Would you like to know how many people have visited this page? Or how reputable the author is? Simply
sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too.
I have 28 fans: Become a Fan. You'll get emails whenever I post articles on OpEd News
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 29, 2018 The battle for Syria's skies will see a move from proxy clashes to direct ones
Mike Pompeo, the hawkish new US Secretary of State, is due in Jerusalem on Sunday to discuss the fate of the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, due for renewal next month. Israel hopes the US will tear up the deal, allowing sanctions to be intensified and forcing Iran to concentrate on its diplomatic woes and mounting protests at home rather than project its influence into Syria.
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 1, 2017 After Sy Hersh's Bombshell Investigation, Why Won't Media Tell the Real Story of Trump's Military Strike in Syria?
Any publication that has covered either the White House-Pentagon threats or the rehashing of the OPCW report and has not mentioned Hersh's revelations is writing nothing less than propaganda in service of a western foreign policy agenda trying to bring about the illegal overthrow of the Syrian government. And so far that appears to include every single U.S. and UK mainstream newspaper and TV station.
(27 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 9, 2016 American liberals unleashed the Trump monster
The reason Trump is heading to the Oval Office is because the Democratic party rigged the primaries to ensure that a candidate who could have beaten Trump, Bernie Sanders, did not get on the ticket. You want to blame someone, blame Clinton and the rotten-to-the-core Democratic party leadership.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 9, 2022 Blocking roads isn't crazy - It's our last hope that sanity will prevail
As long as there is a war to worry about - even nuclear Armageddon, as President Joe Biden recently warned - the threat of an environmental Armageddon can be deemed less pressing, less horrifying, less worthy of attention.
(15 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 7, 2013 Mandela: a Dissenting Opinion
Offering a dissenting opinion at this moment of a general outpouring of grief at Nelson Mandela's death is not likely to court popularity. It is also likely to be misunderstood.
Nonetheless, it is important to pause during the widespread acclamation of his legacy, mostly by people who have never demonstrated a fraction of his integrity, to consider a lesson that most observers want to overlook.
(5 comments) SHARE Friday, February 14, 2014 Tide Turns against Israel: Pariah Status and Isolation Lie Ahead
A damaging falling-out last month, following insults from the defense minister against Kerry, has not subsided. Last week Netanyahu unleashed his closest cabinet allies to savage Kerry again, with one calling the US secretary of state's pronouncements "offensive and intolerable." But despite outward signs, Netanyahu is less alone than he looks -- and far from ready to compromise.
(15 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 18, 2012 Why Gaza must suffer again -- The four guilty parties behind Israel's attack
If Israelis really believe they have to endure greater suffering because the Palestinians lack accurate weapons, then maybe they should start lobbying Washington to distribute its military hardware more equitably, so the Palestinians can receive the same allocations of military aid and armaments as Israel.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 7, 2015 Mr Netanyahu is king of a world of perpetual fear
In this world of perpetual fear, Arabs and Iranians are viewed only as distant and dangerous objects, not people. And in the world of worst possibilities, Mr Netanyahu is king. But Israel's enemies are changing. Where once it fought Arab states, now its tanks and attack helicopters struggle against the guerrilla tactics of Hamas and Hizbollah.
SHARE Saturday, November 26, 2011 Is Britain Plotting With Israel To Attack Iran? Ex-ambassador Exposes Government Cover-up
Last February Britain's then defense minister Liam Fox attended a dinner in Tel Aviv with a group described as senior Israelis. Alongside him sat Adam Werritty, a lobbyist whose "improper relations" with the minister would lead eight months later to Fox's hurried resignation.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 31, 2019 How Israel is working to remove Palestinians from Jerusalem
"The settlers arrive, and then so do the police, the army, private security guards and municipal inspectors. The settlers have a machine behind them whose role is to make life as uncomfortable as possible for Palestinians. The message is: 'You either accept your subjugation or leave'."
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, September 10, 2012 Forget Iran, It's Israel's Nuclear Gun Pointed at Obama's Head
Discord between the two "unshakeable allies" is not limited to Iran. Antipathy has been the norm for decades. Over the summer, current and former CIA officials admitted that the US security establishment has always regarded Israel as its number one counter-intelligence threat in the Middle East.
SHARE Wednesday, January 13, 2016 Why Israel has silenced the 1948 story of Nazareth's survival
Nazareth was not only an anomaly; it was a mistake. It was supposed to be cleared of its Palestinian population, just like those other Palestinian cities now in Israel. Much to Israel's regret, it has become an unofficial capital for Israel's 1.6 million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the Israeli population.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, July 30, 2012 Western complicity exposed -- Europe and US richly reward Israel for pariah status
The Netanyahu government has serially defied and insulted foreign leaders, including US President Obama; given the settlers virtual free rein; blocked peace talks with the Palestinians; intimidated and marginalized human rights groups, UN agencies and even Israeli courts; and fueled a popular wave of Jewish ethnic and religious chauvinism against the country's Palestinian minority, foreign workers and asylum seekers.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, July 6, 2018 Sisi holds key to Trump's Sinai plan for Palestinians
Both Abbas and Hamas are more isolated than ever, and the situation in Gaza more desperate. Israel has cultivated much closer ties to the Gulf states as they fashion joint opposition to Iran. And the Trump administration has dropped even the pretense of neutrality in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Gaza can be kept under Israel's thumb without Israel sharing any blame.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 23, 2017 From an open internet, back to the dark ages
The existing rules of "net neutrality" are already failing progressives and dissidents. If the changes are approved next month, internet service providers (ISPs), the corporations that plug us into the internet, will also be able to decide what we should see and what will be out of reach.
SHARE Sunday, December 3, 2017 In age of forest fires, Israel's law against Palestinian goats proves self-inflicted wound for Zionism
Five years after he bought Sycamore ranch, Sharon created the "Green Patrol," a paramilitary unit of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, whose tasks included seizing and slaughtering the Bedouin's black goats. Faced with the scientific evidence and the threat of more fires, Ariel has climbed down. "Goats are an important factor in fire prevention, and we want to encourage the act of grazing," he now says.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 26, 2016 Israel should be deeply disturbed by the Brexit vote
It has taken decades for Europe to even acknowledge -- let alone remedy -- the problem that it is also trading with illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank. If the EU starts to unravel, and US neoliberal hegemony weakens, Israel will be in trouble. It will be in desperate need of a new guarantor, one prepared to support a country that polls repeatedly show is mistrusted around the world. Brexit is simply the warning siren.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 25, 2020 How We Stay Blind to the Story of Power
Power needs to be rid of Sanders, just as it previously had to rid itself of Corbyn because both are that rarest thing - politicians who are not imprisoned within the current power paradigm. Because they do not serve power cultishly like most of their colleagues such politicians threaten to shine a light on true power.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 21, 2017 Syria, "Experts" and George Monbiot
Although the attack on the "nuclear reactor" occurred a decade ago, there are pressing lessons to be learned for those analyzing current events in Syria. The IAEA failed to disclose the fact that it was certain the building was not a nuclear plant, allowing the fabricated narrative to be spread unchallenged. It abandoned science to bow instead to political expediency.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 12, 2019 How The Hand of Israeli Spy Tech Reaches Deep Into Our Lives
Digital age weapons developed by Israel to oppress Palestinians are rapidly being repurposed for much wider applications - against Western populations who have long taken their freedoms for granted.
(16 comments) SHARE Saturday, May 23, 2020 Why the left's case for lesser evil sounds hollow
The lesser evil argument rests on the false assumption that we are not already in a time of revolution, if not a political revolution, certainly an ecological one. The planet is about to throw up our house of cards, our civilisation and violently reorder it for us.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 30, 2016 Israeli expulsion law "violates all rules of democracy"
Over the past 15 years, the Central Elections Committee, which is dominated by Jewish parties, has repeatedly tried to ban Palestinian MKs from standing for election. However, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the decisions on appeal. on the eve of the election, Netanyahu made his much-criticized comment warning that "Arabs are coming out in droves to the polls."
(21 comments) SHARE Monday, November 7, 2016 No, Hillary Clinton is not less evil than Trump
Unless progressive Americans show they are prepared to vote out of conviction, not out of necessity, the Democratic party will never have to take account of their views. It will keep throwing up leaders -- in different colors and different sexes -- to front the tiny elite that runs the US and seeks to rule the world. It is time to say no -- loudly -- to Clinton, whether she is the slightly lesser-evil candidate or not.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 13, 2018 Western leaders betrayed Palestinians 70 years ago. There is no sign that is about to change
Israel has been crafting a dishonest counter-narrative ever since the Nakba, one that historians scouring the archives have exploded. The only legitimate struggle for Palestinians, it seems, is keeping quiet, allowing their lands to be plundered and their children to be starved.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 29, 2015 Palestinian Woman Shot: Israeli police alter story again
Might the police be disciplined, or, more properly, punished, for shooting a woman six times for no reason at all? Apparently not. They have been investigated and it has been decided that "there is no reason to take disciplinary measures against them, given the extenuating circumstances of the incident". One might well ask: what were those "extenuating circumstances"?
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 10, 2015 The real lessons of the Tory victory
The revolution that we need in Britain and the US has to start with a disengagement from the mainstream media's representation of events. We have to discard their narratives. Even more important than an overhauled electoral system, one that fairly reflects the electorate's preferences, we need a grassroots media that is free of the control of fabulously wealthy proprietors and major corporations.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, July 4, 2019 The plot to keep Jeremy Corbyn out of power
But just as Russell Brand's rejection of the old politics began to articulate a wider mood, it was stopped in its tracks. After Corbyn was unexpectedly elected Labour leader, offering for the first time in living memory a politics that listened to people before money, Brand's style of rejectionism looked a little too cynical, or at least premature.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 24, 2019 Netanyahu, the Joint List and a history of demonising Palestinian voters
Israel's re-run election last week revealed the bitter struggles within the Israeli right for dominance, between a coalition of religious and settler parties led by Benjamin Netanyahu and their opponents in the secular Blue and White party of army generals.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 23, 2019 The Democrats Helped Cultivate the Barbarism of ISIS
The last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East.
SHARE Sunday, February 9, 2020 Duh, Jared! So Who Built the PA as a 'Police State'?
Kushner is right that the PA is increasingly authoritarian and uses its security forces in oppressive ways - because that's exactly what it was set up to do by Israel and the US.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 14, 2012 Don't expect a second-term Obama to take on Israel
The reality is that the White House is stuck with an Israeli government, with or without Netanyahu, that rejects an agreement with the Palestinians. As tensions flare again on the Israel-Gaza border -- threatening an Israeli attack, just as occurred in the run-up to the last Israeli election -- it looks disturbingly like four more years of the same.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, March 1, 2019 Britain's Witchfinders are Ready to Burn Jeremy Corbyn
He dared to challenge the authority of the witchfinders. He suggested that some of those being hounded out of Labour may not in fact be witches. Or more specifically, in the context of constant claims of a Labour "anti-semitism crisis", he argued that the party had been "too apologetic" in dealing with the bad-faith efforts of those seeking to damage a Corbyn-led party.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 18, 2020 A lesson coronavirus is about to teach the world
Despite everything we have been told for four decades or more, western capitalist societies are far from the most efficient ways of organizing ourselves. That will be laid bare as the coronavirus crisis deepens.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, May 11, 2018 At 70, Israel more than ever deserves a cultural and academic boycott
For 70 years, Israel has been expanding a process of canonization and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, while Western leaders have turned a blind eye. In fact, through economic, diplomatic and military support, Western governments have actively abetted Israel in dispossessing Palestinians.
SHARE Sunday, November 3, 2013 Israel to drill for oil in the West Bank
What seems clear is that the oil field extends over a very large area, with much of the reserves believed to lie under Palestinian territory in the West Bank. According to the Oslo accords, Israel is obligated to coordinate any exploration for natural resources in shared territory with the Palestinian Authority, and reach agreements on how to divide the benefits.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 4, 2018 The lies and self-deceptions at work within Israel's "moral" army
A half-century of occupation has not only corrupted generations of teenage Israeli soldiers who have been allowed to lord it over Palestinians. It has also created an industry of lies and self-deceptions to ensure that the consciences of Israelis are never clouded by a moment of doubt that maybe their army is not so moral after all.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, September 2, 2019 How Israel's Religious Right is now in the driving seat
Yossi Gurvitz, an Israeli journalist and researcher on religious extremism said the rise of the religious right was an indication of wider shifts in Israeli society. "Israel is getting more religious and its religious parties are getting more extreme".
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 9, 2019 How Evangelical Christians risk setting the Middle East on fire
The Nigerian pastor, who has millions of followers worldwide and calls himself a prophet aroused local hostility not only because his brand of Christianity strays far from the more traditional doctrines of Middle Eastern churches.
