Stephen Walt, Foreign Affairs blog, January 26: Although it was the official policy of every President since Lyndon Johnson to oppose the construction of settlements, none of them put any serious pressure on Israel to stop. The first President Bush briefly withheld some loan guarantees in 1992 over this issue, but the guarantees were authorized…
Showing all posts in June 2019
Where does the arrogance come from?
An open letter to the Israeli ambassador of Australia, penned by the Independent Australian Jewish Voices blogger Michael Brull.
Well done Israel on a job finely honed
The Palestinian liberation movement is changing before our very eyes. Fatah is close to dead. Hamas is on the rise. Mouin Rabbani, a contributing editor at Middle East Report, writes: The devastation in Gaza has made the inclination to challenge Israel and its occupation and the will to defy international pressure the central criteria for…
Get Up! takes on Israel/Palestine
Get Up! is Australia’s biggest progressive organisation, modelled on US MoveOn.org. Get Up! has shied away from tackling the Israel/Palestine issue, preferring to focus on more domestic concerns. Its success in Australia is undeniable, though I know a number of members have been frustrated with its silence over the Middle East. But maybe that is…
Just don’t upset the Jews
BBC management may be scared of the Zionist lobby, but many staff are not: Last night (25 January), saw our inspiring occupation of the BBC in Glasgow in protest at their decision not to air the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal on behalf of Gaza. We simply managed to walk in to the lobby of this…
The eternal victim
My following article appeared yesterday in the Canadian magazine Adbusters: Each side in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict believes criticisms in the media are biased, but the Palestinians are the ones doing almost all the suffering and dying these days. Antony Loewenstein argues for reality-based… coverage. Israel’s highly decorated Chief of Staff, Mordechai Gur, once said, “we make…
Take them in, somewhere
The forgotten people: The start of 2009 offers little hope to the residents of al-Tanf, a refugee camp on the Syrian-Iraqi border housing more than 700 Palestinians who had fled persecution in Iraq. No country has given any concrete pledge to take any of the refugees for resettlement in 2009, leaving them to battle the…
Step up or move away
With the Arab Initiative on the table for Israel – acceptance by the region if the Jewish state accepts a two-state solution, a highly unlikely proposition considering its obsession with expansionism – the recent war against Gaza has shown once again the impotence of the Arab world: There is more solidarity with the people of…
Do American citizens care about this?
So how does Israel pay for its wars against the Palestinians? Thank you, American tax-payer: War-related defence spending and civilian aid would boost the budget deficit and increase borrowing, said former treasury official Yoram Gabai, who is now the chairman of the Pe’ilim fund management unit of Bank Hapoalim. Raising the money at home might…
When they’ve nothing left in the tank
Jewish blogger Phil Weiss notes a growing tendency of Zionist extremists resorting to name calling: In their refusal to see what the slaughter of hundreds of Arab civilians has revealed about the foreign country they love, Commentary’s Noah Pollak and Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg have begun calling John Mearsheimer “Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer.” This kind of namecalling…