The Guardian’s legal affairs correspondent reports on the reverberations of the UN Gaza report: International criminal justice would be “immensely damaged” by a failure to implement any of the recommendations of the UN report, experts said, as Israel and armed groups in Gaza announced their refusal to implement independent investigations. The report, which was described…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
The hidden abuse in Israeli prisons
Al-Jazeera reports: A group of female former Palestinian prisoners detained in Israeli jails have accused prison guards of carrying out “humiliating” internal body searches in violation of Israel’s prison code. In an exclusive report, former detainee Sabreen Abu Amara told Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh that she spent six years… living in… fear of… intrusive and degrading… treatment… at the hands…
What the Gaza war has done to Israel’s image
The fallout from the UN report on Gaza continues. Two pieces have particularly caught my eye. Here’s Norman Finkelstein on Democracy Now!: Well, the report is the last in a large number of reports that have been issued on the Gaza massacre. There were two significant reports issued by Amnesty International, five reports issued by…
Zionist impunity may be coming to an end
What was once on the fringes is now gaining serious momentum: British union leaders were locked in talks last night over whether to recommend to their delegates a boycott of all consumer goods produced in Israel. Members of the TUC have condemned Israel’s military strikes on Gaza in January, which left 1,450 Palestinians dead and…
The Tamil struggle in the face of Israeli-backed attack
No wonder Israel and the Palestinian Authority are backing Sri Lanka. This British eyewitness, who worked in the hospitals during the recent war helping the countless victims of government attack, talks about hell on earth. Israel and Sri Lanka share one key tactic: keep any independent media out of the conflict zone and humiliate and…
Why J Street may just be having the right effect (sometimes)
It’s clear that J Street is seriously upsetting the Zionist establishment. Jewish Diaspora leaders who publicly criticise Israeli government policy are both necessary and morally important. Last night during a talk at Sydney University I challenged a senior Jewish lecturer who expressed pain about the West Bank settlements to actually try and do something about…
Abuses in the name of Zionist security
Yet more evidence that the recent Gaza war was a travesty: A United Nations fact-finding mission investigating the three-week war in Gaza issued a lengthy, scathing report on Tuesday that concluded that both the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity. The four-member mission, led…
Hold Israel to fair standards or pay the price
The justified outrage over the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) spotlighting Tel Aviv (and ignoring Israel’s occupation and abuses in the West Bank and Gaza) is rightly causing waves. Naomi Klein explains that critics who accuse us of demonising Israel are deliberately missing the point: Imagine that this year the Toronto International Film Festival had…
Tamils are the region’s Palestinians, locked up and ignored
Sri Lanka is now a post-conflict society, one still divided along racial and ethnic lines. But what about the Tamils now forced to live in concentration camps? The Observer reported yesterday: The camp, say former inhabitants, is packed, with two or three families sharing a tent or tin shack. There are complaints of stinking, overflowing…
How the Elders captured a glimpse of Israeli apartheid
Following the recent visit to Israel/Palestine by The Elders, an Israeli lawyer, Emily, Schaefer, wrote this detailed report on her experiences with the group to a select list… (but she has given permission for publication). She helped organise The Elders visit to a Palestinian village: Dear friends, family and comrades, Yesterday might just have been…