Russia has stepped up its military assistance to Syria, including armored vehicles and drones and precision-guided bombs, informed sources told Reuters news agency. A number of sources told Reuters that Assad forces received since December arms and military supplies including drones, which Russia arranged to deliver to Syria whether...

In the days following the official resumption of US-led “peace talks” between Israel and Palestine, the Israeli government decided to expand its list of illegal settlements eligible for government subsidies and approved a plan to build more than 1,000 new settler homes in the Occupied Territories. Meanwhile the US...

After much political drama and media fanfare, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to rekindle “peace talks” between Israel and Palestine finally commenced this week with a meeting in Washington D.C. between the Israeli justice minister, Tzipi Livni, and Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat. Of course this was...

Recent events in Egypt have polarized more than just Egyptians. Activists around the world have also been divided ever since the mass protests against President Morsi on 30th June. Some have voiced support for the military coup on 3rd July that ousted the president and his government from power,...

Historically the US political and media mainstream has often dismissed those who are critical of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic, making it difficult for solidarity activists, including Jewish Americans, to speak out. And although the climate is changing, even today critical conversations that are commonplace in Israel are often still...

Much of the world may not know this, but there are many tens of thousands of opponents of the State of Israel living in and around New York City. And although they are vocal, their voices are being silenced. While many of us are aware of the existence of...

Eight years ago this week, a coalition of Palestinian civil society organizations issued the global call for a Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel in response to the international community’s continued failure to hold Israel accountable for denying Palestinians “their fundamental rights of freedom, equality, and self-determination...

Many Western activists are sceptical of the role of religion in Palestine solidarity. Beyond the problem of Islamophobia, which is sadly manifest across the political spectrum, activist views of religion are also negatively shaped by the legacy of Christian Europe’s darker periods, such as the Crusades and the colonial...

While France and Russia are busy engaging in last minute diplomacy to prevent a US strike against Syria, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is deploying hundreds of activists in the US capital to win over Congressional support for the strike. AIPAC is considered to be the most...

Like many US presidents passed, President Obama is determined to violently attack others in the name of morality and the common good. He and other American exceptionalists tell us that the US has a moral obligation to enter into the Syrian conflict, even though any such military intervention goes...

In 2007, Israel strengthened its occupation of Palestine by placing the Gaza Strip under a siege, restricting the movement of people and goods in and out of the enclave. By denying the population in Gaza direct access to the world by sea or air, the only two entry and...

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington two years ago, the US Congress gave him 29 standing ovations, four more than they had given to President Obama during his State of the Union address earlier that year, leaving some to wonder which leader is the real decider-in-chief...

Last April, the Zionist Organization of America and the student group Owls for Israel invited Israeli Colonel Bentzi Gruber to speak at Florida Atlantic University (FAU). Gruber was traveling across the US for a series of talks on “Ethics in the Field: An Inside Look at the Israel Defense...

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and to celebrate the organisation has been holding a series of high profile events across the US. Last week, the ADL hosted a centennial conference in New York featuring US ambassador to the UN Samantha...

The New York Times recently published an editorial by Yuval Steinitz, an Israeli politician and Knesset member for the Likud party, under the headline “How Palestinian hate prevents peace”. It is not necessary to elaborate on the argument that Steinitz presents in this article, as the title speaks for...

“After I stop eating, how many days does it take before the hunger pains go away? How long will I continue to suffer from thirst? And how many days can I go before I risk dying?” Fortunately most of us will never have to ask these questions, let alone...

Last weekend McClatchy newspapers published an article under the headline “Egypt’s ‘revolution’ is over as people accept imposition of military rule”. In the article journalist Nancy A. Youssef remarks that, “Egypt now resembles the kind of police state whose oppressive policies” once gave rise to the Arab uprisings. The...

In North America, the mainstream media is not exactly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. This presents a huge obstacle for solidarity activists who want to change the hegemonic discourse of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to reflect the reality on the ground: that Israel is an occupying power systematically cleansing Palestinians...

