Israel Lobby Watch

A member of the UK’s National Union of Students Executive Council has denounced several youth and student officers from the opposition Labour Party for taking part in an all-expenses-paid tour of Israel and its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. The Labour students delegation met with Captain Barak Raz, an Israeli army spokesperson and other Israeli officials.

A worker at an Israeli media pressure group used her low dissertation mark as a post-graduate student at University of Warwick to smear a professor involved in Palestine solidarity activism this month.

An influential UK charity denounced Jewish critics of Israel in secret reports to the government earlier this year, The Electronic Intifada has learned.

A number of new initiatives to curtail freedom of speech by conflating opposition to Israeli crimes with anti-Semitism are underway in the United States and Canada.

Foreign Minister of the Netherlands Uri Rosenthal has threatened to punish the Dutch foundation ICCO for its continued funding of The Electronic Intifada. However, ICCO is standing its ground and Dutch civil society organizations are condemning the minister’s tactics.

The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by US President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about US and Israeli roles in the current peace talks. Jonathan Cook reports.

The Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) canceled a 19 September visit by Israeli mayors because the delegation included leaders of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, igniting a firestorm in the Dutch parliament centered at foreign affairs minister Maxime Verhagen.

Even though they are supporting settlement activities that the Dutch government officially considers to be illegal, Christians for Israel and the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities enjoy a cordial relationship with some of the most powerful politicians in the Netherlands.

As owner of 13 percent of land in Israel, and the organization that appoints the largest number of people to the Israel Lands Authority board of directors (6 out of 13), the Jewish National Fund is the central pillar of Israel’s regime over land. Hazem Jamjoum analyzes.

A student group at Columbia called Campus Media Watch, backed by the pro-Israeli media monitor the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), recently violated university regulations while urging students to “report” on allegedly biased utterances by Massad and other professors, according to faculty members and students. Jared Malsin reports for The Electronic Intifada.