Over the past several decades, activists, grassroots organizations, and institutions generally deemed congressional advocacy focused on Palestinian rights as a completely futile exercise. Many avoided direct engagement with lawmakers, often expressing it would be a waste of time.

So, why the title “Judaization of Jerusalem / Al-Quds”?  For one thing, says Basem Ra'ad, author of our Sept.-Oct. 2018 Link issue, the taking of land from one people and giving it to another based on an exclusive blood line is, simply put, racist and the worst form of apartheid.

In 2006, former president Jimmy Carter wrote a book which he entitled "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.  In our June-July issue of The Link, Palestinian lawyer Jonathan Kuttab tells why, 12 years later, the president's worst premonition has come to pass.

The Link is doing a series of issues on how the concept of apartheid in international law applies to the different situations in which Palestinians find themselves:  citizens of Israel, occupied West Bankers, imprisoned Gazans, and residents of Jerusalem. This issue examines the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Our writer is Jonathan Cook, a freelance journalist who lives with his family in Nazareth, Israel.

The world's focus is now on Jerusalem.  But, as Rowan Yaghi narrates in our January-March Link, it should be on the West Bank and Gaza.