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Middle East Monitor
 

Asa Winstanley

AsaWinstanley

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist living in London who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He has been visiting Palestine since 2004 and is originally from south Wales. He writes for the award-winning Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada where he is an associate editor and also a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor.

 

Items by Asa Winstanley

  • Jailing the truth in Egypt

    On Saturday, there was a surprise verdict in an Egyptian court. Three Al Jazeera journalists were jailed for three years each in a widely-covered retrial. The three had previously been imprisoned for a year for supposedly “spreading false news” in support of a “terrorist” group – in fact the...

  • "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...

  • Scottish activists lead the way on BDS

    Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported 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...

  • Is Tony Blair setting a trap for Hamas?

    Reports have trickled out over the summer that Israel and Hamas are engaged in indirect negotiations in Doha. The reports, some of which have originated with Middle East Eye, say that the talks have been facilitated by Tony Blair, and are aimed at establishing a long-term ceasefire in exchange...

  • The Corbyn phenomenon

    It has been the story of the summer, but there are still almost three weeks left to run in the Labour Party leadership election, believe it or not. What initially looked like it was going to be the dullest leadership election ever was electrified after the entry of left-wing...

  • Hilary Clinton's failed attack on BDS

    Earlier this month, The Scotsman reported that US presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton had tried to stop a cultural boycott of Israel in Edinburgh. In 2009, the Edinburgh film festival returned small amount of funding from the Israeli embassy sensitivity that Israel and its supporters have to BDS.. Famed left-wing director...

  • Scandalous attempts to smear Jeremy Corbyn belie reality about Raed Salah

    The current media attacks against leading Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn to smear him as an “anti-Semite” are an absolute scandal. One of the themes in these attacks has been Corbyn’s meeting with Palestinian political activist and religious leader Shaikh Raed Salah, who came to Britain in 2011 for...

  • "Kahane was right" – but not in the way Israeli racists claim

    In 1968 in New York City, an American rabbi named Meir Kahane founded an organization called the Jewish Defence League. Despite the claim in the name to be defending the Jewish community from anti-Jewish attacks, the JDL was from the start far more concerned with going on the attack...

  • A forgotten Palestinian kidnap victim

    Dirar Abu Sisi was once the technical director of Gaza’s only electricity plant. One night in February 2011, traveling on a train to visit his brother in Ukraine he was kidnapped and disappeared. His frantic family could find no word of him. A month and a half later he turned...

  • Iran deal a defeat for the Israel lobby

    The US and several other nuclear-weapon-owning states recently signed an agreement with Iran that would allow the Islamic Republic to continue its peaceful nuclear energy programme while sanctions are progressively lifted. At the same time, Iran has agreed to strict limits on its programme. The Israel lobby, especially in the...

  • The definitive account of the 2014 war on Gaza

    The American journalist Max Blumenthal’s last book, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, was infamously and sarcastically denounced as part of the “Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club” by Blumenthal’s former colleague at The Nation Eric Alterman. The furore in The Nation over Max’s book when it came out in 2013 (Alterman...

  • Syriza-led government learns to "love Israel"

    News broke Monday morning that a deal had finally been reached between the left-wing Greek government and its European Union and IMF creditors on how to impose a regime of further harsh austerity on the country. Although all the details of the agreement are yet to be revealed, it seems...

  • Israeli spy admits: we encouraged anti-Semitic conspiracy theories

    Books by former intelligence, military and political leaders are frequently tedious and self-serving. Obsessed with securing their own legacy, and proving how right they were about some long-standing grudge or another, such volumes rarely make for much of an enlightening read. One such book I probably will subject myself to,...

  • Syrians in occupied Golan furious about Israel's alliance with al-Qaeda

    Israel’s most unlikely alliance is that it currently engages in with Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. Despite a long history of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish rhetoric, the main victims of al-Qaeda’s horrible sectarian attacks have been Muslims in the Arab world, along with western civilian and military targets. The movement...

  • The Likudnik Saudi royals

    One result of 2011’s democratic uprisings in the Arab world was to bring a secretive regional alliance increasingly into the the light. That alliance is the one between Israel and the Gulf Arab dictatorships – foremost among them the Saudi royals. It became clearer and clearer for all to see...

  • Israel punishes Palestinian teens to deter protest

    Palestinian student Lina Khattab was released last week from Ofer, an Israeli prison in the West Bank, infamous for torture and injustice. The 18-year-old journalism student had spent almost seven months in Israeli detention. What was her crime? The simple act of daring to protest, daring to object and daring...

  • Israel's new war against BDS

    Since Israel’s new hard-right coalition government came to power last month, there have been two major bogey men: Iran and BDS, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel until it complies with basic Palestinian rights. But now, as Ali Abunimah has argued, BDS seems set to overtake Iran...

  • Egypt in the hands of a death-sentence regime

    A close run thing to the regularly bad and depressing news coming out of Syria is the regularly bad and depressing news coming out of Egypt. Many of us, I am sure, still remember those headily optimistic days of the uprisings that broke out in Tunisia and Egypt at the...

  • Why is the media ignoring Israel's alliance with al-Qaeda?

    Since January, I have been ploughing a lonely furrow in this column by covering what is certainly one of the most under-reported stories in the world right now: Israeli involvement in the war in Syria. Almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, Israel’s occupation forces in the Golan Heights have been...

  • The new annual conference for Israeli warmongers

    Earlier this month a conference was held in Jerusalem which Israel used as a way to brainstorm changes to international humanitarian law in order to make it easier for them to kill civilians without consequence. It is the season for Israeli propaganda conferences, it seems. As Ben White has covered...

  • Hamas is keeping ISIS at bay in Gaza

    AFP reported last week on recent attacks in Gaza by groups claiming allegiance to the “Islamic State”, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The fanatical group has been bombing Hamas targets. Hamas officials have downplayed reports of any ISIS presence in Gaza. This war between ISIS and Hamas puts the...

  • Saudi Arabia is helping al-Qaeda invade Syria

    Recent events in the war in Syria make for pretty grim reading. The death toll continues to rise, to the point where the UN is no longer seriously counting. There was more than 257,000 dead on all sides at the last count, according to the most widely-cited figures, that...

  • The litmus test of Palestine

    Something that contributed massively to my own political awakening in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States was the work of the brilliant dissident journalist John Pilger. I watched many of his documentaries. These were often broadcast on ITV fairly late at night as if some kind...

  • Britain's deep state breaks cover at Southampton University

    Since 2011’s wave of protests and uprisings in the Arab world, we have heard a fair amount about something often titled the “deep state”. This term is applied in different contexts but it seems most relevant in Egypt. When, in 2011, a people’s uprising managed to overthrow dictator Hosni Mubarak,...