Israel/ Palestine

Thousands of Palestinians rallied in Gaza on Saturday to commemorate the Nakbah or national catastrophe of 1948, when European Jewish settlers brought into the Mandate of Palestine by imperial British policy expelled 700,000 Palestinians from what is now Israel and then sealed the border, confiscating all their property without compensation. These actions turned the bulk […]

New Israeli regulations allow authorities potentially to imprison or expel from the West Bank tens of thousands of Palestinians. The Israeli right has long favored “transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing) as a means of dealing both with Palestinian-Israelis and with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Given the extreme-right character of the government of Binyamin […]

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, now grandstanding at the UN, is the daughter of Eitan Livni, the chief operations officer of the Irgun terrorist organization. Among Irgun’s most spectacular operations was the blowing up of the King David tourist hotel in Jerusalem, which killed dozens of innocents (also some British intelligence officers). Just to give […]

Pepe Escobar writes with regard to my posting about Brazil’s granting of asylum to Palestinian refugees expelled from Palestine by the Israeli military in 1948, who had taken refuge in Iraq but have now been forced out of that country, as well. Escobar writes regularly for the Asia Times and has a recent book, Red […]

At the Global Affairs group blog: Gershon Shafir writes ‘ The focus of political debate in Israel between now and November will be the planned Peace Conference. Two approaches seem to be shaping up. One is expressed by the Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, who argues that no withdrawal from the West Bank should take […]

The Committee on Academic Freedom (North America) of the Middle East Studies Association has written a letter protesting the cancellation of a talk by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt scheduled by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. CCGA maintains that the speakers, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, needed to be balanced […]