Earlier this month, Oxfam published 20 facts about Oslo that painfully illustrate why the “peace talks” between Israel and Palestine have abysmally failed. In the past ten years alone, the number of illegal Israeli settlers has doubled while Israel has constructed a 708 km separation wall around the West...

Last month, the Palestinian movement Islamic Jihad staged a protest at Al-Quds University that sparked an international controversy, leading two American universities to take the decision to sever ties with the Palestinian university in occupied East Jerusalem. While the protest, which was staged on 5 November, was indeed problematic...

It has now been five years since the sentencing of the Holy Land Five: Muslim-American humanitarians who were falsely convicted of providing “material support for terrorism” because of their charitable work in Palestine. To mark the occasion, the daughters of the Holy Land Five have produced a powerful video...

It is widely known that Israel and its allies spend millions of dollars to promote Zionism on college and university campuses across the US. Zionist organisations fund student groups like Hillel, the largest Jewish campus organisation in the world, as well as sponsor American Jewish students to travel or...

American Zionists are once again up in arms about an event taking place later this week at Brooklyn College in New York City featuring Ben White, a researcher and writer for MEMO. White is currently on a speaking tour of North America to discuss Israeli policies of segregation and...

As the New Year approaches and we step back to reflect upon 2013, it becomes increasingly obvious that cracks are emerging in Israel’s most special relationship. While the occupation of Washington continues uncontested, more and more Americans are carving out other spaces of resistance that challenge the hegemony of...

In recent days, a group of American scholars have been debating publicly whether or not to boycott Israel. According to the New York Times, the American Studies Association (ASA) will disclose today the results of its members’ vote on a resolution to endorse an academic boycott of Israel that...

Ever since the 3 July military coup that ousted Egypt’s first democratically elected government, the world has stood back to witness the Egyptian authorities’ brazen attempt to cleanse an entire community from Egypt’s population. As an American citizen I have to ask: how many Egyptians need to be killed,...

MEMO published an article recently by Egyptian scholar and diplomat Abdullah Al-Ashaal about what he calls the disastrous “bartering policy” framework of the ongoing negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In theory, the way this framework is supposed to work is that both parties have their sets of demands...

Here we are again. A decade on from the American-British war of aggression against Iraq, the cruise-missile liberals are demanding that “something must be done” about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Something” inevitably amounts to bombing. What would it take for them to shut up for once? I wish TV...

The peace process circus continued this week, as officials from Israel met in Jerusalem with negotiators from its Palestinian Authority puppet regime Wednesday night. Meeting in secrecy at the dead of night, it now looks as though the talks are due to become a weekly fixture for the next...

The birth of a “Jewish state” in a country overwhelmingly not Jewish required a massive act of ethnic cleansing in Palestine. Between 1947 and 1949, Zionist militias executed this catastrophe by driving out some 750,000 Palestinians. This is commemorated as the Nakba. The latest incarnation of this on-going Nakba...

The 13th of September will mark 20 years since the White House lawn signing ceremony between Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, flanked by former US President Bill Clinton. The signing of Declaration of Principles initiated the related series of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization known as...

Muhammad Assaf, a Palestinian singer from a Gaza refugee camp won the Arab Idol reality TV show. I was in Ramallah on the night of his victory, and I too celebrated enthusiastically. I too felt as if the divided Palestinian national body, spread around Gaza, the West Bank and...

This Ramadan, Israeli restrictions on Palestinians worshippers in Jerusalem are as bad as ever. According to a weekly report of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: “age criteria and permit requirements continued to be applied and Palestinians from the Gaza Strip...

The Arab world is going through a turbulent period. A wave of popular uprisings that began in December 2010 with the self-immolation of Muhammed Bouazizi in Tunisia has had ripples as far west as Morocco and as far east as Bahrain. Complicated and unpredictable revolutionary processes have been set...

