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I am appalled and angry at the British government’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism following pressure by various Jewish Zionist groups for the same reason I am against another document the British government was pressured into adopting – the Balfour Declaration of 1917, “a short letter by Arthur Balfour to arguably one of the[Read More…]
![Photo above: First large meeting of One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) with Israeli Jews in Jaffa: Awad Abdel Fattah, Jeff Halpern, IlanPappe and Yoav Haifawi [Jeff Halper]](https://countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/one-democratic-state-200x150.jpg)
A Trump political initiative for peace is looming on the horizon, but no one expects that “Ultimate Deal” to be, in any sense, a “Palestinian political initiative”. It is difficult to formulate a Palestinian “political initiative”, period. Palestinians are not free political agents. A Palestinian citizen of Israel (example, Haneen Zoabi) is not a free agent politically, even as a[Read More…]
The history behind Palestine and Israel is a history of Jewish European settler-colonialism — i.e., Zionism. And since racism is a symptom and a tool of settler-colonialism, Zionism is also viewed as anti-Semitism, and as ethno-supremacy or Jewish supremacy, Arabophobia and Islamophobia. The triangulation of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and Arabophobia in the history of Palestine and Israel is part of the settler-colonial movement[Read More…]
Chris Hayes’ incredulous tweet on the killing of Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar in Gaza is being echoed everywhere it seems on social media.Hayes hosts All In with Chris Hayes, a weekday news and opinion television show on MSNBC. On June 7, 2018 he tweeted: “The wording of that [Israel Defense Forces] IDF video is so bizarre. Hamas “incited” a woman[Read More…]
Despite Israel’s intensive cover-up of its ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people, stark images and indisputable facts continue to seep through from the Gaza Strip. The world has never witnessed a braver, more steadfast and resolute people than the en-caged Palestinians of Gaza — and that goes for every man, woman and child, from Hamas down, enduring unspeakable conditions and saying, in a voice[Read More…]
As a Palestinian, I barely raise an eyebrow when I hear Mohammed bin Salman say things like, Palestinians“must accept what US offers or stop complaining.” That’s because I don’t make the mistaken assumption (as many people do) that the ideology of “Arab Nationalism” plays a factor today in politics related to Israel and the Jewish settler-colonial occupation of “mandate” Palestine.[Read More…]
During the time that Palestinians call The Great Rebellion, or Revolt against British pro-Zionist policies in Palestine, 1936 – 1939, things began to go seriously wrong for Palestinian Arabs living in Jaffa and have continued to deteriorate with no reprieve yet. Jaffa, at the time, was a major economic center in Palestine, a port and commercial hub.In the 19th century,[Read More…]
The reaction of Israelis to The Great March of Return depends on the “nationality” of the Israeli being referred to. In Israel, there are Israeli citizens but no Israeli nationality – only “Jewish nationality” or “Palestinian Arab”, etc. (this is intentionally aimed at maintaining Israel as a Jewish State). So, we have Palestinian-Arab MK Haneen Zoabi reacting to Israel’s massacres in Gaza as follows, and in the[Read More…]
Israel’s official mantra to explain and defend its crimes against Palestinians, including massacres, has always been, and continues to be, “security”. For Israel, the word “security” means the security to exist as a Zionist Jewish state on part or all of historic Palestine — to exist as a state meant to be populated by as many Jews from around the world as it[Read More…]
You can justify what’s happening now to Palestinians in Gaza only if you can justify our Nakba – the violent establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine in 1948 against the will of Palestinian non-Jewish Arabs, the vast majority at the time. UK Jewish Voice for Labor (JVL) is calling for “an unconditional end to Israel’s inhuman siege of Gaza.” They should be calling[Read More…]
![My great grandfather’s house (Ismail Najjar) in upper Lifta, now inhabited by Jews [Photo: Rima Najjar]](https://countercurrents.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/grandfather-house-200x150.jpg)
If you have never heard of Umm al-Hiran, don’t blame yourself. What’s happening there is a well-kept secret in the international media, along with Israel’s other ongoing crimes. But within Israel, Umm al-Hiran (and other forced evictions and ethnic-cleansing projects taking place today in the Naqab, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem and elsewhere) is run-of-the-mill news coated with hasbara that doesn’t flinch even at an image[Read More…]
If Israel were to become a majority Muslim Arab state, we can expect such a unitary bi-national (since the minority of Jews will remain substantial) state to be secular and democratic. There is no reason to expect otherwise, especially as the existing Jewish settler-colonial regime brought along with it from Europe democratic ideals to Palestine. These ideals manifest themselves in[Read More…]
Mahmoud Abbas today is in the terrible grip of the second phase of the Oslo accord of 1993, also known as “the peace process”. Many, including myself, have written about the death of this agonizing process, but in reality, it is not dead; it is very much in progress as scripted. The epic tragedy of the “Peace Process” is[Read More…]