SHARE Wednesday, November 1, 2017 Balfour Declaration: how Britain broke its feeble promise to Palestinians
In occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinians are denied all national and institutional representation. And in the West Bank, the powers of the Palestinian Authority -- supposedly the Palestinians' fledgling government -- extend no further than acting as a security contractor for Israel and carrying out municipal services like garbage collection.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 28, 2019 France's Macron leads the way as western leaders malevolently confuse anti-Zionism with antisemitism
It is increasingly being accepted that anti-Zionism and antisemitism are two sides of the same coin. That trend was consolidated last week when Emmanuel Macron, the centrist French president, went further than simply reiterating his repeated conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. This time he threatened to outlaw anti-Zionism.
(20 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 5, 2017 The row over Jerusalem gives American Jews a tough choice
The Netanyahu government, it seems, prefers as allies Christian evangelicals and the US alt-right, which loves Israel as much as it appears to despise Jews. Israel is plotting a future in which American Jews will have to make hard choices. Can they continue to identify with a state that openly turns its back on them?
SHARE Monday, December 16, 2019 How Britain Dresses Up Crimes in Israel as 'charitable acts'
The Israeli army laid waste to many hundreds of Palestinian villages, turning them into rubble. Forests planted over the villages were then promoted as efforts to "make the desert bloom".
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 3, 2020 The bigger picture is hiding behind a virus
Our current fear is an enemy to our developing and maintaining a critical perspective. The more we are frightened by graphs, by deaths, the more we are likely to submit to whatever we are told will keep us safe.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 2, 2015 The Israeli war crime that goes unmentioned
Who will be to blame when Israel gets the next war with Lebanon or Gaza it wants and Hizbollah or Hamas respond by firing their imprecise rockets in retaliation? When Israeli civilians die under those rockets, will Hizbollah and Hamas be responsible or will it be Israel's fault? We will doubtless hear the answer from the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and the New York Times soon.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, January 8, 2018 Ahed Tamimi's arrest sheds a disturbing light on how children are targeted by Israel
Sixteen-year-old Ahed Tamimi was charged last week with assault and incitement after she slapped two heavily armed Israeli soldiers as they refused to leave the courtyard of her family home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah. Her mother, Nariman, is in detention for filming the incident. The video quickly went viral.
SHARE Sunday, January 31, 2016 Behind Israel's campaign to vilify peace groups
Israeli government funds have been secretly transferred to far-right organizations leading a smear campaign against groups opposed to the occupation, investigations show. Human rights activists, the campaigns claim, are betraying their country by providing information that fuels criticism overseas of Israel and helps to bolster an international boycott movement.
SHARE Monday, May 4, 2015 The battle between American-Jewish political donors heats up
The growing diplomatic rupture between Netanyahu and Obama appears to have become a motivating factor among major donors in the upcoming presidential race. According to analysts, the key bankrollers of both the Republican and Democratic campaigns want to make sure Netanyahu faces a much easier ride with Obama's successor.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, June 27, 2016 Brexit and the diseased liberal mind
the debate about Brexit was never about values or principles -- it was about money. It still is. The Remainers are talking only about the threat to their pensions. The Brexiters are talking only about the role of immigrants in driving down wages. And there is good reason: because the EU is part of the walls of the economic prison that has been constructed all around us.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 13, 2016 Israel's stolen babies remains the state's darkest secret
If there is a lesson to be drawn from the government's partial admission about the abductions, it should alert Israel's Arab Jews to the fact that they face the same enemy as the Palestinians: a European Jewish establishment that remains resolutely resistant to the idea of living in peace and respect with either Arabs or the region.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, September 12, 2016 Is Israel on the brink of tearing itself asunder?
An Israeli consensus believes Gaza has been free of occupation since the settlers were pulled out in 2005, despite the fact that Israel still surrounds most of the coastal strip with soldiers, patrols its air space with drones and denies access to the sea.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 3, 2019 Don't Be Fooled: Media Still Selling Out Assange
The media outlets that have suddenly rushed to Assange's cause are doing so out of self-protection, writes Jonathan Cook, not legal or journalistic principle.
SHARE Tuesday, June 27, 2017 Israel's efforts to hide Palestinians from view no longer fools young American Jews
Increasingly, American Jewry is becoming polarized, between an older generation whose ignorance allows them to advocate unthinkingly for Israel and a young generation whose greater knowledge has brought with it a sense of responsibility. In an ever-more globalized world, this trend is going to intensify.
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 26, 2015 Netanyahu goes nuclear ... prepare for fallout
A leaked report has undermined Binyamin Netanyahu's claims on Iran's nuclear capability. If the Israeli prime minister keeps going, he will destroy more than his own credibility, says Jonathan Cook.
SHARE Friday, October 11, 2019 Israeli Police 'turning a blind eye to killing spree'
The absence of banking services in many Palestinian towns, and the difficulties Palestinian citizens faced gaining loans and mortgages, had strengthened the role of criminal groups. They lent money at extortionate rates that borrowers could often not afford to repay.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 8, 2020 Israel's 'Peace Camp' Flirts With Oblivion
No surprise that Gantz has competed with Netanyahu to support the Trump plan's sanctioning of the annexation of the West Bank's illegal settlements and the Jordan Valley.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 13, 2010 US Arms 'Bonanza' in Middle East; Israel and Saudis to Buy Advanced War Planes
Two of the United States' closest allies in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia, are on the brink of signing large arms deals with the US in a move designed to ratchet up the pressure on Iran, according to defence analysts.
(19 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 9, 2014 Israel not ready to give up "villa in the jungle"
The last thing Israeli leaders want is for Jewish and Palestinian citizens to develop shared interests, forge friendships and act in solidarity. That would start to erode the rationale for a Jewish state, especially one premised on the supposed need of the Jews to defend themselves from a hostile world. In short, a Jewish state's future precisely depends on the anti-Arab stereotypes inculcated in young Israeli minds.
SHARE Tuesday, October 1, 2019 Why Israel is Struggling to find a way out of its political deadlock
Mr Gantz thinks it is important to maintain bipartisan US support for Israel's belligerent occupation while Mr Netanyahu has preferred to throw Israel's hand in with Donald Trump and the Christian religious right.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 11, 2018 The Crisis in Corbyn's Labour Party is Over Israel, Not Anti-Semitism
It should be clear that this anti-semitism "crisis" is not chiefly about respecting Jewish sensitivities or even about Jewish identity. It is about protecting the sensitivities of some Jews on Israel, a state oppressing and dispossessing the Palestinian people.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 17, 2018 Robert Fisk rips away excuses for air strike on Syria
Fisk's report shows that there is a highly credible alternative explanation for what happened in Douma -- one that needs to be investigated. Which means that an attack on Syria should never have taken place before inspectors were able to investigate and report their findings. The US-UK-France launched air strikes hours before the UN inspectors were due to begin their work in Syria, thereby pre-empting it.
SHARE Wednesday, October 10, 2018 Breaking the Silence about Israel's occupation of Hebron
Ido Even-Paz switched on his body camera as his tour group decamped from the bus in Hebron. The former Israeli soldier wanted to document any trouble we might encounter in this, the largest Palestinian city in the occupied West Bank, but it was not Hebron's Palestinian residents who concerned him.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 30, 2019 Endless Procedural Abuses Show Julian Assange Case Was Never About Law
Chelsea Manning has been repeatedly jailed, and is now facing ruinous fines for every day she refuses to testify against Assange as the US desperately seeks to prop up its bogus espionage claims. In Medieval times, the authorities were more honest: they simply put people on the rack.
SHARE Sunday, October 13, 2019 Uninhabitable: Gaza Faces the Moment of Truth
Stories of Gaza's endless suffering a short distance from Israelis' homes are unlikely to shame them into action. They can be roused only out of self-interest - a fear for their own safety and the well being of their loved ones.
SHARE Saturday, May 30, 2015 Why Israel's cabinet will be a headache for the US
Just as the White House gears up for another 18 months of humiliation and sabotage from Netanyahu and his government, Obama is showering Israel with gifts, as part of its long-standing "security" doctrine. Obama may signal verbally his disquiet with the current Israeli government, but he is not about to exact any real price from Israel, even as it shifts ever further right.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, December 21, 2012 Why the Washington Post killed the story of Murdoch's bid to buy the US presidency
In early 2011 Murdoch sent Roger Ailes, the boss of Fox News, to Afghanistan to persuade Gen David Petraeus, former commander of US forces, to run against Barack Obama in 2012. The Post buried it inside the paper's lifestyle section, presenting it as what the section editor called "a buzzy media story that...didn't have the broader import" that would justify a better showing in the paper.
SHARE Tuesday, July 2, 2019 Trump's Peace Plan Has Been Designed to Fail -- Exactly Like Its Predecessors
When Trump's plan crashes, as it will, Washington will have the chance to exploit a supposed Palestinian rejection as justification for approving annexation by Israel of yet more tranches of occupied territory. The Palestinians will be left with a shattered homeland. No self-determination, no viable state, no independent economy, just a series of aid-dependent ghettos.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, September 17, 2018 Is Israel's hand behind the attacks on Jeremy Corbyn?
Has Israel been covertly fuelling claims of an "anti-Semitism crisis" purportedly plaguing Britain's Labour Party since it elected a new leader, Jeremy Corbyn, three years ago?
That question is raised by a new freedom of information request submitted this week by a group of Israeli lawyers, academics and human rights activists.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 23, 2017 Israel maintains robust arms trade with rogue regimes
Israel has not divulged details of its ties to Myanmar's military government, but public records show that it has sold the military there armed patrol boats, guns and surveillance equipment. Myanmar's special forces have also been trained by Israelis.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 6, 2017 Netanyahu alarms Palestinians with talk of land swap
Netanyahu made public his adoption of the long-standing and highly controversial plan of his far-right defence minister, Avigdor Lieberman. This would see borders redrawn to allow Israel to annex coveted settlements in the West Bank in exchange for stripping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their Israeli citizenship and reassigning their communities to a highly circumscribed Palestinian state.
SHARE Tuesday, June 18, 2019 Annexation: How Israel already controls more than half of the West Bank
A state of de facto annexation already exists on the ground in most of the occupied West Bank.
Almost two-thirds of the Palestinian territory including most of its most fertile and resource-rich land is under full Israeli control.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 30, 2019 In Bahrain The Horizon of Peace stretched further away from Palestinians
Once more the West is trying to foist on the Palestinians an inequitable peace deal. The one certainty is that they will reject it - it is the only issue on which the Fatah and Hamas leaderships are united - again ensuring the Palestinians can be painted as the obstacle to progress.
SHARE Wednesday, August 2, 2017 Jodi Rudoren says Palestinians experience "apartheid" -- but not in NYT
Reporters covering Israel and Palestine are systematically targeted by Israel lobbyists in an attempt to pressure them and their papers into self-censorship. The goal is to skew the coverage to make Israel look much better than it would otherwise, and the Palestinians much worse.
SHARE Wednesday, March 4, 2020 Netanyahu may yet prove himself the Houdini of Israeli politics
It may have taken him a year and three elections to achieve it, but on Tuesday, Benjamin Netanyahu started to look like the Great Houdini of Israeli politics - escape artist extraordinaire.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 18, 2015 Lawfare, Israel's continuation of war by other means
Israeli leaders, led by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, have accused the PA of pursuing what they call "lawfare" instead of peace negotiations. In January Netanyahu convened legal advisers to help devise a strategy to discredit the ICC, saying war crimes investigations against Israel were "absurd" and a "perversion of justice."
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 14, 2020 Antisemitism Threats Will Keep Destroying Labour
If there is one issue that denotes the terminal decline of Labour as a force for change - desperately needed social, economic and environmental change - it is not Brexit. It is the constant furore over an "antisemitism crisis" supposedly plaguing the party for the past five years.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 21, 2010 The secrets in Israel's archives: Evidence of ethnic cleansing kept under lock and key
The state's chief archivist says many of the documents "are not fit for public viewing" and raise doubts about Israel's "adherence to international law," while the government warns that greater transparency will "damage foreign relations."
