Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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After the Afghanistan exit, could the US ramp up aggression against Iran?
The Afghanistan debate in Parliament this week was nothing less than nauseating. Ministers, MPs and shadow ministers all united to ratchet up a bizarre form of rhetoric that somehow managed to be both war-like and totally impotent at the same time. They seemed to think that British occupation forces should be...
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Israel’s PR problems and the Palestinian Authority
Liberal Zionist newspaper Haaretz wrote an especially galling headline this week: “After String of Fatalities, IDF Chief Urges: Reduce Shooting of Palestinians,” it read. In the article itself, the nonchalance with which the Tel Aviv publication describes the frequent shootings “by mistake” of unarmed Palestinians in the West Bank and...
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Israel’s lucrative lobby racket
The British comedian David Schneider is well known for his memorable bit parts in sitcoms and his writing for shows such as faux news bulletin “The Day Today”. Unfortunately he is a political disappointment. Like so many minor British celebrities and TV personalities, Schneider took a hostile posture against...
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The plight of Palestinians is well understood, now action needs to be taken
“I am tired of reporting the same brutality every day, of thinking of new ways to describe the obvious.” Those are the words of Mohammed El-Kurd, the renowned Palestinian activist from East Jerusalem. He and his family are threatened with expulsion from their homes. They have committed no crime, but are being kicked...
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Israel’s icy reception for Ben and Jerry’s
A landmark victory in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s (BDS) campaign against Israel came on Monday, with an announcement from Ben and Jerry’s. After years of BDS campaign appeals to them, the US ice cream maker declared that it would no longer be selling its products in Israeli settlements...
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Marriage law vote proves that even 'left' Zionism is racism
This week, Israel’s Parliament the Knesset failed to pass an extension to Israel’s racist marriage law. The law bars the spouses of Palestinian citizens of Israel from receiving citizenship. This means that Palestinians from Haifa, Acre or Jaffa are effectively banned from marrying Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and...
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How Europe sustains Israel
Many people object when first learning that Israel participates in the Eurovision Song Contest. Why is such an obscenely violent and racist human rights-abusing regime allowed to participate in an international competition like that? And Israel isn’t even in Europe, it’s in Asia. Of course, I agree with the first point....
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Don’t look away from Palestine
If there was only one tiny sliver of hope that emerged after the horrors that Israel inflicted on the Palestinians last month, it was a new sense of unity among the people of Palestine themselves. And the global solidarity movement for Palestinian rights received a major boost too. On...
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The 'Palestinian' Authority is actually Israel’s auxiliary occupation force
Palestinian activist and political candidate Nizar Banat, 44, was killed in the early hours of Thursday morning. But it was not Israeli soldiers that killed him. Banat was a critic of the Palestinian Authority, or PA, condemning its corruption and its central policy of “security coordination” with Israel. His popular Facebook page...
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'Death to the Jews' would have caused an international scandal, yet Israel’s incitement gets a free pass
Go along with me on a thought experiment for a few minutes. Imagine that British police forces permitted a crowd of thousands to march through an area of London with a high Jewish population chanting “Death to the Jews” and other similar violently bigoted obscenities. Imagine such a group of racists...
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The Israeli political circus
Is the Israeli election circus finally coming to an end? I wouldn’t bank on it quite yet, for two related reasons. Since 2019, there have been no less than four general elections in Israel, all inconclusive. This is partly due to Israel’s electoral system, which uses proportional representation. A confusing array...
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A morning of victory in Jerusalem
Palestine awoke last Friday morning to a new reality. The death and destruction Israel had been visiting upon Gaza came to an end with a 2am ceasefire. More than 230 Palestinians, including 64 children, had been killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip in the preceding eleven days. The new...
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Palestinians have a right to defend themselves
The scenes we’ve been witnessing on our screens coming out of occupied Palestine this week are unprecedented. What has been happening is a unified national uprising of the entire Palestinian people against Israeli ethnic cleansing, apartheid and aggression. Resisting colonial fragmentation of their body politic, Palestinians from all segments of the...
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Progressive, but not on Palestine
One of the perennial frustrations on the pro-Palestine left is the issue of allegedly socialist or liberal politicians who seem to have a blind spot when it comes to issue of Palestine. In other words, they are Progressives Except for Palestine, or PEPs. Things are not as bad as they once...
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The long shadow of Israel’s arm in Europe
Israel has been allowed to get away with far too much for far too long. As a self-proclaimed “outpost of civilisation in the jungle”, Israel has been supported by the forces of European and US imperialism for decades. The welcome decline of the European empires meant that Israel was – correctly...
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Palestinians called Israel an apartheid state decades ago
In 1965, Syrian-Palestinian academic and diplomat Fayez Sayegh wrote a groundbreaking monograph called Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. The short booklet was published by the PLO Research Centre in Beirut. It is a model of clarity and precision. The fact that most of what it explains still very much applies today...
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Israel’s pogroms in Jerusalem
The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines a pogrom as “a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority”. That is exactly what is happening today against the Palestinian people in Jerusalem. Palestinians are not a minority in Palestine – the country...
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The ‘real’ apartheid
“This is the real apartheid,” Jewish American lawyer Brooke Goldstein tweeted last week. “The fact that Jews can’t enter into ‘Palestinian territory’,” she claimed, “I reject that some places are dangerous for me to enter because I AM A JEW.” Goldstein accompanied her tweet with a photo of a large...
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The US empire is extorting Sudan into an unpopular recognition of Israel
“No conciliation, no coexistence and no negotiations with Israel” – those were the famous “Three Nos” of the August 1967 Khartoum summit of the Arab League. This was a defiant declaration of the refusal to accept Israeli violence, expansion and apartheid, in the wake of the June 1967 war that...
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It is necessary to be an anti-Zionist in order to reject anti-Semitism
One of the most common misunderstandings about the Israeli occupation of Palestine is that it is a “conflict” between two countries, “Israel” and “Palestine”. Such language is highly misleading, because it gives the impression that these are two evenly matched countries which are fighting it out in an interminable...
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Free in Israel, convicted spy Jonathan Pollard calls for more Americans to betray their country
Israel Hayom published an extremely long, fawning interview on Friday with convicted American traitor and Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. It made for startling reading. The newspaper is owned by Miriam Adelson, Israel’s richest person and the widow of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. The couple were leading funders of...
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Israel’s war against Palestinian minds
There is a major mental health crisis brewing in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A study published in a medical journal in 2014 gives the grim and shocking figure that as many as a quarter of Palestinian adolescents living in those territories have attempted to take their...
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Don’t let the Israeli lobby fire David Miller
I first met sociology professor David Miller a decade ago. His depth of knowledge and thoughtful research impressed me right away. At the time, I was reporting on the story of Raed Salah, a Palestinian Muslim preacher and political activist who was doing a small speaking tour in the UK....
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The Benjamins may be losing their ability to get US politicians to toe the Israeli line
As a working journalist who reports frequently on the machinations of the pro-Israel lobby, one of the most common claims I come across is that it doesn’t actually exist. Almost uniquely among Middle Eastern regimes allied to Britain and the US, we are told, Israel has no lobby which...