24 October 2013 · 3:57 pm

Recognising the right of return is not optional

My latest column, on the centrality of the Right of Return to the Palestinian struggle:

For all the tragedies and hardships faced by the Palestinian people today there is one constant root, exacerbating or causing all the others in turn: Israel’s block on the refugees’ right to return to their homeland. In every war, the office of the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has as its primary goal “to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily”. But the UNHCR does not have primary responsibility for Palestinian refugees: there is a whole separate UN agency for them, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

23 October 2013 · 3:55 pm

Time to start talking about Zionist anti-Semitism

On why Zionist anti-Semitism is a thing:

To return to Brummer’s comments, there is a more sinister element to what he told the Today programme – something that went almost entirely unnoticed by commentators. As proof the Mail could not possibly be anti-Semitic he said it was “one of the most pro-Israel papers on Fleet Street.” This statement is itself anti-Semitic, since it implies all Jews are responsible for the actions of Israel. If that was not bad enough, he made this vile equation more explicit, claiming that the other papers’ “demonis[ing]” of Israel ipso-facto “demonise[s] the broader Jewish community”. There you have it: according to Brummer “Israel” is equivalent to “the broader Jewish community”. This is a disgusting anti-Semitic statement, but it is a common argument for Zionists to make.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , , ,

22 October 2013 · 3:53 pm

Is Zionism more “Christian” than “Jewish”?

On the influence of Christian Zionism:

Pew found that 82 percent of white evangelicals “believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people” compared to less than half of many of Jewish Americans who believe the same. In fact, the proportion of Jews who believe as much (40 percent) is actually lower than the general public in America.

With Israel doing everything it can to market and present itself as “the Jewish state,” this may all come as a surprise. But take a step back and consider some other salient facts.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

21 October 2013 · 3:53 pm

Edward Said’s legacy lives inside us

MEMO column:

Said was a moral inspiration, not least because of his refusal to be bowed or intimidated by systems of power. These systems included Arab regimes, as well as imperial America and colonial Israel.

Time and again as one reads through Said’s collected newspaper columns (which you can do in books such as “Peace and its Discontents”, “The End of the Peace Process” and his final collection “From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap”) a constant theme is denunciation of the brutal and corrupt dictatorships that rule in the Arab world. He ridiculed and denounced subservient Arab intellectuals and journalists, the court stenographers of oil sheikhs and dictators.

In that respect, Said pre-empted 2011′s popular Arab uprisings by decades (although I am personally convinced that he would, like me, have disliked the Western imposed label “Arab spring”).

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

20 September 2013 · 11:25 am

Israel and Saudi Arabia: the permanent counter-revolution

The “moderate” Saudi regime’s alliance with Israel is now in the open:

The two regimes are both military dictatorships in very different ways. The two regimes are also theocracies, each in their own way. The extreme Wahhabist religious vision of the sprawling Saudi royal family which dominates the country may lead you to think it would hate the so-called “Jewish state”. Not so.

Read all about it.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

19 September 2013 · 2:48 pm

Are Israeli spooks reading your emails?

On the latest Greenwald-Snowden revelations:

This means Israel is spying on America – its biggest ally — more than most other states in the world. If this was a Facebook friendship, it would be listed as “It’s complicated”.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , , ,

6 September 2013 · 3:22 pm

I talk Syria on Pacifica radio’s Flashpoints

Last week I discussed the impending Western bombing campaign against Syria with Kevin Pina, the host of Pacifica radio’s Flashpoints show. You can listen here, and here.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Blog

Tagged as ,

· 3:17 pm

Inventing a genocide as pretext to bomb Syria

This week’s column over at MEMO. An extract:

Claiming that all the killing in this war is being done by Assad alone, is a way to increase the propaganda beat of the war-drums against Syria. If in fact the vast majority of the 100,000 had been killed by the regime, it would imply a one-way massacre, not the reality of this dirty civil war. Mousab Azzawi, the pro-NATO leader of the SOHR splinter group even claimed to Western media that there is a “genocide” going on in Syria. Freedland seems to be implying the same.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

· 3:15 pm

Western powers “doing nothing” in Syria? If only

Here we are again. A decade on from the American-British war of aggression against Iraq, the cruise-missile liberals are demanding that “something must be done” about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Something” inevitably amounts to bombing.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

· 3:13 pm

Israel’s military dictatorship jails peaceful Palestinian activists

Israel’s system of racist political imprisonment does not care about the methods Palestinians use to resist Israel, so much as the fact of resistance to Israel. Anyone who lifts a fist of protest or a pen of dissent are as guilty in the eyes of Israel’s kangaroo military courts system as one who lifts the freedom fighter’s rifle.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

21 August 2013 · 11:00 am

Don’t be fooled by Israel’s “negotiations”

The farce that is the “peace process”:

Israel’s own housing minister, Uri Ariel is himself a settler who lives the West Bank colony of Kfar Adumim, between Jerusalem and Jericho.
Indeed, the main Israeli negotiator is “justice” minister Tzipi Livni. She has in the past has had to skip the UK to avoid arrest on suspicion on war crimes. In 2011 the Palestine Papers revealed that she once said: “I am a lawyer … But I am against law — international law in particular. Law in general.” In her own words: Israel’s justice minister is “against law.”

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,

20 August 2013 · 5:00 pm

Israel’s new plan of ethnic cleansing in the desert

I write on Prawer:

The latest incarnation of this on-going Nakba is Israel’s Prawer plan. Passed by its parliament in June as the Prawer-Begin law, this new wave of ethnic cleansing aims to empty the southern Naqab desert (known as the Negev in Hebrew) of tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins.

These Palestinians are nominally citizens of Israel, but are not treated as equals to Jewish Israelis. Varying estimates state that between 30,000 and 70,000 Bedouin citizens will be removed if Prawer is fully implemented. In their places will come new Jewish developments.

Read the whole column over at MEMO.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Published articles

Tagged as , ,