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 28, 2015 Netanyahu's "Mr Iran" routine is for the home crowd
Why is Netanyahu acting like a bull in a diplomatic china shop, and doing so at the cost of imperiling relations with the US, when his own advisers say there is no obvious Iranian threat and a deal is unlikely? Scaremongering about Iran has proved a winning formula for Netanyahu, who looks about to secure a third consecutive term as prime minister at next month's general election.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 6, 2020 The Slow Exodus of Palestinian Christians
Israel has exploited the steady decline in the numbers of Palestinian Christians to advance its claim that they are being hounded from the region by Muslim extremists. But the real blame lies with Israel and the foreign Churches
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 25, 2015 Videos of Israeli raids on sleeping children
Behind the immediate terror of being confronted by these faceless soldiers, the children know from friends or family that there is a real danger they will be seized -- maybe tonight or another night -- if the military decide they are wanted. They will be taken from their parents without warning to a military prison, where they may be held for months and their family will probably be unable to visit them.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 19, 2017 Palestinian rage will rise to the surface in time
The US policy change on Jerusalem has been a hammer blow to the three main pillars supporting the cause of Palestinian statehood: the Palestinian Authority, the European Union and the Arab states. The undercurrents of Palestinian rage chiefly swirl below the surface. But they will rise in time, and the consequences of Mr Trump's deed will become all too apparent.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, February 5, 2018 Fourteen-year-old Ghada was the latest victim of Israel's dehumanizing machine
What crushes Palestinian spirits is not just the calculated malevolence of Israel's occupation authorities as they kill and imprison Palestinians, seal them in ghettos, steal land and demolish homes. It is also the system's casual indifference to their fate. Palestinians are viewed as numbers and bodies rather than human beings.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 2, 2019 A second Israeli election proves Netanyahu's grip on power is slipping
Netanyahu was forced to dissolve the 120-member parliament to block his chief rival, Benny Gantz, from getting a chance to assemble an alternative governing coalition..So in September, Israelis will cast their votes afresh.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 9, 2019 Is leaked document Trump's 'deal of the century'?
While the authenticity of the document is unproven and indeed contested there are serious grounds for believing it paves the direction of any future declaration by the Trump administration. Not least it is a synthesis of most of the Israeli right's ambitions for the creation of a Greater Israel with a few sops to the Palestinians.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 18, 2018 Make no mistake, Netanyahu is not a man of peace
While hardline nationalists make political capital by publicly demanding an attack on Gaza, Israel's prime minister is opting to keep Palestinians there voiceless and isolated.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 10, 2020 The US and Israel Hope to scare the Hague War Crimes Court off from Helping Palestine
The Court is considering examining widespread human rights abuses perpetrated by US soldiers in Afghanistan, and crimes committed by Israeli soldiers in the occupied Palestinian territories, especially Gaza, as well as the officials responsible for Israel's illegal settlement programme.
SHARE Thursday, April 30, 2015 Israeli city revives historic mission to keep out Arabs
Upper Nazareth was built on Nazareth's confiscated lands on the orders of Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. It was part of an official campaign to "Judaise" the only Palestinian city to survive relatively unscathed from the 1948 war. the proportion of Arabs in the city -- once inhabited almost exclusively by Jews -- has risen dramatically over the past 15 years. One in five residents is now reported to be Arab.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 4, 2016 Will Israel be put on trial for war crimes?
Israel has agreed to allow the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to send a delegation to Israel and the occupied territories. It was revealed over the weekend in a step that could dramatically increase the risk of Israeli officials being tried for war crimes.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 17, 2019 For Israel, annexation of the West Bank is a long-established goal
This is a war of attrition - what Israelis have long understood as "creeping annexation", carried out by stealth to avoid a backlash from the international community. Ultimately, Israel wants the Palestinians gone entirely, squeezed out into neighbouring Arab states, such as Egypt and Jordan.
SHARE Tuesday, September 12, 2017 Criminal indictments loom large for Israeli PM
According to reports in Israeli media, police sources believe the way the Netanyahus ran their official residence reflected a pattern of behaviour. In one of the other corruption scandals, the pair are suspected of receiving gifts from wealthy businessmen worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including jewellery, pink champagne and luxury cigars.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 1, 2011 Israel's Grand Hypocrisy: Netanyahu Slams "Anti-Liberal" Arab Spring
As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an "Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave", adding that Israel's Arab neighbours were "moving not forwards, but backwards".
SHARE Thursday, June 15, 2017 Netanyahu wants the UN out of the way to be able to achieve his objective
Washington has long pampered Israel, giving it millions of dollars each year to buy weapons to oppress Palestinians, and using its veto to block UN resolutions enforcing international law. With Mr Trump in the White House, a crisis-plagued Europe ever-more toothless and the Arab world in disarray, Mr Netanyahu wants to seize this chance to clear the UN out of the way too.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, January 21, 2018 Why is the Israeli army suddenly concerned about Gaza?
For years, Gaza has been on the brink of collapse. Jonathan Cook looks at the troubling reasons behind a sudden uptick in interest by the Israeli military
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 6, 2018 2018: When Orwell's 1984 Stopped Being Fiction
Liberal, watchdog-style journalism is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian -- or maybe Lewis Carroll -- fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoon-fed familiar government propaganda: that the tentacles of a Russian octopus are everywhere, that the Reds are again under our beds -- or at least, poisoning our door handles.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, July 8, 2022 By making China the enemy - Nato is threatening world peace
Both Russia and China, forced into deeper alliance by Nato hostility, have been seeking to overturn the international trading system by decoupling it from the US dollar, the central pillar of Washington's hegemonic status.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 22, 2015 The strategy behind Israel's attack on Iran and Hizballah
Claims from Israel that it was under imminent threat of a Hizballah attack from the Quneitra area -- justifying the strike -- are implausible. If Hizballah is now averse, as seems to be the case, to hitting Israel after it killed so many of its commanders, why would it have been preparing to attack Israel before the strike, when it had far less cause?
(7 comments) SHARE Monday, March 25, 2019 Three Lessons for the Left from the Mueller Inquiry
The most important lesson of all for the left is that support among its ranks for the Mueller inquiry against Trump was foolhardy in the extreme. Not only was the inquiry doomed to failure - in fact, not only was it designed to fail - but it has set a precedent for future politicised investigations that will be used against the progressive left should it make any significant political gains.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 26, 2020 Our leaders are terrified. Not of the virus -- of us
A worldview that has crowded out all other thinking for nearly two generations is coming crashing down. It has no answers to our current predicament. There is a kind of tragic karma to the fact that so many major countries meaning major economies are today run by the very men least equipped ideologically, emotionally and spiritually to deal with the virus.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 24, 2015 Europe's feeble efforts to "punish" Israel
The question of punishing illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory was considered separately in Europe and Israel last week, with only superficial differences in the conclusions reached. Israel's near half-century occupation is in no immediate danger, either at home or abroad.
SHARE Monday, August 1, 2016 Palestinians inside Israel are under attack
Recently leaked protocols reveal that the police have secretly awarded themselves powers to use live fire against Palestinian protesters in Israel, even if they pose no danger. Yet another law threatens jail for any Palestinian citizen who tries to dissuade another from volunteering in the Israeli army.
SHARE Wednesday, November 2, 2016 Western leaders grow deaf to Israeli abuses
While Israel exercises ever more physical power over Palestinians, its moral credit is running out with foreign audiences, who have come to understand that the occupation is neither benign nor temporary. The rise of social media has accelerated that awakening, which in turn has bolstered grassroots reactions such as the boycott (BDS) movement.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, May 27, 2019 The Western Media Is Key to Syria Deceptions
The media are not a watchdog on power but the public relations arm of giant corporations pursuing their narrow interests in the Middle East.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 6, 2014 Israel moves to outlaw Palestinian political parties in the Knesset
Zoabi was originally suspended after legislators from all the main parties expressed outrage at a series of comments from her criticizing both the build-up to Israel's summer assault on Gaza, dubbed "Operation Protective Edge," and the 51-day attack itself, which left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, most of them civilians.
SHARE Wednesday, July 10, 2019 Entry Ban at Israeli City Park provokes apartheid warnings
The barring of a lawyer and her infant from a public park in the Galilee last week has triggered a legal battle over whether local authorities in Israel can segregate citizens on a racial basis.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 1, 2017 Trump, "Fake News" and the War on Dissidents
What Trump and his followers have done is appropriate the linguistic veneer of media criticism, without its intellectual substance, to justify their hyper-selfish agenda. By "fake news," Trump means those who disagree with him and his political program. That is not what the progressive left means. Their goal is to identify when and how the news is misrepresented by the corporate media, and whose interests are being served.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, September 21, 2015 Corbyn victory unmasks Britain's Guardian
Corbyn's campaign has highlighted a truth about the existing British political system: that, at least since the time of Tony Blair, the country's two major parliamentary parties have been equally committed to upholding neoliberalism. The Blue Neoliberal Party (the Conservatives) and the Red Neoliberal Party (Labour) mark the short horizon of current British politics.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 18, 2012 Israel's immigration plan for 'ethnically pure' bunker state
As it did with the Palestinians many years ago, Israel has criminalized these new refugees -- in their case, for fleeing persecution, war or economic collapse. Whole families can now be locked up, without a trial, for three years while a deportation order is sought and enforced, and Israelis who offer them assistance risk jail sentences of up to 15 years.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 5, 2022 The persecution of Julian Assange
According to UN torture expert, the UK and US have colluded to publicly destroy the WikiLeaks founder and deter others from exposing their crimes.
SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2015 Israel seeks in Nepal to whitewash its crimes in Gaza
The criticism that Israel is demonstrating selective compassion -- bringing salvation to far-off Nepal while smashing homes and cutting down lives close by in Gaza -- is blithely dismissed by most Israelis. Israeli soldiers saving children in Nepal should be commended -- but not if it gives them and their compatriots an excuse to turn a blind eye to Palestinian children suffering amid the rubble of Gaza.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 15, 2022 Israel calls the Nakba a lie - So why do its leaders threaten a second one?
While Israel denounces Palestinians and their supporters as liars for speaking of the Nakba its own officials publicly cite the Nakba as a real event that can be repeated if Palestinians do not submit completely.
SHARE Saturday, June 2, 2018 Under Trump, the Israel lobby is a Hydra with many heads
AIPAC's power now derives not chiefly from Israel. Since Trump's election, the Israel lobby has managed to absorb and mobilize an additional four powerful lobbies -- and to a degree not seen before. They are: the Christian evangelicals, the alt-right, the military-industrial complex, and the Saudi Arabia lobby.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 18, 2018 Israel has accelerated its annexation of the West Bank from a slow creep to a run
The US is preparing to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, not only pre-empting a final-status issue but tearing out the beating heart from a Palestinian state. The thrust of US strategy is so well-known to Palestinian leaders -- and in lockstep with Israel -- that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is said to have refused to even look at the peace plan recently submitted to him.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 10, 2019 With strikes against Iran, Netanyahu risks jeopardising his closest alliance
If Mr Trump indicates a readiness for rapprochement with Iran before polling day, Mr Netanyahu's narrative is sunk and the corruption allegations he faces are likely to take a stronger hold on the public imagination.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 20, 2019 Jerusalem's Old City: How Palestine's Past Is Being Slowly Erased
The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem, including the Old City, as the capital of a future state, while Israeli leaders have claimed Jerusalem as the state's "eternal capital" since 1949.
SHARE Saturday, February 4, 2017 Netanyahu scandals reflect corruption at the heart of Israeli society
The next question for Netanyahu is whether he will step down if indicted. He should, if Olmert's example is followed. But his officials are citing a 1993 high court ruling that allows a cabinet minister under indictment to remain in office. Certainly if Netanyahu chooses to stay on, his decision would be appealed to the court again. However, the judges may be reluctant to oust a sitting prime minister.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 28, 2019 Trump's Green Light to Israel: First the Golan, Then the West Bank?
This is another crude attempt by Trump to meddle in Israel's election, due on April 9. It will provide Netanyahu with a massive fillip as he struggles against corruption indictments and a credible threat from a rival party, Blue and White, headed by former army generals.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 24, 2015 Israel's new Asian allies
The deterioration in relations between Israel and the White House is now impossible to dismiss, as Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama lock horns, over negotiations with Iran. The fallout is spreading to the US Congress, where for the first time Israel is becoming a partisan issue. Netanyahu's officials blame the crisis with Washington on Obama, implying that they will wait out his presidency for better times to return.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 16, 2015 Israel's race to economic (and moral) bankruptcy
The reality is that most Israelis' perception of their national interests, both as a Jewish state and as a military power, are intimately tied to a permanent occupation and the exclusion of Israel's Palestinian minority from true citizenship. If the watching world really wants peace, economic wishful thinking will not suffice.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 11, 2018 Knesset foils efforts to end Israeli apartheid
The propaganda campaign is swiftly unravelling. Phone cameras now record "moral" soldiers executing unarmed Palestinians in Gaza or beating up children in Hebron.
The backlash, including a growing international boycott movement, has driven Israel's right wing into even greater defiance and self-righteousness. It no longer conceals its goal to aggressively realize a longed-for "Greater Israel."
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 20, 2020 How Israel wages war on Palestinian history
The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 13, 2019 Jerusalem cable car project passes over objections from many quarters
Political interests drive tourism plan that would blight historic city's skyline and bypass Palestinians. A proposed cable car project through occupied East Jerusalem has received new impetus from the rise of the Israeli far right and Washington's decision to move its embassy to the city.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 5, 2020 The Holocaust, the BBC and Antisemitism Smears
Palestinians are not just collateral damage of the European project to create a Jewish "home". They are also presented as a new breed of antisemite - their anger supposedly driven by irrational, inexplicable hatred - that Jews need protecting from. In Israel, roles of oppressor and victim have been reversed.