Palestinians are in a constant state of rage. And the question that presents itself daily is: Against whom to focus this rage? Today, 19 March 2018, our rage is split, as summed up by KamelHawwash on Twitter: “#Abbas launches stinging attack on #Hamas holding it responsible for the explosion that targeted Prime Minister Hamdallah’s convoy when he visited #Gaza but also calls US Ambassador Friedman a[Read More…]
Stop the censorship! It is impossible for Palestinians to advocate against Israel without using the words “Jews” And “Jewish”. My answer on Quora to ‘What is the “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” movement regarding Israel?’ does not break any Quora rules, certainly not the one meant to keep discourse on Quora civil, even when the question itself was altered[Read More…]
Regarding the story Al-Jazeera headlines as: ‘Two Israeli soldiers killed in West Bank attack Incident in the West Bank comes amid ‘100 days of rage’ protests by Palestinians against Trump’s #Jerusalem embassy move.’ CNN, which also broke the news, could use the following pointers from a Palestinian reader to improve its presentation of the story to a world-wide audience. FIRST, notice that[Read More…]
“I am done with you!” This, coupled with an accusation of bigotry, is the reaction by an anti-Zionist Israeli Jew to my questioning of the pro-Palestine speech of another Israeli Jew and assuming he was a liberal-Zionist. This characterization on my part meant that I believed all Jews are Zionists – such was her knee-jerk assumption. All Jews are[Read More…]
How deep is the historical illiteracy of Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Party and Donald Trump and his party? It is so deep, they are even immune to déjà vu, also known as “cryptomnesia”, which is where history is forgotten but nevertheless stored in the brain. Consider how AIPAC and the White House and State Department advisers[Read More…]
I hate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee – AIPAC, “the preeminent power in Washington lobbying” today. I hate it with a strong, unadulterated passion that has been burning inside me for decades. Throughout most of these decades, there was no outlet for me to say these words or to do anything about them (Watch U.S.-Israel Relations and Middle East[Read More…]
In breathtaking cognitive dissonance that is impossible to explain, so-called liberal Zionists stand against every wrong known to man except for the wrong meted out by the Zionist movement to Palestinian Arabs. Zionism is, as Dr Gideon Polya put it, “genocidal racism in awful theory and appalling, intentional genocidal practice”. [See Zionist quotes reveal genocidal racism and Palestinian Me Too: 140 Alphabetically-listed Zionist crimes Expose Appalling[Read More…]
In applying its community standards, Facebook frequently conflates anti-Zionist attacks with anti-Semitism. A case in point is a post for which I have just been put in Facebook jail (i.e., blocked from posting for 30 days). The post says, “#Hillel, a racist organization, has as much place on university campuses as does the #KKK.” And Facebook removed it, saying: “We[Read More…]
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is a movement that came into prominence, as Ali Abunimah documents in The Battle for Justice in Palestine: The Case for a Single Democratic State in Palestine (2014), after the collapse of the so-called “two-state solution” in response to the escalating problem of the partitioning of Palestine in 1948. As Columbia University MESAAS professor Joseph Massad wrote about[Read More…]
As a Palestinian, I am skeptical about Mahmoud Abbas’s address, billed by the press as “Abbas delivers rare address at UNSC meeting”, which calls for two states. Whereas I believe that BDS goals can be achieved through more than one political accommodation, including a two-state scenario in historic Palestine as a solution to its violent partition in 1948, I am skeptical about[Read More…]
Facebook is under pressure to chill or suppress speech that delegitimizes theJewish state in the context of the Palestinian national liberation movementand international solidarity for Palestinians. At the same time, speech that delegitimizes Palestinians as a people with fundamental human rights is freely promoted on Facebook, not least by Israeli and U.S. officials themselves. The battle for hearts and minds over Palestine has long been[Read More…]
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has come a long way in advocating for Palestinian rights. They now fully embrace the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, seeing it as the most effective method to effect change. JVP is on Israel’s BDS Ban List and is described by another Jewish group in the US (the Anti-Defamation League — ADL) as “the largest[Read More…]
A continuum of oppression is pervasive in Palestinian society, ranging from the matrix of control the Jewish state has imposed on Palestine to the oppression of cultural norms, such as those having to do with patriarchy, gender and class that are common to all societies toone degree or another. Because of the degradation, humiliation and devaluation Palestinians daily encounter, even[Read More…]
Herbert Block, the new executive director of the American Zionist Movement (AZM), says he wants to “rebrand” Zionism. What direction this re-branding will take is anybody’s guess, as he is still talking in the language of the existing brand of Zionism, which equates Zionism with being a Jew. The days are long gone when, as in the movement’s infancy, Zionism was largely opposed by[Read More…]
