Why Jewish dissent over Israel signifies move away from tribalism

My weekly Guardian column: The South African national high school debating team was recently in Bangkok for the world debating championships. During the competition, the team uploaded a picture of themselves at the tournament’s opening ceremony to Facebook, and controversy ensued. “Team South Africa wearing Palestinian badges and Keffiyehs to show our opposition to the…

Humiliating Palestinians as Israeli policy

Amira Hass is a leading journalist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Two recent columns show the direct and daily assault on Palestinian lives that too rarely appears in the Western press. The Israeli agency that oppresses Palestinians ‘for their own good’: And this month’s George Orwell Prize for excellence in misleading language, for rose-colored ink…

Why Kafka lives in Palestine

Amira Hass in Haaretz: The Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli police in the West Bank will continue trying to convince the High Court of Justice on Monday that the routine of fear in which two elderly farmers live due to attacks by settlers is reasonable and proportionate. In the name of the IDF and…

Establishing Palestinian bantustans always the plan

Amira Hass in Haaretz: When Habayit Hayehudi party leader and rising political star Naftali Bennett calls for annexing Area C, the part of the West Bank under full Israeli security and civil control, he is following the logic of every single Israeli government: maximize the territory, minimize the Arabs. ”¦ Bennett can propose annexation because…

Memo to Europe; Israeli occupation won’t end with a few harsh words

Amira Hass in Haaretz: Compared to the value of the security technology Israel sells overseas, the value of European imports from the settlements are mere pocket money. Israel’s economy won’t be hurt even if European governments adopt the measures proposed by a group of nongovernmental organizations in order to shrink trade with the settlements and…

The Jewish state counts acceptable calories for Palestinians in Gaza

No comment is really required on this story except to say that it shows Israel to be a nation that views another people, the Palestinians, as lesser human beings. Amira Hass in Haaretz: After a three-and-a-half-year legal battle waged by the Gisha human rights organization, the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories has finally…

The daily, mundane nature of Israeli occupation

Amira Hass in Haaretz on the kind of behaviour that rarely receives media coverage. It isn’t sexy, just the reality for Palestinians: It is not for us to be burdened by the considerations of foreign news editors, and so for the second week in a row, we return to Live Fire Zone 918, this time…

How many anti-Semitic attacks are Zionists ignoring?

Amira Hass in Haaretz: Here’s a statistic that you won’t see in research on anti-Semitism, no matter how meticulous the study is. In the first six months of the year, 154 anti-Semitic assaults have been recorded, 45 of them around one village alone. Some fear that last year’s record high of 411 attacks – significantly…

Thank God for Tony Blair helping transport sweaters from Gaza

Amira Hass in Haaretz: Senior British diplomats invested supreme efforts in the past year so that one truck could transfer 2,000 sweaters, to be sold in the United Kingdom. The future wearers of these sweaters must, first of all, thank their former prime minister, Tony Blair, who this week will be marking the fifth anniversary…

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