SHARE Wednesday, July 22, 2015 Israel's endless misery for Gaza is no policy at all
A group of Israeli military commanders have argued that it is time to offer Gaza some relief, by easing -- if only marginally -- the blockade. None of this is being done from conscience or out of recognition of Palestinian rights. Israel's compulsive need to dominate Palestinians trumps all -- even as it finally dawns on a few generals that Gaza's endless immiseration is no policy at all.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 16, 2017 The real reasons Trump is quitting Unesco
Unesco's responsibility is not to safeguard the occupation or bolster Israel's efforts at Judaization. It is there to uphold international law and prevent Palestinians from being disappeared by Israel. The US is not an "honest broker" of a Middle East peace. Rather it is the biggest obstacle to its realization.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 11, 2017 Israel's ever-more sadistic reprisals help shore up a sense of victimhood
This endless heaping of insult upon injury for Palestinians is possible only because the west has indulged Israel's wallowing in victimhood so long. It is time to prick this bubble of self-delusion and remind Israel that it, not the Palestinians, is the oppressor.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Why is Mike Pompeo risking a one-day trip to Israel amid the pandemic?
Pompeo will use his visit to sound out Gantz more closely now he is inside the government and if needs be gently lean on him on Netanyahu's behalf to ensure he doesn't publicly waver on annexation from within the coalition.
(5 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 18, 2016 Clinton's defeat and the "fake news" conspiracy
For good or bad, the US has operated an inherently unrepresentative electoral college since the 18th century. That has provided plenty of time to demand electoral reform. Concern about the electoral college now, only because it elected Trump, is simply ugly partisan politics, not political principle.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 20, 2019 Forget Trump's "deal of the century." Israel was always on course to annexation
Netanyahu is in an unusually tight spot, even by the standards of an often chaotic and fractious Israeli political system. After a decade in power, his electoral magic may be deserting him. There are already rumblings of discontent among his allies on the far right. Some observers fear that he may need to pull a new kind of rabbit out of the hat.
SHARE Thursday, April 10, 2014 Seymour Hersh and the Spineless Nay-sayers
Hersh's his sources are anonymous. So what does that tell us? Chiefly, that the Obama administration's war on whistleblowers has been supremely effective.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, February 1, 2019 A Liberal Elite Still Luring Us Towards the Abyss
Elections across the European Union will be "the most calamitous that we have ever known: victory for the wreckers; disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster".
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 15, 2019 Trump enjoys bipartisan support for his plan to eradicate the Palestinian cause
Washington is playing a game of chicken with Abbas and the PA. It is determined that the Palestinians will blink first.
Deeply implicated in Washington's vision, even if largely out of sight, are the Arab states, whose role is to strong-arm whatever Palestinian leadership is required for the Greater Israel "deal of the century" to be implemented.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 14, 2019 How the rule of the rabbis is fuelling a holy war in Israel
Israel is transforming a settler-colonial project against the Palestinians into a battle with the wider Islamic world. It is turning a territorial conflict into a holy war.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, July 6, 2020 The threat of annexation is far from over
Annexation by Israel of occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank was never likely to happen on July 1, as many observers assumed. The date was not a deadline; it was a window opened by the Israeli government to carry out annexation before US President Donald Trump leaves office.
SHARE Tuesday, July 4, 2017 Marwan Barghouti and the Battle of the Empty Stomachs
Israel's treatment of Palestinian prisoners has significantly deteriorated in recent years, with only cursory objections from the International Committee of the Red Cross. A surge in Palestinian inmate numbers over the past 18 months -- to 6,500 detainees -- has brought the prison population to levels not seen since the early years of the second intifada, some 15 years ago.
SHARE Thursday, October 5, 2017 As battle rages in UK Labour Party, Moshe Machover expelled after asserting "Anti-Zionism does not equal anti-Semitism"
Over the past 18 months the British Labour party has been beset by a moral panic. According to pro-Israel activists in Labour, there has been a surge of anti-semitism in the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader two years ago. Corbyn has broken with decades of party policy by placing a much stronger emphasis on the need to end Israel's oppression of the Palestinians.
SHARE Tuesday, December 23, 2014 Israeli election could end in Arab-free Knesset
Israel's large Palestinian Arab minority is facing the most crucial, and possibly most dangerous, general election in its history, according to analysts. Both the survival of Arab political parties in the Israeli parliament and the status of Palestinian citizens -- who make up one in five of the population -- inside a Jewish state are at stake.
(5 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 8, 2015 Netanyahu aims his WMD at Obama
Netanyahu wishes to prevent a rapprochement between the US and Tehran, one that might weaken Israel's hold on Washington's Middle East policy and increase the pressure for a real peace process with the Palestinians. As former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman has noted, continuing leaks of high-level discord over Iran have made Israel look "ridiculous."
SHARE Tuesday, February 13, 2018 The UK's Hidden Hand in Julian Assange's Detention
Assange is still holed up in the embassy, at great risk to his physical and mental health. Last year Sweden dropped an investigation that in reality it had not actually been pursuing for more than four years. The UK (read US) authorities have a new, even less credible pretext for continuing to hold Assange: because he "skipped bail." Apparently the price he should pay for this is more than five years of confinement.
SHARE Wednesday, July 20, 2016 In the US, money talks when it comes to Israel
The grubby underside of US electoral politics is on show once again as the Democratic and Republican candidates prepare to fight it out for the presidency. And it doesn't get seamier than the battle to prove how loyal each candidate is to Israel. It should be dawning on US politicians that a real debate about the nation's relationship with Israel cannot be deferred much longer.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 16, 2018 Why liberal Jews in Israel and the US have made Lara Alqasem a cause celebre
Israeli officials control entry not only to Israel but also to the occupied Palestinian territories. For decades, foreigners with Arab-sounding names -- like Ms Alqasem -- have been routinely harassed or turned back at the borders, with barely a peep from most on the Israeli left.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 7, 2015 Israel's army of spin-doctors is doomed to defeat
Hasbara's cartoon version of reality is not only unconvincing but, in alienating friends as much as foes, self-defeating. Netanyahu may hope to repackage Israel, but his product -- ongoing oppression of Palestinians -- is one few can be persuaded to buy.
(23 comments) SHARE Friday, December 7, 2018 From Marc Lamont Hill to the Quakers, no criticism of Israel is allowed
In this deeply perverse form of identity politics, the rights of the nuclear-armed state of Israel and its supporters abroad are weaponized to damage the rights of a weak, dispersed, colonized and marginalized community of Palestinians.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 5, 2017 Why the London Terror Attack Happened Now
Those behind the London attack -- whether those carrying it out or those dispatching the terrorists -- want to have an effect. Terrorism is the use of indiscriminate violence for political ends. It has a logic, even if it is one we mostly do not care to understand.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 29, 2018 Guardian escalates its vilification of Julian Assange
The Guardian has not erred in this latest story attacking Assange, or in its much longer-running campaign to vilify him. With this story, it has done what it regularly does when supposedly vital western foreign policy interests are at stake -- it simply regurgitates an elite-serving, western narrative.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, August 2, 2020 Can the anti-Netanyahu protests grow into a larger movement?
Demonstrations have yet to draw a connection between Netanyahu's personal abuses of office and the systemic corruption of Israeli politics with the occupation its beating heart
SHARE Sunday, June 6, 2021 Tech Giants Help Israel Muzzle Palestinians
Jerusalem is presented as Israel's unified and undisputed capital just as Israel claims - making the occupation of the Palestinian section of the city invisible.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, March 31, 2014 Israel to consider war crimes case
Israel's Supreme Court is set to consider evidence April 2 that Israeli political and military officials committed war crimes in relation to major military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. Former PM Ehud Olmert and his Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the current justice minister, are among the high-level figures accused of breaking the laws of war when they attacked Lebanon in 2006, and Gaza in the winter of 2008-09.
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 16, 2018 West's failure to act will be cause of the next Gaza massacre
Netanyahu's grin said it all. As he mouthed platitudes about "Middle Eastern peace," he finally had Washington's blessing for all of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. But politics is about more than power -- it's about imagery too. The champagne-quaffing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem while Gaza drowned in blood left a profoundly sour taste in the mouth.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, September 6, 2015 Israel hopes "lost tribes" can boost Jewish numbers
A government committee established last month will determine whether immigration rights should be extended to "groups with ties to the Jewish people." That would include so-called "lost tribes," remote communities in India, Latin American and elsewhere that claim their ancestors were once Jewish.
SHARE Tuesday, October 3, 2017 How Kurdish independence is central to Israel's plans to reshape the region
The unravelling of Britain and France's map of the region would likely lead to chaos of the kind that a strong, nuclear-armed Israel, with backing from Washington, could richly exploit. Not least, yet more bedlam would push the Palestinian cause even further down the international community's list of priorities.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, July 15, 2018 How Israel helped to revive Europe's ugly ethnic nationalisms
While western liberals have grown exercised at the separation of children from their parents by the Trump administration, they have ignored decades of similarly brutal Israeli policies. In that time, thousands of Palestinian children have been seized from their homes, often in night-time raids, and jailed in trials with a near-100 percent conviction rate.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 14, 2018 How the Corporate Media Enslave Us to a World of Illusions
Our planet and our children's futures depend on us liberating ourselves, seeing the ghosts in the machine for what they truly are. We have to begin rebuilding our societies on the basis that we share a common humanity. That other humans are not our enemies, only those who wish to enslave us to their power.
SHARE Saturday, March 26, 2016 Parents protest as dream of bilingual education in Israel turns sour
The opening of the first bilingual classrooms in Israel's largest city was celebrated with great excitement by parents and teachers last September. It broke with a decades-old model of strict segregation between the country's Jewish and Palestinian pupils.
SHARE Thursday, August 18, 2016 The Birth of Agro-Resistance in Palestine
Israel has done much to try to weaken Palestinians' connection to the olive tree, understanding that the "amoud" is the Palestinians' defense against Israeli guns, bulldozers, settlers and ill-will. Since the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza began in 1967, Israel has waged a relentless assault on Palestine's olive groves and the way of life they support.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, October 10, 2014 Israel and the G-word
A plan just disclosed by the Israeli media indicates that Netanyahu and his allies have been secretly plotting to force many Palestinians into Sinai, with the US arm-twisting the Egyptians into agreement. If true, the bombing campaigns of the past six years may be better understood as softening-up operations before a mass expulsion from Gaza.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 7, 2020 The JNF's sordid history - Tower and stockades, forests and Jim Crow vetting committees
A half-hour drive from my home in Nazareth is a replica of a tower and stockade, next to Kibbutz Beit Alpha in the Beit She'an Valley. It was only the second tower and stockade built in Palestine, in 1936. Soon there would be dozens of them marching across the landscape.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, June 18, 2018 What's in Trump's "deal of the century"? The answers are in plain sight
It is becoming hard for the Trump administration and Israel to ignore the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza -- one Israel helped to engineer with an 11-year blockade and intermittent military attacks. The United Nations warned some time ago that Gaza would soon be "uninhabitable."
SHARE Tuesday, October 2, 2012 Arab Jews vs Palestinians -- Israel's refugee pawns
Bipartisan pressure is mounting in the US Congress to count as refugees only Palestinians personally displaced from their homes in 1948, stripping millions of descendants of their status. While another -- and seemingly contradictory -- legislative move would insist on Arab Jews being granted the same refugee status as Palestinians.
SHARE Wednesday, February 15, 2017 US-Israel relations: Is Trump backing down?
Netanyahu will follow the pattern he used with Obama: declare support for limited Palestinian statehood, reiterate that settlements are not an obstacle to peace, and require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. He is also likely to demand Israeli "security supervision" over the Palestinians for many years, claiming it is necessary to prevent the emergence of radical Islamic groups in the West Bank.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 19, 2017 Harvey Weinstein and the politics of Hollywood
The Weinstein story perfectly illustrates how politically disempowering identity politics can be. It should hardly surprise us that a rich man who had the ability to give desperate young women a shot at stardom preyed on them. The Hollywood employment system is capitalism in microcosm, at its rawest and most naked.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 26, 2014 Time to stop inflating Israel's huge bubble of denial
The reason why popular criticism of Israel is currently galvanising around the boycott movement -- what Netanyahu grandly calls "delegitimization" -- is that it offers a way for ordinary Americans and Europeans to distance themselves from their governments' own complicity in Israel's crimes.
