Feb 7
Later this year, Israel’s Supreme Court will hear a petition filed on behalf of a 70-year-old Palestinian citizen who has one simple request: to visit her father’s grave.
The story of Salwa Salem Copty, of her family’s village and her quest to visit the grave of her father, will, unfortunately, not get the attention from journalists and diplomats that it deserves. Read more
As many as 1,000 Bedouin Palestinian families are threatened with forced displacement by the Israeli government under plans for a major new highway in the Naqab (Negev) region.
The route of the new section of Road 6 already entails the forcible relocation of some 100 Bedouin families. In December 2018, however, Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel declared he intended to takeadvantage of the situation to expel a further 900 families. Read more
Long marginalised in Israel by an ascendant nationalist right, the so-called “Zionist Left” has retained significant moral and intellectual influence abroad. Author Amos Oz, who died aged 79 on 28 December, was perhaps the best-known embodiment of this political current and was widely revered internationally – as The New Yorker put it in 2004 – as “the godfather of Israeli peaceniks”.
Yet this image of the liberal artist or prophet, aided in no small part by political shifts in Israel that mean even mild critics are now denounced as “traitors,” is in stark contrast to Oz’s views on events past and present, and in particular on what Zionism has meant for the Palestinians. Read more
On Thursday, the Israeli government formally passed the “Jewish nation state”law. With the Knesset’s summer recess on the horizon, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu managed to pass the law ahead of the break.
“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote. Read more
During his recent Middle East trip, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn tweeted: “In Jordan, I went to Baqa’a, one of the largest Palestinian refugee camps. We must work for a real two state settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict, which ends the occupation and siege of Gaza and makes the Palestinian right to return a reality.”
UK-based pro-Israel groups were, to put it mildly, unimpressed. Read more
Palestinians are dehumanised in death, as they are in life.
Those gunned down by Israeli snipers – who, army officials assure us, carefully record every shot – are not husbands, sons, brothers, friends, colleagues, journalists, students or medics. They are ‘terrorists’. Pawns. Cannon fodder. Read more
On 15 May, Palestinians mark Nakba Day, an annual event which both remembers the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 and protests Israel’s continued rejection of their right to return.
This year Nakba Day comes as the Trump administration makes good on its promise to relocate the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Today’s opening of the new US embassy comes amid protests in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. In response, Israeli forces have killed at least 41 Palestinian protesters, wounding hundreds more.
The convergence of the 70th anniversary of Nakba Day with these contemporary developments is an opportunity to consider its significance in the past, present and future. Read more
As with the decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, US President Donald Trump surely had his electoral base in mind when deciding to slash funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which looks after Palestinian refugees.
Trump’s decision, however, can not be divorced from a long-standing Israeli animus towards the agency, whose current difficulties have been broadly welcomed by Israeli politicians – including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Israeli officials and pro-Israel groups make two main arguments in their attacks on UNRWA: Palestinian refugees are “fake” and the UN agency “perpetuates” the conflict. Read more
The 100-year anniversary of the Balfour Declaration is many things, but it should not pass without observing how, in 2017, Israel’s friends are still justifying the Zionist project with the same lexicon of colonialism as they were 100 years ago.
Last week, a debate was held in Parliament on the “Centenary of the Balfour Declaration”, moved by Matthew Offord, the Conservative Member of Parliament for Hendon.
During the discussion, fellow Tory MP Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) marvelled that the State of Israel “rose out of the desert” Read more
There is a growing consensus that the status quo in the Israeli-occupied West Bank is fatal to the possibility of an independent Palestinian state.
This was the take-home message of a recent, high-profile speech by US Secretary of State John Kerry, and, as pointed out recently by Yousef Munayyer, the diplomat himself warned four years ago that the window for the “two-state solution” would definitively close in two years.
Versions of this warning, that Israel’s colonisation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank is becoming irreversible, have been issued by Palestinians, Israelis and international diplomats and commentators for decades. Read more
