Rosemary Bechler interviews Galia Golan, professor of Russian and East European Studies at the Hebrew University, and a co-founder of Peace Now and of Bat Shalom as well as being/having been a member of the Meretz Party executive, of the Editorial Board of the Palestine-Israel Journal and Director of IPCRI.

She explains why, despite the fact that the war on Gaza has alienated her from her government and fellow-countrymen as never before, she believes that the time has come for a solution.

Sindyanna of Galilee and WAC have launched a campaign to introduce a unique and meaningful calendar to all our friends and partners and to all peace lovers in the world. Fair Trade Calendar 2010 Our Bread and Roses Calendar for 2010 consists of 12 paintings by Palestinian and Jewish women living in Israel. The works [...]

JfJfP meeting at the Indian YMCA, 41 Fitzroy Square, London W1t 6AQ – 17 June, 7.00 for 7.30pm
Settlement Expansion in the Jordan Valley & Non-Violent Efforts to Challenge the Occupation

This report contains:

An analysis of the escalating abuse of state power
A sample letter of protest
Government officials to protest to
A list of Israeli Press Contacts for ‘Letters to the Editor’

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a study indicating that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The study has been posted for public debate on the HSRC website.

This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State…A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others… The consequences are inevitable. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted of this crime. There will be a need for concentration camps all over the country…

Amos Elon, the Israeli journalist and historian, has died.
Robert Mackey says of Amos Elon’s seminal article “Israelis & Palestinians: What Went Wrong?” published in The New York Review of Books in 2002: “Mr. Elon’s rich, textured, concise overview of the century of struggle in the Middle East that followed Herzl’s death is worth reading in its entirety, but it is not hard to discern from it what this historian of Israel saw as the biggest mistake made by modern Israeli governments: the settlements on occupied Palestinian territory…”

TEL AVIV, 28 May 2009 (IRIN) – Reports published recently by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), Israeli NGO B’Tselem and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) paint a grim picture of life in Gaza more than four months after the 23-day Israeli offensive ended on 18 January.

Will You Back Obama for a Settlement Freeze? Show your support by signing Brit Tzedek’s “We’ve Got Your Back, Mr. President!” pledge. If you’re on Facebook, click here, so you can ask your friends to sign the pledge. The Obama Administration is tackling the contentious settlement issue head on. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated [...]

All these books are written by Jews who have spent their lives being deeply engaged with, and enraged by, Israel and Zionism. Avishai and Halper made aliyah; the former, twice. Burg, of course, was Chairman of the Jewish Agency and Speaker of the Israeli Knesset. Some are on the left; some are on the center. But what they all share is a vision of different sort of Jewish State than the one founded in 1948. No, it is not just that they are critical of this or that policy of the state of Israel. They have fundamental problems with a state whose conception, they feel, is fundamentally flawed. This brings them to reject the reigning orthodoxies of the Zionist center, and to align themselves not with what Israel is today, but with what it could be – when it becomes a liberal democracy.

From Islington Friends of Yibna For a week, medics unable to get into Gaza, went on hunger strike  – caught in a catch 22 situation, between the Egyptian authorities and the FCO/British Embassy in Egypt, where the Rafah Crossing is an impasse – neither open nor closed. This is while Israel is tightening the siege. [...]

There is a short answer and a longer answer to this question. The short answer is that I don’t take a position on one state or two states. In the end I’m not invested in one end product, but in ending the conflict. For that to happen, there are several principles that any just solution will have to meet. Some of those principles are equality (in the personal and collective sense) and self-determination. These are principles that can be met in theory in any configuration of solutions, whether they be one state, two states, a confederation, etc.

As I passed along the line, a man who was about sixty, just about to enter the long cage to the turnstile, said to me very softly in English: “Why? Why? Why?”

What could I say? “Because you are not Jewish.”

JfJfP runners took part in a successful attempt to set the world record for the most people running a 100m relay in 12 hours.

East Jerusalem residents who make up 36% of the residents of Jerusalem receive 7% of the budget while 64% of residents who are in West Jerusalem receive 92% of the budget.

At the 14th Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting, held in Jamaica earlier this month, a resolution on the Middle East was passed, criticising the Israeli occupation. An original version of the resolution was originally submitted by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network (APJN), but as the language was felt by some to be too “strong”, a new resolution was put forward and adopted.

A new Fabian Freethinking paper argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is on the verge of becoming irresolvable but that President Obama’s first term offers a final opportunity to settle it.

Published as Obama meets with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in Washington, long term Middle East observer Tony Klug outlines a workable three step strategy based on clear goals and effective enforcement to bring this most calamitous of conflicts to a swift and fair end.

Update (Friday 22 May 16.30) We have just received this statment from the PR company representing CBS Outdoor, regarding removal of the posters: “Instructions to remove the campaign came through to CBSO from Posterscope acting on behalf of Total Media.  As a result of this instruction we stopped posting on Wednesday night (20/5) with approximately 109 sites [...]

Mirjam Hadar Meerschwam of New Profile, May 2009
My computer, today, is still at Tel Aviv police headquarters where it stayed after my two-hour interrogation last week. I am not given, I believe, to conspiracy thinking but the thought crossed my mind, comically rather, whether I’d ever written anything unkind about my neighbor or his family…

20 May 209: A group of MPs has called for an immediate end to Israel ’s blockade of Gaza.

A delegation from the Britain-Palestine All Party Parliamentary Group (BPAPPG) visited Israel , Gaza and the West Bank in the immediate aftermath of “Operation Cast Lead”, to assess the deteriorating situation in the Occupied Territories . Their subsequent findings include a call for crossings into and out of Gaza to be opened and for a rigorous international inquiry into allegations of war crimes.