The US home-sharing company Airbnb has announced it will continue to list Jewish settler homes in the occupied West Bank, in a reversal of a previous decision.

The announcement came after Israeli lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of property hosts and others, following the decision last year by Airbnb that it would remove such listings.

That move had come after years of accusations that the company was benefitting from rentals in the illegal outposts.

On Tuesday night, after admitting it was a controversial issue, Airbnb said in a news release that it was settling all lawsuits brought by hosts and potential hosts and guests who had objected to its most recent policy.

Read more

NZFOI:  This article slipped through unnoticed, so it is a few weeks old but what is disturbing is that the event organizers are overtly adhering to BDS guidelines for assessing whether the Israeli quartet should be subject to boycott.

An Israeli chamber music ensemble will be the focus of a political protest in Nelson later this week. 

The Jerusalem Quartet will be guests at the 2019 Adam Chamber Music Festival, which runs from January 31 to February 9. 

However, Nelson’s Te Tau Ihu Palestinian Solidarity group, who are aligned with the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) are planning to stage a protest.

The BDS movement categorises Israel as an “apartheid” state, with the aim of the movement to establish a single, bi-national state in Palestine/Israel.

Read more

Dr. Lara Kollab, who was fired from her residency at the Cleveland Clinic after old anti-Semitic tweets surfaced, was accepted to a residency program in California and then fired from it.

Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield, California, said in a statement dated Monday that it notified Kollab on March 15 that her position as a first-year internal medicine resident was withdrawn effective immediately.

“Dr. Kollab submitted information that was false, misleading, and incomplete to Kern Medical during the interview and match process,” the statement said.

The statement continued: “Kern Medical is dedicated to the health and wellbeing of our patients and expects the highest level of integrity and compassion from our staff. We value that a key part of our mission is to teach and train our resident physicians to always provide exceptional care to all patients, regardless of race, religious background or social standing.”

Kollab wrote scores of anti-Semitic social media posts between 2011 to 2017, which she said in an apology after they publicly resurfaced were written because she had “difficulty constructively expressing my intense feelings about what I witnessed in my ancestral land,” following visits to Israel and the West Bank.

Among the posts that got the most attention was a tweet from 2012, when she was a medical student, which said: “hahha ewww.. ill purposely give all the yahood [Jews] the wrong meds….” Kollab graduated from the Touro College of Osteopathic Medicine in New York, which calls itself “the largest private university in the U.S. with Jewish roots.”

Read more