Friends on the Earth Middle East release a statement today about an issue that receives far too little coverage in the media and on this site. Environmental concerns in the region and Israel’s withholding of essential services to Palestinians: EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) calls on the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
We will no longer accept your normal behaviour
Something is stirring at the New York Times. Columnist Roger Cohen has spent the last months writing piece after piece about Iran, Israeli extremism and war. Yesterday he was back with another round, titled, ‘Israel, Iran and Fear‘: A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu…
Denying reality is what they’re good at
The following letters appear in this week’s Australian Jewish News: Jeff Halper in The Sydney Morning Herald (10/04) wrote, “Diaspora Jews need to revalidate Diaspora Jewish culture (that Zionism dismissed as superficial and ephemeral) and find genuine, compelling reasons why their children should remain Jewish. Blindly supporting Israel’s extreme right-wing and militaristic policies is not…
Finding the full view of a war
Imagine if this technology was used during Israel’s bombardment of Gaza?
When the mainstream just isn’t enough
The Palestine-Israel Journal is an important quarterly magazine that details the reality of life in Palestine and Israel proper. Based in East Jerusalem, such Arab, Palestinian and Jewish voices are even more essential in these dark days.
You can’t touch us
Richard Silverstein asks the question that the mainstream media should be asking: So here’s a question: when are IDF personnel ever held accountable for their misdeeds? Answer: only when it’s captured on video and the entire world watches via YouTube. IDF Moral: ensure there is no video documentation of its misdeeds.
But will Obama put pressure to make this happen?
There is much to criticise in this Haaretz editorial (not least its optimism that a two-state solution is still feasible, let alone moral), but one can’t fault its determination to pressure the hardline Israeli government against trying to maintain the intolerable status-quo: History provides very few opportunities to utterly change political realities. It seems such…
Their Israel does not exist
Independent Australian Jewish Voices blogger Michael Brull beautifully skewers the parochialism and racism within the Australian Jewish News, a paper containing countless examples of paranoid, bigoted and clueless Jews. It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic. This is how Jews want to be viewed in the wider community? Some clearly do. Palestinians are…
Searching for balance is a fool’s game
Following the revelation that the BBC Trust has censured a BBC journalist for supposed bias in his Middle East reporting, the London Independent today publishes a few letters in response: In comments on the Jeremy Bowen affair there seems a constant confusion between two different meanings of “impartial”. The first it that if two parties…
You can talk about everything, except Palestine
After all the hype, propaganda and dis-information over the upcoming Durban II anti-racism conference in Geneva (see here, here and here), a more measured understanding of the politics is required; it’s not pretty: As the wreckage from Israel’s recent siege on Gaza continues to smoulder, international civil society organisations are assembling this week in Switzerland…