With a truce between Hamas and Israel coming into force today, the sad likelihood of it lasting is virtually nil, but at least death and destruction will be on hold. For now (until Israel decides to properly re-invade Gaza.) Meanwhile, Palestinian militants are taking their battle into cyberspace: The Palestinian Islamist movement, Islamic Jihad, has…
Showing all posts tagged Hamas
The decider’s gut feeling
Guess who? “I know people are saying we should have left things the way they were, but I changed after 9/11. I had to act. I don’t care if it created more enemies. I had to act.” “I think the election of Hamas was a good thing. It proved to [Mahmoud] Abbas he was failing.…
Time to find new friends
How Bush and his mates are increasingly irrelevant in the Middle East. (Though this doesn’t stop many Western NGOs still supporting the worst aspects of Israeli occupation policies.)
The never-ending “peace process”
Amira Hass, Israeli journalist with Haaretz, talks to Salon: “You can’t talk about 60 years of Israel without talking about the naqba, the Palestinian disaster. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian elite, with their vested interests in maintaining the status quo, are interested in peace. One of the Palestinian negotiators has a son whose company supplies…
The changing of the guard
Robert Fisk in the London Independent on the current crisis in Lebanon: Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that…
A celebration that ignores the plight of Palestine
My following piece in the Melbourne Age, co-written with Michael Shaik, reflects on Israel’s 60th anniversary: “If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.…
Israel’s 60th birthday – what the media left out
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Antony Loewenstein, author of My Israel Question and the co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices, writes: “I am not a Jew”, said an Arab radio journalist in Jerusalem to the New York Times. “How can I belong to a Jewish state? If they define this as…
Knowing your enemy too well
Israel and Hamas, like two peas in a pod (courtesy of Haaretz’s Gideon Levy.)
What is there to be proud of?
As Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches, the country’s creeping apartheid continues: Among the many tools used in the battle between Israel’s Arabs and Jews, you can add a new one: gentrification. The Arab Association for Human Rights alleges that Arab residents in a seaside neighborhood of Jaffa are being driven out so that the area can…