Tag: Palestine

New heights of pandering to Israel in liberal America

This week an influential think tank in the US invited the leader of Israel to address it in Washington DC. Nothing unusual in that you may think. True; except the group was the Center for American Progress, an organisation with close ties to the Democratic party.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is head of the right-wing Likud party and can in no way be described as a “progressive”. CAP, under pressure from some liberal critics, justified the move claiming that they would ask Netanyahu tough questions and that they have a policy of engaging with people they may disagree with.

In the event, neither of these things was true. The “moderated conversation” totally pandered to Netanyahu. The host was CAP’s president, Neera Tandem (a Hilary Clinton loyalist). She let him lie though his teeth about all sorts of important issues while he was free to launch his charm offensive to win back liberals in the US, some of whom have been growing increasingly critical of Israel in recent years.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 2 of 2

Since the start of October, at least 61 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces (although the death toll is rising, literally as I type) and ten Israelis (often soldiers) have been killed by Palestinians – usually youths armed with knives at the absolute end of their tether.

During this time, the Israelis have claimed that increasing tensions around al-Aqsa are nothing more than mindless Palestinian incitement aimed at attacking Jews for the sake of it, and all the talk of Israeli encroachment is nothing more than Hamas and Fatah propaganda.

But the reality is very different.

A host of perfectly legal Israeli settlers’ groups openly incite for the destruction of the Mosque and have made detailed plans about the “Third Temple” they want to replace it with. Traditional Orthodox Jewish theology held the Temple Mount to be the site of the “Holy of Holies” from the Biblical stories (the physical site of God’s presence manifest on earth) so it was considered far too sacred for Jews to enter. So these efforts are nothing to do with Jewish religious freedom, and everything to do with anti-Palestinian and anti-Islamic provocation and are yet another part of Israel’s long-term project to erase the Palestinians entirely from their own homeland.

Read more over at MEMO.

The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 1 of 2

As is quite well known, the Palestinian body politic is split between political factions. Historically, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was split between its leftist factions (foremost among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Fatah, the Palestinian national liberation movement. Since the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Islamist factions increased in popularity, with Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, leading the way.

Various degrees of competition and animosity have ebbed and flowed over the years, with the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah even degenerating into a short civil war of sorts on the streets of Gaza in 2006 and 2007.

But the reality of the “Gaza coup” was quite the opposite of what is portrayed in Israeli propaganda, which still to this day maintains it was a coup by Hamas over the legitimate Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

In fact, the reality of the 2007 coup was that it was instigated by forces within Fatah (led by by the now-disgraced warlord Muhammad Dahlan) against the elected government of the PA – Hamas swept to power in the democratic elections of 2006.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Hamas in South Africa

Last week top leaders from Hamas, Palestine’s Islamic liberation movement, made an official visit to South Africa. The delegation, led by Khaled Meshaal himself, visited the country at the invitation of the African National Congress, the ruling party.

At a press conference, it was explained that the ANC and Hamas had signed a letter of intent aimed at fostering closer relations between the two liberation movements. The goal, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe explained, is to build “a long lasting relationship” between the two parties.

The Israeli government was unsurprisingly not happy about the invitation, and summoned the South African ambassador in Tel Aviv to protest at the conferring of legitimacy on what it claims is a “terrorist” group.

But ANC spokespeople responded that their leaders were once considered to be “terrorists” by western governments too, and that it regarded Hamas’ struggle against Israeli occupation to be a legitimate one.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Netanyahu’s Hitler remarks part of a disturbing trend

Last week Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech to the World Zionist Congress with an extraordinary claim.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time” he said. He only wanted to expel them. It was, he claimed, none other Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and ’30s who convinced the Nazi leader to embark on the extermination programme which ultimately led to 6 million dead.

“Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. ‘Burn them!’,” Netanyahu claimed, quoting an imaginary conversation between the Palestinian leader and Hitler.

And it really was imaginary: there is no record that any such conversation ever took place, and Netanyahu’s speech has been widely criticised as ahistorical.

It seems astounding that, in an attempt to vilify the Palestinians by association with an old leader (albeit one appointed by the British occupation forces of the time), an Israeli leader would stoop even to exonerating Hitler.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Egypt’s coup regime has devastated its own people in Sinai

A new report by Human Rights Watch has cast light on the scale of the Egyptian dictatorship’s crimes against its own people in the Sinai region.

The report on forced evictions in the Egyptian town of Rafah says that “at least 3,255″ homes, businesses and other local buildings have been demolished by the military since it came back to full power in the coup of July 2013. Innocent people have been forced to move out of their own homes, often at extremely short notice and with little or no compensation in return.

The report opens with a moving quotation from one of the local people who has suffered at the hands of the military in this way, reflecting on what she lost: “I myself used to make food and tea for the soldiers and they came and sat in the shade of our olive tree when the sun beat down on them… My mother told me: ‘The tree is your responsibility. I fed you from it and raised you on it. Even in times of war, we lived from its oil when nobody could find food.’ Now there’s nothing I can do but hold the tree and kiss it and say, ‘Forgive me, mom, what can I do.'”