The #BDS Movement is a nonviolent grassroots movement originating in the occupied territory of Palestine. Its overriding principles are consistency and commitment to universal human rights, and it has proven to be effective, as a tactic, not least for changing the conversation on Israel. [See What is BDS]. The fact that the BDS Movement is a rights-based, apolitical approach does not mean[Read More…]
I wish Caryl Churchill would write a follow up to her play Seven Jewish Children and call it Seven Palestinian Children. Churchill’s play, first produced in February of 2009, was “for Gaza”, and was predictably received along political lines, either as a “heartfelt lamentation” on one side and “wantonly inflammatory” on the other — inflammatory in the same way as the[Read More…]
Zionism [see http://state-of-terror.net/] is an insidious ideology. Its ideologues often gain traction by well-placed and oft repeated constructs – in films and TV series, in posts and comments on social media, and even in academia. So, it is no wonder that people end up having ideas about certain things, like the nature of Israel, the Zionist Jewish state, or[Read More…]
Jewish identity politics complicate the Palestinian response to the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. Sometimes it seems impossible to address the crux of the matter, the Jewish state Nakba in Palestine, without being subjected to attacks one way or another. On the last day of 2017, I posted a meme on my Facebook wall that provoked a long and heated argument. The meme[Read More…]
The detention of Ahed Tamimi of the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, along with her human rights activist mother Nariman Tamimi, for “lightly slapping” an Israeli soldier, as Amira Hass put it in Haaretz, is remarkable only because of the high profile, courage and sumoud (steadfastness) of the Tamimi family, who were featured on the cover of The New[Read More…]
Since 1897, the first Zionist Congress, Judaism has been entangled with Zionism. It’s time to disengage the two – no easy matter. When Zionist Jewish terrorist gangs in Palestine were transformed into Israel’s Defense Forces, they continued systematically practicing sociocide, politicide, ethnic cleansing, and incremental genocide on the Palestinian people under the banner of a bastardized Star of David. “The[Read More…]
What’s going on in Jerusalem is what has always been going on in Palestine since 1948 –the forced dispossession of Palestinian Arabs of their identity, land and heritage. Because of Donald Trump’s declaration to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and the resultant global outrage regarding this decision, many people have become interested in understanding what is going on in[Read More…]
In 1917, the British government unleashed the Zionist Jewish colonial enterprise that is now Israel. In the process, it meted out on Palestinians destruction, dispossession and oppression that are ongoing to this day. [Watch Al Jazeera English video: 100 Years On: The Balfour Declaration explained] The language used in the document that facilitated this disaster, the Balfour Declaration,is devious and[Read More…]
The benign-sounding term “settler” or “settlement” is used so often in the news without reference to Jewish colonization of Palestine that the world often loses sight of the immoral nature of the Zionist project in Palestine. The term is used to describe Jews moving illegally to the West Bank, and commandeering land that belongs to Palestinians. Waves of Jews moving[Read More…]
Among ongoing outrageous actions and in defiance of international law, Israel’s HabayitHayehudi party has just approved a plan for annexing the remaining occupied Palestinian territory “while either facilitating the exit of Palestinian residents or allowing them to remain but without voting rights.” This is by no means a surprising outcome, nor is it simply a reflection of so-called right-wing[Read More…]
It’s been almost one hundred years since the Balfour Declaration and we are still trying to “understand” Zionism and Jewish supremacy in Palestine. For a long time, what stood in the way of full understanding is the desire in Jewish intellectual circles on the left to fuse Zionism and Socialism in the belief that such a fusion would achieve[Read More…]
Today, we hear a lot about White supremacy but very little about Jewish supremacy, as if the former stands for the latter. It is true there are more similarities than differences between Jewish supremacy and White supremacy. Both are based on ethnic/nationalist bias and racism. They are both “historically based, institutionally perpetuated system[s] of exploitation and oppression … a web of[Read More…]
As Richard Falk points out, “anti-Semitism, and its links to Nazism and Fascism, and now to Trumpism, are genuinely menacing”, but Jews who call Trump himself an anti-Semite (in the sense of having an animus against Jews) are being false and so are those who perceive that the Labour Party in the U.K. is “too tolerant of anti-Semitism”. Consider these[Read More…]
Look at me. Look at me as I am — a fellow human being. Look at me independently from your Jewish identity and your Jewish suffering. Are you offended? Does your worldview need wrenching out of a life-long schooling in a painful collective memory? Does it need, as a Jewish friend explained, an “internal revolution” to coax you out into a[Read More…]
