Articles |

Oct 2

It’s about Palestine

The clinking champagne glasses on Engage’s website said it all. The movement established to oppose the proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions was celebrating a victory, as the British University and College Union (UCU) announced that to even discuss the boycott risked “infringing discrimination legislation”. The boycott of Israel, it seemed, had suffered a blow. Engage and their fellow-travellers popped open the bubbly at the end of what must have seemed like a rather good week. Days earlier, the UK’s Socialist Worker had published an article in which the boycott was called into question for tactical reasons. Smugly, it was noted that “even” the “Israel-demonising” Socialist Worker’s Party now doubted the boycott. Read more

Sep 20

Shoot and cry: Liberal Zionism’s dilemma

Howard Jacobson is one of the most high-profile Jewish authors in Britain, having written numerous critically-acclaimed and successful comic novels. He also writes a weekly column in the liberal-leaning The Independent and in recent times has used it to vociferously attack the growing boycott of Israel. His column on 1 September, “There seems to be a pecking order among the dispossessed, and Jews come last,” was a fine example of the twin track approach of the liberal Zionist, combining moral remorse with unhampered support for ethnic cleansing.[1] Read more

Aug 29

Bureaucratic dispossession

On 20 August 2007, a story appeared in the Israeli daily Haaretz about the disputed ownership of a piece of land in East Jerusalem. The “land in question,” the report said, is “an olive grove called Kerem Hamufti” and part of the “Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.” [1] According to Haaretz, the “Israel Lands Administration (ILA) is working together with the Ateret Cohanim association to wrest from Palestinian landowners control of 30 dunams (7.5 acres) of land in East Jerusalem and to transfer it to the association without a tender.” Petitioning the High Court, the land’s owners, the Palestinian Arab Hotels Company, described the purpose of this expropriation as “extraneous, illegitimate, racist and discriminatory.” Read more

Aug 29

Apologetically imperial: Liberals, political Islam, and a war of terror

Long before Nick Cohen ruminated on “What’s Left?” and Martin Amis imagined the sexual frustration of millions of Muslim men, even as the ink dried on opinion pages in the “liberal” New York Times, Guardian and Independent urging on the slaughter in Iraq, those on the left still committed to resisting imperialism were already ably despatching the accusations of “appeasing Islamofascism”. It is not my intention to repeat those thorough demolitions here. Read more

Aug 29

Dying to live

Every death from the thousands of Palestinians killed by the Israeli occupation has been a despicable crime. Yet some of them acquire a symbolic significance in the way that the personal horror speaks to something more fundamental in Israel’s colonial policies. The murder of Nizar al-Adeeb is one such case. Nizar was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he approached the border separating the occupied Gaza Strip from Israel. He was 22 years old and a resident of Nusseriat refugee camp. His death was recorded by the Associated Press in the following way:

Israeli troops shot three Palestinians as they approached the fence around the Gaza Strip Saturday, killing one and lightly injuring the other two, the army said. Read more

Aug 2

The Nakba in Israeli textbooks and official discourse

The contents of school textbooks in Palestine/Israel have often been the cause of controversy, normally when a report is published purporting to reveal “shocking revelations” about the alleged indoctrination of Palestinian schoolchildren. Last week, however, it was Israeli textbooks in the spotlight, as the Ministry of Education approved a new textbook with a difference. As the BBC reported, “for the first time” the “Palestinian denunciation of the creation of Israel in 1948″ had been included. This incident afforded a perfect opportunity for seeing how the Nakba — what Palestinians called their expulsion by Zionist forces from their homes and villages in what is now Israel during 1947-48 — is viewed by “official” discourse in the West (through the filter of the mainstream media), and within Israel itself. Read more

Jul 18

Blair is Right Man for the Job, Indeed

As soon as it was confirmed that Tony Blair would be taking up the role of special envoy to the Middle East on behalf of the Quartet (USA, EU, UN and Russia), typical reactions ranged from skepticism to mockery. However, the choice of Blair is only incredible if one takes at face value the stated function and intent of the Quartet regarding the ‘peace process’. Most mainstream commentators, therefore, have missed a trick.

Some have coyly hinted at the fact that Blair will be an ‘unpopular’ or ‘controversial’ choice of envoy in the Middle East (without going into any of the gruesome details). Others have gone further, highlighting specific Blair policies in the Middle East and concluding that the Quartet could have made a better selection. Common amongst all these approaches though is that the Quartet’s intentions are placed beyond serious critique. On closer inspection, the Quartet and Blair are a perfect match for each other, having been consistently on the same wavelength both in terms of practical strategies and the corresponding informing ideology. Read more

Jun 19

Decoding the media’s Palestinian “civil war”

Major news stories from Palestine/Israel are often accompanied by what becomes a self-reinforcing “vocabulary,” typically generated by Israeli government ministries or other propaganda outlets, and then picked up by the Western media. A classic example was the redeployment of Israeli settlers and military from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which was successfully packaged as a “disengagement” that pitted “Israeli against Israeli,” in a “painful compromise.” This kind of marketing exercise often works even when there are widely available contradictory reports, such as how “disengagement” was openly trumpeted by Sharon and his advisors as a strategy for destroying the peace process. Read more

Jun 6

The War in Gaza

The events in Gaza this week, which represented the dramatic climax of months of tense bouts of fighting between Hamas and Fatah, were painful to watch. Those who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians, like the thousands who marched in London last weekend, need not be shy about speaking out, despite the pressures of the cynical, smug analysis that laughs at Palestinian ‘self-rule’ and says ‘I told you so’. Responsibility for the current crisis is shared amongst most of the protagonists. Read more

May 15

Coretta Scott King and the Jewish National Fund

Towards the end of April, the Associated Press filed a story reproduced by, amongst others, Ha’aretz, Guardian Unlimited, and CNN, reporting that “Israel will name a forest in northern Galilee after Coretta Scott King”, part of a wider campaign to replant “thousands of trees destroyed during last year’s war with Hezbollah”. At least 10,000 trees will be designated as a “living memorial to King’s legacy of peace and justice”, according to US Israeli ambassador Sallai Meridor. Although it was a small story that merited a few paragraphs of a news agency feed, unpacking this publicity stunt can be instructive in understanding just how successful Zionist propaganda has been in tapping into US popular culture, appropriating symbols for Israel’s benefit. Read more