A recent blog in the Times of Israel  by Dani Dayan, Chief Foreign Envoy of the YESHA council of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria (known to the rest of the world as the occupied West Bank) epitomised the extent of Zionist fraudulence. Arguing the necessity and legality of...

Since the bloody coup in Egypt, the country has been in an irrational state; it is all a bit unreal. Everything occurring in Egypt at the moment is farcical: the murders of innocent youth; the detention of honourable citizens; and the release of killers and corrupt individuals from prison....

Yesterday, a powerful car bomb ripped through a police headquarters in the Egyptian city of Mansoura. At least 14 people were killed and 120 more injured. Reportedly, five senior police officers were among the dead, and the injured include the area’s police chief. State television said it was the...

Palestinians and Israelis have met more than twenty times since July 2013 with little progress. Israel security issues dwarfed the final status negotiators while it continued to build, at an accelerated rate, “Jewish only” colonies undermining the very peace talks. Fearing its collapse, US Secretary of State John Kerry...

The distortion of Palestinian resistance has escalated in Israeli official rhetoric. During an IAF graduation ceremony, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared the intention “to strike those who threaten to damage our existence”. Holding Hamas responsible for what was described as “heightened tensions” by Israeli media, the continuous Israeli...

During the two and a half years of the Syrian war, there has been widespread anxiety in the region about the conflict spilling over into neighbouring countries. Nowhere is that more acutely felt than in Lebanon, which was wracked by its own protracted civil war from 1975 to 1990....

The United Nations has classed the Syrian refugee crisis as the worst since the Rwandan genocide ten years ago. They have compared it to the aftermath of the war and sectarian violence in Iraq and the conflicts that came out of the breakup of Yugoslavia. There are now over...

The agreement for the two seas Canal connecting the Red and Dead Sea was summed up best by Israeli water minister Silvan Shalom who jubilantly described it following the December 9 signing ceremony at the World Bank headquarters as “a historic agreement that realises…the dream of (founder of modern...

Paraphrasing the famous words of nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil, free and honourable Egyptians have declared, “If I wasn’t a Brotherhood member, I would wish to be a Brotherhood member.” They have taken to chanting this slogan following the interim government’s absurd decision to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist...

Last week European Union foreign affairs policy chief Catherine Ashton and her family were photographed on their Christmas holidays in Luxor visiting the Valley of the Kings and sailing the River Nile. According to the Middle East Media Center for Studies the EU chief also met with tourism minister...

Internationally-renowned Israeli musician Idan Raichel has come out in defence of a former IDF interrogator accused of torture. Doron Zahavi, referred to as “Captain George” until a gag order was lifted earlier this week, is suing the Israeli ministry of defence for having “turned him into a scapegoat“, following...

Eliminating chronology and context from the recent Palestinian resistance against Israel’s state terror, its ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, urged UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to condemn alleged Palestinian incitement against Israel. Conjuring the usual depiction of helpless citizens living in constant terror, Prosor stated: “I urge...

A recent report in the Times of Israel illustrates the emphasis which Israeli officials place upon diplomatic rhetoric, instead of expounding upon the prevailing expansionism associated with the Zionist settler-colonial state. The regular approval of further settlement construction in retaliation for the release of Palestinian political prisoners has portrayed...

Routine torture in Israeli prisons occasionally makes the news as a reminder of its existence combined with the perpetrators’ impunity. The recent outrage over detained Palestinian children exposed to extremely cold weather while held in outdoor cages by the Israeli Prison Service prompted a detailed discussion with the Public...

Dutch pension fund giant PGGM has withdrawn all its investments from Israel’s five largest banks because of their complicity in West Bank settlements. The report in Israeli newspaper Haaretz was apparently confirmed by PGGM this morning. The Israeli banks targeted are Bank Hapoalim, Bank Leumi, Bank Mizrahi-Tefahot, the First...

Echoing previous statements regarding Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to recognise the Palestinian right of return, Israeli government officials have declared their refusal of “a symbolic acceptance of the so-called right of return”. A report by the Chinese news agency Xinhua states that US Secretary of State John Kerry had proposed...

