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Asa Winstanley

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist living in London who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He has been visiting Palestine since 2004 and is originally from south Wales. He writes for the award-winning Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada where he is an associate editor and also a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor.

 

Items by Asa Winstanley

  • Keep your eyes on Palestine

    This is going to be my last MEMO column for a few months. I’m taking some time off to focus on finishing a long-term project which I’ve been working on. If that sounds a bit mysterious, fear not: details will be revealed when I return from my break. With that...

  • Israel has lost the apartheid propaganda war

    Who wrote the following quote? “Whereas the Afrikaner apostles of apartheid in South Africa, for example, brazenly proclaimed their sin, the practitioners of apartheid in Palestine beguilingly protest their innocence.” Amnesty International? Human Rights Watch (HRW)? Perhaps even the Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem? Since January of last year – culminating...

  • Palestinian prisoners have commenced a boycott of Israeli courts

    The latest episode of European Union hypocrisy over Palestine came to light this week with the case of Amal Nakhleh. Nakhleh is a Palestinian teen who was still a child – 17 years of age – when he was first arrested in January of last year. Like hundreds of other Palestinians,...

  • A victory for common sense and free speech in Germany

    Where in the world exists the most repression of solidarity with the Palestinian people? The correct answer, of course, is within occupied historical Palestine itself. Palestinians are subjected by the Israeli regime to a military dictatorship in the West Bank, a brutal siege and periodic massacres in Gaza and systemic discrimination...

  • Palestinians don’t need Israel investigated, they need justice

    Last week, 80-year-old Palestinian-American Omar Asad was kidnapped, tied up, and apparently tortured by Israeli army thugs in the West Bank. He was found dead soon after. It’s the kind of brutality habitually imposed upon Palestinians by the illegitimate Zionist regime to maintain a “pure” Jewish state in historical Palestine. But...

  • Emma Watson post shows Israel’s anti-Semitism smears are beginning to break down

    Harry Potter actress Emma Watson was smeared on Monday by a racist Israeli official. More on this later. But first, it’s important to note that the Israeli government has always fabricated anti-Semitism smears against its enemies. This goes right back to the foundation of the State of Israel itself in 1948,...

  • University confirms politicians were lying about student protest against Israel envoy

    I wrote in this column last month condemning the feigned national outrage among the political class and corporate media elite against students who had protested against the Israeli ambassador. News this week confirmed that I was right to say students had done nothing wrong. The university itself has now confirmed...

  • The war for Israel on British campuses

    Throughout most of 2021, the Israel lobby waged a war at the University of Bristol. Its main target was David Miller, then a professor of sociology there. Backed by the Israeli government itself, the lobby ran a long-term campaign that resulted in the summary firing of Miller for still undisclosed...

  • Palestine Action acquitted in first trial: Hope for anti-drone protest strategy 

    As I write this, the news is breaking of a terrible tragedy for justice and humanity – a serious blow for press freedom worldwide. The UK High Court has ruled that Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange can be extradited to the US to stand trial for the crime of journalism. The ruling...

  • Arab masses will always oppose the existence of racist Israel

    Thousands of Jordanians demonstrated in the capital of Amman last week against the regime’s latest deal with the Israeli enemy. Despite the fact that an estimated 60 per cent of Jordanian citizens are also Palestinians (refugees and their descendants from the 1948 Zionist mass expulsion that immediately preceded the creation...

  • Overthrowing Israel’s bogus definition of anti-Semitism

    On the first of October, the University of Bristol fired Professor David Miller, a world renowned expert on the Israel lobby, the Zionist movement and Islamophobia. They did not give an explicit reason for the sacking, claiming only that Miller “did not meet the standards of behaviour we expect...

  • Could an Apple lawsuit mean the end of Israeli cybercriminals NSO?

    This week it emerged that Silicon Valley giant Apple is suing Israeli spyware maker NSO Group. The creators of the iPad, the iMac, the iPhone and so many other iconic computer products announced that they had filed the suit so as to hold NSO “accountable for the surveillance and targeting...

