The rise of privatised detention centres and prisons globally is an issue that receives far too little scrutiny in the media (yesterday’s Al Jazeera’s The Stream was a notable exception). The profit motive inevitably skews priorities. Here’s a great piece from this week’s New York Times by Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen that asks the necessary questions: Immigration… control…
Showing all posts tagged West Bank
How one-state solution is inevitable now
Gideon Levy in Haaretz on how the two-state solution in Israel/Palestine is long dead – thank you America, settlers, the Israeli government and the Zionist Diaspora – and there’s only one outcome now: Even a dead body can sometimes twitch reflexively. Here we go again: The settlers have occupied another building. Their lawyer isn’t ashamed…
What hardline Zionists don’t want young American Jews to think
The American Jewish community is slowly but surely becoming more willing to critically debate Israel’s brutal policies towards Palestinians. Norman Finkelstein, here interviewed by Haaretz, says occupying Israel has a problem on its hands: “Nobody really defends Israel anymore,” he said in an interview. “If you go on college campuses, there are some Hillel faithfuls…
My lecture at Sydney’s Israeli Apartheid Week 2012
I gave the following talk at the University of Sydney on 15 March:
Netanyahu sounding like liberal Zionists
With the delusion of maintaining a Jewish, democratic state – a concept that never existed post 1948 and even less so today with the occupation of millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and discrimination against Arabs in Israel proper – the Israeli leader sounds like any number of liberal Zionists desperate to…
What has Israel really done to Jewish culture post WWII?
The continuing expanding colonies in the West Bank are a key reason that Israel has a grim future as a Jewish state (rightly pointed out by Andrew Sullivan). But what of the argument, made by many Jews and others, that Israel is a refuge for the Jewish people and has the right to exist on…
Challenging MSM approved imperial enforcers
Here’s a book review I wrote a while ago published here exclusively: The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work Belen Fernandez Verso, $22.95 Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? Derrick O’Keefe Verso, $22.95 Antony Loewenstein Back in May 2003, two months after the start of the American-led war in Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman…
Leading American Zionist calls for “Zionist BDS”
Something is stirring in the American, Jewish, liberal, Zionist heartland. Peter Beinart, former supporter of the Iraq war and tough Zionist, has become a very vocal and very public critic of occupying Israel. His “dream” is still to maintain so-called democratic Israel, an inherently undemocratic outcome for the countless Palestinians inside Israel, but this is…
Israel and America are both in an abusive relationship (and they rather love it)
This really a remarkable piece in The Economist that requires no explanation: News flash: Israel is not master of its fate. It’s not terribly surprising that a country with less than 8m inhabitants is not master of its fate. Switzerland, Sweden, Serbia and Portugal are not masters of their fates. These days, many countries with…
Watch liberal Zionists realise the Israeli experiment has become a nightmare
Naturally enough it takes two astute American academics, Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer, authors of The Israel Lobby, to explain in the Financial Times that Iran isn’t the real issue for Israel: On Iran, Mr Netanyahu is convinced it wants nuclear weapons, and that this goal threatens Israel’s existence. He does not think diplomacy can…