Tonight’s film is the 2012 Peabody Award winning film My Neighbourhood, the latest production by Just Vision, a team of Palestinian, Israeli, North and South American filmmakers, journalists, and human rights advocates dedicated to telling the stories of Israelis and Palestinians working nonviolently to achieve freedom, dignity, security and peace in the region. Our guest tonight is Just Vision’s Creative Director Julia Bacha, who co-directed My Neighbourhood together with independent filmmaker Rebekah Wingert-Jabi.

Emad Burnat is the Palestinian director of the Oscar-nominated documentary, “5 Broken Cameras.” He is the first Palestinian to be nominated for an Academy Award.

He traveled to the United States this week because the Academy Awards ceremony is this weekend. It is common for nominees to be in attendance. But on Tuesday night, US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers detained and held him at the Los Angeles International Airport. They threatened to send him back to Palestine before the ceremony.

A documentary the filmmakers describe as a “deeply personal, first-hand account of non-violent resistance” in a West Bank village threatened by Israeli settlements, which is short-listed for an Academy Award, is streaming now for free through January 6.

Now I hate to rain on anyone’s parade following the excellent news of the vote taking Palestine from being classified as a “non-member observer entity” to a “non-member observer state”. It’s very good news as it means that Palestine can sign treaties and join such bodies as the International Criminal Court (ICC). But perhaps some parade ground raining is in order before people make unwarranted assumptions and statements about what the court is and what it can and cannot do.

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Amr announced ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. There was no signed agreement. The ceasefire is essentially “quiet in exchange for quiet,” as one Israeli diplomatic source put it.

In the announcement, Clinton reiterated the US’s position that “all rocket attacks must end” and said the US would be working with Egypt in the coming days on the next steps in the process. She said improvement of conditions for the people of Gaza and providing security for the people of Israel would be sought in any long-term agreement and there was “no substitute for a just and lasting peace.”

Kirkpatrick could have added a paragraph here about the siege or blockade of Gaza. He could have described the occupation, but he did not and proceeded to note that the anonymous Egyptian official had compared “leaders of Hamas to George Washington in America or Charles de Gaulle in France” because they had “resisted foreign occupation by armed force.”

Early Sunday, as widely reported, Israeli warplanes launched air strikes, which hit two complexes with media offices. The strikes wounded ten journalists or media persons. One person, Khader al-Zahhar, a cameraman for Al-Quds TV, had to have his leg amputated and suffered shrapnel wounds.

The first complex attacked around 2 am was the Al-Shawa Wa Hassri Tower. According to Reporters Without Borders, fifteen reporters and photographers wearing vests with “TV Press” on them were on the building’s roof trying to cover Israel’s air strikes on Gaza.

Five missiles hit the 11th floor offices used by Al-Quds TV and injured four employees— Darwish Bulbul, Khadar Al-Zahar, Muhammad al-Akhras and Hazem al-Da’our. Hussein Al-Madhoun, a freelance photographer working for the Ma’an News Agency was wounded. The office had been serving as a headquarters for various foreign and Palestinian media organizations, including Ma’an News Agency.

The Times reported spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Mark Regev, stated, “Government buildings had been targeted because Hamas ‘makes no distinction between its terrorist military machine and the government structure…We have seen Hamas consistently using so-called civilian facilities for the purposes of hiding their terrorist military machine, including weapons.”

Under this concept, it is hard to see how Israel would not be able to justify hitting any part of Gaza and killing any person inside or nearby that infrastructure. Saturday morning, according to Haaretz, Israel’s air force targeted Gaza’s police headquarters, other government buildings and a mosque in Rafah. It also is impossible to see how a cease-fire can be brokered if Israel is going to destroy the offices of political leaders elected in disputed or undisputed Palestinian elections.

Seventy-five thousand reservists in Israel have been called up for whatever Israel has planned for Gaza. It’s been bombarding it for three days and has asserted to the world that it must continue to respond to rocket attacks from Hamas because Israel cannot tolerate such terrorism. Yet, when one examines the collective punishment imposed upon the people of Gaza, it is clear that there is no equivalency between the power of Hamas to terrorize Israeli civilians and the power of Israel to terrorize Palestinian civilians.

Hamas has committed crimes and abuses. Its rocket attacks are mostly inaccurate and, because they lack precision, they are widely considered to be war crimes.

But Mitt being Mitt, he couldn’t just grab his check from orange-haired grotesque Sheldon Adelson (the Jewish Trump) and skip town without stopping to point out that Jews are good with money while people held prisoner in enormous open air concentration camps are not. I mean, what’s up with that?