We now have confirmation from the Israeli daily Haaretz of what we should have suspected: that the idea for the so-called Egyptian “ceasefire proposal” was actually hatched in Washington, the messenger boy was arch-war criminal Tony Blair, and the terms were drafted by Israel. The intention was either to corner Hamas into surrendering – and thereby [...]

Three Israeli suspects who have confessed to the gruesome killing of 16-year-old Mohammed Abu Khdeir, who was abducted in East Jerusalem and later burnt to death, are going to plead “temporary insanity”, according to Haaretz. Mohammed’s father guessed as much last week, when asked whether he trusted Israel’s judicial system: “I think they will say that [...]

Lots of people have been wondering over on my Facebook page how it is that Israelis are so incapable of understanding what bombing one of the most crowded places on earth entails: lots of Palestinian civilian casualties. Well, this Israeli TV interview with Palestinian Knesset member Haneen Zoabi should help. The programme is Meet the Press and [...]

Here in one little story, you have the reason why Israel keeps getting away with it. The band Coldplay put a link on Facebook to a video of the song “Freedom for Palestine”. Thousands of “fans” – more likely the hasbara crew – flood their site with angry comments. Fox News, of course, lambasts them. [...]

Notice the security state’s perfect, circular logic, as the US announces that it is introducing more stringent checks at the airport on electronic devices such as phones. Now if you have a flat battery and can’t open a device, you may not be allowed to take it on board with you. This is what Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of [...]

The families of the three Israeli teens killed by their abductors have been the focus of a huge outpouring of national sympathy. But what about the family of 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir, who was burnt alive by his abductors? How have they been treated by Israel since the devastating news of Muhammad’s murder in Jerusalem [...]

I’m generally a big fan of Noam Chomsky’s work, but I’ve often found myself disagreeing with some aspects of his analysis of the Israel-Palestine conflict. So I’m not especially impressed by his comments as reported here in the Guardian on BDS and the apartheid analogy. But that aside, what interests me more about his latest article, published in the Nation magazine, is [...]

If we want to understand the brave new world we are entering with social media, then this story is an important read. Facebook decided to manipulate the posted content of hundreds of thousands of its users without telling them that they were part of an experiment. What Facebook did was to control what its users [...]

Guy Rolnik is a very strange mainstream journalist. There is no equivalent I can think of in the anglophone media – certainly no one comparable at the Guardian or Independent, let alone the New York Times. Rolnik began as a correspondent for the Israeli army, and then joined Israel’s liberal Haaretz newspaper, rapidly rising through the ranks to [...]

This week Mahmoud Abbas’ wife, Amina, secretly had leg surgery in Israel, after it was judged she needed an operation beyond the capability of hospitals in the occupied territories, given the restrictions imposed by … Israel. We all understand that the Palestinian president wakes up each morning with a US diplomatic knife hovering close to [...]

I have had further thoughts about my brief Facebook comments attacking the International Committee of the Red Cross. I accused the organisation of hypocrisy for calling for the immediate release of the three abducted Israeli teenagers while refusing to call for a similar release of the nearly 200 Palestinian children effectively taken hostage by a member state of the UN (Israel) while in [...]

I can’t remember watching a documentary that, using a single case study, so effectively strips away the political theatre we see in the mainstream media to reveal the horrifying exploits of the gangsters who run our energy corporations and political systems. In Egypt’s Lost Power, Al-Jazeera have produced an absorbing 45-min film that, on one level, shows how a couple of corrupt businessmen – one Egyptian, [...]

In their latest alert, Media Lens examine a familiar argument about journalistic “professionalism”, this time made by the popular British philosopher Alain de Botton in his new book The News: A User’s Manual – and one that appears to have made an impact on Russell Brand, for example. De Botton argues that the reason the news is [...]

Here is a simple infographic (possibly behind the Haaretz paywall) setting out how Israel has engineered a series of hurdles to prevent intermarriage, especially between Jews and non-Jews. There are no civil institutions in Israel dealing with marriage (and many other personal status issues), meaning that only hardline Orthodox rabbis get to determine who marries a [...]

This article on business efforts to create a craze for smartwatches profoundly depressed me. We are burning up the planet to feed our incessant craving for new gadgets. And now a bunch of corporations – worried that almost all of us have a smartphone and that the market is stagnating – is trying to encourage us [...]

There is something positively Orwellian about an Orwell Prize that chiefly honours a writer not for his political truth-telling, or originality, or even risk-taking, but for his “lucidity and elegance”. After all, Leni Riefenstahl is widely credited with making visually stunning movies, but most of us would shrink from the idea of an Orwell Prize in 1935 that celebrated a leading Nazi propagandist. [...]