Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ben White
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Court case highlights Israel’s ‘globally unique’ discriminatory land regime
Israel’s apartheid policies are under the spotlight again, with a petition before the country’s High Court demanding that planning rights be returned to Palestinian villages in the West Bank. At stake is a discriminatory system described just last week by Amnesty International as “unique globally.” On Sunday, the second hearing...
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A tale of two marathons - and a microcosm of Israeli Apartheid
The West Bank was cut in two today so Israeli settlers could run a marathon. For seven hours, from 6am to 1pm, Israeli forces shut down the Palestinians’ main north-south road in order to facilitate the ‘Bible Marathon‘, a race that cut east across the West Bank and finished...
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Will UN betray Palestinian child victims of Israeli atrocities?
A meeting reportedly takes place in New York today to decide whether or not to include the Israeli military on a list of serious violators of children’s rights, amid claims that political interference will prevent the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) being named and shamed. In mid-March, The Guardianpublished claims that...
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Human rights group: Evidence points to Israeli war crimes in Gaza
The Israeli military likely commissioned war crimes and crimes against humanity during 2014’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’, a leading international human rights NGO has concluded. The report by FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights), a Paris-based body representing 178 global human rights organisations, comes shortly before Palestine’s ratification of the Rome...
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Israel's military occupation in 2014, by the numbers
2,312 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. 56 of those Palestinian fatalities were killed in the West Bank. 2 Palestinians were killed by Israeli settlers. 67 percent of the Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza last summer were civilians. 1 in 4 of the Palestinians killed in Gaza were children. 142 Palestinian families...
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Beyond the ballot box: how Israel's 'Arab voters' are second-class citizens
On Monday, newly re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed regret for his now notorious remarks on polling day last week, when he warned that Israel’s Palestinian citizens were coming out to vote “in droves.” Netanyahu did not actually say sorry; he merely noted that what he had said “hurt...
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Israel lobby pressure on Southampton shows signs of desperation
As Israel lobby groups in Britain continue to pressure the University of Southampton to cancel an upcoming conference, the desperation is starting to show. Earlier this week, The Academic Friends of Israel claimed that conference coordinator Professor Oren Ben-Dor had “been removed from the Board” of The Parkes Institute, based...
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Amongst frustrated allies, patience has run out with Israel
The British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond didn’t mince his words. Israel, he said, was guilty of “what looks and feels like a deliberate attempt to sabotage the two-state-solution.” The diplomat went on, claiming that the “window” for a two-state agreement is “closing”, and that this was down to Israeli “settlement...
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British ambassador met Universities UK over Israel & 'free speech' concerns
British ambassador to Israel Matthew Gould met last month with UK university heads in a meeting that discussed Israel and the limits of ‘freedom of speech’, it has been reported. The meeting was held in early February with four vice-chancellors from umbrella group Universities UK, and also included representatives of...
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10 facts about Israel's elections and the Palestinian vote
On 17 March, Israelis will go to the polls to elect a new government. Here are 10 facts about the Knesset elections and the Palestinian vote. 1. One in seven Palestinians can vote in Israel’s elections. Only one in seven of the total Palestinian population live inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders and...
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Israel's 'moral' army: expanding settlements, expelling Palestinians
The Israeli army has recently changed the status of West Bank land east of Jerusalem to enable the expansion of Ma’aleh Adumim settlement. The order, signed on 18 January by Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, cancels the status of a military firing zone in the Jordan Valley known as ‘Firing Zone...
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Israel is losing the debate - in more ways than one
Last night, I participated in a debate at the Cambridge Union on ‘This House Believes Israel is a Rogue State.’ Speaking alongside Ghada Karmi and Norman Finkelstein for the proposition, the motion was carried by 51 percent to 19 percent – with a 7 percent swing from the pre-debate...