The town of Rafah sits near the border with Palestine, close to the Gaza city of the same name. Historically, these two places were one city, but as the saying goes, these people did not cross the border, the border crossed them.

Continue reading at MEMO.

Israel is a threat to the entire region

The Zionist project represented by Israel is a fundamental threat to the entire Middle East. Despite the attempts by Arab dictators to demonise Palestinians and downplay the threat from Israel, many remain unconvinced.

In 2013, Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal told former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview that “the threat is from Persia, not from Israel”. The increasingly open nature of the Israeli alliance with the Gulf dictatorships is helpful in the sense that it clarifies things that many have long suspected.

But the way Israel has behaved historically throughout the middle east will not soon be forgotten by those who have been its victims. Israel occupied south Lebanon for decades and was only driven out in 2000 by a successful armed resistance campaign (although some small border territories remain illegally occupied by Israel).

Despite the way the Palestinian struggle has become the most iconic one against Israeli occupation and apartheid, there is no denying the reality of the threat that Israel poses to everyone in the region.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Me on CKUT radio talking Jeremy Corbyn and Palestine

Canadian community radio station CKUT has a regular Palestine programme called Under the Olive Tree. Sawssan Kaddoura kindly invited me on to talk about Jeremy Corbyn’s election victory as new Labour Party leader and his long record as a Palestine solidarity activist. You can listen in the player embedded below, or linked to on their Facebook page.

UOT interviews Asa Winstanley (September 28, 2015) – Jeremy Corbyn by Under The Olive Tree (Ckut.Ca) on Mixcloud

Israel’s dystopian dictatorship

Israel takes great pride in its propaganda claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. This is something it bangs on about at sanctimonious length in every international forum it has access to.

As well as being totally false for Palestinians (more of which below) it is entirely hypocritical. In reality, Israel has long had an important role in supporting, propping up and being in tacit or open alliance with the region’s worst dictatorships and human rights abusers.

The undemocratic regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example. But it also includes the Iran-Contra episode of the 1980s in which Israel was recruited by the US to sell weapons to Iran; the profits were used to aid the terror war of the right-wing Contra army against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua (the US President at the time needed to get around Congress, which had imposed some limits on aid to the Contras after the record of their war crimes became impossible to ignore).

The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan has, despite some conflicts, too often served as a buffer between Palestinian anger and resistance, and Israel. The Black September war of the early 1970s being only one example. More recently, the Jordanian regime has played a key role in training anti-democratic, pro-imperialist forces in the region, such as when it trained and armed the Palestinian Contras led by the former Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose failed 2007 coup attempt in the Gaza Strip (backed by Israel and the US) was nipped in the bud by forces loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority government of the time (led by Hamas).

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Israel’s ‘Prisoner X2’ revealed?

In 2013, the Australian press broke the story of Israel’s “Prisoner X”. Ben Zygier was an Israeli-Australian who had become a Mossad agent. But he was effectively disappeared by the notorious spy agency after allegedly betraying its secrets.

Zygier supposedly hanged himself while in Mossad custody in 2010, though the clouds of doubt and uncertainty still hang low around the case. Such was the secrecy enveloping the case that it was only three years later that the Australian press broke open the story. The Israeli press had been totally banned from speaking about the case, and at first his name was not even known, leading to the designation “Prisoner X”.

Last week details emerged of a “Prisoner X2” – allegedly a double agent working for Iran inside the Mossad.

Ever since the Zygier case reached the world media, talk of a “Prisoner X2” has been ongoing. But this month the American journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, citing an anonymous “knowledgeable Israeli security source”, told some of what is known about his story and revealed that “X2” was allegedly a double-agent for Iran.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

“Jewish extremists” are Israel’s own sons

Earlier this month, a strange thing happened: a Jewish extremist was held in “administrative detention” by Israel. This practise, internment without charge or trial, dates back to the British occupation of Palestine, and Israel habitually uses it against Palestinians.

But for a Jewish citizen to be “administratively detained” is highly unusual. The internee is Meir Ettinger, a 24-year-old pro-settler fanatic who is the grandson of the notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defence League, a terrorist organization founded in New York in 1969. The group was responsible for a string of bombing and other violent attacks against Palestinian, Egyptian and Soviet civilian targets in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as against JDL members who quarrelled with the leadership in one way or another.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Scottish activists lead the way on BDS

Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Thursday that this year, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe did not host a single Israeli act for the first time in years.

“Because of the high costs and political tensions,” the reporter stated, “there have never been more than one or two Israeli productions at Edinburgh over the past two decades.”

A performance put on last year by Jerusalem’s Incubator Theatre (which is funded by the state of Israel) ultimately had to be cancelled: “BDS caused huge outlays on security … and the play collapsed.”

Protests led by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) in 2014 meant that there were fears of disruptions of the production at the Scottish venue, and police insisted that a large number of security guards would have to be employed. Neither the organizers or the venue had the resources, so consequentially it was called off.

Continue reading over at MEMO.