Will Goldstone’s retraction provoke another Cast Lead?

1 May 2011

Richard Goldstone, the international jurist whose now-notorious report on Gaza tarred the Israeli army with war crimes, backtracked unexpectedly and very publicly on 2 April in the pages of the Washington Post. For 18 months Goldstone had suffered a campaign of character assassination by Israel and its supporters as they sought to discredit his United Nations investigation into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09.

Jerusalem bookseller a ‘foreigner’ in homeland

13 April 2011

Despite high-profile connections, Munther Fahmi’s days in the city of his birth may be numbered. Israeli officials have told him that, after 16 years running his bookshop in the grounds of East Jerusalem’s 19th-century hotel the American Colony, he is no longer welcome in Israel. Two months ago he exhausted his legal options when Israel’s high court refused to overturn the decision to deport him.

Goldstone’s rethink: The cleansing of Israel’s war crimes

5 April 2011

Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article in last Friday’s Washington Post by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his United Nations-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008. In what appeared to be a partial retraction of some of his findings against Israel, Goldstone argued that he would have written the report differently had Israel cooperated at the time of his inquiry.

Israel and Hamas will risk a war in Gaza to deny Abbas’s plan

27 March 2011

After a lengthy lull, violent confrontation has returned to the centre stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Over the past week, the Israeli army and Palestinian militants have appeared keen to flex their muscles with regular exchanges of fire. Israel’s tanks and fighter planes have attacked the Gaza Strip, killing civilians and fighters, while Palestinian militants have launched mortars and rockets, some reaching as far as the Israeli cities of Ashdod and Beersheva.

Disappeared on a Ukraine train: Mossad snatches Gaza’s power plant boss

23 March 2011

Israel has admitted that it was behind the abduction of a Gazan engineer who went missing more than a month ago while travelling on a train in the Ukraine. The whereabouts of Dirar Abu Sisi, the operations manager of Gaza’s only power plant, have been the subject of intense speculation since he disappeared on February 18 as he travelled on a train to the Ukrainian capital, Kiev.

Quartet gives up on peace talks

18 March 2011

There were growing indications last week that the international community has abandoned hopes of reviving Middle East peace talks, effectively leaving Israel and the Palestinians to battle out the next few months with their own unilateral strategies. The daily Haaretz newspaper reported on Thursday that the Quartet, the international group overseeing the peace process, had reached its pessimistic conclusion after meetings with local officials in Tel Aviv and Ramallah earlier this month.

Hawkish new Netanyahu adviser signals a harder Israel line

15 March 2011

Despite mounting speculation that Mr Netanyahu is preparing to unveil a peace initiative in the coming weeks, Haaretz newspaper revealed last week that he has been conducting negotiations with the National Union to bring three of its four MPs into his coalition. The party is considered the most right-wing in the 120-member Knesset. Mr Netanyahu also announced the appointment of a hawkish former general as the new head of the National Security Council.

Global unpopularity wearing down Israeli government

10 March 2011

Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers conceded last week that the Israeli prime minister is more downcast than they have ever seen him. The reason for his gloominess is to be found in Israel’s diplomatic and strategic standing, which some analysts suggest is at its lowest ebb in living memory. A global survey for Britain’s BBC published on Monday will have only reinforced that assessment: Israel was rated among the least popular countries, with just 21 percent seeing it in a positive light.

Who are Palestinians to fight first: Israel or the PA?

3 March 2011

More than a thousand Palestinians who staged a day of rage in the West Bank city of Hebron last week were left with few illusions about how their struggle for liberation differs from that of Tunisians, Egyptians and Libyans. The protesters were confronted, on one side, by massed ranks of Israeli paramilitary police, while Palestinian security forces assisted by blocking the entry of demonstrators from the other side. Squeezed into their own little Tahrir Square, the protesters suffered tear gas and baton attacks from the Israeli police while the Palestinian forces mutely stood by.