Seasons six and seven of The Good Wife, an otherwise smart, sophisticated TV series with inspired acting, does a pretty good hatchet job on Palestine and Palestinians by hardly mentioning them and whitewashing Israel. This series, written by Robert and Michelle King, has attracted millions of viewers all over the world. The accumulation of bits and pieces about Israel and[Read More…]
I first heard of Ariel Gold through a Haaretz article that described her in the headline like this: Jewish Mother and BDS Activist: Code Pink’s Ariel Gold vs. Israel’s Travel Ban: The pro-Palestinian provocateur is under attack after a newspaper alleged that she ‘tricked’ her way into Israel last month. She says she will be ‘heartbroken’ if the authorities ban[Read More…]
Few people know that, as a condition for admission to the UN in 1949, Israel accepted UN Resolution 194, which stipulates that Palestinians who fled or were expelled during the Jewish takeover of 1947-49 in Palestine, have the right of return. As with every other legitimate claim that Palestinians have made about their situation over the long years since[Read More…]
Anti-Semitism should not be used as an issue in discussions and debates over the struggle for the liberation of Palestine. Ever since the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine and all throughout the unfolding of Zionist policy, Jews like Chaim Weizmann have expressed the idea that Zionist crimes in Palestine are to be deplored, not so much because of[Read More…]
When I write about the Jewish state, I am forced to write about Jews. Although there is controversy among Jews themselves about Jewish identity, the fact remains that Israel manifests itself in Palestine as Jewish, both in the sense of “Jewish nationality”, an invention of political Zionism whose early leaders were atheists, as well as in the religious sense[Read More…]
As usual, commentary on the latest stand-off between Israel’s forces and Palestinian Muslims due to the closure of al-Aqsa mosque compound to Friday prayers on July 21, 2017 was confusing. One commentary goes like this: Yes, these are Muslims being killed, gassed and pushed around, but the “clashes” are not really about the encroachment on al-Aqsa by the so-called Temple[Read More…]
I view Saudi Arabia as a dysfunctional manifestation of Islam. In the same way, I view Israel as a dysfunctional manifestation of Judaism. This is not to mean, I hasten to say, that either Judaism or Islam is inherently at odds with the social, cultural or political lives of its adherents or with universal moral values. The point I am[Read More…]
Hasan Breijieh is a Palestinian activist and spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He participates in weekly protest activities against the Israeli military presence in the West Bank (aka occupation), the illegal Jewish colonies turned into townships on stolen Palestinian land (aka settlements) that choke off Palestinian villages around Bethlehem and elsewhere, and the illegal[Read More…]
The new Israeli law giving police power to block websites that purportedly publish “criminal” or “offensive” content follows a similar blockade of various websites in Palestine by the 13-year president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas – all in the name of “law and order”, “peace” and “fighting terrorism”. The equation is simple and has long been propagated by[Read More…]
Israel, a rogue state if ever there was one, pursues its “security” as a Jewish Zionist entity on all of Mandate Palestine through demonizing Palestinian Arabs, whom it has long subjected to a racist campaign that defines their resistance, both violent and non-violent, as anti-Semitism on the one hand and as terrorism on the other. Thankfully, Israel’s cover for its[Read More…]
Several articles have been published about the “legal limbo” in which Palestinian Jerusalemites exist and proposals as to what Israel ought to do about this 50-year old travesty, among them being righting “the wrong” of denying Palestinian Arabs in East Jerusalem Israeli citizenship. In my view, such articles both define the injustice done to Palestinians deceptively and are meant[Read More…]
Lawfare as used by the Zionist organization The Lawfare Project and others is meant to persuade every Jew in the world (and not just Israeli Jews) that his or her Jewish identity, welfare and security are inextricably related to the continued suppression of justice, equality and freedom of Palestinian Arabs or, in other words, to the Apartheid Zionist Jewish state. Lawfare is a[Read More…]
East Jerusalem is occupied by Israel. It is also illegally annexed. It is also illegally separated from the rest of the West Bank by an illegal wall. In Jerusalem, Israel boasts of 220,000 illegal Jewish settlers settled on land confiscated from 300,000 Palestinian residents who are now landless. It boasts of 50,000 illegally displaced Palestinian Arabs and 685 illegally demolished Palestinian homes that have rendered 2,500[Read More…]
For some time now, the discourse on Israel has been shifting from a place where Israeli “hasbara” disinformation had the upper hand no matter where one turned, to a place where Israeli criminal policies are more frankly discussed and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which is now championed by some academic associations, church groups and labor unions[Read More…]
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This article is based on a talk delivered in Hyderabad on 7th October 2018 as part of the 9th memorial meeting of ‘Remembering Balagopal’, an annual event commemorating the late social activist K Balagopal It is a truly a great privilege for me to be here today to speak to all of you at this meeting to remember Prof.[Read More…]
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