Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Israel’s vaccine apartheid is a violation of international law
The propagandists are having an increasingly hard time explaining Israel’s vaccine apartheid. Broadly speaking, there are about six million Israeli Jews and 6.5 million Palestinian Arabs (mostly Muslims and Christians) living in historic Palestine. This is the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: the West Bank (including...
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Could Israel invade the Hague?
It has been a long time coming. Earlier this month, a panel of judges ruled that the International Criminal Court (ICC) could investigate Israel for war crimes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A coalition of Palestinian human rights lawyers celebrated the “landmark” ruling as “a critically important step...
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Kahanism is now Israel’s mainstream
Rabbi Meir Kahane is considered something of a prophet by the Israeli right-wing. He openly advocated expelling all Palestinians from historic Palestine between the river and the sea – what he called “the Land of Israel”. “The Jews and Arabs of the Land of Israel ultimately cannot coexist,” he wrote in...
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Biden’s cybersecurity pick is a threat to US security
Just after Christmas, Jonathan and Esther Pollard were flown on a private jet from New Jersey to Tel Aviv. After touching down, Jonathan kissed the tarmac and was greeted by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Pollards had been flown in style at the expense of Miriam and...
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What is a former Israeli spy doing in the British Labour Party’s head office?
Last week when I broke the story of Assaf Kaplan, a recent Labour Party hire, the main feedback – often objection – I received on social media went along this sort of line: “There’s no such thing as a ‘former’ spy.” A failing elections campaign operative for the Israeli Labor...
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Why Israel is a settler-colony
When I first began my journey into the Palestine solidarity movement two decades ago, there was much debate about whether or not Israel is truly an apartheid state. These days, of course, the debate is over. Even the liberal Israeli human rights group B’Tselem now defines Israel as an apartheid...
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B’Tselem didn’t go far enough; Israel has always been an apartheid state
Israeli human rights group B’Tselem made the headlines this week when it released a new paper in which – for the first time – it described Israel as an apartheid state. The paper is titled “A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This...
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Jonathan Pollard’s release shows that Israel is unrepentant about spying on its ‘allies’
On the evening of 18 November, 1985, Jay, an innocent-looking analyst, left his office at the US Naval Intelligence. Jay was in his early thirties, looked slightly overweight, sported a very eighties moustache and wore thick glasses. Heading home for the evening, he took with him a ream of classified...
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Britain should end, not extend, its military cooperation with Israel
Earlier this month, Israeli and British military officials signed a joint agreement to formalise and increase their “defence relationship”. The full terms of the pact are secret, but it seems that it will involve joint training exercises and other forms of military cooperation. The agreement came only one month after...
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Israel’s war against European aid for Palestinians
Anyone visiting the West Bank, as I have done on many occasions, will discover something rather common, especially in rural communities: signs, billboards and plaques advertising the European Union and other donors of aid to Palestinian communities. The most insidious example of this neo-colonial phenomenon is the US Agency...
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Torturing children is normal for Israel
In 2018, veteran Palestine solidarity campaigner and Jewish anti-Zionist Tony Greenstein was expelled from the Labour Party after being smeared as an anti-Semite. As has been seen so often during Labour’s manufactured anti-Semitism crisis, the charges cited by party lawyers referred not to actual “anti-Semitism”, but to legitimate criticism...
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Israel's $16 billion siege on Gaza
A new report on the Gaza Strip by a United Nations (UN) agency makes for sobering reading. The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reports that the economic cost to Gaza of the Israeli siege since 2007, along with a series of major military assaults, amounts to no less...
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Israel’s growing strategic threat to our freedom of speech
There is an old saying that you should not put the fox in charge of the hen house. It makes perfect sense, and yet that’s exactly what Western governments are increasingly starting to do when it comes to their freedom of speech policies. All bluster about “cancel culture” aside,...
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UN experts have basically just said that Israel is not a democracy
Although it is only one of Israel’s many injustices, the case of Mohammed El-Halabi is a particularly egregious example of the colonial-settler state’s criminality. El-Halabi was a leading Palestinian aid worker — the Gaza director for WorldVision, a Christian charity funded in part by the Australian government — but...
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Trump’s parting shots for Israel
At the start of this year, in this column, I argued that the annexation of the West Bank was coming, one way or another. The West Bank and the Gaza Strip were the remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine left for the Palestinians in 1949, after the ceasefire between...
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Joe Biden will continue the pro-Israel status quo
Although the final full results of the US presidential election have yet to be officially announced, all the indications are there that Joe Biden has won the electoral college fairly decisively, and will be the next president. The candidate for the Democrats is 5.3 million votes ahead of Donald Trump...
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To what extent did the spycops target Palestine solidarity groups?
This week the Undercover Policing Inquiry finally got underway, albeit in an unusual, coronavirus-restricted virtual fashion. There has been a delay of more than five years since it was first formally announced by then Home Secretary Theresa May. The inquiry is investigating the deployment of undercover police officers in campaigning political...
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The Jewish Chronicle’s war of words against Palestinians and their supporters
Believe it or not, the Jewish Chronicle hasn’t always looked increasingly like a racist, anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim rag. Under the ownership of Asher Myers and Israel Davis between 1878 and 1906, in fact, the paper even had an anti-Zionist period. This was not as unusual as some readers may think....
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The ‘left-wing anti-Semitism’ hoax
We are now only ten days away from the US presidential election. Like it or not, the election affects us in the UK almost as much as those in the US. Such is the influence that the US has had on British policy for decades. The news recently broke that Trump’s...
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The spirit of Palestinian resistance
Palestinian political prisoner Maher Al-Akhras has been on hunger strike for 83 days now. A father of six children, Al-Akhras was arrested by Israel in July and has been held for months without charge or trial. This is a practice Israel calls “administrative detention”, that relies on a law that is...
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The Israeli merchants of death flying drones off Britain’s coastline
On Saturday, Palestine solidarity activists will be protesting once again outside the UK headquarters of the Israeli arms firm Elbit. The new group, Palestine Action, has called for supporters to join a mass rally against Elbit’s central London office on 77 Kingsway. Elbit is Israel’s largest private arms firm and is...
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The hidden toll of Labour's fabricated anti-Semitism crisis
A message left on the answerphone of a 71-year-old Jewish woman said: “You f***ing Nazi b**ch… You should burn in the gas oven. You dirty f***ing b**ch…. Stinking, stinking swine… You deserve … to burn in acid.” The victim of this hate crime was a Jewish member of the Labour...
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Could this religious extremist be Israel’s future prime minister?
Recently, I conducted a long interview with former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone for an upcoming project. He told me a number of interesting things. Right-wing commentator Charles Moore once described Livingstone as: “The only truly successful left-wing British politician of modern times.” He certainly lives up to that reputation...
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Gulf regimes’ normalisation with Israel will not placate the Palestinian struggle
The signing of the so-called “Abraham Accords” last week was an empty sham. A “peace deal” between three countries – Israel, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain – that, in fact, have never been at war, is clearly more of a public relations campaign than any genuine move towards...