Leading Jewish American blogger Phil Weiss – a true friend and ally on Middle East matters – provides wider context to the recent comments by Israeli writer Naomi Ragen: Here’s Naomi Ragen, a writer who seems to split her citizenship between Israel and the U.S., speaking to the Sydney Morning Herald. She’s orthodox, and dismissive…
Showing all posts tagged West Bank
How to lose Jewish friends in one easy step
Naomi Ragen is a prominent American-Israeli writer and playwright about to visit Melbourne for the writer’s festival. She is a typical, radical Zionist who believes that “terrorists” should be killed by the Jewish state. “We need to kill these people”, she told the Sydney Morning Herald today. Her message of peace? No withdrawals from occupied,…
How to kill a state
What will it take for Diaspora Jews to realise that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and the extremist Jews who populate the territory, is threatening their beloved homeland?
Crushing humanity
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, July 24: Israel might be able to go on claiming that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but it cannot do the same regarding another weapon of mass destruction: the bulldozer. The claim that terror has adopted an original new weapon, a “new fashion”…
Goodbye to all that?
Israeli newspaper Haaretz has become one of the great journals of the world, fearlessly reporting the effects of the occupation. But a new German owner appears determined to radically shift its focus. An insider writes: A new German owner has purchased Haaretz and a “Putsch is being carried out among reporting staff,” in the most…
Three questions: Antony Loewenstein
The following interview appears in today’s Sydney Morning Herald: Which writer, alive or dead, would you most like to see at a writers’ festival? George Orwell. We need somebody to skewer the imperial ambitions of the right and the self-righteousness of the left. He could regale audiences with tales of war and hopefully convince any…
Weapons of mass instruction
My latest New Matilda column is about Israel after its 60th anniversary and features an exclusive interview with Palestinian-American Ali Abunimah: Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations are over. Hardline British Zionist commentator Melanie Phillips hopes that Israel or America will now bomb Iran. Israel complained to the UN about its use of the word “Nakba” to…
Slingshot hip-hop
A striking documentary about male and female Palestinian rappers in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel proper:
Blaming the victims
Talking honestly about Palestine in Australia is clearly too challenging for some: The decision by a Sydney library to dump an exhibition about Palestinian refugees after a visit by counter-terrorism police the night before it opened has been criticised as an act of censorship. Leichhardt municipal library was to launch the Al-Nakba pictorial exhibition last…
A celebration that ignores the plight of Palestine
My following piece in the Melbourne Age, co-written with Michael Shaik, reflects on Israel’s 60th anniversary: “If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.…