An empire of lies: Why our media betray us

28 February 2011

Last week the Guardian, Britain’s main liberal newspaper, ran an exclusive report on the belated confessions of an Iraqi exile, Rafeed al-Janabi, codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA. Eight years ago, Janabi played a key behind-the-scenes role — if an inadvertent one — in making possible the US invasion of Iraq. His testimony bolstered claims by the Bush administration that Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein, had developed an advanced programme producing weapons of mass destruction.

Israeli army will cash in on Egyptian revolution

22 February 2011

Israel has been indulging in a sustained bout of fear-mongering since the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was toppled earlier this month. The ostensible aim has been to warn the international community that the lengthy “cold peace” between the two countries is on the verge of collapse. In reality, the peace treaty signed three decades ago is in no danger for the forseeable future. The Egyptian and Israeli armies have too much of a vested interest in its continuation, whatever political reforms occur in Egypt.

‘Economic peace’ betrays the hand of a grasping Israeli right

1 February 2011

The peace process between Israel and the Palestinians was widely pronounced dead last week as hundreds of official documents leaked to Al Jazeera television showed Palestinian negotiators had agreed to make major concessions on Jerusalem, refugees and borders. But there were few indications that Israel’s leaders are in mourning. Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s prime minister, has been happily reverting to his default position on solving the conflict: “economic peace”.

Palestinian Authority’s back to wall after Al Jazeera revelations

31 January 2011

Is the Palestinian Authority finished and, with it, 18 years of the Middle East peace process? That is the question increasingly being asked by Palestinians in the wake of a week of damaging revelations that Palestinian negotiators secretly made major concessions to Israel in talks on Jerusalem, refugees and borders. The question of the PA’s survival, and the future direction of Palestinian politics, has gained added urgency as the wider Middle East is rocked by unrest, from Tunisia to Yemen.

Israeli leaders at loggerheads over Iran attack

27 January 2011

Rivals camps within Israel’s political and security echelons appear to be at loggerheads over whether Israel should keep open an option to launch a military attack on Iran. The feud has been brought to the fore by comments from Meir Dagan, the outgoing director of the Mossad spy agency, that Iran is not in a position to develop a nuclear bomb before 2015 at the earliest. His assessment conflicts with previous Israeli estimates, including one presented in 2009 by Ehud Barak, the defence minister, that Tehran might have a nuclear weapon as soon as this year.

Town angry at Israel’s secret plan for land swaps

26 January 2011

A towering concrete wall looms over the main street of what was once a flourishing market in the northern Israeli town of Baqa al-Gharbiya, or Western Baqa. The 8-metre high barrier separates them from the West Bank and their former twin, Eastern Baqa. Western Baqa’s 22,000 Arab residents say they are opposed to living in the shadow of a wall that separates brothers from sisters and children from their parents. But they were equally unhappy to learn this week that, as part of peace negotiations with the Palestinians three years ago, Israel secretly proposed redrawing the borders to strip them and potentially tens of thousands of other Israeli Arabs of their citizenship.

Palestine Papers confirm Israeli rejectionism

25 January 2011

For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, the mantra of Israeli politics has been the same: “There is no Palestinian partner for peace.” This week, the first of hundreds of leaked confidential Palestinian documents, the so-called Palestine Papers, confirmed the suspicions of a growing number of observers that the rejectionists in the peace process are to be found on the Israeli, not Palestinian, side.

Pilgrims to site where Jesus was baptised risk landmines

20 January 2011

Thousands of pilgrims flocked this week to Israel’s latest tourist attraction, touted as the place where Jesus was baptised in the River Jordan. Visitors to Qasr al Yahud, in the Jordan Valley, received an unusual welcome, however. They had to pass through a fenced-off corridor warning that landmines surrounded them on all sides. At the river’s edge, they were watched over by armed Israeli soldiers in watchtowers with orders to stop anyone trying to cross the short stretch of water that marks the border with Jordan.

The death of the Israeli left

18 January 2011

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, appears to have driven the final nail in the coffin of the Zionist left with his decision to split from the Labor party and create a new “centrist, Zionist” faction in the Israeli parliament. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pressing reasons for wanting Barak to stay in the most rightwing government in Israel’s history. He has provided useful diplomatic cover as Netanyahu has stymied progress in a US-sponsored peace process.