Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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A Palestinian police state in waiting
When it comes to Israel, and to supporting Palestinian rights, at the far reaches of acceptability in mainstream British party politics is the idea of supporting a Palestinian state in Gaza and (some) of the West Bank. In recent years, this has focused on the campaign to recognise the Palestinian...
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The lawless state of Israel
Israel tries to present itself in front of the world as “the only democracy in the middle east”. In more explicitly racist and colonial terms, it sometimes claims to be a “villa” of civilisation in the “jungle” of the middle east, as war criminal Ehud Barak once put it. But...
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Blaming the victim in Palestine
Israel’s most recent anti-BDS conference in Jerusalem had some fall-out in terms of negative global coverage, but only in alternative and independent media. The fact that the Israeli intelligence minister made a blood-chilling threat against the founder of the boycott Israel movement (an entirely non-violent civil society campaign) was of...
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Uses and abuses of the word 'Zionism'
The Labour right, in close coordination with pro-Israel propaganda organizations like BICOM has orchestrated this entire scandal out of thin air....
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Deadly Israeli euphemisms
There is a concerted campaign going on in the UK, in France, in the US and in the entire western world to suppress any form of criticism of Israel – especially the movement to boycott Israel. It takes many forms.A prime example is the current witch hunt in the...
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Privatised psi-ops
A recurring theme of this column has been Israeli propaganda. More specifically, I have looked at some of the ways in which Israeli government entities, and Israeli corporations like to over-value and exaggerate their impact on the world and their effectiveness against their enemies. In a way, one can understand...
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A new phase in Israel's 'lawfare' strategy
For the last decade, a central plank of Israel’s strategy to combat its global critics has been something it terms “lawfare” – using courts around the world to attack, defame, silence and intimidate its enemies. Since Israel is addicted to real life war, it’s no surprise to find that even...
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The Palestinian Authority's looming succession crisis
The octogenarian leader of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank will not be around forever. Elected as president of the PA back in 2005, the democratic mandate of Mahmoud Abbas expired years ago. Armed putschist forces loyal to Abbas took over the West Bank back in 2007, several months...
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Hilary Clinton poses imminent danger to Palestine
Out of all this week’s speeches of presidential candidates to AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby group, Hilary Clinton’s was in my book the most convincingly pro-Israel. But she has had to work hard to achieve this status. The Israel lobby is becoming increasingly right wing. AIPAC is widely perceived to...
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The Trump show reaches Israel
The carnival of reaction that is the preposterously over long US presidential election period rolls on and on. The Republican candidates seem to be doing their best to outdo each other to find out who can will the most terrible people around. Religious fanaticism and the legacy of the Tea...
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America’s annual festival of pandering to Israel
What a disgusting show. The annual policy conference of AIPAC, the most influential pro-Israel lobby group in the Unites States, has just been held. Most of the main candidates in this year’s US presidential election lined up to make speeches, each trying to outdo the others in their ever more...
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Are you now or have you ever been an anti-Zionist?
Last month the American reporter Eli Clifton revealed a secret “Anti-Israel” enemies list maintained by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL was founded 103 years ago as a civil rights organisation to defend Jews in America from then-rampant anti-Semitism. However, long ago, it all but abandoned this mission. Instead, its main...
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Victories come thick and fast, despite "war" on BDS
It seems like no sooner did the British government issue its new regulations aimed at “banning” boycotts of Israel than the move backfired. “BDS,” the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, protesters declared in response, “is here to stay.” There was immediate talk of defying any ban, with civil disobedience if...
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Mossad touts cyberwar against BDS
At a cyberwar forum in Tel Aviv in January, it came out that Israel has allocated almost $26 million in this year’s budget to fight the ever-growing movement to boycott, divest from and sanctions Israel – BDS for short. An Associated Press report on the event quoted one high Israeli...
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The crackdown on Israeli dissidents
It is not sensible to have any hope that the Israeli public will ever support ending the occupation, let alone support equal rights for Arabs, or return of Palestinians refugees. All the polling data says as much. During the 2014 Israeli war against the civilian population of Gaza more than...
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Why an Israeli newspaper wanted to 'flatten' a city of millions
Earlier this month Haaretz, Israel’s influential liberal daily, published a blood-curdling article. It openly argued for war crimes on a massive scale against the civilian population of a neighbouring Arab state. “Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” the article’s headline mused. It was written by Amitai Etzioni, a...
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Is Israel changing its strategy in Syria's war?
An article in Haaretz this weekend laid out an analysis purporting to show that the Israeli government is changing its approach to the war in Syria. Amos Harel, the liberal daily’s military correspondent, cited some of the reasons for Israel to want the conflict in Syria to continue. The war...
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Tory moves to curb Israel boycotts will fail
Last week the government made an announcement intended to intimidate supporters of Palestinian rights. It was trailed in the media as a “ban” on boycotts of Israel, which The Independent claimed would now become a “criminal” offence for public bodies. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign said this amounted to “a gross attack...
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A tale of two journalists
This is the story of two journalists treated unjustly by Israeli occupation authorities. Yet they are not being equally treated by the media. Indeed, they should not be equally treated, because their plights are anything but equal. But the media has its priorities upside down. One journalist was detained for 40...
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The wild beast of Israeli racism
This week the prime minister of Israel slandered Arabs in disgustingly racist terms. This was nothing new for the man who, during the last election, warned the Israeli people that “the Arabs” were turning out to vote “in droves”. But the terminology he used was a notable new low,...
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UK hacked drone feeds to watch as Israel bombed Gaza
The latest revelations from the documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden once again concern Israel. Glenn Greenwald’s site The Intercept revealed last week that American and British spies have managed to hack into the visual feed of the Israeli drones and F16 fighter jets that regularly...
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The PA's "One Gun" belongs to Israel
In December the US weapons industry trade publication Defense News carried a telling interview with two top big-wigs in the Palestinian Authority. These were PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat and mukhabarat chief Major General Majid Faraj. The magazine’s Israel bureau chief, who conducted the interviews, described them as “the top two...
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Tangible achievements of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine
Ireland’s second-largest company announced earlier this month that it had entirely sold-off its 25 per cent stake in the holding corporation of Israel’s only cement-making firm. This withdrawal followed a decade-long campaign by Irish activists calling on the company, CRH, to divest from Israeli cement-maker, Nesher. The Irish company had...
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Israeli defence minister: "I choose the Islamic State"
At a “security” conference in Tel Aviv last week, top-level Israeli speakers argued the case for viewing Israel as being in the same trench as the so-called Islamic State. It sounds like an unlikely thing for me to be reporting, but it happened all the same. “Islamic State”, a hideously...