Talking is no longer enough

The head of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies Jake Lynch explains why it’s appropriate to academically boycott Israel: Israeli academics are the source of a great deal of significant criticism of, and opposition to, Israel’s policies…so there is no suggestion that individual contacts should now cease. Discussions about peace journalism have been…

Negating their history

Ahmad Samih Khalidi writes in the Guardian that the Palestinian leadership should be very wary to accept Israeli terms: The fact is that the demand to acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state is meant less to block the prospects of being swamped by Arabs – as Israeli propagandists claim – and more as a …­covert…

If only they cared about the Arabs

The recently deceased Israeli writer Amos Elon wrote the following passage in 1967, a fascinating insight into where his country was already headed: Had they [Palestine’s Arabs] agreed in 1919, not to turn Palestine into “the” Jewish homeland, but to incorporate “a” national home for the Jews, as stipulated by the Balfour Declaration, a Jewish…

What’s a few illegal wars here and there?

Zionist stenographer Jeffrey Goldberg tries to reassure a worried world: If Israel does strike Iran, it would bomb military targets while trying to minimize civilian casualties. Goldberg backed the US-led invasion of Iraq. His predictions then were almost criminally inaccurate.

Forgetting that Israel is an occupier

Jewish anti-Zionist writer Shraga Elam emails just the latest example of mainstream Israeli racism: On 26.5.2009 “Channel 2” cameras photographed Betar players among them the star Amit Ben Shoshan singing very happily after they won the Israeli cup a song popular among their fans. A song that goes like this: What’s Salim doing here? Don’t…

We have rules and you should not break them

Don’t believe, writes The Nation’s Roane Carey, that Israel’s press is fair and dissent in society is truly accepted: And as for being an open, fully democratic state, most people I talk to speak of a chilling of dissent in recent years, running in parallel with the election of increasingly right-wing governments. The nadir came…

What next, banning Palestinians from breathing?

Jewish American blogger Richard Silverstein says it right: The Israeli Supreme Court, that toothless wonder when it comes to confronting the national security state, has permitted the state intelligence apparatus to throw up an entirely new set of non-security criteria in order to prevent Palestinians from studying at Israeli universities.

Will Zionism be truly able to stop itself?

The Obama administration is allegedly giving the Israeli government a headache over its insistence that all settlement building in the West Bank must stop. No ifs, no buts and no exceptions. Strong words, to be sure, but the Israeli political elite doesn’t seem to be listening: The most surprising speaker at the conference [in Israel…

Repeating bad actions time and time again

This story – Israeli commandos killed a senior Hamas militant in the West Bank on Thursday – led an American colleague to make the following observations: It is a classic Israeli technique to respond to uncomfortable political situations (such as the current moment of too much talk of a “peace process” and of “two states”)…

Directly killing women and children

This report is a few days old – I’ve been flying to the US – but its importance cannot be under-estimated: Amnesty International has accused Israel of repeatedly violating the rules of armed conflict during its recent offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “Israeli forces repeatedly breached the laws of war, including by carrying…

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