Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Jordan's domestic pressures and the US empire
Last weekend, Jordan announced that it would end the lease of two enclaves of land to Israel. As part of the unjust 1994 peace deal signed between Israel and Jordan, the latter gave Israelis access to these Jordanian territories for 25 years. But on Sunday, the lease expired. Jordan’s king announced...
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Israel has kidnapped a Palestinian socialist and is torturing her
Khalida Jarrar is a leading Palestinian activist for women’s rights and prisoners’ rights. She is a socialist MP elected to the Palestinian Authority’s moribund legislative council, as part of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). All of this makes her an enemy in the eyes of...
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Israeli mercenaries are a threat to democracy and human rights around the world
Recent reports have revealed that a cyber-spying company in the United Arab Emirates has been hiring former Israeli intelligence officers. DarkMatter, which has intimate links with the UAE government, has been paying exorbitant sums in an effort to lure these spooks away from Israel. Their pay packets are said...
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The PA is doing Israel’s dirty work; that’s why it was created
Despite what you may have heard, the Palestinian Authority is not a “Palestinian government”. Indeed, “Palestinian Authority” is a misnomer, as the entity has no genuine authority, and does not act in the interests of most Palestinians. Above all else, it is certainly not a democratic body. There have been...
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Nelson Mandela’s church has adopted a boycott of Israel to be emulated
Nelson Mandela’s church, the Methodist Church of Southern Africa, this month endorsed Palestine’s Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). At a recent conference in Cape Town, the church denounced “Israel’s ongoing ill-treatment and oppression of Palestinian people, and the historic prophetic role played by the church and international community in...
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Labour’s right-wing, anti-Corbyn MPs are slowly purging themselves
So, another one bites the dust. Louise Ellman MP quit the Labour Party this week. The chairperson of Labour Friends of Israel is the latest in a line of right-wing Labour MPs to quit the party in protest against its left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn. Ellman is the second LFI chairperson...
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Gas deal with Israel proves Jordan is still a client state
Considerable attention is paid by Western media to the governments of official enemies, when they lack democracy. The Western media’s long attention span for Syria’s democratic deficiencies, as one example, is all too often not motivated by genuine concern for the peoples of the region, but by subservience to their...
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Demi Lovato proves that Brand Israel is now toxic
“Brand Israel” was launched. As I’ve written before, this public relations strategy was an utter failure. War crimes, apartheid and denial of basic human rights are a hard sell, it seems. By now, Israel is a completely toxic brand, even for some of its own supporters. Israel no longer has the...
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Anti-Palestinianism is the modern day McCarthyism
As regular readers of this column will know, the McCarthyite atmosphere in Britain against supporters of Palestinian rights is getting worse. That is down in part to the Labour Party leadership’s acquiescence to the smear campaign to portray the party as anti-Semitic. The Labour National Executive Committee’s acceptance of...
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Israelis just voted for occupation – stop pretending they want peace
Israelis have just voted in favour of continuing to deny all Palestinians, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, equal rights....
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Israel’s systemic harassment of human rights workers
Last week Israel launched its latest attack against Palestinian human rights workers. Israeli army thugs raided the offices of Addameer, a prisoners rights association, stealing some of its computers and hard drives. This is all part of Israel’s long-running war against the Palestinian civilian population. It is a war to...
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Israel has been caught spying on the US, again
A recent report on the US news site Politico revealed that in 2017, US intelligence agencies discovered several cell phone interception devices near the White House. They concluded that Israel had most likely installed these “StingRay” spying devices, in an attempt to listen in on President Donald Trump’s phone...
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Netanyahu’s annexation plan is a liberal Zionist dream
The liberal Zionist “two state solution” supporters have been out in force, tweeting about how they “condemn” and are “concerned” about Benjamin Netanyahu and his plan to annex as much as a third of the occupied West Bank. With Israel’s latest General Election coming up next week, on Tuesday...
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The Palestinians resisting Israel’s threats of detention and death
Political prisoner Amir Makhoul has been released after almost a decade in an Israeli dungeon. He has given his first interview to the anti-apartheid activist, Adri Nieuwhof, who has been corresponding with him in prison all these years. Makhoul was the director of a Ittijah, a union of Palestinian community organisations...
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The plight of the Palestinian people is to face racism, anywhere and everywhere
Seventeen-year-old Ismail Ajjawi must have been giddy with excitement when he, a Palestinian refugee living in southern Lebanon, won a major scholarship to Harvard University. The prospect of a new life studying medicine in the United States, in one of the world’s most prestigious universities, must have been absolutely...
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Israel would not exist without ethnic cleansing
In 2006, dissident Israeli historian Ilan Pappé published his most seminal work, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Although far from the first book which told the truth about the Nakba (Catastrophe), The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine set the facts out in particularly clear and accessible terms. Pappé popularised and...
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Next up, a Saudi embassy in Jerusalem
It is open season for Arab normalisation with Israel. The brutal absolutist monarchies which rule in the Arab Gulf countries have increasingly found common cause with Israel in recent years. And this sickening mutual appreciation society for oppressors is only getting more blatant. Despite not having any formal diplomatic relationship...
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Trump’s anti-Semitic comments have a history in Zionism
US President Donald Trump added to his repertoire of racist comments this week, by making his latest, most openly anti-Semitic remark yet. “Any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat – I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” he said. He later clarified that this...
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Labour’s fabricated anti-Semitism crisis is a threat to free speech
UK MP Chris Williamson has begun legal action against Labour, the British political party which has suspended his membership. The treatment of Williamson by Labour’s bureaucrats has been totally unjust and completely bizarre. His situation is only the latest in a long line of phoney examples of anti-Semitism, which have...
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UK council's ban on cycle ride for Palestine proof anti-Semitism definition is about protecting Israel
Last week the Palestine Solidarity Campaign revealed that a council in East London had banned the use of any of its parks by a charity bike ride for Palestinian kids. The Big Ride for Palestine holds annual sponsored events in London and Manchester to raise money for Palestinian children’s charities. This...
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It’s time for progressives to get off the fence over BDS
The boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement has come a long way since it was formed in 2005. Once known only to a relatively small group of activists, BDS now makes headlines in mainstream media the world over. One opinion piece yesterday asked, “Does anyone take the BDS movement...
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The truth is out about Israel’s cover-up of Nakba facts
Recent news reports have shed light on the lengths to which Israel’s security establishment is going in order to cover-up the history of the country’s war crimes against Palestinians. A long piece in Haaretz earlier this month explained that for the best part of two decades, Israel has had...
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How Israel teaches its children to hate
Much like white South Africans, Jewish Israelis will never voluntarily give up their privileged position as settlers...
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The solution to Israel’s siege on Gaza is decolonisation
Unemployment in the Gaza Strip now stands at more than 50 per cent. Enforced joblessness is “as high as 69 per cent in the under-26 age bracket,” according to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. These shocking statistics tell you a lot about the truly desperate state of affairs in the...
