Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
-
Labour is slipping back into Zionist hegemony
The Trades Union Congress (TUC) this week agreed a motion proposed by the general union Unite, opposing Israel’s plan to annex much of the West Bank, and calling for sanctions against the occupation state. The motion was historic in more ways than one. Significantly, it twice used the word “apartheid”...
-
Israel: A rogue state
Last week, US President Donald Trump’s administration announced that it was imposing economic sanctions on the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The decree was announced by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who reported that the US would: “Not tolerate illegitimate attempts to subject Americans to...
-
Israel: Secret trials to detain unconvicted Palestinian charity worker on bogus charges
The release of leading Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activist Mahmoud Nawajaa last month was a welcome reminder that people power can work. When Nawajaa was kidnapped by a gang of Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night at the end of July, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions...
-
Israel’s false flag anti-Semitism
“The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies” – thus spoke the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl. Herzl was far from the only Zionist to advocate for an alliance with anti-Semites, and this malign pattern still holds today. In Ukraine, for example, Israel has been arming...
-
Israel’s characteristic Beirut hypocrisy
The massive explosion which devastated Beirut earlier this month was nothing short of a catastrophe. Some 220 people lost their lives and, according to the BBC, as many as 300,000 people are now homeless as a result. This is a devastating blow from which it will take Lebanon’s capital...
-
The UAE’s perfidious normalisation plan with Israel
One year ago I predicted in this column that a Saudi embassy to Israel in Jerusalem was coming soon. With last week’s news about the United Arab Emirates, it looks as if we are moving closer towards such a tragic eventuality. US President Donald Trump formally announced that the UAE and Israel had signed a...
-
Israelis do not support Palestinian equality
It is a common platitude amongst some of the weaker parts of the Palestine solidarity movement that “Israelis want peace” and do not support their government’s policies of oppression against the Palestinians and other Arabs peoples. But the facts simply don’t bear this out. Let’s take a cursory examination of...
-
Free Mahmoud Nawajaa!
A nine-year-old boy shouts: “Leave dad alone. Get out. Your dog doesn’t scare me!” The boy’s home has just been invaded in the middle of the night by a score of soldiers in full battle-dress, armed to the teeth. Accompanying them is a vicious, trained military hound. The boy and his...
-
Israel’s global cybercrime racket
Earlier this month an Israeli court ruled that notorious cyberwarfare spyware firm NSO Group would retain its export licence. The ruling came despite the fact that lawyers for Amnesty International presented what the human rights group described as “mountains of evidence” concerning NSO’s crimes. NSO is responsible for Pegasus, a sophisticated...
-
The pro-Israel lobby is smearing Black Lives Matter as a ‘terrorist’ movement
The global Black Lives Matter movement has become a major strategic threat to Israel. At least, that’s how the pro-Israel lobby increasingly views it. One obscure lobby group recently ratcheted up its anti-BLM rhetoric a notch. Something calling itself the “Zachor Legal Institute” has started to attack BLM online for...
-
Fifteen years of BDS has united all Palestinians and their supporters
Today marks 15 years since the official foundation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Palestine. The movement against Israeli apartheid has a long history and deep roots, but it was on 9 July 2005 that it was established formally with the publication of the “Palestinian Civil...
-
The Black Lives Matter movement’s stand with Palestinians has a history
It is common to think of Black Lives Matter as a single group when it isn’t; it is a movement. Indeed, it is a movement for Black liberation which first erupted in response to police brutality in 2014, following the killing of two African Americans: Mike Brown in Ferguson,...
-
Time to disband the Palestinian Authority
Since 1993, the Palestinian Authority (PA) has policed Palestinians in the West Bank and, until 2007, the Gaza Strip. Under Israel’s apartheid regime, the PA has no authority to police the Israeli settlers who illegally occupy the West Bank – quite the opposite. In fact, the PA protects them. Many people,...
-
Churchill was an anti-Semite who embraced Zionism as a colonial tool
Recent Black Lives Matter protests in Britain have thrown a light on the country’s history of colonialism, racism and slavery. Throughout the 17th century, and much of the 18th, the British Empire was a leading force in the transatlantic slave trade. The trade was imposed by Europe on Africa,...
-
Legal blow for pro-Israel lobby as BDS continues its long advance
The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) had a landmark legal victory against Israel last week. The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously against the convictions of Palestinian-rights campaigners by French courts for BDS protests they staged more than a decade ago. In September 2009 and May 2010, the...
-
Palestine activists have 2 billion opportunities to pressure for divestment
Local government pension schemes hold direct investments worth more than £2.3 billion in companies involved in Israeli war crimes and apartheid, it was revealed this week. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on Friday published a new database documenting the many ways that local government employees’ pension contributions are being misused...
-
The Silicon Valley cyber-monopolies are a threat to free speech
Of the articles I have written so far this year, one of the most popular has been a piece I wrote in January for The Electronic Intifada, about an Israeli lobby operative’s bizarre video claiming to have “slaughtered” Jeremy Corbyn in the election. During the winter holiday season, Joe Glasman...
-
Israel is a safe haven for criminals and terrorists
David Sheen, a friend of mine and a fellow journalist, published a great investigative story the other month. It tells a tale of murder, racism, duplicity, and justice denied. In October 1985, Palestinian-American civil rights activist Alex Odeh was murdered by Zionist fanatics in California. Odeh was blown to smithereens by...
-
Israel: 72 years of catastrophe
Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias and the newly-formed Israeli army expelled more than half of the indigenous population of Palestine. Some 800,000 Palestinians were either forced out literally at the barrel of a gun, or fled in fear of being massacred by the Zionist forces. This is commemorated by Palestinians...
-
Israeli spy firm uses coronavirus cover to impose global mass surveillance
NSO Group has become one of Israel’s most notorious mercenary private spy agencies. For an eye-wateringly high fee, the firm flogs a malware suite called Pegasus in order to allow some of the world’s worst dictatorships to spy on its enemies. Once infiltrated onto a target’s phone, Pegasus can steal an...
-
Annexation of occupied territory is a crime
Israel is about to annex large swathes of the occupied West Bank, making the territory formally part of the Zionist state according to Israeli law. The millions of Palestinians living in the West Bank will continue to be denied the vote and even the most basic of human rights...
-
Has the FBI been spying on US citizens at Israel’s behest?
US Federal Bureau of Investigation documents obtained by The Intercept and published at the start of April made for fascinating reading. They showed that federal officers conducted a 2004-2006 “terrorism” investigation into the International Solidarity Movement, a non-violent Palestine solidarity group. The investigation proved only that the ISM was exactly...
-
Jeremy Corbyn was defeated because he refused to defend himself against the Israel lobby
So that’s it. Jeremy Corbyn is out. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. With the media’s attention rightly focused on the coronavirus pandemic, coverage of Corbyn’s departure as Labour leader last weekend was muted. In truth, the die had already been cast the moment Corbyn announced, after December’s election...
-
Israel needs the Arab world to be ruled by dictators
In February, the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s global death squad, visited Doha, the capital of Qatar; Yossi Cohen was accompanied by Major General Herzi Halevi, the head of the Israeli army’s Southern Command. They went at the invitation of Emir Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani and met with national...