Israel has confirmed plans to start working on a pipeline to export natural gas to Jordan via the Dead Sea, informed Israeli sources told Bloomberg earlier this week. Work on the 15 km (9 mile) pipeline is expected to start in 2015 and will be completed in 2016. Israel...

Even by the standards of The New York Times’ news coverage, a recent Jodi Rudoren piece on “incitement” by Palestinians was abysmal. Based on the article’s word count, an estimated 70% of Rudoren’s piece is dedicated to putting forward the Israeli case about Palestinian ‘incitement’, with a mere 20%...

Other than the fact that they both graduated from the Military Academy, it is hard to find any similarities between the late president Gamal Abdel Nasser and the future president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi. Although Abdel Nasser is ultimately like any other officer and reached power by means of a...

During a political and cultural event organised by the Embassy of Palestine in Cuba and the Arab Union of Cuba, representatives of both organisations reiterated the importance of revolutionary struggle against colonialism and imperialism. The event commemorated the launch of Palestinian armed struggle against Israel in 1965, founded by...

They feared that he would appear like a lion behind bars, so they hid him at an undisclosed location and claimed falsely that he could not be transported to the court due to bad weather. He is an unarmed man, who has nothing but his faith in his Creator...

The British parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee held a special session on Tuesday to listen to the Palestinian and Israeli ambassadors to the UK, as well as Middle East experts, including Professor Rosemary Hollis, Professor Yezid Sayigh and Dr Ahron Bregman. The session, chaired by Richard Ottoway MP, quizzed...

The conflict in Syria is nothing if not complicated. Over the course of the conflict, which has now raged for two and a half years, the opposition to President Bashar Al-Assad has been splintered and multifaceted. It is difficult to speak about the rebels as a singular group, ranging...

Ariel Sharon, after fighting with the Haganah during the Nakba, went on to head up Unit 101, forces whose activities, in the words of Eyal Weizman, “mostly constituted the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian civilians in villages and refugee camps”. On one occasion, they expelled Bedouin in the Negev by...

A resident in Gaza has made himself an electric car to beat the fuel shortage and long queues at the petrol stations across the Gaza Strip. Although Monther Al-Qassas described his new car as “primitive”, he said that it solved his problem of spending too much time queuing for...

During the Arab Spring social media channels were elevated to heroic status. Tunisian Facebook pages bore the slogan ‘Ben Ali, Out’, a harsh signal to the former president in a country more used to censorship than freedom of speech. It was through Twitter that the Egyptian revolutionaries disclosed their...

The images of Gaza you see on the news are only half of the story. Images of destruction, reconstruction, poverty and conflict do not do justice to the lives that people lead in the densely populated and besieged Gaza Strip. Despite the hospitality of the people, there is an...

The incident about the subway ad sponsored by anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller (“In any war between the civilized man and the savage support the civilized man. Support Israel, defeat Jihad”), and the arrest of Mona Eltahawy over spray painting the ad, leaves one disillusioned with many of the Western...

The anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims, was brought from obscurity by the Egyptian television, al-Nas, and transformed by interested parties into a means to mobilize Muslims across the world against the West, and particularly the United States. The controversy generated by the film and the ensuing protests enabled French...

I love the spiritual side of Ramadan in London,” Houda Mizioudet from Tunisia who is holidaying in London told the Tripoli Post. I don’t like Ramadan in Tunisia. I love the cosmopolitan side of London. You go to different London mosques. In any London mosque you find people from...

Women wearing luminous orange vests and huge red rubber gloves sort through the cans and plastic bags passing by on the conveyor belt before them. The masks that cover their faces protect them from the hazardous gas released from the rubbish, as well as the stench. Outside, their colleagues...

If you have a craving for coffee in the middle of the night in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, it’s not difficult to find a café that’s open 24/7. The glare of light from the shops downtown fills the street well into the early hours; taxis roam the streets through...

In a move designed to challenge Israeli expansion in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a group of about 250 Palestinians claimed to have established the village of Bab al Shams in an area of land called E1 and the site of forthcoming illegal Israeli settlements.  The village’s name, borrowed from...

