One more tragic example of Gaza’s isolation thanks to Israeli bombardment and a Western-supposed siege: UN agencies and the health ministry in Gaza are working to strengthen communicable disease surveillance systems in Gaza, in light of the fact that leaking sewage may be contaminating drinking water.
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Palestine matters, but not alone
Why, asks Geoffrey Alderman in the Guardian, isn’t the carnage in Sri Lanka receiving blanket coverage in the UK and internationally? I’ll tell you why. Because Sri Lanka is not Israel. Because the Tamils are not Arabs. And because here, in the UK, the Tamil vote is negligible whereas the Muslim vote is not. Yes,…
A witness to terrorism
Rachel Johnson, an Australian human rights activist with the International Solidarity Movement, was in Gaza during the recent war. I heard her speak recently in Sydney and she articulated the indiscriminate shooting, shelling and killing by the IDF in the occupied zone. She explains more: “The huge civilian death toll is largely a result of…
Western supported colonialism on show
Another day and another announcement that Israel continues to flout international norms, law and decency: Israel has taken a step towards expanding the largest settlement in the West Bank, a move Palestinians warn will leave their future state unviable and further isolate its future capital, East Jerusalem The Israeli Peace Now group, which monitors settlement…
When the military is king
Civil disobedience is central to any democratic society, though it’s not unusual for authorities to crack down hard on non-violent protests for daring to challenge the rule of the state. For example: Six suspects, one of them a 70-year old woman, were detained for questioning and released Sunday on suspicion that they preached in favor…
Taking care of your own problems
One of Israel’s leading historians, Benny Morris – a fine scholar who now represents the bigoted underbelly of Israeli society – knows how to solve the Middle East conflict: Morris concludes that a majority of Jews during the Mandate and Israelis in the years since have come to accept the notion of two states for…
Taking on Goliath
The campaign against corporations that benefit from the Israeli occupation is only growing (including favoured Palestinians close to colluding President Mahmoud Abbas). The latest from suburban Melbourne: A small band of residents in the West urged commuters at the Footscray train station last Thursday to “dump Connex” as the State Government reviews shortlisted contenders for…
Get ready for a repeat of history soon
This story in today’s Sunday Independent caught my eye: David Cameron accepted an all-expenses paid trip to apartheid South Africa while Nelson Mandela was still in prison, an updated biography of the Tory leader reveals today. The trip by Mr Cameron in 1989, when he was a rising star of the Conservative Research Department, was…
Is Zionism really racism?
During last week’s Durban II conference, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave a speech that some in the West regarded as outrageous and others as merely representing public opinion in much of the world (personally speaking, I think it harmed the Palestinian cause no end). This clip from the BBC is startling for its honest questioning…
Jews who don’t want to be defined through the Holocaust
A new film, Defamation, according to Mondoweiss, “is about the consecration of anti-Semitism as the central mode of Jewish identity and the raison-d’etre of Jewish nationalism–it sustains Israel.” Just the kind of reason why so many Jews are able to defend the most horrific Israeli policies because anything, literally anything, can be justified as self-defense.…