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NGOs slam 'disarmament for development' as Gaza lies in ruins
Leading NGOs have heavily criticised attempts to link the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip with its demilitarisation, ahead of a debate about the issue in Westminster today. Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) will this afternoon urge “disarmament for development”, as the Israel lobby group launches a new campaign focusing on...
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Israel is still banning Gaza students from West Bank universities
Palestinian students from Gaza are still prevented by Israel from studying at West Bank universities, after an announcement this week to the contrary was retracted as a mistake. On Wednesday, Israel’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) announced that a quota of 50 students would be permitted to...
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UK university rebuffs call by Israel lobby to cancel conference
Southampton University has rejected calls to cancel a conference on Israel and international law, after the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) said it would “have a detrimental impact on cohesiveness.” The conference, ‘International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Responsibility and Exceptionalism’, is billed as “the first of its kind”,...
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UN agency: Israel’s “fragmentation” of Bethlehem region has “accelerated”
The Bethlehem region is increasingly fragmented by Israeli occupation policies, according to a new UN agency factsheet. The OCHA publication, ‘Bethlehem governorate: fragmentation and humanitarian concerns’, details ways in which colonisation and apartheid restrictions are blighting Palestinians’ lives in the region. Israeli policies and practices applied since the beginning of...
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Israel kills another Palestinian in the West Bank, after bloodiest year in a decade
Over the weekend, Israeli forces killed 19-year-old Palestinian, Ahmad Ibrahim al-Najjar. Thousands attended the young man’s funeral Sunday in Burin, a village near Nablus. Al-Najjar was shot dead after a group of Palestinian youths threw Molotov cocktails at Israeli settler vehicles driving on the Israeli-controlled bypass road between Kedumim and...
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BDS and Israel's war on Palestinian higher education
A report by UNESCO has documented the “material, human and educational damage” sustained by Gaza’s higher education institutions (HEIs) during Israel’s assault last summer. The UN agency’s conclusion: that “higher education institutions were directly targeted during the hostilities.” Israel’s “failure to treat learning environments as safe spaces and protect universities...
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Israeli soldiers are provoking Palestinians to shoot them with live ammo
The Israeli army is using live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian stone-throwers in the Occupied West Bank, deliberately provoking confrontations in order to open fire on protesters. This is the conclusion of Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, in a new press release detailing “a dramatic rise in Israeli security forces’ use...
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Wars abroad, witch-hunts at home: responding to Panorama and John Ware
Last week, BBC’s Panorama broadcast a documentary on “The Battle for British Islam” by John Ware, a journalist and film-maker. Ware followed this up with an extended op-ed in this weekend’s Independent on Sunday, covering much of the same ground. Together, they provide an insight into the disturbing assumptions...
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Israeli think tank holds anti-BDS 'hackathon'
Pro-Israel activists have vowed to fight back against a growing global boycott campaign, using new technological “tools” proposed and developed at a recent “Legitimacy Hackathon.” The gathering, held on January 4-6 in Tel Aviv, was organised by Israeli think tank the Reut Institute, who in 2010 produced an influential report...
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'Israel is your home': Netanyahu’s exploitation of the Paris attacks
Last Saturday, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Paris, Israeli PM Netanyahu responded to the bloody events by urging France’s Jews to move to Israel. “I wish to tell to all French and European Jews”, he said, “Israel is your home.” A tweet from Netanyahu reiterated the point:...
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Internal inquiry must not whitewash Israeli war crimes in Rafah
Over the last couple of weeks in Israel, in what has been called an “exceptionally widespread attack”, politicians, op-ed writers, and reservists have urged the IDF Military Advocate General (MAG) Danny Efroni to end investigations into a number of incidents that occurred during the recent assault on the Gaza...
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Business as usual at the UN - but US public opinion on Israel is shifting
Speaking to the Security Council on Tuesday shortly after voting against the doomed Palestinian-drafted resolution on statehood, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power referred three times to an “unsustainable status quo” between Israel and the Palestinians. It is of course Washington itself that bears most responsibility for this status...