ne consequence of being Jewish is a standing familiarity with a wide range of Jewish jokes – including those that address what seems to be our collective inability to let well enough (or, more often, bad enough) alone. So, for instance, there’s the one about the difference between a Jewish pessimist and a Jewish optimist: the Jewish pessimist moans, “Things can’t […]
By B’Tselem (a technical glitch has listed BSNews editor as author, apologies. We’re working on it) More than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule. The common perception in public, political, legal and media discourse is that two separate regimes operate […]
Over a decade ago, in 2009, I was on a protest at Scotland Yard about the death of Sean Rigg, left to die on the floor of Brixton police station. His family was there; Lowkey, best known for his fight for justice for the Palestinians, was there performing in the street one of his brilliant, incisive, truth-telling raps. No-one there […]
Below is the open letter signed by approximately two hundred Latin American journalists and news organisations sent to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights calling for the release of Palestinian journalists held in Israeli prisons. The Journalist Support Committee has declared that about twenty journalists have languished in Israeli prisons without charge for years and are victims of torture […]
Cotler’s campaigns for foreign regime change or intervention almost always march in lock-step with neoconservative U.S. foreign policy. His “humanitarian” branding is but a thin veneer of hypocrisy to conceal his establishment policies — policies that almost always serve the interests of Israel. On July 22, 2018, Israel organized and facilitated an exceptional evacuation of White Helmet operatives from southern Syria, claiming […]
The announcement by seven MPs from the UK Labour Party on Monday that they were breaking away and creating a new parliamentary faction marked the biggest internal upheaval in a British political party in nearly 40 years, when the SDP split from Labour. On Wednesday, they were joined by an eighth Labour MP, Joan Ryan, and three Conservative MPs. There […]
CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill and outrage at Airbnb and the Quakers reveal a complete intolerance of criticism For 30 years, the United Nations has held an annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on 29 November. The event rarely merited even a passing nod in the mainstream media. Until last week. Marc Lamont Hill, a prominent […]
An Israeli general has confirmed that when snipers stationed along Israel’s boundary with Gaza shoot at children, they are doing so deliberately, under clear and specific orders. In a radio interview, Brigadier-General (Reserve) Zvika Fogel describes how a sniper identifies the “small body” of a child and is given authorization to shoot. Fogel’s statements could be used as evidence of […]
At the end of six days in Damascus last week, and on the eve of Ramadan, I finally found time to re-visit a Palestinian-run art gallery and shop with my wife; we had been there eight years earlier, and before this terrible war that we could never have imagined was begun. At that time, in 2010, the sins of the […]
On the night of the Palestinians’ slaughter, Zion exulted an embassy and a Eurovision. It’s difficult to think of a more atrocious moral eclipse When will the moment come in which the mass killing of Palestinians matters anything to the right? When will the moment come in which the massacre of civilians shocks at least the left-center? If 60 people […]
When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter. “Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. […]
With the presidential race heating up ahead of the New York primary, Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton has joined right-wing proponents of Israeli violence in attacking Bernie Sanders for his criticism of Israel’s 2014 military assault on Gaza.
