All 193 member states of the UN are subject to the Universal Periodic Review of their human rights record. Only one country has ever refused to take part – Israel. At its 2008 UPR Israel undertook to address the inequalities in its society. In its submission to the UN Adalah details the outstanding inequalities of Israeli society which the UPR should examine while 15 NGOs warn of the consequences of this boycott.

The people and organisations which are quickest to cry ‘antisemitism’ – think Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or many of the so-called Jewish representative groups in the UK – seem to have no grasp of what actually constitutes antisemitism and its true horror. To help them master their hysteria, and provide a service to our sensible readers, we post the Daily Beast’s 17 point guide to antisemitism and the abuse of that term.

Susya settlers have already seized about one sixth of Palestinian land around the old village of Susya. Since last summer, the villagers have been defending their residence against aggressive legal attacks from the right-wing Zionist body, Regavim. On Thursday, the Supreme Court should arrive at a judgment on Regavim’s petition for the destruction of all Palestinian structures in Susya and the villagers’ petition for access to their land..

M.J. Rosenberg is an any-stater – any state that produces a just peace is OK. But he’s not swept up in the new enthusiasm – or desperation – for a one-state solution. simply because he is sure it will never happen. So it is a recipe for no change. So that leaves the 2-state solution to be pursued.

As in many Jewish households, Robert Cohen’s gave money to the Jewish National Fund, inspired by the idea of creating forests in the barren desert. As in many Jewish households he later realised that where the trees were planted, Palestinian villages were forcibly deserted. He finds the rich Biblical imagery of trees as a phenomenon of nature to be in stark contrast to the Israeli practice of forced environmental change.

Here is a range of cartoons and comments on cartoons condemned as antisemitic. We have not reproduced undoubtedly antisemitic cartoons which show a stereotypical and thus anonymous Jewish character who has an inherent tendency to wreak destruction on the path to world domination. We at JfJfP postings do not think Netanyahu stands for all Jews or imagined ‘Jewish traits'; rather he stands for policies which many people abhor.

The history of Muslim intellectual work is long and distinguished. When Israeli soldiers looted Palestinian homes in 1948 they found a treasure trove on the shelves of educated former residents — and promptly stole the books, about 40,000 of them. Some have been located in Israel’s National Library, some have disappeared into private ownership and trade. Dalia Hatuqa on a documentary about this little-known pillage.

The death toll of Palestinians armed with nothing more lethal than stones, mounts. BTselem, in a re-issued report on the crowd control weapons used by the IOF, has counted 56 Palestinians killed since 2005 by the IOF combatting protesters. Live ammunition has been used as well as rubber-coated metal bullets prohibited for use inside Israel.

Don’t say peace, occupation, Palestinians; instead say security, normalcy and Arabs – that would seem to be the way to gain political dominance in Israel. But, says Jeff Halper, with a combination of good Israeli and Palestinian leadership or strong outside pressures, Israelis could be induced to give the Occupation up. It’s up to the critics to devise what sort of shared living space would be do-able.

Adam Keller did his civic duty by manning a polling booth, from where he observes that the social movement of 2011 was a protest at the unequal burdens Israelis carry; but while some raged at the well-connected tycoons who twist things in their favour, others focussed on the exemptions from most civic duties of the ultra-Orthodox. It was the latter group who gave Lapid his votes. Can he go beyond this grievance?

22-year old Lubna Munir Hanash was shot dead by the IOF while walking to college last week. Her companion was injured in what appears to be a burst of indiscriminate firing from men in a civilian car (1 and 2). While boys had thrown stones at the car in a nearby main road, there were none in the road the women were walking along (3). She is the sixth Palestinian to have been killed by Israeli forces this month.

Holocaust Memorial Day is January 27. The theme of the UK HMD Trust is ‘building bridges’. Visit their website to ‘build a bridge’. Watch the UCU’s video. But while both HMD and UCU make connections to other genocides, for some the Holocaust memory is sacred and, in particular any reference to Israeli treatment of Palestinians, as MP David Ward did, is unacceptable. But is this the day to stand up for Wiesel’s words: ‘Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.’

You might think Labour MPs would not want to favour a company which practised racial discrimination, paid its workers less than half the minimum wage, on casual terms, in poor working conditions, which mislabelled its products in order to fool consumers. When you add this company has based its production facility on a site which made a longed-for peace settlement impossible you do wonder why Labour Friends of Israel were happy to attend an event (1) publicising Sodastream (2, Who Profits report. Send this to an LFI member (List, 3)!

These are a few excerpts from the comprehensive annual report by the ACRI. It documents the loss or denial of civil rights to Israelis especially Palestinians. Many of these are local rules (building,use of Arabic) reminiscent of the ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the federally ‘equal’ but actually segrated southern US. A new factor is the privatisation of police and judicial services which will leave Palestinians and the poor with little access to justice..

‘I hope that whatever Israeli Government emerges will recognise that we are approaching the last chance of bringing about such a solution’ Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons last Tuesday. Despite reports of Britain and France ‘spearheading’ a two-state initiative (see link in post), Mr. Hague insisted that nothing would happen without the intervention of the USA, for whom he thinks ‘this should be the single highest priority for new momentum in American foreign policy’, which seems to blunt the European spear.

The anti-Netanyahu vote was roughly the same as the vote for him and his coalition list. But that does not mean a left-wing vote. There was nothing in the result that suggested any shift against the Occupation or settlers. The next Knesset will have a record number (c. 40) religious MKs. And voting seems to have been almost entirely on ethnic lines. Yousef Munayyer (1) and Noam Sheizaf (2) on the dismal showing.

This one’s for the election geeks; so you couldn’t be there, so here’s the next best thing, a live blog from AFP reporting developments as they unfold. First news of Yesh Atid’s unexpectedly strong showing at 18.15 via Twitter, although this had been predicted by Ha’aretz. Misled by opinion polls, perhaps, Netanyahu’s strategy of appealing to the right looks profoundly mistaken – though he would have made an unconvincing centrist candidate.

Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party have been hailed as the unexpected winners of the Israeli election by gaining enough Knesset seats to give them a place in coalition negotiations. He stands as the pragmatic anti-ideological candidate, for the Haredim doing military service and against any Palestinian right of return. He blames the Palestinians for the failure of negotiations but believes those negotiations must take place.

There’s no real democracy in Israel says the minority whose prime concern is the political exclusion of Palestinians whose lives are checked in every way by Israeli rules and rulers over which they have no say. So on the initiative of some (including a JfJfP signatory) Israeli supporters of the Real Democracy group offered individual Palestinians the right to choose who to vote for – or to not vote. Reports from +972, BBC, Ha’aretz.

Land, water and vast reserves of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean are some of the vital resources to which Palestinians have a title, especially now the PA has UN non-member status. Francis Boyle, professor of international law and adviser to the PLO, tells Dennis Bernstein what legal claims the PA could now bring, from gas to Gaza.