking” each other, a tactic defined by police as “slamming their brakes while ahead of one another.”

At one point, Hale pulled up alongside Allison and shouted something through the window, after which he heard a “pow” and noticed his daughter screaming. He returned fire.

According to documents, Allison also fired shots in Hale’s direction, claiming a water bottle had been thrown through his window, and a single bullet struck the girl in the backseat in the leg. Hale emptied his magazine toward Allison’s Nissan SUV, hitting Allison’s daughter in the back.

On March 31, the prosecutors decided to drop the charge of second-degree murder against Allison due to Florida’s “stand your ground” law, suggesting that Hale was the suspected aggressor.

Hale has since been charged with attempted murder and aggravated assault and has been charged with shooting into a vehicle.

Hale is due back in court on April 20 for his arraignment. It is hoped that the victims of this incident will receive justice and the families can begin to heal. Sheriff Bill Leeper stated after the event, “There could’ve been two dead kids cause of two stupid grown men.”