Let’s imagine for just a moment that a people was forcibly dispossessed of its homeland. Let’s imagine that a portion of this people had rotted in refugee camps for some seven decades while the rest had lived under a brutal military occupation for almost five decades. Let’s imagine that the people living under this military occupation were systematically tortured, abused, stolen from, and prevented from exercising their most basic and universally ratified human and political rights. Let’s imagine that for
Yesterday Ken Livingstone, a prominent UK politician, socialist and key ally of Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, was suspended for allegedly antisemitic comments. His suspension brings the phony ‘antisemitism’ smear campaign being waged against the elected leadership of the Labour Party to within an inch of Corbyn himself. Over the past 36 hours Livingstone has been accused of being a ‘Nazi apologist’, a ‘disgusting racist’ and a historical revisionist – and that’s just from one of his party colleagues. I’ve written a short piece
I have an article up at openDemocracy debunking the ‘antisemitism’ smear campaign against the elected leadership of the UK Labour Party. Headline after headline in recent weeks has claimed that the party, in whose last-but-one leadership election both front-runners were Jewish, has become infested with antisemitism. The outbreak has been blamed on the veteran socialist and prominent Palestine solidarity campaigner Jeremy Corbyn, and the mass influx of new members who were inspired by his leadership to join. These attacks are
I have an article at openDemocracy pushing back against the thuggish smear campaign against Malia Bouattia, the newly-elected president of the UK’s National Union of Students. The attacks on Bouattia are part of a broader offensive against the elected leadership of the Labour Party and the Palestine solidarity movement, waged under the guise of fighting antisemitism. The offensive is being prosecuted by two distinct, but overlapping, groups: pro-Israel activists, who hope to unseat a prominent critic of Israel and to discredit Palestine solidarity activism; and
The Palestinian Authority (PA) suffers an extreme case of that increasingly common political affliction, responsibility without power. Its domestic legitimacy hinges on an ability to display plausible evidence of progress towards ending Israel’s occupation, while providing effective economic administration in the interim. But the occupation sets strict limits on what can be achieved economically, and even within those, the PA’s ability to deliver depends entirely on international support, which is itself conditioned on the PA enforcing Palestinian quiescence in the
“If it feels bad, do it”: Personally, I’m sick of the Sanders/Clinton thing; I didn’t want to write about it for today. But one of my mottos for column-writing has been “if it feels bad, do it.” If I would really like to avoid a topic because it makes life uncomfortable and will predictably lead to another wave of angry mail, that’s probably a good indication that it’s important. Still, I hope that I won’t have to do more columns