(7 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 8, 2016 How most aid to the Palestinians ends up in Israel's coffers
Western humanitarian aid to the Palestinians is clearly intended for the victims, not the victors. Palestinians under occupation are among the most aid-dependent in the world, receiving more than $2bn from the international community a year. Shir Hever, an Israeli economist, concludes that at least 78 percent of humanitarian aid intended for Palestinians ends up in Israel's coffers.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 18, 2016 How Israel seeks to erase the region's history
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been drafting a basic law defining Israel as belonging to a globalized "Jewish nation," not the country's citizens. And he insists that peace talks take place only once the Palestinians under occupation recognize Israel as such a Jewish state -- a condition that, once viewed as risible, has now been adopted by Washington.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 23, 2017 Palestinians will need more than unity to save them
Israel's deputy attorney general, Dana Zilber, was this month stripped of her authority over law enforcement in the West Bank after attempts to rein in the settlers. The readying of the infrastructure of annexation will only accelerate under the blind eye of a Trump administration. Palestinians will need more than grudging unity to withstand the birth of the new order.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 27, 2018 The flames that killed Fathi Harb should make us all burn with guilt and shame
Since late March, the struggle for liberation has shifted back to Gaza. Tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians have massed weekly close to Israel's fence encaging them. The protests are intended as confrontational civil disobedience, a cry to the world for help and a reminder that Palestinians are being slowly choked to death. Yet again, the world has remained largely impassive.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 1, 2018 Bolsonaro: A Monster Engineered by Our Corporate Media
Despite their professed concern, the plutocrats and their media spokespeople much prefer a far-right populist like Trump or Bolsonaro to a populist leader of the genuine left.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 22, 2014 Cracks in the alliance: Is there finally daylight between Israel and the US?
While Netanyahu may act as though he is doing the White House a favor by negotiating, he should be in no doubt of his dependence on US goodwill. He received a timely reminder last week when Congress voted through a $3.1 billion aid package for Israel in 2014 -- plus hundreds of millions of dollars more for missile development -- despite the severe troubles facing the US economy.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 25, 2011 The Palestine Papers -- Israel's peacemakers unmasked
One of the Palestine Papers quotes an exasperated Mr. Erekat asking a US diplomat last year: "What more can I give?" The man with the answer may be Mr. Lieberman, who unveiled his own map of Palestinian statehood this week. It conceded a provisional state on less than half of the West Bank.
SHARE Monday, August 29, 2016 Carrot and stick carve-up will not work for Israel
An Israeli strategy that failed decades ago -- before the PA even existed -- is not going to succeed now. Social media campaigns and paltry handouts will not persuade Palestinians they are nothing more than a humanitarian problem. They are not about to shelve their dreams of liberation just because Mr Lieberman color-codes them in red and green.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 4, 2018 Netanuyahu's courting of Bolsonaro is the latest of Israel's alliances with far-right figures
The victory of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil's presidential election last week has won Israel a passionate new friend on the international stage. The world's fifth-most populous nation will now be "coloured in blue and white", an Israeli official said, referring to the colours of Israel's flag.
SHARE Thursday, February 5, 2015 Israel's insolence to Obama may rebound on it
Netanyahu believes he can use the US Congress to stymie any threat of an agreement between Washington and Tehran. His assumption is that the Congress is "Israeli-occupied territory," as a US observer once called it. Israel has enormous sway in Congress, but Netanyahu is already getting a lesson in the limits of his influence. The very rift he is fostering with Mr Obama is likely to rebound on him strategically.
SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2016 Israel considers its demographic time bomb
Last week a video showed the "nightmare scenario" of Palestinians putting down their weapons and heading to the polls to elect one of their own as Jerusalem's mayor. It was precisely this kind of "political terror" that led Mr Lieberman to ban Mr Madani from Israel last week. With the Arab Jews on the Palestinians' side, the conflict with Israel might be ended at the ballot box. That truly would be subversive.
SHARE Tuesday, July 5, 2016 Israel can't avoid the fallout from a disunited Europe
Brexit is a warning sign that western leaders will pay a price if they continue overlooking popular concerns. Israel would be foolish to assume that it can remain immune indefinitely from the upheavals consuming Europe and the US.
SHARE Friday, September 22, 2017 The growing affinity between Netanyahu's Israel and the West's far-right is hardly surprising
The affinity between Netanyahu's Israel and the West's far-right is understandable. Both detest a human rights discourse they have yet to crush. Both mobilize their supporters with dog-whistle Islamophobia. Both prefer militarized, fear-based societies and both share an obsession with Jew hatred.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, May 9, 2016 Once, most Jews viewed Israel as the anti-semite's best friend
In his Holocaust Day speech last week, Yair Golan compared current trends in Israel with Germany in the early 1930s. In today's Israel, he said, could be recognized "the revolting processes that occurred in Europe ... There is nothing easier than hating the stranger, nothing easier than to stir fears and intimidate."
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 25, 2014 Israel-Palestine talks: US desperate to keep futile peace process show on the road a little longer
The US political cycle means Obama's Democratic party is heading this autumn into the Congressional mid-term elections. A humiliating failure in the peace process would add to perceptions of him as a weak leader in the Middle East, following what has been widely presented as his folding in confrontations with Syria and Iran.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 10, 2014 ISIS and Israel allies against a Palestinian state
n casting a popular resistance movement like Hamas as ISIS, Netanyahu has tarred all Palestinians as bloodthirsty Islamic extremists. And here we reach Israel's real goal in equating the two groups. Netanyahu's comparison has a recent parallel. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks on the US, Ariel Sharon made a similar equivalence between al-Qaeda and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
SHARE Thursday, May 10, 2012 Netanyahu Crowns Himself King of Israel: Will Israeli Left Finally Stir?
Should Obama choose a fight on the Palestinian issue, he will be facing a prime minister whose position in Israel is unassailable. Netanyahu will doubtless exploit his strengthened position to up the rhetoric against Tehran and add to the pressure for intensified action from the US and Europe.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, February 19, 2018 Benjamin Netanyahu's ruthless instinct for political survival remains undimmed
The allegations against the Israeli Prime Minister continue to mount, but it is unlikely he will go quietly, writes Jonathan Cook. Netanyahu's scandals have split Israeli society down the middle. While thousands have turned out to march against Mr Netanyahu, his core electorate is still behind him.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 25, 2015 Israel unleashes its diplomatic thug on the UN
Danon's appointment indicates the extent to which the Israeli right has abandoned any hope of persuading the international community of the rightness of its cause -- or even of working within the rules of statecraft. An Israel that has no place for negotiations or compromise wants only to tell the world that it is wrong and that Israelis don't care what others think.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, February 8, 2016 The Liberal Hounding of Julian Assange: From Alex Gibney to The Guardian
At what point do we cry foul when we witness the abuse of a political dissident, one who dares to take on mighty vested interests? the UN panel on arbitrary detention ruled that Assange, who has spent more than three years confined to a tiny room in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, is being arbitrarily detained and that he should be allowed to walk free.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 29, 2010 God-TV Helps Israel Oust Bedouin
Half a million trees planted over the past 18 months on the ancestral lands of Bedouin tribes in Israel's Negev region were bought by a controversial Christian evangelical television channel that calls itself God-TV.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 25, 2013 The false analogy of Syria and Palestine
Gaza is not like Syria because Palestinians live under a belligerent occupation, not in a unified, if failing state run by a dictator. There are very few decades-long occupations, but there are lots of dictators the world would be better off without. Occupations are regulated by international law, which in Gaza's case is almost entirely ignored.
SHARE Friday, June 9, 2017 The Facts Proving Jeremy Corbyn's Election Triumph
Corbyn turned around the electoral fortunes of the Labour party more than any other party leader in 70 years. And unlike Blair, he's done it without making back-room deals with big business to eviscerate his party's economic and social programs.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 31, 2013 Whatever Happened To The Peace Talks?
All indications are that these "peace" talks, like their predecessors, are doomed to fail. The question is whether the Palestinians have the nerve to unmask the charade. If not, Israel will use the peace process as cover while its settlements devour yet more of the Palestinian state-in-waiting.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 21, 2019 Anti-semitism is cover for a much deeper divide in Britain's Labour party
The chief concern cited for the split by the eight Labour MPs, however, was a supposed "anti-semitism crisis" in the party.
The breakaway faction seemingly agrees that anti-semitism has become so endemic in the party since Jeremy Corbyn became leader more than three years ago that they were left with no choice but to quit.
SHARE Tuesday, December 16, 2014 US feels the heat on Palestine vote at UN
While Europe is tentatively finding a voice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, silence reigns across the Atlantic. The White House appears paralyzed, afraid to appear out of sync with world opinion but more afraid still of upsetting Israel and its powerful allies in the US Congress.
SHARE Monday, January 21, 2019 Israeli politics is being dragged into the grubby realm of reality TV
Netanyahu has forced the attorney-general, Avichai Mendelblit, onto unfamiliar - and constitutionally tricky - terrain. Mendelblit, an appointee of Netanyahu's, has indicated that he will make a decision on whether to issue an indictment before the ballot, so that voters have the facts to make an informed choice.
SHARE Wednesday, February 8, 2017 Land law is final nail in the two-state solution coffin
International law is clear that an occupying power can take land only for military needs. Israel committed a war crime in transferring more than 600,000 Jewish civilians into the occupied territories.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 4, 2015 US loses its grip on Israel and Palestinians
By taking on the president, Netanyahu risks smashing apart Washington's political consensus on Israel and exposing the American public for the first time to a debate about whether Israeli interests coincide with US ones. The very rift he is fostering with Obama is likely to rebound on him. That could have unpredictable -- and dangerous -- consequences for Israel.
(5 comments) SHARE Monday, January 24, 2022 Is It Already Too Late to Say Goodbye?
A proportion of early readers of this post have mistaken it for an actual goodbye rather than as a cautionary tale of what has been happening and what is still to come.
SHARE Monday, February 13, 2017 Trump and Israel: Flashpoint of Jerusalem hangs over White House meeting
Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, it has moved more than 200,000 Jewish settlers into the Palestinian part of the city, and sought to cut off the Palestinian population from the West Bank by building a separation wall.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, April 22, 2019 As the Israel lobby in the US weakens, its UK counterpart grows more fearsome
Advocates for Israel are not only Jews. While the pro-Israel lobby represents the views of a proportion of Jewish Americans it is also significantly comprised of Christians, evangelicals in particular.
Millions of these Christians - including Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo can be accused of dual loyalty too.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 9, 2018 Israel is bulldozing Khan Al Ahmar -- and with it the two-state solution
In an indication of the Palestinians' dire predicament, the Trump administration is expected to propose in its long-awaited peace plan that the slum-like Abu Dis, rather than East Jerusalem, serve as the capital of a future pseudo-Palestinian state -- if Israel ever chooses to recognize one.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, February 12, 2021 Politics - Not Law - will decide whether Israel faces war crimes charges
"Universal Jurisdiction" rules which allow foreign citizens to seek the arrest of an official suspected of violating international law if his or her state refuses to adjudicate have never been enforced in practice against Israelis.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, June 21, 2013 Big Racists vs Little Racists -- How Israeli Apartheid Is Coming Unstuck
This month South Africa's departing ambassador to Israel, Ismail Coovadia, warned that Israel was a "replication of apartheid." The idea that the world may soon wake up to this comparison deeply unnerves Netanyahu and the right, all the more so as they risk being identified as the party refusing to make concessions towards peace.
SHARE Wednesday, February 28, 2018 Money, not the protection of Palestinian Christians, was at the root of Holy Sepulchre protest
Christian leaderships are at least in part to blame for opening up a Pandora's box on land matters in Jerusalem and elsewhere. They have treated their extensive holdings, much of it land and property entrusted to them by Palestinian Christians and overseas pilgrims, as chips in a game of real-estate poker. Israel has been looking for a chance to raise the stakes.
SHARE Monday, November 28, 2016 The fantasy at the center of Israel's "muezzin bill"
The "muezzin bill" does not arrive in a politically neutral context. The extremist wing of the settler movement championing it has been vandalizing and torching mosques in Israel and the occupied territories for years. The new bill follows hot on the heels of a government-sponsored expulsion law that allows Jewish legislators to oust from the parliament the Palestinian minority's representatives if they voice unpopular views.
SHARE Friday, December 21, 2018 Inside Banksy's The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem
Israel strenuously claims the wall was built to aid security by keeping out Palestinian "terrorists". But the wall's path outside The Walled Off Hotel seals off Bethlehem from one of its major holy sites, Rachel's Tomb, and has allowed Jewish religious extremists to take it over.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 20, 2021 Amazon and Google: partners in Israeli apartheid
The $1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus awarded earlier this year means the two tech firms are to build data centers in Israel on behalf of the Israeli military and government.
