Articles |

Jan 20

Israel wanted a humanitarian crisis

The scale of Israel’s attack on the Gaza Strip, and the almost daily reports of war crimes over the last three weeks, has drawn criticism from even longstanding friends and sympathisers. Despite the Israeli government’s long-planned and comprehensive PR campaign, hundreds of dead children is a hard sell. As a former Israeli government press adviser put it, in a wonderful bit of unintentional irony, “When you have a Palestinian kid facing an Israeli tank, how do you explain that the tank is actually David and the kid is Goliath?”

Despite a mass of evidence that includes Israel’s targets in Operation Cast Lead, public remarks by Israeli leaders over some time, and the ceasefire manoeuvring of this last weekend, much of the analysis offered by politicians or commentators has been disappointingly limited, and characterised by false assumptions, or misplaced emphases, about Israel’s motivations. Read more

Jan 16

This is not a balanced conflict

EVENTS in the Gaza Strip are so fast-moving that, when you read this, the statistics will be outdated. As a surgeon in Gaza City commented, there is simply “too much happening for the media to cover”. But, though it is difficult to convey the impact, it is possible to give an idea.

At the time of writing, about 900 Palestinians have been killed and more than 3500 injured: more than half of the casualties are civilians, and as many as one in four of the victims is a child. Despite its statements that it is aiming at only “terrorist” targets, the Israeli military has hit blocks of flats, refugee camps, passing cars, a market place, mosques, a university, clinics and ambulances, schools, harbours, and even a bird farm. The infrastructure of normal life has been obliterated in a territory the size of a decent-sized European city and already reeling from a siege and Israeli policies of isolation that go back about 20 years. Government ministries have been destroyed, and access to water, electricity, and basic foods has been severely affected. This week, Israel is being accused of war crimes in the Gaza Strip by agencies such as the United Nations, the Red Cross, and international and local human-rights groups. Read more

Jan 6

Israel’s targets in Gaza

In just the first six days of ‘Operation Cast Lead’, the Israeli Air Force carried out more than 500 sorties against targets in the Gaza Strip. That meant an attack from the air roughly every 18 minutes for almost a week – not counting hundreds of helicopter attacks, tank and navy shelling, and infantry raids. At the time of writing, the operation was into its 10th day.

That’s an intense number of attacks for a territory of similar size to the city of Seattle. Read more

Dec 1

Why God believes in human rights

Western Christians have often expressed ambivalence about the language, assumptions, and practical outworking of ‘human rights’ and the extent to which it threatens to be a rival creed: God-centred ethics replaced by well-meaning but shakily-grounded humanism.

Emerging after the horrors of World War II in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights1, the modern human rights movement has been characterised by the law professor John Witte Jr as an attempt to find a world faith to fill a spiritual void – ‘to harvest from the traditions of Christianity and the Enlightenment the rudimentary elements of a new faith and a new law that would unite a badly broken world order’.2 Read more

Nov 20

Economy first in Palestine?

With Israeli domestic politics focused on the election early next year, the various players are busy manoeuvring themselves into positions they feel will count in their favour come voting day, including Likud’s strong contender, Binyamin Netanyahu.

On Sunday, Netanyahu repeated his belief that the best way forward with regard to Israeli-Palestinian peace was to prioritise helping the Palestinian economy from the bottom up. Insisting this was not an “alternative” to negotiations, ‘Bibi’ argued that “economic prosperity significantly reduces terror and the foundations of war”. Read more

Oct 31

Farming Palestine

In what is becoming somewhat of an annual tradition, recent weeks have seen dozens of stories in the international media about the difficulties facing Palestinians during the olive harvest season. Ever since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, the West Bank olive harvest has been extensively covered by the press, with reporters accompanying Palestinian farmers and villagers out to the groves.

The olive harvest, as a proportion of the Palestinian economy, is not particularly big, but for many families and villages, it represents the prime, or even only, source of income. The olive tree is also invested with heavy symbolic value; rooted in the soil, ancient, it has come to represent Palestinian steadfastness in the face of concerted efforts to remove them from their land. Read more

Oct 7

Israel: wedded to war?

For Israel, the aftermath of the 2006 Lebanon war was all about questions. What mistakes were made, and who made them? What could be done to restore the Israeli military’s “deterrence” after a widely perceived defeat? In general, what lessons could be learned from the confrontation with Hizbullah in order that next time, there would be no question of failure?

Unfortunately, it seems that entirely the wrong kinds of conclusions are being reached, at least in the military hierarchy and among the policy shaping thinktanks. On Friday, Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper published comments made by Israeli general Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army’s northern command. Eisenkot took the opportunity to share the principles shaping plans for a future war. Read more

Sep 26

Holy Land crisis discussed

MORE THAN 100 church leaders gathered on Monday in central London to discuss the crisis facing the Christian community in Israel and Palestine. Held at All Hallows on the Wall conference, “The Disappearance of the Holy Land”, was the fruit of co-operation between nine Christian and Jewish organisations, including the Amos Trust, which was hosting the event. Read more

Sep 24

Ben White v Alex Stein

Ben White to Alex Stein

Firstly, thank you for agreeing to this debate. Since space is limited, I’ll jump straight in.

I believe that Paul McCartney’s concert should not go ahead, firstly on account of Israel ’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinians, and secondly, because I believe that a boycott plays an effective role in a wider campaign for a just peace in Palestine and Israel.

(I’d like to add that while someone might disagree with the first premise – and hence consider the boycott ridiculous or sinister – it’s possible to agree with this assessment of Israel ’s past and present, but consider a boycott to be tactically flawed.) Read more

Aug 7

One for the shelf

Yesterday, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz published what seemed like a significant development in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, reporting that PM Ehud Olmert had presented Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president “with a detailed proposal for an agreement in principle on borders, refugees and security arrangements between Israel and a future Palestinian state”.

The “offer” is nothing too different to what we’ve seen before: Israel keeps the main settlement blocs, including around Jerusalem, Gush Etzion, Maaleh Adumim, and, the Ha’aretz article suggests, Efrat and Ariel too. There is no mention of arrangements for the Jordan valley, crucial territory that Olmert has previously declared his intention to annex. Read more