Israel/ Palestine

Despite the breathless flurry of approving statements provoked by the English-language pledge issued by the prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu that the blockade of Gaza would be ‘eased,’ in fact , Haaretz reports, the Hebrew text of the communique does not indicate that the cabinet made any such decision, and there has been no […]

One problem with the focus the Israeli raid on the Gaza aid flotilla is that it may make it appear that the Israeli blockade of Gaza is the central issue. Then any Israeli loosening of the blockade would seem to be an advance. In fact, the blockade is not the problem but is rather a […]

“Gaza” is an abstraction to most Israelis, including [partisans of Israel like] Sen. Charles Schumer of New York. A majority of the 1.5 million Gazans is not even from Gaza, but rather is from what is now Israel. Americans do not know, and perhaps do not care, that 68% of Gazans are refugees living in […]

Democracy Now! interviews Iara Lee about the video she managed to get past Israeli jamming, from the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara aid ship in international waters. She later that day released 15 minutes of footage at the website, Culturesofresistance.org. It shows scenes from the period before and during the Israeli commandos’ boarding of […]

Stephen Colbert, who parodies rightwing t.v. pundits, debates himself on the Israeli assault on the Gaza aid flotilla and tells the Israeli ambassador to the US that ‘the Palestinians should go back where they came from.’ The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Formidable Opponent – Michael Oren www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes […]

Update: Paul Woodward has discovered an earlier video posted to the Web from which the following was apparently culled, via what he calls ‘creative editing.’ Obviously, raw footage is preferable, but it isn’t clear if the effect of the editing was actually any falsification of the sordid reality of what occurred. Original posting: The Israeli […]

Kenneth O’Keefe, a victim of the brutal Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara on Memorial Day that killed one American citizen and 8 others, at least, speaks of how he grabbed Israeli commandos’ weapons after they went on a shooting rampage, and then saved the commandos. And here is O’Keefe’s interview in which he ridicules […]

Now a German Jewish organization, Jewish Voice for Peace in the Middle East, is planning an aid flotilla to Gaza! Please send them money. There are over 250,000 Jews in contemporary Germany, and more Jews immigrated to Germany in 2005 than to Israel. Four-fifths of them are Russian Jews who prefer Berlin to Beersheva. And, […]

Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, is often wrongly thought to have been writing science fiction in his seminal novel, 1984. In fact, he was simply warning about certain tendencies in governmental practice as actually observed not only in the mass authoritarian regimes but often in his own Britain. Thus, newspeak, whereby the government calls things […]