SHARE Saturday, November 29, 2014 Israel's Jewish state bill: assessing the wider impact
Netanyahu has found himself being increasingly outmaneuvered by political challengers on his right as his coalition wobbles, threatening a general election, said Bar Ilan University's Klein. "He needs to show he is the true leader of the right-wing camp." In advancing the Jewish nation-state bill, Netanyahu has usefully put clear water between himself and the centrists in his cabinet.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 7, 2014 George Monbiot, the Left's Very Own McCarthy
Monbiot is no longer what he claims to be or seems. Years of being embedded in the corporate media have eroded his ability to remain truly independent or to appreciate those like Herman, Peterson and Chomsky who demand the right to retain that privilege for themselves.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 24, 2018 Young protesters are defying Israel's blockade with scraps of paper and plastic
After the snipers began maiming thousands of the demonstrators, including children, medics and journalists, for the impudence of imagining they had a right to liberty, the enclave's youths reinvented the kite's role. If it failed to serve as a reminder of Palestinians' humanity, it could at least remind Israel and the outside world of their presence, of the cost of leaving two million human beings to rot.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, December 17, 2021 The Hounding of Julian Assange leaves honest journalism with no refuge
The message sent to journalists could not be clearer or more chilling. What happened to Assange could happen to you too. It leaves honest journalism with no refuge no sanctuary anywhere in the world.
SHARE Thursday, June 25, 2015 Israel's Arab citizens fight for a roof over their heads
Israel's 1.5 million Palestinians, a fifth of the population, have citizenship but their leaders say they are treated more like an enemy population. Interior ministry officials are evasive about figures for unauthorized building in Israel, but experts say the number of such homes is believed to have reached around 30,000 in Israel's Palestinian communities.
SHARE Monday, September 19, 2016 Palestinians lose in US military aid deal with Israel
The clearest message from Israel's new aid package is one delivered to the Palestinians: Washington sees no pressing strategic interest in ending the occupation. It stood up to Mr Netanyahu over the Iran deal but will not risk a damaging clash over Palestinian statehood.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 4, 2022 How the Pentagon dictates Hollywood storylines
New documentary discloses the ways western publics are softened up for aggressive global US militarism through the Pentagon's influence over thousands of films and TV shows.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 19, 2021 We Can Defeat the Corporate Media's War to Snuff Out Independent Journalism
The constant acts of intimidation and violence by political and media elites to crush media pluralism in the name of "democratic values" will serve only to further expose the hypocrisy and bad faith of the corporate media and its hired hands.
SHARE Sunday, February 15, 2015 Israel's Palestinian parties face test of unity
If Zoabi is excluded, the other parties in the list will have to decide whether to refuse to run in a show of solidarity. If, as seems more likely, they choose to ignore her disqualification and stand anyway, that could send a troubling message to their voters -- that Lieberman and Netanyahu get to decide who represents Palestinian citizens in the Israeli parliament.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 10, 2017 How will US Jerusalem move affect Israel's far right?
Few have factored in the likely effect of Trump's new Jerusalem policy on the Israeli public, which has been shifting steadily to the right for most of the past two decades. The city and its contested holy sites have gained an increasingly powerful religious and national symbolism for many Israeli Jews.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 7, 2015 Will Netanyahu end up at the Hague?
At the weekly Israeli cabinet meeting, Netanyahu warned: "Those who need to answer before a criminal court are the heads of the Palestinian Authority, who have forged an alliance with the war criminals of Hamas." One of his officials similarly noted that they had "quite a bit of ammunition" to use against Abbas.
SHARE Tuesday, January 13, 2015 Netanyahu defies French pleas to push Zionist agenda
Netanyahu's narrative that all Jews should come to Israel depends on a central fallacy: that Israel is a safe haven. In fact, statistically Jews are far safer in France than in conflict-plagued Israel. Is Jewish immigration so important to Israel that it is prepared to endanger the very Jews it claims to protect?
SHARE Thursday, March 18, 2021 'Finished With The Bluffing': Jewish National Fund goes public with its aid to settlers
The Jewish National Fund JNF intends to stop pretending to Jews abroad that it is only engaged in non-controversial forestation and desert-reclamation projects. Rather it is ready to go public with aggressive Judaization projects designed to dispossess Palestinians in the occupied territories.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 16, 2014 The two-state solution may ultimately be doomed to fail
There can have been few Palestinians whose hearts did not warm at least a little to the news that the British parliament voted overwhelmingly this week to recognize a Palestinian state. The parliamentary win, as has been widely noted, was symbolic -- and in more ways than one. The motion, backed by 274 votes to 12, is not binding.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 22, 2017 Trump's clarifying moment for Israel and Palestinians
The one-state option mooted by Mr Trump will resonate with both Israelis and Palestinians because it reminds each side of their historic ambitions. It is a supremely clarifying moment. Each side must now define what it really wants to fight for: a fortress for their tribe alone, or a shared homeland ensuring rights and dignity for all.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2014 Israel's New Abyss
Israel's law chief has agreed that the Palestinian politicians, journalists and activists swept up in the latest mass arrests will be treated as "ticking bombs." Israel's torture cells are back in business. s it becomes ever clearer to Palestinian society that Israel is never going to concede Palestinian statehood, things that were once barely tolerated are now seen as unendurable.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, September 28, 2010 Israel's reasoning against peace: Deal comes at high cost to Jewish privilege
A peace agreement and Palestinian statehood would turn Israel overnight into an insignificant Middle Eastern state, one that would soon be starved of its enormous US subsidies. To most Israeli Jews -- including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu -- that a real solution to their conflict with the Palestinians might come at too heavy a price to their own pockets.
SHARE Wednesday, January 11, 2017 Fury at Azaria verdict is Israel's Trump moment
Israel's new army is no longer even minimally restrained by concerns about the army's "moral" image or threats of international war crimes investigations. It cares little what the world thinks, much like the new breed of politicians who have thrown their support behind Azaria.
SHARE Sunday, March 10, 2019 Once again, the UN has failed to name firms that profit from Israel's illegal settlements
The more violent Israel becomes towards the Palestinians and the more intransigent in rejecting peace, the less pressure is exerted upon it.
Not only does Israel continue to enjoy generous financial, military and diplomatic support from the US and Europe, both are working ever harder to silence criticisms of its actions by their own citizens.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, November 22, 2010 Obama's Bribe; Palestinians Will Be The Losers - Again
Watching the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians drag on year after year without conclusion, it is easy to overlook the enormous changes that have taken place on the ground since the Oslo Accords were signed 17 years ago.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 29, 2019 Benny Gantz and Israel's drive to become a modern-day Sparta
Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.
SHARE Tuesday, June 10, 2014 Hamas-Fatah reconciliation -- Unity on Israel's terms won't help
The unity government simply breathes new life into the illusion -- created by the Oslo accords of two decades ago -- that good governance by the Palestinian Authority can change the Palestinians' situation for the better. In practice, such governance has entailed submitting to Israel's security demands, a Palestinian obligation Abbas termed "sacred" last week.
SHARE Tuesday, March 7, 2017 Israel: where vision and reality violently diverge
Israel is denying entry not only to Arabs and would-be record breakers. And it is deporting not just those such as migrant workers and African asylum seekers who might pollute the Jewish state with non-Jewish genes. Now it is openly targeting Jews whose politics do not align with the far-right government of Mr Netanyahu.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 1, 2022 Pegasus spyware row is really about who controls cyber weapons
Professions of concern about human rights violations and invasions of privacy will keep dominating headlines but the real battle will be for who emerges as the global spymaster.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 19, 2018 "A place I do not recognize": Palestinians mark 70 years of Israeli injustice
Israel keeps no public records, but it is believed that nearly a quarter of Israel's Palestinian minority are internal refugees or descended from them. Israeli law even provides them with a special, Orwellian designation as "present absentees" -- present in Israel, but absent from their villages. They have been stripped of any right -- even as Israeli citizens -- to reclaim their property or return to their lands.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 24, 2016 Rise in Palestinian children held by Israel "alarming"
Israel is the only country in the world, according to DCIP, that "systematically prosecutes between 500 and 700 children in military courts each year." The Israeli army had been unnerved by the mounting bad publicity, said Gerard Horton, of Military Court Watch, which monitors abuses of children in detention.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 10, 2013 Treatment of Palestinians is Apartheid by Any Other Name
The international community has long criticized Israel for the "discrimination" its Palestinian citizens face and for the "oppression" of Palestinians under occupation. This terminology needs overhauling too, say the human rights lawyers. A system that treats one ethnic group as less human than another already has a legal name: it is called apartheid.
SHARE Wednesday, October 2, 2013 Partners in Crime -- Gaza: Crushed Between Israel and Egypt
Israel has turned a blind eye to Egypt pouring troops, as well as tanks and helicopters, into Sinai in violation of the 1979 peace treaty. Israel would rather Egypt mop up the Islamist threat on their shared doorstep. The destruction of the tunnels, meanwhile, has sealed off the main conduit by which Hamas armed itself against future Israeli attacks.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 20, 2021 Picnic Video Exposes Both Faces of Israeli Apartheid
Israel upholds a system of Jewish supremacy over the land and it doesn't matter whether those challenging its apartheid rule are Palestinian subjects without rights or 'Arab' citizens supposedly with full rights.
SHARE Sunday, July 19, 2015 Israel's minister of culture cracks down on TV station for Palestinians
The station, which broadcasts six hours a day to Israel's 1.5 million Palestinian Arab citizens, focuses on news, arts, food and celebrities, as well as offering children's programs and quiz shows.
Despite the channel's modest budget and ambitions, however, Israel's public security minister, Gilad Erdan, ordered its closure last week, describing its operations as a "breach of Israel's sovereignty."
SHARE Monday, January 11, 2016 Welcome to Israel's Version of Apartheid, as Passengers Evict Palestinians from Plane
Most Israeli Jews have long supported two Israels: one for them and another for the Palestinian minority, with further, even more deprived ghettos for Palestinians under occupation. The inhabitants of one Israel remain hostile towards, and abusive of, those in the other, who refuse to accept Jewish privilege as the natural order -- just like the mob that insisted that their fellow citizens had no right to share a plane.
SHARE Monday, September 16, 2019 Brexit Reveals Jeremy Corbyn to be the True Moderate
These UK politicians aren't just Remainers, they are Remainists, who not only refuse to contemplate any weakening of the bonds between the UK and Europe but actually want those bonds to tighten.
SHARE Tuesday, April 19, 2016 Israeli paramedics accused of medical violations
There is mounting evidence that Israeli ambulance crews are withholding treatment from Palestinians injured during a wave of attacks over the past six months, according to rights groups. Physicians for Human Rights in Israel, a medical watchdog group, found that wounded Palestinians had been left untreated for as long as two hours.
SHARE Sunday, December 2, 2018 Israel wages a new war of attrition in Jerusalem
What Palestinians in Jerusalem urgently need is a reason for hope -- and a clear signal that other countries will not join the US in abandoning them.
SHARE Wednesday, November 13, 2013 Why Israel wanted Arafat dead
Israel's interests in killing Arafat are evident when one considers what occurred after his death. Not only did the Palestinian national movement collapse, but the Palestinian leadership got drawn back into a series of futile peace talks, leaving Israel clear to concentrate on land grabs and settlement building.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, March 11, 2019 Desperate Netanyahu openly embraces Jewish extremists
Last year, Otzma Yehudit's leader, Michael Ben-Ari, called for violence against Israel's 1.7-million-strong Palestinian minority, who have second-class citizenship, calling them "a fifth column" that was "waging war against us".
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 7, 2010 Obama's cave-in to Israel: letter suggests US not honest broker
The disclosures were made by an informed source: David Makovsky, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a close associate of Dennis Ross, Obama's chief adviser on the Middle East, who is said to have initiated the offer.
SHARE Wednesday, September 18, 2013 Red Lines And Green Lights -- Israel Still Angling For Attack On Syria And Iran
Soon, as Israeli analysts are already pointing out, Syria will be hosting international inspectors searching for WMD, not unlike the situation in Iraq shortly before the US-led invasion of 2003. Israel, it can safely be assumed, will quietly meddle, trying to persuade the West that Assad is not cooperating and that Hizbullah and Iran are implicated.
SHARE Sunday, May 22, 2016 Religious zealots waging a quiet revolution in Israel
The goal of the religious nationalists is undisguised: to remove the last restraints on the occupation, and build a glorious, divinely ordained Greater Israel over an obliterated Palestinian society. That means no hope of a peaceful resolution of Israel's conflict with the Palestinians -- unless it is preceded by a tumultuous civil war between Israel's secular and religious Jews.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, June 19, 2016 Israel's anti-terror law "dangerous" and "anti-Arab"
An advisory committee will be able to approve declaring a group a terror organization. Those under investigation for links to terror may find that they have no access to the secret evidence used against them. Legislation is expected to be passed in the next few weeks cracking down on human rights groups and giving a majority of Knesset members the power to expel Palestinian lawmakers.
SHARE Wednesday, July 23, 2014 US plays decisive role in Israel's attack on Gaza
Of great concern should be the Obama administration's decision to back Israel to the hilt and the US media's silence on the matter. There can be no hope of a peaceful solution ever gaining traction -- or these bouts of blood-letting in Gaza coming to end -- unless Washington is finally unmasked as Israel's abettor-in-chief.
