There are many reasons to be greatly disturbed about the way the US has become a Stasi-style surveillance state. This Glenn Greenwald article highlights a new depth plumbed by the Obama Administration. As with the AP case last week, US officials, it is revealed, secretly read the emails of a journalist, Fox News’ James Rosen. [...]

Is there any US institution with a backbone when it comes to criticising Israel, even when the criticism is only implicit? Today the Newseum, a museum to the news industry based in Washington DC, caved in to pressure from the Israel lobby and removed two Palestinian cameramen from its yearly roll call of journalists killed [...]

I’m not quite sure what the subliminal message of this Guardian report is: I suspect it is to imply that Stephen Hawking was bullied into joining the boycott of Israel. But that aside, it is pretty big news – assuming it’s true – that Noam Chomsky was one of those who signed a letter to [...]

Every few years, an Israeli government or state agency makes a grand promise that it is going to fix the historic injustices perpetrated against the country’s Palestinian citizens. No one in the Palestinian minority believes it, of course, but such declarations make awfully good hasbara. Israel’s supporters trot out these promises as proof that things [...]

Simon Tisdall was once my boss at the Guardian. Either I’ve changed a lot since I left the paper more than a decade ago (undoubtedly true!), or he’s subsequently become nothing more than a mouthpiece for the US-Israeli security establishments (and there’s plenty of evidence for that!). This “analysis” of US options on Syria is [...]

A few days ago I reported on the BBC’s apparent caving in to Zionist pressure to ditch at the last moment a documentary called Jerusalem: An Archeological Mystery Story. I speculated that this was an act of political censorship in line with other recent craven positions on Israel and the Palestinians adopted by BBC executives. [...]

It’s difficult to overestimate the weak-kneed position of BBC senior editors in relation to Israel nowadays. But even by the corporation’s craven standards, this one takes the biscuit. Last night BBC4 (the BBC’s slightly more highbrow channel) was due to show a documentary on archeology in Jerusalem. It’s a fascinating topic, given Jerusalem’s rich history, [...]

One matter I’ve been trying to understand for a while is the power of Avigdor Lieberman always to get his way. Corruption is endemic to Israel and its politics, of course, even more so than it is in our ever-more corrupt western societies. But still this matter seems to go beyond the fact that Lieberman [...]

The Boston bombing was good news for Israel, or so says Ron Dermer, one of Netanyahu’s closest aides and the man tipped to be the next Israeli ambassador to Washington. Dermer: “If you can look, historically, there was a big change after 9/11, and I am sure that after the tragic bombing in Boston, people [...]

Israel’s social justice movement (now led by millionaire TV presenter Yair Lapid, it seems!) was doomed to irrelevance the moment it chose to prefer inclusion of the settlers’ interests over those of the country’s Palestinian citizens. Now we have the evidence. According to a study by the Israeli Institute for Economic Planning, between 1996 and [...]

Excellent piece in the Electronic Intifada exposing the BBC’s footdragging and sophistry to avoid correcting a false claim made by one of its presenters, Martha Kearney, during a Radio 4 interview with Israeli spokesman Mark Regev last August as an Israeli court issued its ruling into the killing of Rachel Corrie by the Israeli army. [...]

Here is an article in Haaretz about the Nazis and the green movement quite astonishing in its obtuseness. It tries to tar modern concerns about impending ecological catastrophe with the Nazi obsession with caring for the German homeland. An Israeli historian Boaz Neumann provides a veneer of academic credibility to this nonsense. Far more interesting [...]

I find something intriguing about these surveys showing Israelis among the happiest people in the developed world. The latest, from the OECD, ranks Israel in 8th place out of 36 countries on this scale. Strangely the same surveys, including this latest one, also show Israelis have many reasons for high levels of dissatisfaction: Israel is [...]

This would be an extraordinarily strange story if it weren’t by now so familiar: another made-up anti-semitic attack in France. On this occasion it is an Israeli film director, Yariv Horowitz, who inflated a trivial incident of a French minor throwing a punch at him into a “lynching” by a group of Arabs, who beat [...]

The Israeli left gets very worked up about an issue that to most of us seems little more than a distraction: which settlements are built legally? The government colludes in this debate, distinguishing between legal settlements and illegal outposts, because it helps create an Israeli consensus about the large settlements, which are well established. This [...]

The problem with even the best coverage of Israel-Palestine is that it has to overlook – or feign ignorance of – realpolitik. Here we have Gideon Levy in fine form castigating Obama for an obsequious interview he gave on Israel’s Channel 2 TV on the eve of his visit to the region. Levy: When Obama [...]