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. [...]

You can understand a lot about journalists and journalism by examining our professional nervous tics. We all have them – and they tell you a lot about the hidden assumptions that drive the news agenda. Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s new Jerusalem bureau chief, and a veteran reporter, is a good liberal journalist with both a [...]

A nice post from Interventions Watch, assessing the backwards and forwards on Seymour Hersh’s latest investigation suggesting that Turkey was behind the sarin gas attack on Ghouta last August. I would go a little further. What I find irritating is seeing so many people who should know better invest their energies in abusing Hersh and [...]

Back in February the Guardian quietly announced a deal with the global consumer goods corporation Unilever. Here is the beginning of the Guardian’s press release: Guardian News and Media today officially launches Guardian Labs – its branded content and innovation agency – which offers brands bold and compelling new ways to tell their stories and [...]

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has a second fascinating essay that rewrites the official record of the sarin gas attack on Ghouta, near Damascus, in August last year. As usual, Hersh uses his sources in the US security establishment to throw light on what took place. The bottom line: Turkey was almost certainly the party responsible [...]

One can write endlessly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as I do, and never feel one has conveyed a proper sense of a peculiar pathology that has taken hold of many in Israeli society and makes them so impervious to any kind of self-reflection and self-criticism. We are all susceptible to this kind of unreason, of [...]

Dear Shaun, I wanted to bring my readers’ attention to your response to my critique of your recent article in the Guardian headlined “Ukraine and Crimea: what is Putin thinking?”. Given that you commented late, and only on Facebook, most of those who read the critique probably never saw your reply. I am therefore posting [...]

It’s not often I post good news about Israel, but this is one of those rare occasions. According to a report by Amira Hass, Israel has ended its blanket policy of racial profiling at Ben Gurion airport. This means most Palestinian citizens, and other non-Jews like me, will no longer be routinely subjected to degrading [...]

What does Benjamin Netanyahu hope comes next, after his stalling formally ends the peace process? My best guess is he thinks that, if he can hold on a couple more years, he will have in office the Republican candidate of his choice. Am I suggesting that Netanyahu can decide who is US president? No, but [...]

I spend a lot of time on this blog criticising the propaganda role of liberal media, including my former newspaper the Guardian. Media critics like Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman have called it “brainwashing under freedom”. Because of a long filtering process before they reach positions of influence, journalists working for the corporate media in [...]

Tony Benn, probably the last real socialist to serve in a British government, died today aged 88. I’m posting a short video of him below in action (long after his retirement from politics) in early 2009. It sums up what was so great about him. Here he is using a three-minute interview on BBC news [...]

Apologies for the prolonged silence. I’m back in Nazareth after my speaking engagements in Canada. Having spent the last few days sorting out my own computer malware problems, there was a certain irony to the fact that the first article I accessed on my return was this report from Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher, based [...]

It’s great to see the recent burst of creativity among Palestinians in telling their story where it is needed most: in the United States. Here’s a video that promotes BDS while pummelling all that hypocrisy we keep hearing about “singling out” Israel, not just from Israeli leaders but from US campus administrators. The video is [...]

A decade ago, I wrote a commentary for the International Herald Tribune (now the International New York Times) arguing that Israel’s wall that was then just starting to be built in the West Bank was really a land grab. Difficult to believe now, but in those days that was a controversial opinion. The paper then [...]