SHARE Thursday, November 13, 2014 The transfer of Israeli Arabs
The attitudes of the police, government and the Israeli public were shaped -- and still are -- by a more general political atmosphere that derives from Israel's founding ideology, Zionism. Israel's Palestinian minority is viewed as the state's Achilles' heel; an opening for Palestinians in the occupied territories to undermine the state's Jewishness.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Bedouin Land Fight; Claim For Native Title Threatens Jewish State
68 year old Bedouin activist, Mr al Uqbi, claims the right to return to a patch of 82 hectares in the Negev, close to the regional capital, Beersheva, that he says has belonged to his family for generations. But as both the government and the judge in the case, Sarah Dovrat, seem to appreciate, much more is at stake.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 27, 2019 Is Israel's Tax Grab a Prelude to Further Hollowing Out the Palestinian Authority?
The current stand-off between Netanyahu and Abbas lays bare the duplicity of the situation for all to see. The PA leader may say the prisoners are the most cherished Palestinian constituency but he also describes his security services' co-ordination with Israel as "sacred".
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, February 9, 2014 The Israeli Surveillance State: Did The "Shin Bet" Just Hack My Computer?
The Shin Bet is run by people who have the minds of thugs, clever thugs, but thugs nonetheless. If that has always been true, it is all the more so now. The Haaretz newspaper recently revealed that three of the four top posts in the Shin Bet are currently occupied by people who describe themselves as national-religious -- that is, the ideology of the extremist settlers.
SHARE Thursday, January 28, 2016 Israel continues to sow the seeds of discontent
The struggle for two states appears finished. As Netanyahu averred recently, Israel would prefer to "live forever by the sword" than concede territory to the Palestinians. The message of the dovish opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, is softer but the same. At the weekend he told the French president, Francois Hollande: "Now is not the time for a Palestinian state."
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 20, 2019 UK Blurring Two Very Different Extradition Claims
The Swedish and U.S. claims are vastly different, writes Jonathan Cook. But the public conversation in the U.K. is simply about which has first dibs on Assange.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 15, 2014 On Nakba Day, Israelis Forced to Confront a Guilty Secret
While Israeli Jews were trying to enjoy guilt-free street parties last week, news reports focused on the activities of their compatriots -- the Palestinians who remained inside the new state of Israel and now comprise a fifth of the population. Estimates are that one in four of these 1.5 million Palestinian citizens is from a family internally displaced by the 1948 war.
SHARE Sunday, January 24, 2016 Rabbis deny 1 in 10 Jews the right to marry in Israel
The Chief Rabbinate, the supreme religious authority in Israel for the Jewish population, has exclusive control over a range of personal status matters, including conversion, marriage and divorce. The rabbinate represents a strict stream of Judaism known as Orthodoxy. Other, more liberal trends within Judaism have no official standing.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, December 17, 2018 Growing US public support for one state shared equally by Israelis and Palestinians falls on deaf ears
Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect -- and in ways that will please neither of them. The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians
SHARE Tuesday, October 28, 2014 How Israel is turning Gaza into a super-max prison
Where else in the world, apart from the Palestinian territories, would the international community stand by idly as so many people suffer -- and not from a random act of God but willed by fellow humans? The reason for the hold-up is, as ever, Israel's "security needs." Gaza can be rebuilt but only to the precise specifications laid down by Israeli officials.
SHARE Wednesday, August 28, 2013 Israel seeks to pit Christian Arabs against Muslims in a cruel clash
Israel would prefer that Christians reject the Palestinian variant of liberation theology and adopt the Christian Zionism that dominates in the US, Israel's chief sponsor. All of this is designed to corral Israel's Muslim population into a corner, creating a much cleaner narrative for Israel in which Jews and Christians are brothers guarding the ramparts.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, May 26, 2014 Israel's Christians need all the support they can get
A visit that eschewed politics to focus only on religion -- elevating holy sites above the people who live next to them -- would betray a Christian community that needs all the help it can get as it fights for its continuing place in the holy land.
SHARE Wednesday, November 26, 2014 Israel's model of political despair in Jerusalem
It should be no surprise that Jerusalem is the eye of the storm. For more than a decade it has served as a laboratory for the Israeli right to experiment with a model of political despair designed to make Palestinians either submit or leave.
SHARE Saturday, March 12, 2016 Israeli textbook "bad for Arabs, bad for Jews"
Although the ministry produced the new civics textbook amid great secrecy, leading Jewish educators who have seen the final text complain that it is riddled with factual inaccuracies, maligns the Palestinian minority, and discounts democratic values.
SHARE Monday, February 25, 2013 Obama's Israel trip
The Palestinians are stuck in a political and diplomatic cul-de-sac, unable to move forward either with the development of their national struggle or with talks on viable statehood. Whatever Obama's intentions, the reality is that this will be another four years of diplomatic failure.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, July 4, 2011 Britain Arrests Respected Palestinian Leader
He is an Islamic "preacher of hate" whose views reflect "virulent anti-Semitism" and who has funded Hamas terror operations, according to much of the British media.
SHARE Sunday, February 21, 2016 How Israel is "turning Palestinians into Zionists"
Israeli officials had stepped up interference in the Palestinian curriculum in recent years, censoring large sections of textbooks. Changes have included removing pictures of Palestinian flags and PA logos; excising information about PLO leaders; cutting lines from poems that could be interpreted as promoting struggle against occupation; and redacting references to the Nakba, loss of Palestinians' homeland in 1948.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, February 26, 2016 Israel accused of using trickery to snatch refugee lands
For Palestinian society, land dealing with Israel is considered taboo. But some refugees admitted that Israel had been using various forms of pressure long before the latest lawyers' ruse to persuade families into signing away their rights.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 12, 2016 Spymaster's final interview reveals deep rift in Israel
Almost no one in Israel, it seems, wants justice for the Palestinians. But a gulf is opening up between the old order that cares what others think of Israel and a new order that refuses to make even the smallest concessions to the sensitivities of the outside world. In that war, Mr Netanyahu and the far-right look set to emerge triumphant.
SHARE Monday, July 29, 2013 We Steal Secrets: The assassination of Julian Assange
Gibney's film treats Assange as if he and the US corporate-military behemoth were engaged in a simple game of cat and mouse, two players trying to outsmart each other. This documentary could have been a fascinating study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the surveillance super-state. Instead Gibney chose the easy course and made a film that sides with the problem rather than the solution.
SHARE Monday, August 4, 2014 Eyeless in Gaza
Israel is occupying and besieging Gaza, conferring on its inhabitants a right under international law to fight for their freedom. How does the oppressor, the lawbreaker have a right to self-defence? If Israel objects to being scratched and bruised, it should stop choking its victim.
(4 comments) SHARE Monday, January 19, 2015 Netanyahu and Europe's far right find common ground
Netanyahu and the far-right share much common ground. He wants a Europe free of Jews -- as well as Muslims who undermine Europe's support for Israel -- because he thinks that is in Jewish interests. The far-right wants the same because it believes it will be in the interests of a supposed "native" white majority.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, November 6, 2020 The task before 'Sleepy Joe' is to put liberal America right back to sleep
There is no real way to sleep through life or politics and not wake up one day - usually when it is too late - realizing catastrophic mistakes were made. As individuals, we may face that terrible reckoning on our death-beds. Empires rarely go so quietly..
SHARE Saturday, October 15, 2011 Setting a price tag for Israeli supremacy
A mosque was torched, followed days later by an attack on Muslim and Christian graves. In each case the settlers left their calling card -- the words "Price tag," indicating an act of revenge -- scrawled on their handiwork. None of the recent attacks against Palestinians has led to prosecutions.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 13, 2022 Why Washington's Focus on 'Credibility' Is a Recipe For War
The world is entering what looks like a new even more complex cold war in which any misunderstanding, mishap, or false move, could rapidly escalate into nuclear confrontation.
SHARE Thursday, March 7, 2019 Labour's civil war on Israel has been a long time coming
Labour MPs have a choice. They can stand on the wrong side of history, battling the tide like some modern King Canute, or they can recognize that it is time to fully enter the modern era and that means embracing a program of anti-racism that encompasses everyone, including Jews and Palestinians.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 17, 2013 Sapping Assad's Strength -- Israel Stirs The Pot In Syria
The best Israel can hope for is that Assad holds on but only just. That would keep the regime in place, or boxed into its heartland, but sapped of the energy to concern itself with anything other than immediate matters of survival. It would be unable to offer help to Hizbullah, isolating the militia in Lebanon and cutting off its supply line to Iran.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 9, 2016 After Tel Aviv attack, Israel's Palestinians tarred as "criminals"
Netanyahu said he was "not impressed" by accusations that he had incited hatred with his speech. He was "making a very large effort to ensure Israel is a state under unified law," he said. An Israeli Facebook post of a bogus video supposedly showing the village of Arara celebrating the Tel Aviv killings, went viral. It was later shown to be footage of celebrations in Lebanon at Ariel Sharon's death two years ago.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, March 12, 2021 Israel's KKK on the way to government?
Party pushing for expulsion of Palestinians forms election pact with Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 17, 2013 Even the World Bank understands: Palestine is being disappeared
The World Bank report follows a long line of warnings in recent years from international bodies on the dire economic situation facing Palestinians. But, significantly, the World Bank has homed in on the key battleground for an international community still harboring the forlorn hope that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will end in Palestinian statehood.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, December 28, 2012 The terror lurking in a Christmas tree
Few mayors or rabbis find themselves in the uncomfortable position of needing to go public with their views on the dangers of Christmas decorations. In Israel, segregation between Jews and Palestinians is almost complete. Even most of the handful of mixed cities are really Jewish cities with slum-like ghettoes of Palestinians living on the periphery.
SHARE Wednesday, July 18, 2012 Israel's Annexation Plan
Under international law, Israel's rule in the West Bank and Gaza is considered "belligerent occupation" and, therefore, its actions must be justified by military necessity only. If there is no occupation, Israel has no military grounds to hold on to the territories. In that case, it must either return the land to the Palestinians, and move out the settlers, or defy international law by annexing the territories.
SHARE Monday, April 7, 2014 Distracted by the peace process: What really happened during the talks
Both the US and Israel have come to rely on the endless theatrics of the two-decade peace process. Settlement freezes, prisoner releases, rows about Palestinian Authority funding and, of course, intermittent negotiations have served as useful distractions from the main developments on the ground. The era of wishful thinking may finally be coming to an end -- and that will be progress in itself.
SHARE Tuesday, June 30, 2015 Church-run schools in Israel face "death sentence"
Studies by the Follow-Up Committee for Arab Education show that Jewish pupils receive at least five times more funding than Arab pupils -- $1,100 each compared to $192. The Arab sector suffers from a shortage of more than 6,000 classrooms and 4,000 teachers. Jewish schools have twice as many computers relative to their student body than Arab schools.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 19, 2015 Jerusalem chaos is a warning of things to come
Israel has almost completed the division and enclosure of Palestinians into disconnected enclaves. As they hear the sound of the prison doors closing, Palestinian youths are lashing out at the guards closest to hand. Strangely, in the face of all this, there are signs of a parallel breakdown of order and leadership on the Israeli side.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 24, 2016 Israel is on the brink of a tyranny of the majority
Netanyahu is legislating the expulsion of Balad and throwing down the gauntlet to the courts. It won't end there. If Balad is unseated, the participation of the other Joint List factions will be untenable. In effect, the Israeli right is seeking to ethnically cleanse the parliament.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, March 18, 2016 Appointment of Israeli spokesman viewed as snub to US
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the appointment of a new foreign media adviser and spokesman this week, the latest in a series of moves viewed as snubs to the Obama White House. Keyes steps in as Netanyahu's foreign media adviser at a time when Israeli officials have been accused of conducting a "witch hunt" against both the foreign press corps in Israel and Israeli social media activists.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 4, 2013 Palestinians To Be Cast As Fall Guys -- Again
Palestinians have no control over their borders, airspace, radio frequencies, water and other natural resources, not even over the currency or internal movement of goods and people. Everything depends on Israel's good will. And few investors will be prepared to bet on that.
SHARE Wednesday, April 23, 2014 All is not lost for Palestinians, even if talks hit the buffers
The most disturbing scenario imaginable for Israel is on the horizon: a campaign of popular non-violent resistance by Palestinians. It needs no formal leadership and its simple demand -- equal rights -- is one Israel and the US will struggle to counter. Israel's arsenal may be well-stocked but it has no weapons to defeat such a campaign.
SHARE Thursday, March 3, 2016 Emerging from a "reign of terror": Palestinians in Israel hold first BDS conference
A private cinema in Nazareth agreed to host the event after several public venues in Haifa backed out, apparently fearful that they risked being punished by the Israeli government. The question of how feasible it is for Israel's 1.6 million Palestinian citizens to promote BDS was high on the conference agenda, with speakers addressing issues of legality and strategy.
