Day 1023

[matt (Matt Kiser)]

1/ Nearly 17 months after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade – and for the second general election in a row – voters in increasingly Republican-leaning states defended abortion rights. In Tuesday’s off-year general elections, Ohio voters passed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing access to abortion. Trump won Ohio in 2020. In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection – a state Biden lost by 26 points – after making support of abortion rights a key message of his campaign. And in Virginia, Democrats won majorities in both chambers, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin had put a 15-week abortion ban at the center of his campaign to help Republicans gain control both the House and Senate. In the 2022 midterm elections, voters in California, Michigan, and Vermont enshrined abortion rights in their state’s constitution, while voters in Kentucky rejected a proposed amendment to the state’s constitution to say that it does not “secure or protect a right” to abortion or the funding of abortion. (NBC News / CNN / Bloomberg / Wall Street Journal / New York Times / Washington Post / NPR / Associated Press / Politico / Vox)

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2023/11/08/day-1023/

[awrightiv (Allan Wright)]

I wanted to dive deeper into this assertion that “from the river to the sea, [Palestine will be free]” is “widely interpreted as calling for the elimination of Israel” or is antisemitic regardless of what the ADL has deemed. To do so, I landed on this article by Al Jazeera.

To Palestinian and Israeli observers alike, different interpretations over the meaning of the slogan hang on the term “free”.
Nimer Sultany, a lecturer in law at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, said the adjective expresses “the need for equality for all inhabitants of historic Palestine”.
“Those who support apartheid and Jewish supremacy will find the egalitarian chant objectionable,” Sultany, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, told Al Jazeera.
Freedom here refers to the fact that Palestinians have been denied the realisation of their right to self-determination since Britain granted the Jews the right to establish a national homeland in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
“This continues to be the crux of the problem: the ongoing denial of Palestinians to live in equality, freedom and dignity like everyone else,” Sultany said.