My following review appears in yesterday’s Weekend Australian newspaper: Understanding the insular and tribal Melbourne Jewish community has fascinated sociologists for decades. With one of the largest concentrations of Holocaust survivors outside of Israel, proudly Zionist and with strong Jewish day schools, it’s a world that created Ben Zygier, the Australian Mossad agent who committed…
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Why BDS must be supported for justice in the Middle East
My weekly Guardian column is published today: The… boycott, divestment and sanctions… (BDS) movement,… a thriving Palestinian-led initiative… that attacks… institutional links… to Israel’s illegal settlements,… has been… gaining in popularity. In Australia, the movement has been slowly growing… as Israel continues to defy international law – and it now faces one of its greatest opportunities in the court of public opinion. Shurat HaDin…
Introductory passages in For God’s Sake
Following great media coverage over the last week for my new book, For God’s Sake, with Jane Caro, Simon Smart and Rachel Woodlock, here’s an extract by me from the introduction. Please buy the book! Birth is a beginning And death a destination. Rabbi Alvin Fine This poem has remained with me since childhood, when…
Tell me it ain’t so, a fair piece in Murdoch’s outlet on Palestine
Following what feels like years of comical attacks on anybody who dares breath any criticism of the sanctioned Zionist state, today’s Murdoch’s Australian publishes a response to the endless lies and explains that BDS against Israel isn’t akin to Nazism. Well, who knew? The author, Stuart Rees, sent me his original article yesterday and I…
What I discovered as a Middle East correspondent
Independent journalist Donald MacIntyre has written a reflection on his eight years reporting Israel/Palestine: As the world concentrates on the Israeli Prime Minister’s new “red line” for an Iran strike, Jewish settlement in the West Bank accelerates apace. Settler leader Dani Dayan offered, in a recent New York Times article, a panglossian picture of the…
Curious, conflicted but important WPost piece on Israeli nuclear weapons
This piece by the Washington Post Ombudsman Patrick Pexton is an important intervention in an issue that receives virtually no mainstream debate. His final paragraph, where he outs his true position and takes the predictable Zionist view that is vital if you want to survive in a corporate publication, is revealing and rather depressing: I…
When will Jews get past their incessant victimhood?
Strong essay by Israeli Uri Avnery: Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an observant Jew, said years ago that the Jewish religion had practically died 200 years ago, and that the only thing that unites all Jews now is the Holocaust. There is much truth in this, but the Holocaust must be understood in this context as the culmination…
Being “wrong” about war isn’t merely a mistake; it’s a deliberate decision
As the drumbeat for war against Iran grows louder by the day – cheered by the same neo-conservatives, extreme Zionists and hacks who led us into conflict with Iraq – it’s vital to hold to account the commentators who never take responsibility for their war-mongering. A fine piece in Jadaliyya: This is not another article…
How French Jews are embracing an anti-Muslim, French bigot named Marine Le Pen
Tablet reports on how blind love for Zionism and hatred of Islam has become a toxic mix: Since its inception in the 1970s, the Front National has wrapped itself in the repellent rags of traditional French anti-Semitism. The series of outrageous… dérapages, or verbal slips, of the movement’s founder and longtime leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—Marine’s father—are…
Palestine statehood bid signals long struggle ahead for equal rights
My following piece is published today on ABC’s The Drum: Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas returned from New York to occupied Ramallah on the weekend as “an Arab leader of significant standing“, according to writers from the liberal Israeli paper Haaretz. The Abbas speech in front of the United Nations, calling for the international body to…