The rightwing Institute for Zionist Strategies has been at the forefront of recent campaigns to undermine the civics curriculum in Israeli schools and to “expose” leftwing academics at Israeli universities. Now the chairman of the IZS, Yoaz Hendel, until recently one of Netanyahu’s senior advisers, has come up with a new wheeze: he has established [...]
All that talk about the Israeli elections proving Israelis were moving to the centre should be stilled by the new coalition agreement. So-called centrist Lapid has, as expected, opted out of taking a role in the occupation-oversight ministries in favour of domestic issues. As finance minister, he’s going to have his hands full trying to [...]
Talking of ethnic cleansing and 1948, Israeli historian-journalist Tom Segev has a fascinating farewell column in Haaretz, in which he examines the minutes of a cabinet meeting in September 1948, at the end of the war’s second truce . PM David Ben-Gurion is trying to persuade the other ministers to start a provocation – namely, [...]
Remember the row a few years back about the Swedish newspaper that printed the “blood libel” about body parts from Palestinian corpses being harvested by Israel. That controversy managed to overlook entirely the fact that Israel’s long-time chief pathologist, Yehuda Hiss, the man who carried out all post-mortems in Israel for two decades, had a [...]
Anyone interested in the extent to which the ideology of Zionism can make you blind to the obvious, and corrupts Israeli academic research, needs to read this article on the latest National Resilience survey. The “resilience” in question refers to how bullish Israelis are about the country’s ability to terrorise neighbouring states into submission – [...]
This article is astounding in two ways. First it reveals the shocking fact that 40% of Palestinians (I assume this is a reference to those in the occupied territories) are clinically depressed, a rate unmatched anywhere else in the world. Forbes: “It’s more than triple that of the U.S., ten times higher than in the [...]
Many thanks to John Hilley for keeping us up to date with the David Ward saga. Ward is the British MP accused by the UK Jewish establishment of anti-semitism for making the patently obvious point that most Israelis appear to have ignored the universal lesson of the Holocaust and instead gone from being members of [...]
It’s often difficult to get people excited about mundane issues like water rights. But actually it’s precisely through the denial of access to water (and other resources) that Israel and other colonial settler states force native peoples off their land. It’s such policies that lie at the heart of ethnic cleansing programmes. So this piece [...]
This picture really does speak 1,000 words. Here is an Israeli Border police officer shaking hands with a Jewish settler who has masked his face with a white sheet. The settlers are heading down to terrorise a group of Palestinian shepherds off their land. Does the image look familiar? That’s right: these guys look like [...]
I’ve been following the case of David Ward, the British MP accused of anti-semitism, with some interest. As in most of these cases, it’s clear he is not actually anti-semitic (or more importantly, racist) but, of course, that’s not the purpose of the “controversy” the UK Zionist lobbies have generated in the media. As we [...]
Israel talks endlessly about illegal building by Palestinians in East Jerusalem, including the Old City. The reason is, as elsewhere, that the Old City has an outdated master plan that prevents building new homes by Palestinians. (Israeli Jews in the so-called Jewish Quarter have a separate plan.) For eight years Jerusalem municipality has been considering [...]
The BBC’s latest idea for a daring comedy drama, featuring “bad language, sexual innuendo, sexism and childish banter” among a squad of British bomb disposal experts operating in … Afghanistan! Who needs Hollywood to launder one’s war crimes, when we have the dear old BBC. Here are some of the comedy gold moments we can [...]
Those who still linger under the misapprehension that the Israeli army is the most moral in the world should watch this short video of the army’s late-night entrance into Nurif, a small village near Nablus, deep in the West Bank. The soldiers behave more like football hooligan militia. They fire flares, wail their noisy sirens, [...]
The other day Shimon Gapso, the far-right mayor of Upper Nazareth, outraged a family of US Jewish philanthropists by refusing to set up a school teaching in Arabic for the fifth of the students in his care who belong to the Palestinian minority. The Green family have threatened to withdraw the funding they provide to [...]
Lobbies, like cockroaches, are happiest operating in the dark. Here are a couple of pieces suggesting that things may finally be moving in the right direction – even if only a little – in the US. One is a major new TV series starring Kevin Spacey in which a plotline brings out into the open [...]
A new study by Yesh Din shows a familiar pattern. Some 240 complaints of crimes by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians were filed in 2012; Israel launched 78 investigations but instituted no indictments at all. In other words, absolute impunity for the soldiers. Two things are worth noting. In the Haaretz report, the Israeli army tries [...]
Our views of the Israel-Palestine conflict may not coincide much but I can’t help enjoying the refreshingly no-nonsense opinions of Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief of Haaretz. He makes a very intriguing analysis of the priorities of all Israeli governments, including Netanyahu’s. In short, he argues that Israeli leaders have understood the need to glue Israeli [...]
