Dec 11
The 25th anniversary of the Oslo Accords has been marked with unsurprisingly downbeat coverage and talk of broken promises. Marginalised or neglected in much of the analysis, however, has been an honest appraisal of Israel’s own strategic considerations at the time.
First, from Israel’s point of view, Oslo was not about Palestinian statehood. Read more
After Avigdor Lieberman’s departure from Israel’s ruling coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied expectations by keeping his government intact.
The prospect of an immediate vote might have receded, but election speculation is only intensifying, with a maximum of a year left in the government’s term.
A major part of the debate pertains to the Israeli opposition, and in particular, the possibility of Netanyahu finally being replaced as prime minister. Read more
Israeli newspaper Haaretz this week published minutes of a secret meeting between then-Israeli premier Menachem Begin and Shimon Peres, who was head of the opposition at the time. The discussions took place on 31 August 1978, ahead of Begin’s talks with Egypt’s leader Anwar Sadat at Camp David, the US presidential retreat.
For Haaretz, the minutes “lay bare the hawk that peacemaker Peres once was”. In fact, the document gives a valuable insight into what shaped Peres’s world view to the very end: settler colonial racism. Read more
It was a perfect microcosm of the Oslo peace process: Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, requesting permission from the Israeli military to attend the funeral of Shimon Peres. Read more
Shimon Peres, who passed away Wednesday aged 93 after suffering a stroke on 13 September, epitomised the disparity between Israel’s image in the West and the reality of its bloody, colonial policies in Palestine and the wider region.
Peres was born in modern day Belarus in 1923, and his family moved to Palestine in the 1930s. As a young man, Peres joined the Haganah, the militia primarily responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in 1947-49, during the Nakba. Read more
As announced by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) and subsequently covered by The Guardian, Reuters and others, world-renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Professor Stephen Hawking has decided to heed the Palestinian call for boycott, and pull out of an Israeli conference hosted by President Shimon Peres in June. After initial confusion, this was confirmed – Hawking is staying away on political grounds.
Here are five reasons why Professor Hawking is right to boycott: Read more
benwhite.org.uk 