Arab funding for Jerusalem comes a decade too late

6 April 2013

For Palestinian leaders, waiting anxiously in the hope that US Secretary of State John Kerry unveils a peace plan when he visits this week, the need to secure East Jerusalem’s future has come sharply into relief. The reason is simple: there can be no viable Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital. This was the background to a March 26 pledge by the Arab League to establish a $1 billion fund to protect East Jerusalem’s Arab and Islamic characters.

Obama comes to bless Israel’s government of settlers

20 March 2013

Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed. At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians.

Herod exhibit digs up controversy

1 March 2013

The largest exhibition ever staged by Israel’s national museum, dedicated to the life of King Herod, has generated unprecedented excitement at home and abroad. But the exhibits have been taken from sites located in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, outside the recognised borders of Israel. PA official Hamdan Taha said: “This is just the latest example of an Israeli policy to use archeology to cement its political claims to land that belongs to the Palestinian state.”

Obama’s diplomatic overture will fall prey to Israel’s hawks

25 February 2013

Will the Palestinians be able to take advantage of President Obama’s apparent renewed interest in diplomacy? Here is the rub. Benjamin Netanyahu already has a stranglehold on the politics of his potential peace partners. He can easily manipulate the fortunes of the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas on the two biggest tests he faces: the peace process overseen by the international community, and reconciliation talks with the rival Palestinian faction Hamas.

Pictures speak volumes in Oscar-nominated Israeli films

20 February 2013

Israelis have been revelling in the prospect of an Oscar night triumph next week, with two Israeli-financed films in the running for Best Documentary. But the Israeli government is reported to be quietly fuming that the films, both of which portray Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories in a critical light, have garnered so much attention following their nominations. Guy Davidi, the Israeli co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, said industry insiders had warned him that pressure was being exerted on the Academy to stop the films winning the award.

Israel’s rightward shift leaves Palestinian citizens out in the cold

14 February 2013

Shortly before polling day in Israel, the Arab League issued a statement urging Israel’s large Palestinian minority, a fifth of the country’s population, to turn out en masse to vote. The call revealed a profound, if by now well-established, misunderstanding of Israeli politics. It assumed that the Israeli polity can be divided neatly into left and right wings, and that the differences between the two correspond primarily to relative willingness to make concessions to advance the cause of peace.

Israel’s left turn to the far right

28 January 2013

This election has been a personal blow to Netanyahu, but not to the right. Netanyahu misread the public mood, but not on the central issues that should define the left-right divide in Israel: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and decades of belligerent Israeli occupation. Far from a collapse of the right, the election demonstrated that the right is continuing to push the center of political gravity ever further rightwards.

Palestinian citizens wearily eye Israeli elections

19 January 2013

As Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s Palestinian minority, gears up for the country’s general election next week, the most common poster in the city features three far-right leaders noted for their virulently anti-Arab views. Paid for by one of the largest Palestinian parties, the posters are intended to mobilize the country’s Palestinian citizens to vote. They pose a blunt question in Arabic: “Who are you leaving it [the Israeli parliament] to?”

How 20 tents rocked Israel

14 January 2013

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has done little to capitalise on his recent diplomatic success at the UN. So instead, it was left to a group of 250 ordinary Palestinians to show how the idea of a “state of Palestine” might be given practical meaning. On Friday, they set up a tent encampment that they intended to convert into a new Palestinian village called Bab al-Shams, or Gate of the Sun.

The terror lurking in a Christmas tree

24 December 2012

Israel’s large Palestinian minority is often spoken of in terms of the threat it poses to the Jewish majority. Palestinian citizens’ reproductive rate constitutes a “demographic timebomb”, while their main political programme – Israel’s reform into “a state of all its citizens” – is proof for most Israeli Jews that their compatriots are really a “fifth column”. But who would imagine that Israeli Jews could be so intimidated by the innocuous Christmas tree?

Murdoch, Petraeus and the US media matrix

21 December 2012

Carl Bernstein, of All the President’s Men fame, has a revealing commentary in the Guardian today, though revealing not entirely in a way he appears to understand. Bernstein highlights a story first disclosed earlier this month in the Washington Post by his former journalistic partner Bob Woodward that media mogul Rupert Murdoch tried to “buy the US presidency”.

Why Gaza must suffer again

18 November 2012

The inciting cause of the latest confrontation between Israel and Hamas has little to do with the firing of rockets, whether by Hamas or the other Palestinian factions. The conflict predates the rockets – and even the creation of Hamas – by decades. It is the legacy of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, forcing many of them from their homes in what is now Israel into the tiny Gaza Strip. That original injustice has been compounded by the occupation Israel has not only failed to end but has actually intensified in recent years with its relentless siege of the small strip of territory.

Don’t expect Obama to take on Israel

14 November 2012

The speculation among Israelis and many observers is that an Obama second term will see much greater pressure on Israel both to make major concessions on Palestinian statehood and to end its aggressive posturing towards Iran over its supposed ambition to build a nuclear warhead. Such thinking, however, is fanciful. The White House’s approach towards Netanyahu and Israel is unlikely to alter significantly.

‘It’s time for Palestinians in Israel to stand firm against the Bantustan plan of Oslo’

12 November 2012

Interview with Awad Abdel Fattah: ‘The PA is still using the discussion about one state as a way to frighten Israelis. The demand for justice and equality should not be used as a scare tactic: in fact, we should be making the argument that one state would be good for Israelis too.’

Israeli Ministry of Tourism map annexes over 60% of the West Bank

2 November 2012

Is Israel preparing to annex Area C, as a growing number of analysts have recently been speculating? This week, on a visit to the Israel’s tourism bureau in Nazareth, I came across an official brochure, “Your Next Vacation: Israel”, that suggests the answer. The brochure is supplied to travel agents around the world as well as to hundreds of thousands of tourists who arrive in Israel each year.

Israel’s formula for a starvation diet

24 October 2012

Six and a half years go, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian national elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel’s planned response: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Few observers treated the comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterisation of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave. Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy.

The full story behind the war against free speech in Israel’s universities

22 October 2012

A sustained battle by the Israeli right to stifle academic freedom at the country’s universities is close to claiming its first major scalp. In an unprecedented move last month, Israel’s Council for Higher Education recommended the effective closure of the politics department of Ben Gurion University, based in the Negev. The threatened closure comes in the wake of a series of repressive measures sanctioned by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to intimidate or silence domestic criticism, from human rights groups to the media and judiciary.

Israel’s impossible plan for refugees is just a stalling tactic

30 September 2012

In the shadow of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s theatrics at the United Nations last week, armed with his cartoon Iranian bomb, Israeli officials launched a quieter, but equally combative, initiative to extinguish whatever hopes have survived of reviving the peace process. For the first time in its history, Israel is seeking to equate millions of Palestinians in refugee camps across the Middle East with millions of Israeli citizens descended from Jews who, before Israel’s establishment in 1948, lived in Arab countries.