  • Israel is the world’s leading exporter of cybercrime

    Last week, I was struck down with COVID-19 and was forced to have some time off. I was hit quite hard in the end. Thankfully, I did not have to be hospitalised. I received support from NHS doctors over the phone. Many people have had it much worse than me. When...

  • Politicians are lying about the Palestine student protest at LSE

    This week, students at the London School of Economics (LSE) protested on campus to oppose a lecture by Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely. Their protest was not only entirely peaceful, but a righteous example of necessary anti-racist activism. Hotovely is a particularly egregious example of Israeli racism. Her record is very...

  • Israel - Unban the 6 human rights groups

    Last Friday, Israel outright banned six leading Palestinian human rights groups. To do so, “Defence” Minister Benny Gantz and his government unilaterally designated them as “terrorist” groups. The Israelis presented no evidence for this new claim. This is quite simply an attack on Palestinian existence. There are no forms of Palestinian public...

  • Free Palestinian aid worker Mohammed El-Halabi

    Mohammed El-Halabi is a senior Palestinian aid worker with the global Christian charity World Vision. He was kidnapped by Israeli army thugs in June 2016 during a routine trip between World Vision’s Jerusalem and Gaza offices. He has been languishing in Israeli jails ever since and has still not faced...

  • Why Israeli fascists are more honest than liberal Zionists

    The Palestinian citizens of Israel “are here by mistake—because Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” That was the latest rant this week from fascist Israeli lawmaker, Bezalel Smotrich, in Israel’s parliament. Speaking from the Knesset podium, Smotrich was attacking Palestinian lawmakers from the Joint List. He...

  • David Miller’s sacking is just the start

    “Britain is in the grip of an assault on its public sphere by the State of Israel and its advocates,” David Miller wrote in February. Since then, almost as if to perfectly illustrate his point, Miller has been sacked from his job as a sociology professor at Bristol University. Miller is...

  • Apartheid responses show that appeasing the pro-Israel lobby is a waste of time

    It’s rare for Israeli apartheid to be a topic of conversation in Britain’s House of Commons, but from time to time it does happen. In May, for example, Labour MP Naz Shah said, correctly, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. There is, however, another side to this....

  • Pro-Israel treason in Ireland

    Treason is commonly defined as the betrayal of a trust or allegiance, especially to one’s country or government. But what about when one faction of the government or establishment betrays another? Who will be regarded as the real traitor then depends on the balance of political power. One historical example...

  • The limits of ‘human rights’ discourse in Palestine

    In 2014, a large part of Ismail Ziada’s family was wiped out. The lives of his mother, 70-year-old Muftia, his three brothers, Jamil, Yousif and Omar, his sister-in-law Bayan, his 12-year-old nephew Shaban, as well as a seventh person who had been visiting, were all ended in one fell swoop. Israel’s...

  • Israel's inevitable failure

    Covering the topic of Israeli oppression against Palestinians and pro-Israeli propaganda in the West for a living is exhausting. Merely researching and writing about the issue is mentally and emotionally draining. So, imagine then how Palestinians feel after living under Israel’s racist system of occupation, apartheid, military dictatorship, torture, mass surveillance,...

  • The Israeli-Egyptian siege of the Gaza Strip must end unconditionally without delay

    So much for the Israeli army supposedly wanting to “reduce” the number of Palestinians it shoots. An Israeli soldier shot and killed another Palestinian child in the besieged Gaza Strip on 21 August. Omar Hasan Abu Al-Nil was just 13. The boy succumbed to his wounds last Saturday. According to...

  • Naftali Bennett lies his way to Washington DC

    Online Palestinian outlet Quds News Network resurfaced a video clip this week from over a decade ago featuring current Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. The video shows Bennett helping to lead a training session teaching Israelis how to insert themselves into Wikipedia (the free online encyclopaedia that unknown persons can...