This month’s historic disclosures about the US National Security Agency by tireless journalist Glenn Greenwald have embarrassed the Obama administration and its allies. Greenwald’s source is Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor who has blown the whistle on a massive global snooping programme. The disclosures to date are massive...

A poll of American Jews published by Pew Research this week had a headline finding that many will perhaps find surprising: “Jews’ feelings for Israel are equaled or even exceeded by those of white evangelical Protestants.” Pew found that 82 percent of white evangelicals “believe God gave the land of...

This past week marked a decade since the sad, early passing-away by cancer of Edward Said, and I would like to dedicate this column to him. Edward Said was an intellectual and moral powerhouse. As an English literature professor at New York’s Columbia University, for many years he was...

What has the record of 2011’s Arab uprisings taught us so far? One could list many things, but to me, the most striking reality is the now open nature of the alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel. This alliance represents a permanent counter-revolution which together dominates the region –...

Courageous American journalist Glenn Greenwald had another massive scoop this week, revealing a secret agreement that American spy agency the NSA made with Israel. A memorandum of understanding between the NSA and Israel’s equivalent agency (which the Guardian published in full), provided to Greenwald by whistle-blower Edward Snowden, shows...

Of all the stupid justifications given for the American plan to bomb Syria, this week I read the stupidest one yet in a Guardian column. Probably the most common stupid reason is that which states America’s “credibility” will be damaged if it doesn’t bomb Syria. This is the “credibility”...

Media coverage of the release of 26 Palestinian prisoners last week, such as it was, tended to focus on their alleged crimes. Especially in the Israeli media, the reader is called to sympathise with Israeli victims and understand what a great sacrifice Israel is supposedly making for peace. Palestinian...

Due to the large number of complaints we’ve received which deemed this article to be offensive to the sacrifices of the Syrian people in their struggle for justice, it has been removed. Asa Winstanley stands by his article....

Palestinians have long suspected their leader Yasser Arafat was assassinated by Israel. Thanks to Clayton Swisher and his team at the Al Jazeera Investigations Unit, we have new evidence they were right all along. His 2004 death, in then-unclear circumstances, was almost certainly caused by a manufactured radioactive poison...

Only a week ago I wrote in this very column of my hope for more revelations about Israel emerging from the cache of secret National Security Agency documents leaked by Edward Snowden. My wish has been fulfilled already.   A long article published in last weekend’s New York Times...

Glenn Greenwald is on a roll. This column has followed his historic coverage of Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents with great interest. Last week there was another intriguing revelation that implicated Israel.   In a Le Monde article co-written with a French journalist, Greenwald revealed that Israel...

This week, the pop star Rihanna played a gig in Tel Aviv, despite many requests made to her by Palestinian and solidarity activists to observe the cultural boycott of Israel. As usual, BDS campaigners tirelessly posted messages on Facebook and Twitter pages asking her to cancel her gig. She...

Fortress Europe’s tyrannical border continues to claim lives. Last week there was another terrible shipwreck in the Mediterranean which claimed the lives of dozens of desperate, fleeing refugees. It came only a week after the last tragedy, off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which killed more...

During the recent media dust-up over the Daily Mail’s attack on Labour leader Ed Milliband’s father, many people on the left called attention to the right-wing tabloid’s history of support for the Nazis. All well and good, but to me the more salient issue was the Mail’s toxic coverage...

The alliance between the apartheid state of Israel and the absolutist monarchy of the Saudi royal dictatorship is no longer merely tacit. After recent diplomatic moves to cool tensions with Iran by the administration of US President Barack Obama, the Saudi royals seem to be engaging in a collective...

The death of South African liberation icon Nelson Mandela last night has brought in floods of well-deserved tributes. But the hypocrisy of many of these, often from the very same politicians who formerly denounced him a “terrorist,” seems to know no bounds. The mythology that has grown up around...