SHARE Tuesday, November 15, 2016 Trump may kill Netanyahu with kindness
The creation of a Greater Israel could damage Israel by reframing the Palestinian struggle as a fight for equal rights in a single state. Comparisons with earlier struggles, against South African apartheid and Jim Crow in the US deep south, would be hard to counter.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 3, 2016 Execution of Palestinian exposes Israel's military culture
hardly surprising that most Israelis feel this soldier is being singled out. His crime was not executing a Palestinian -- that happens all the time -- but being caught on film doing so. That was nothing more than bad luck. The Israeli public did not reach this conclusion by accident. They have been schooled in a tribal idea of justice from a young age. Palestinians are not viewed as fully human or deserving of rights.
SHARE Sunday, May 5, 2019 Hamas and Fatah - Why the Two Groups are Failing
There is no tangible regional or international support for the Palestinian cause and the Trump administration barely bothers to conceal its role now as a cheerleader for Israel.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, August 1, 2014 The experts' verdict: Every Israeli missile strike is a war crime
Even if we assume total good faith on Israel's part that it is trying to hit only Hamas and other military sites, it is clear it cannot do so even with the advanced weaponry it has. The inherent imprecision of its arsenal is compounded many fold by the fact that it is using these weapons in densely built-up areas. Israel is committing war crimes by definition -- right now.
SHARE Saturday, December 5, 2015 Banned Islamic leader: Netanyahu pushing region to religious war
"In any normal country, there is a duty on the politicians to listen to their intelligence services. But Netanyahu simply ignored their advice," Salah said. "After Paris, we issued a statement condemning the attacks. But Netanyahu wants to libel Islam as a violent, extreme, inciteful religion. It is Netanyahu who is leading the region to a religious war."
SHARE Tuesday, April 26, 2016 In Israel, an ugly tide sweeps over Palestinians
The trigger-happy soldier Elor Azaria and the peace camp leader Isaac Herzog have more in common than either might wish to admit. In their different ways, both have helped to turn all Palestinians into outcasts -- and crush any hope of concessions from Israel to peace.
SHARE Tuesday, November 30, 2010 Wikileaks and the New Global Order; America's Wake-Up Call
The Wikileaks disclosure this week of confidential cables from United States embassies has been debated chiefly in terms either of the damage to Washington's reputation or of the questions it raises about national security and freedom of the press.
The headlines aside, most of the information so far revealed from the 250,000 documents is hardly earth-shattering...
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 6, 2016 Netanyahu frets over how to tackle French peace plan
Europe is increasingly fearful that an emboldened Israeli government may soon annex all or major parts of the West Bank, stymieing any hope of creating even a severely truncated Palestinian state. The Paris conference is a sign of the mounting desperation in Europe to restrain Israel.
SHARE Tuesday, September 29, 2015 Israel's army and schools work hand in hand, say teachers
Most Jewish children in Israel are subject to a military draft when they matriculate from high school at the age of 17. Boys usually serve three years, and girls two. Nearly 300 schools have been encouraged to join an IDF-education ministry program called "Path of Values," whose official goal is to "strengthen the ties and cooperation between schools and the army."
SHARE Friday, January 17, 2014 Israel: Divide-and-conquer in Nazareth?
Efforts by Israel to divide its large Palestinian minority along sectarian lines have heightened fears that the Biblical city of Nazareth may be about to return to the scenes of violent clashes. Tensions in the hometown of Jesus and a destination for hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, have risen sharply in recent months after Israel unveiled plans to encourage Christian school leavers to serve in the military.
SHARE Saturday, November 21, 2015 Israeli ban on Islamic party marks a "dangerous turning point"
Given the mood in Europe and the United States after the Paris attacks, Netanyahu can probably count on the international community not studying too closely the comparisons between the Islamic Movement, Hamas and Islamic State. The timing of Netanyahu's announcement takes advantage of the growing climate against Islamic political activism at the local, regional and international levels.
SHARE Thursday, November 19, 2020 Netanyahu Seeks to Smash the Joint List and cement permanent rule by Israel's far-right
Netanyahu, ever the experienced tactician, has more incentive than ever to play high stakes to keep himself out of jail. With the Joint List as one of the main obstacles to his political survival he will do whatever it takes to bring the alliance down.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 9, 2014 Israelis have the upper hand when it comes to vengeance
In the face of the enduring violence of Israel's occupation, and the licence it provides soldiers to humiliate and oppress, ordinary Palestinians have a stark choice: to submit or resist. Ordinary Israelis, on the other hand, do not need to seek revenge on their own account. The Israeli state, military and courts are there every day doing it for them.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 13, 2015 As unrest grows in Israel and Palestine, Netanyahu seeks scapegoats
Netanyahu's hard line comes as his poll ratings have slumped following the upswing in violence, which has been accompanied by concerted attacks from rightwing rivals, including from within his own governing coalition. A survey of Israeli Jews at the weekend found 73 percent were unhappy with his performance.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 6, 2015 Netanyahu seeks to impose a new reality at Al Aqsa
For the past month Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to rewrite the David and Goliath story by declaring war on what he terms Palestinian "terrorism by stones." There are echoes of Yitzhak Rabin's response nearly 30 years ago when, as defence minister, he ordered soldiers to "break bones" to stop a Palestinian uprising, often referred to as the "intifada of stones," against the Israeli occupation.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 14, 2021 Twitter's Ban on Trump will Deepen the US Tribal Divide
In the cost-beneft calculus censoring Trump is almost certain to further polarise an already deeply divided American society, amplify genuine grievances and conspiracy theories alike, sow greater distrust towards political elites, further fracture an already broken political system and ultimately rationalise political violence.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, April 12, 2019 After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange the US Readies for Its First Media Rendition
Most of the media refused to acknowledge that Assange was a journalist and publisher even though by failing to do so they exposed themselves to the future use of the same draconian sanctions should they or their publications ever need to be silenced.
SHARE Monday, November 2, 2015 Israel's encirclement of al-Aqsa "nearly complete"
Israeli officials have denied accusations that Islamic control at the site is being undermined. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed last month: "Israel is not the problem on the Temple Mount; it's the solution. We maintain the status quo." But there are indications of mounting concern in Europe and the United States that Israeli measures are weakening the status quo.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, October 11, 2010 Israel's Other 'Peace' Plan: Arm-Twisting Obama
A ghost haunted the meeting of the Arab League in Libya at the weekend, as its foreign ministers decided to give a little more time to the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
SHARE Wednesday, August 14, 2013 Futile Peace Talks Again -- The Jewish State's Bottom Line
There are many flies waiting to spoil the ointment of the Middle East peace talks, not least Israel's recent announcement of a rash of settlement-building. The mood 20 years on is unchanged. The Palestinian minority is still viewed as a fifth column, one a Jewish state would be better off without.
SHARE Friday, December 20, 2013 Kerry's framework agreement -- US plans "Gazafication" of the West Bank
However vigorous the EU's arm-twisting, the reality is that the Palestinian leadership is being cajoled into an agreement that would destroy any hopes of a viable Palestinian state. Abbas is said to have viewed the US plan as "worse than bad." His agreement to it would be worse than disastrous.
SHARE Friday, October 16, 2015 Videos challenge Israeli police account of shootings
Rami Nasreddin, the director of Palvision, a youth empowerment program in Jerusalem, said videos of violence by the security forces and of Jewish mobs had left many Palestinians in Jerusalem frightened to go out. "Most of the schools are closed because parents are afraid to let their children on to the streets," he said.
SHARE Tuesday, September 23, 2014 The Occupation's Dark Underbelly Exposed
Surveillance helps confine millions of Palestinians to their territorial ghettos, ensures their total dependence on Israel, and even forces some to serve as undercover go-betweens for Israel, buying land to help the settlements expand. Palestinians who resist risk jail or execution.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, January 14, 2013 How 20 tents rocked Israel -- Palestinians take the fight to their occupiers
A group of 250 ordinary Palestinians set up a tent encampment they intended to convert into a new Palestinian village called Bab al-Shams, or Gate of the Sun. In a sign of how disturbed Israel is by such acts of popular resistance, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the the occupants removed in a dawn raid--although his own courts had issued a six-day injunction against the government's "evacuation" order.
SHARE Thursday, December 16, 2010 Law to Keep Jews and Arabs Apart: Apartheid Israel-Style
The pretty two-storey home with a red-tiled roof built by Adel and Iman Kaadan looks no different from the rows of other houses in Katzir, a small hilltop community in northern Israel close to the West Bank. But, unlike the other residents of Katzir, the Kaadans moved into their dream home this month only after a 12-year battle through the Israeli courts.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 14, 2019 Annexation may provide the key to unlocking Netanyahu's legal troubles
The principle of victor-takes-all has been established in Washington.
The question, therefore, is increasingly not whether, but what kind of annexation Netanyahu plans. It will most likely be done in stages and not referred to as annexation but rather "extending Israeli sovereignty".
SHARE Monday, December 7, 2015 Youtube becomes Israel's new battleground against Palestinians
Most Palestinian videos are simply a record of their bitter experiences of occupation at the hands of soldiers and settlers. It is these experiences, not the videos, that drive Palestinians to breaking point. A "war on incitement" waged through YouTube and Facebook won't change Palestinian suffering. But it may, Mr Netanyahu presumably hopes, conceal Israel's brutality from the eyes of the world.
SHARE Wednesday, March 23, 2016 A history of silencing Israeli army whistleblowers -- from 1948 until today
In recent decades a few brave Israeli scholars have chipped away at the official facade. In the late 1990s a Haifa University student collected testimonies from former soldiers confirming that over 200 Palestinians had been massacred at Tantura, south of Haifa. After the findings were made public, he was pilloried and stripped of his degree.
SHARE Thursday, February 4, 2016 Security ties between Palestinians and Israel begin to fray
The fragile nature of the security relationship was underscored last month when Netanyahu told his cabinet that Israel was preparing for the possibility that the PA, to which the security services answer, may collapse.
SHARE Wednesday, December 14, 2016 In the West Bank, Israel's "charity" comes at a price
Israel's tourism video is designed to reverse the Oslo accords, which held out a false promise two decades ago that the Palestinians would one day enjoy statehood and self-determination. Israel's micromanagement of the territories is now such that it is even taking responsibility for attracting visitors to Palestine.
SHARE Monday, September 26, 2011 UN Bid Heralds Death of Palestine's Old Guard
Amid the enthusiastic applause in New York and the celebrations in Ramallah, it was easy to believe -- if only a for minute -- that, after decades of obstruction by Israel and the United States, a Palestinian state might finally be pulled out of the United Nations hat. Will the world's conscience be midwife to a new era ending Israel's occupation of the Palestinians?
SHARE Wednesday, November 11, 2015 A Palestinian call for "unarmed warfare"
The power of disciplined non-violent resistance, Mubarak Awad says, is that it forces on the occupier a heavy burden: to "deal with our willingness to stand up for ourselves with nothing but our bodies and hearts." Awad argues that it is precisely by demonstrating an irrepressible humanity that Palestinians can again discover hope, reclaim their dignity and win freedom.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 19, 2013 Palestinian Citizens Wearily Eye Israeli Elections
The "center-left" is starting to panic, fearing that the momentum of the shift rightwards may soon prove unstoppable. Without concerted action to shore up a credible opposition to Netanyahu, Israel is hurtling towards full-blown fascism at home and pariah status abroad.
SHARE Sunday, April 7, 2019 Netanyahu and Gantz are two sides of the same coin
Netanyahu's electioneering has rarely been subtle. But after Israel's attorney general announced during the campaign that the prime minister faced corruption indictments, Netanyahu has had every incentive to plumb new depths.
His officials have stated that his main rival, Benny Gantz, a general he once appointed as military chief of staff, is mentally unstable. One Likud video showed Gantz's head emerging from a cuckoo clock.
SHARE Friday, May 10, 2013 The Samson complex
Once the US formally abandons the peace process, the current status quo intensifies: a single state ruled over apartheid-style by Israel, with a Palestinian Authority consigned to irrelevance or oblivion. Another round of failed peacemaking will do far more damage to the Palestinians and Washington's reputation than to an Israel that never intended to pick up the phone in the first place.
SHARE Friday, April 5, 2019 The media smoothed the path to British soldiers using Corbyn as target practice
The political and media elites don't really care whether politicians are assaulted, vilified or threatened -- at least, not if it is the kind of politician who threatens their power. They aren't seriously worried about attacks on democracy, or about political violence, or about the rottenness at the core of state institutions. Their outrage is selective. It is rooted not in principle, but in self-interest.
SHARE Tuesday, October 19, 2010 Israeli Forces Test Transfer Scenario; Secret Drill Simulates Riots By Arab Citizens
Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, August 2, 2013 If They Fail, Peace Talks Will Only Deepen Crisis For Palestinians
There is also something puzzling about a peace process driven by a nine-month timetable rather than the logic of the negotiations. The most worrying indication that the US is heading down the same failed path is the announcement of Martin Indyk's return as mediator. Mr Indyk, a long-time Israel lobbyist, has been intimately tied to previous diplomatic failures.