Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Israel under cover of the coronavirus crisis
The populations of many countries the world over are right now living under unprecedented quarantine measures and restrictions on movement. The threat of the rapidly spreading coronavirus pandemic has changed the world for the foreseeable future. It is true that most people who contract COVID-19 (the disease caused by this new...
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Where did Israel’s Mossad get 100,000 coronavirus testing kits from?
Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, has caused an unprecedented global pandemic. This has spread fear, suffering and needless death around much of the world. Due to the genuine and serious threat to public safety, governments are taking steps usually only witnessed in wartime to curb freedom...
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Refusing to take yes for an answer
Some of Israel’s most successful strategies are simply its intransigence and extremism. Even those of us opposed to Israeli war crimes – apartheid and occupation – should be honest enough to recognise the strengths of the enemy. It is only by knowing your enemy that you can work to defeat...
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The Palestinian artist jailed by Israel for the ‘crime’ of inspiring his people
Today he may be sitting and rotting in an Israeli cell, but in 2012 Palestinian graphic designer Hafez Omar’s posters were setting the internet alight. On Facebook in particular, his simple, iconic, anonymous brown avatars in support of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel spread like wildfire. People all over...
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Listing companies to boycott over Israeli war crimes is a start…
The UN finally published its database this month listing companies which profit from Israel’s brutal military occupation of the West Bank. This move was only made after years of unexplained delays. Rather helpfully, though, the Zionist Federation – an anti-Palestine, pro-Israel lobby group in Britain — admitted that, “The...
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The decline and fall of Labor Zionism
Britain’s Labour leadership hustings held last week by the party’s internal pro-Israel lobby were a bizarre sight to behold. Organised jointly by the Jewish Labour Movement and Labour Friends of Israel, the event put all the candidates to replace Jeremy Corbyn as party leader through a grilling based almost...
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The Israel lobby is mobilising to stop Bernie Sanders
In September 2016, the Jewish Labour Movement in Britain held a small barbecue to establish a new youth wing. Thanks to the fact that an undercover journalist from Al Jazeera was among the tiny handful of attendees, we know in quite some detail what was said at the event. The...
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Labour is rigged against Palestine solidarity
Labour seems to now formally consider use of the blandly factual phrase 'Israel lobby' to be 'anti-Semitic'...
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Labour’s fabricated anti-Semitism crisis is being replicated in America
As far as Zionist lobby groups are concerned, the verdict has finally sunk in: they defeated Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. According to one of them at least; the hard-right, anti-Palestinian group misnamed the “Campaign Against Antisemitism” . Last month one of the group’s leaders posted an utterly bizarre video...
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Trump’s plan is the logical conclusion of the ‘two-state’ delusion - Part 2
Click here to read Part One. The project to create a Jewish state in Palestine has always been a fundamentally racist one – and will always be so as long as the project lasts. Until Zionist militias violently expelled half of the indigenous population in 1948, Palestine was always a...
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Trump’s plan is the logical conclusion of the ‘two state’ delusion - Part 1
So the administration of US President Donald Trump finally published its “Ultimate Deal”, a document being trumpeted as a “peace plan”. But in reality, it is nothing of the sort. It is more like a plan for the pacification of Palestinian resistance; a formula for the liquidation of the Palestinian...
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The annexation of the West Bank is coming
We are about to witness the third Israeli election in the space of one year. The elections for the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, which are coming in March, are being held after the failure of anyone to either score an overall majority or to forge a coalition government. Israeli prime minister, Benjamin...
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UK PM’s threat to Palestine is also a threat to our free speech
The entire western world is facing an almost unprecedented assault on freedom of speech – and Palestine is the issue at hand. In the United States over the last few years, at the urging of the Israel lobby, 28 states have now passed laws targeting the BDS movement, for boycott,...
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Free Jonathan Pollak
Back in my mid-twenties, I went off to Palestine to become a solidarity activist. I volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – a group which used to take part in non-violent Palestinian protests in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. All told, I spent the best part of two...
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Will Israel ‘invade The Hague’ now?
A supposed Israeli “civil rights” lawyer once wrote an opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post under the headline “Israel needs to invade The Hague”. The writer was Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, then the founder-director and now the president of Shurat HaDin — the Israel Law Centre — which is actually a...
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Think about this at Christmas: Israel’s war on Palestinians targets Christians too
Here’s a particularly galling thought for Christmas: Israel is much like the Grinch or Ebenezer Scrooge, as it once again does its best to spoil the festive season for Palestine’s indigenous Christians. Unlike these two fictional characters, however, Israel has no redeeming features; it is not going to come...
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Trump demonstrates again why Zionism is anti-Semitism
You have to hand it to Donald Trump, he knows which side his bread is buttered. Spewing out disgusting remarks that some of the commentariat deemed only “controversial” at worst, Trump attended the Israeli-American Council’s (AIC) national summit earlier this month. A major pro-Israel lobby group, the IAC is bankrolled by...
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Zionism relies on white supremacism
A long-term strategic aim of the Zionist movement has been to foment sectarianism in Palestine and the wider region. It’s a classic trick out of the imperialist playbook: divide and rule. This has, of course, been successful to some extent. The false division of the region into “Arab versus Jew”...
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Israel’s international war against human rights
Israel has a long record of camouflaging the truth where Palestine is concerned. Integral to this, in recent years, has been the growing war against human rights groups documenting Israel’s abuses against Palestinians and other Arabs. Israel’s hostility towards such groups is targeted, first and foremost, against Palestinians themselves. The office of...
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Labour’s ‘anti-Semitism crisis’ will continue until all pro-Palestine members are silenced
There’s no getting away from the fact that last Thursday’s General Election was a disaster for the left in Britain. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party lost almost as many seats as it did in the calamitous 1983 election. Labour’s leader at the time was Michael Foot, who, like Corbyn, was also...
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The pro-Israel lobby is on the decline; let’s help it on its way
A lot has been written about the pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian lobby over the years. Many take the view that the US and Britain have their foreign policy dictated to them by Israel and its influential lobby groups in the West. I don’t intend to revisit the whole debate over the lobby...
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The transatlantic anti-Semitism smear campaign
Here we are, with another General Election and another seemingly coordinated round of allegations to smear Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. Labour has found it almost impossible during this election campaign to actually talk about its policies. Every time it launches a new one, the journalists just want...
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It may not know it, but the US is accelerating the end of Israel’s apartheid regime
Last week US President Donald Trump’s administration made a notable move. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the US is reversing previous policy which basically accepted that Israel’s colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank are a violation of international law. This is a moment of some significance and...
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Demand Israel stop its oppression of Omar Barghouti
For the last decade and more, Omar Barghouti has been one of the world’s most important Palestinian public intellectuals. A co-founder of the BDS movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, Barghouti has been instrumental in spreading the word about the movement. His clear-sighted, logical and humanistic arguments for BDS...
