IPAN, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, is inviting organisations and individuals throughout Australia to sign the open letter to the Prime Minister on Gaza and their freezing of funds to UNRWA. After the International Court of Justice’s ruling on South Africa’s case on 26 January, it is clear Israel is not halting its attacks Continue reading »
Israel / Palestine
Around two decades ago, the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, took an increasingly close interest in the wretched condition of Palestinians living under punishing Israeli domination. What he saw convinced him that Israel was maintaining an apartheid state very like those he had previously visited, at length, in Southern Africa. Readers may be familiar, from television, Continue reading »
Veterans of Middle East affairs say wryly that anyone who claims to understand the Israel-Palestine conflict has been misinformed. This paper reviews the complex and emotionally fraught history of the Conflict; looks at 10/7 and Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza in retaliation, and then speculates on possible pathways to the conflict’s resolution that could Continue reading »
By way of introduction let me quote Richard Falk, noted international law professor and former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Falk: the decision by the ICJ “marks the greatest moment in the history of the [Court]”. The initial response to the decision on 26 January suggested that South Africa Continue reading »
Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people. There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), Continue reading »
It is now very obvious that the Albanese government is determined to assist Israel in ensuring that the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are undermined and rendered unworkable. Within hours of Israel being ordered by the ICJ (approved in a 16 to one vote by the court’s judges) to “take Continue reading »
Doctors, Teachers, Journalists, Academics are being disciplined, hauled before disciplinary bodies and even sacked for criticising the slaughter in Gaza and, most heinous sin of all, for mentioning genocide. Arrayed against those professionals is a lobby promoting the notion that criticism of Israeli government policies is anti-Semitic, hence the need to censor commentary about the Continue reading »
The State of Israel can butcher thousands of innocents but New Zealand would not lift a finger to provide support to its victims. IDF soldiers can gun down old men and women waving white flags, shell lines of refugees queuing for aid and deprive hospitals of power and medicine – and all New Zealand does Continue reading »
Netanyahu and his supporters in Washington are playing for very high and dangerous stakes indeed as the Middle East war threatens to widen beyond Gaza. I will try in this unavoidably long essay to draw together the main political-military threads of the now very tangled situation across the Middle East, with the Gaza war as Continue reading »
For many of us a burning issue in our lives at this time is clearly what is happening in the Middle East – or more particularly Palestine. That genocide on a massive scale has been occurring cannot be denied. One hoped for a stronger preliminary finding to support interim measures by the ICJ. But it Continue reading »