Israel’s preoccupation with sustaining a demographic majority has shifted focus to the Bedouin community in the Negev. A significant area targeted since the commencement of the occupation, the Bedouin community has faced discriminative practices which disrupt basic services and access to electricity and water, as well as forced displacement,...

Following the Israeli massacre during Operation Pillar of Defence and Palestine’s accession as a non-member state of the UN, many in Palestine have been clamouring for the right to indict Israeli officials for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PHCR) launched its...

The Palestinian human rights organization, Al Haq, recently published a position paper titled, ‘Feasting on the Occupation: Illegality of Settlement Produce and the Responsibility of EU Member States under International Law’. It provides a succinct debate about the economic repercussions for Palestinians and violation of international law by stakeholders...

Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem suffer “inequitable” Israeli predominance over their water supplies, claims a report from the UN Human Rights Council. Indeed, Israeli violations of the human rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories are described as “institutionalised discrimination” in the report, which is the product...

According to a report in the United Press International, Israel’s outgoing Deputy Foreign Minister, Danny Ayalon, stated that Israel should be willing to recognise Palestine if Palestinians are ready to give up ‘terrorism’. The veiled discourse of security can once again be discerned owing to Israel’s deconstruction of Palestinian...

Samer Issawi’s hunger strike in protest against administrative detention has exposed the myth of human rights organisations and the limits of official concern from the international community. The pervading silence about Issawi’s deteriorating conditions as a result of Israel’s apartheid and discriminative policies against Palestinians has been challenged by...

Far from the targeting of Palestinian children being a fabrication designed to gain sympathy, this reality was publicly exposed by IDF soldier Mor Ostrovski, who uploaded a photo to his Instagram account depicting a child seen through the cross hairs of a rifle. The photo generated outrage throughout social...

Administrative detention and the postponement of court hearings seem to go hand in hand with Israeli courts’ fabrication of justice. Samer Al Issawi and Ayman Al Sharawna have been once again shackled to their hunger strike, as deferrals pushed hearings to later dates, while solidarity with prisoners on hunger-strike...

In an interview with the New Internationalist last year American scholar Norman Finkelstein pointed out recent, prominent defections from American support for Israel; New Yorker editor, David Remnick, previous editor of the New Republic Peter Beinhart and Nobel prize-winning and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Despite this, a...

Israel’s “concern” once again propels itself into news headlines as Tel Aviv warns that a “new intifada” could begin following the death of Ahmed Jaradat while being interrogated in Israeli custody. Refusing to accept responsibility for the escalation of protests against its policies, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has...

For the first time in twenty years, Hebrew is on the curriculum in Hamas-run schools in the Gaza Strip. Around 750 ninth-grade students are learning the language of Israel, under a pilot scheme that could be rolled out to other schools in the coming years. The Islamic University in...

On March 16, activists will be remembering the day when Israeli soldiers annihilated the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist Rachel Corrie’s life. Ten years ago, whilst striving to protect a Palestinian family home from possible demolition by Israeli soldiers, Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer – an...

In Jordan, the parliamentary elections in January were viewed as little more than an exercise in public relations. At least this is the sentiment among those who oppose the election law on the basis that it endorses government loyalists and tribal leaders, excludes emerging political parties and represents a...

Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has revealed that this week Israeli soldiers arrested twenty-seven young Palestinians in route 160, Hebron, whilst they were on their way to school. At least 14 of them were under the age of 12 and some were as young as eight. Though they are...

Reports concerning conflict diamonds have largely dealt with labour exploitation and subsequent use of profits falling into the hands of rebel groups in Africa unleashing massacres on various communities – notoriously personified by Liberia’s Charles Taylor. The UN’s Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, described on its website as ‘unique and...

On January 16, 2013 the Association for Civil Rights in Israel filed a petition against government plans to forcibly displace around 1,000 Palestinians living in rural villages in the Yatta District in South Hebron, known as Firing Zone 918. The High Court’s response was to issue a temporary injunction...

Syria once smelt of strong black coffee and sheesha pipes. People played backgammon in crowded coffee shops late into the night, whilst the aroma of fresh chicken drifted through the air from street stalls that lined the pavements. Markets were piled high with Syrian soap and wooden boxes with...