In repeating blatant Zionist propaganda to justify her support for Israel, Nova Peris erroneously and harmfully conflates Jewish identity with support for the Zionist project in Palestine, which in effect depicts all Jews as complicit in Israel’s criminality. Her abject apologism also betrays all indigenous peoples’ struggles against colonial oppression. In an interview on Sky Continue reading »
Israel / Palestine
In a calculated and vicious attack Israel bombed an area in Rafah, Gaza designated as a “safe zone’ by the Israeli military, incinerating women and children and leaving flimsy plastic tents burning in a horrifying conflagration. This inferno was fuelled by the plastic and blanket tents, the only shelter available. The attack took place in Continue reading »
For Australia, the urgent challenge is when will we act independently and not be associated with war crimes and genocide. With unaccustomed speed, the international courts have risen to the occasion, responding to global outrage at Israel’s devastation of Rafah and its Defence Force’s murderous assaults on Palestinians. But Australia has not. This week, Western Continue reading »
When asked to compare life in apartheid South Africa with conditions in occupied Palestine, Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s judgement ran counter to prevailing orthodoxy. People make the comparison, said Tutu, but life in Palestine is far more brutal and repressive than in apartheid South Africa. A moral equivalency argument, that one side is no Continue reading »
The rather timid headline for a recent aggressive story in the New York Times (NYT) introduced a detailed investigation by that newspaper of how the governance of Israel has been captured by brutalised backers of apartheid. Michael Edesess recently observed how headline writing is regarded a special skill in journalistic circles. The NYT, he noted, Continue reading »
With the ICJ ordering a cessation of Rafah hostilities there is now close to a certainty Netanyahu and defence minister Gallant will be charged with a war crime. At the heart of the ICJ’s decision is that Israel all but ignored its previous order and fell far short of “all necessary and effective measures” to Continue reading »
“For 57 years, Israel has been maintaining a regime of wrongdoing and evil, and now, at last, the world is waking up and starting to act against it. Will it also be able to wake up at least some Israelis from their heedless, twisted sense of justice?” writes senior Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy. Watch the Continue reading »
Let me introduce myself. I am a child of Holocaust survivors. My mother survived Auschwitz and my father fought the Nazi war machine as a partisan during the Second World War. Ninety-eight percent of my extended family perished during the Holocaust. From a very early age, beginning perhaps when I was four, I became acutely Continue reading »
James Crawford has been described as “Probably Australia’s greatest international lawyer of all time” (SMH, 16 June 2021). James Crawford died on 31 May 2021. But perhaps he still has something to contribute to the major controversy facing today’s world: Palestine. Why should I be aware of someone by the name of James Crawford, you Continue reading »
What a twenty-five-year-old memo by Daniel Ellsberg says about the past failures of Lyndon Johnson and the current horrors of Benjamin Netanyahu. The conversion of my friend Ellsberg, who died last June of cancer, from avid supporter of and adviser on the Vietnam War to perhaps its most important critic is well known. One of Continue reading »