The lives of Palestinian children held illegally by Israel.
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Where US policy should be heading in the Middle East
Jewish lobby J Street, severely upsetting the Zionist establishment, is having its first annual conference at the end of October in Washington DC. I’ll be attending and working on a number of projects there. According to the Forward, “it is still struggling to prove its pro-Israel credentials” (whatever that means.) Too critical of Israeli government…
Zionist morality runs into some troubles with the truth
Israel is shocked, just shocked, that a Turkish TV program would depict Israeli troops as killers (“but we’re the most moral army in the world”). If you behave like thugs, you’ll be treated as such. Gazan farmers are still paying the price for this brutality: Thousands of Gazan farmers may be unable to replant their…
Locking up Arabs and throwing away the key
B’Tselem and Hamoked – Center for the Defence of the Individual release a report this week that shows the real burden of the Israeli occupation: Under international law, a state may detain a resident of occupied territory without trial to prevent danger only in extremely exceptional cases. Israel, however, holds hundreds of Palestinians for months…
Israeli school-leavers offer a moral lesson
It takes bravery to act this way in militaristic Israel. Bravo: Dozens of graduating high school seniors signed a letter on Monday declaring their refusal to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. The missive, which was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, stated that…
Finding a way to solidify support for Palestine
British journalist Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, is an example of the necessary skepticism individuals should display when writing about Palestine. Occupation can’t be hidden. In a new interview, he says: This is a Palestinian grassroots initiative that cannot be bought off by Israel in the way the Fatah leadership was bought off by Oslo.…
Don’t ignore the Tamil calls for justice and peace
The situation in Sri Lanka remains desperate (the issue of war crimes was discussed in my essay in the Daily Star last week.) Australian Tamils remain determined to keep the issues in the public domain. Tamils in Canada are continuing to protest… and raising their voices for the close to 300,000 Tamils locked up against their…
Perhaps Jews can kill Arabs for the sake of peace
The New York Times on some Israeli responses to the devastating UN Gaza report: Not surprisingly, Israelis in southern Israel have little patience for the international condemnation, and there is not much soul-searching under way. “People scoffed” at the Goldstone report, said Sasson Sara, the owner of a newspaper store in Sderot, the border town…
Do not speak out of turn in the Islamic Republic
Fear, loathing and retribution in Iran: An Iranian man arrested in his country’s postelection unrest has been sentenced to death, according to reports on a Web site aligned with the reformist movement. If so, it is the first death sentence to be issued in cases involving the hundreds charged in the vast protests that followed…
What we are doing to the people of Gaza
Mohammed Omer writes in the New Statesman: As the 456,000 schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip start their academic year, they face chronic shortages of everything from paper, textbooks and ink cartridges to school uniforms, school bags and computers, the result of the Israeli blockade. At the same time, severely overcrowded classrooms are having to accommodate…