The the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition blurs the distinction between anti-Jewish racism and criticism of Israel, argues Jake Lynch.
Israel
A New Yorker investigation has exposed that between 2018‒20, at least 65 leading figures in the Catalan government and independence movement had their mobile phones bugged, reports Dick Nichols.
Journalists, media workers, writers and commentators have released a statement calling on the mainstream media to improve its coverage of Palestine, including avoiding “both siderism”.
Scenes of brutality in Jerusalem have generated outrage and solidarity among Palestinians and around the world, report Ali Abunimah, Maureen Clare Murphy and Tamara Nassar.
Palestinian solidarity activists rallied in Sydney on May 11, commemorating al Nakba and calling for justice for Palestine.
Fifty Palestinians have been killed in Gaza’s eastern perimeter since March 30, five of them children and two journalists, writes Maureen Clare Murphy. The vast majority were participating in the Great March of Return protests, during which no Israelis have been killed or injured.
The jingoistic festivities to mark the centenaries of the Battle of Beersheba (in present day Israel, October 31, 1917) and the Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917) are being accompanied by an orgy of myth-making.
They mendaciously promote the story that Australia, through its mythological role in the battle with the Australian Light Horse Brigade, led to the foundation of the State of Israel.
FIFA, the governing body of world football (soccer), has capitulated once more to intense pressure from the Israeli government. It has removed from the agenda of its upcoming congress the issue of teams from Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land playing in Israel’s national league.
A Friday night march through Sydney city streets marked the 67th anniversary of Al Nakba, “the catastrophe”, the beginning of the violent dispossession of the Palestinian people.
Jews Against the Occupation released this statement on August 27.
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"The anti-Semitic leaflet distributed widely in Sydney's eastern suburbs is disgusting" said Vivienne Porzsolt of Jews Against the Occupation.
"It replicates the ancient shibboleths of traditional European hatred of Jews which has no place in a modern democracy.
You know, there is a lot of ridiculous and quite unfair criticism of Israel floating around, simply because it has been relentlessly bombing 1.5 million people trapped in a 360 square kilometre open-air prison over which it maintains a brutal siege and has slaughtered hundreds of people including dozens of children, supposedly in retaliation for homemade rockets fired from Gaza that has kill a total of one person in the current conflict.
But there is a little reported story that shows exactly what Israel's true values are.
The Only Democracy In the Middle East (TM) held elections on January 22, which is what all good democracies do — even if not all those actually governed by the Israeli Knesset got to vote.
Those in Gaza, which depends on the Israeli government elected in the poll to decide such things as which basic goods are let in to the besieged territory and whether or not they will be bombed on any given day, didn't get to cast a ballot. But in the West Bank, you'll be pleased to hear it is more mixed.
“In a war between the civilised man and the savage, support the civilised man.” So declared billboards on New York’s subways paid for by the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) early in August.
But, let’s face it, in these days of horrific mass slaughter, it can be difficult to determine who is who. So the AFDI ads spell it out: “Support Israel! Defeat Jihad!”
Activists in Melbourne have won a big victory for the right to political protest after the charges against the Max Brenner 16 were dismissed on July 23. The court trial lasted for 17 days in May.
The 16 Palestine solidarity activists had been arrested and charged over a protest outside the Max Brenner chocolate shop in QV Square, Melbourne in July last year. The protest was part of the campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel and the occupation of Palestine.
The Sydney Al-Nakba rally and march - marking 64 years since the brutal dispossession of Palestinians from their homeland - was successful despite police attempts to derail it. Around 500 people protested, after the Supreme Court dismissed the NSW Police Commissioners attempts to derail the march, which was organised by the Palestine Action Group Sydney.
Media reports suggested that US President Barack Obama's May 19 Washington DC speech on the Middle East and North Africa contained a new proposal for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. A look at the content shows this is false.
The May 20 New York Times declared: “President Obama, seeking to capture a moment of epochal change in the Arab world, began a new effort [in his speech] to break the stalemate in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, setting out a new starting point for negotiations on the region's most intractable problem.”
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