Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Palestinians are being arrested by Israel for posting on Facebook
One of the more insidious aspects of Israel’s military dictatorship in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is its blanket monitoring of Palestinian social networks and other forms of communication via the internet. This often leads to arrests being made. A recent report by 7amleh, the Arab Centre for...
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Journalist Hasan Safadi has been detained without trial for speaking against Israel’s occupation
It is with a sense of depressing familiarity that I am, once again, writing about yet another defender of Palestinian human rights imprisoned without trail by Israel. Hasan Safadi’s “crime” is that he spoke out and wrote against Israel’s human rights abuses. He is a journalist and human rights...
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Britain is on the verge of a political revolution
Britain’s general election has changed everything. Over the past two years since Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party, history has been moving at a frenetic pace. As events unfold, it only seems to accelerate. The election may have not been won outright by any one party,...
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Eurovision has shown us BDS reaches Israeli psyche
A long-standing question from Eurovision viewers has been, how come Israeli musicians take part in the competition when it is not even in Europe? Well, fact fans, here’s the answer: Israel’s public broadcaster was long part of the European Broadcasting Union, membership of which is the entry qualification for...
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Norwegian unions’ full BDS policy leads the way
The Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) voted through a ground-breaking motion earlier this month. It pushes the boundaries in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. The LO is the equivalent of Britain’s Trades Union Congress; an umbrella organisation that federates the nation’s trade unions into...
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How Lonely Planet and Airbnb are burnishing Israeli occupation
Three of the world’s most famous travel websites are treating the illegally occupied Golan Heights as if it were genuinely a part of Israel, research by a Syrian human rights group has found. The Golan Heights is a sector of Syria which was invaded by Israel in 1967 and...
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This secretive report exposes the vacuum at the heart of Israel's war against BDS
A leaked report last month revealed the lengths to which Israel is going to undermine and sabotage the Palestine solidarity movement. The report, a copy of which has been obtained by The Electronic Intifada, was authored jointly by influential Israeli think tank the Reut Institute and US pro-Israel group...
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Mahmoud Abbas goes to Washington
Last week Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas was received at the White House by US President Donald Trump. The whole thing was an entirely pointless spectacle – a meeting between two “presidents” who are deeply unpopular in their respective countries. Prominent Palestinian intellectual and former PLO advisor Diana Buttu...
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The new Hamas charter and Palestinian consensus
Palestine’s Islamic Resistance Movement – Hamas – has finally revealed its new charter. The document was launched by the head of the Hamas political bureau, Khaled Meshaal, at a press conference in Doha, Qatar on 1 May. The charter’s formal title is, “A Document of General Principles and Policies”...
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Palestinian prisoners are on hunger strike for fundamental human rights
Saturday marks the thirteenth day of the latest mass hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israeli jails. Palestinian human rights groups announced earlier this month that 1,500 prisoners had started a new protest against their prison conditions with the objective of compelling Israel to make fundamental...
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Israel’s ‘cyber mercenaries’ are hacking into smart phones around the world
Earlier this month a new high-tech espionage threat was discovered by Google and cyber security research company Lookout. The Chrysaor malware is thought to have been created by the NSO Group, an Israeli firm with strong links to the state. NSO was founded by two men who, according to...
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Israel’s divide and rule strategy in Syria is nothing new
I have recently been reading By Way of Deception, the 1990 book written by former Mossad spy Victor Ostrovsky. It provides some interesting insights into Israel’s violent and vindictive methods in the Arab region, not least its pernicious divide and rule strategy. The book was controversial even before its...
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Israeli encroachment and the one-state reality
The region of Palestine known as the West Bank is occupied illegally by Israel, and has been since June 1967. Despite regime propaganda which attempts to redefine the territory as simply a “disputed” plot of land, the facts of international law in this regard are clear. Although we are...
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Zionism is anti-Semitism
Zionism in the age of Trump: it is becoming increasingly clear to more people that the Israeli state’s officially defined ideology is, at its very core, an anti-Jewish one. It sounds counter-intuitive. How can the “Jewish State” or the Zionist movement be anti-Semitic? But several of US President Donald...
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We can expect even more Israeli propaganda to infiltrate our social networks
Earlier this month, the liberal Zionist Haaretz newspaper reported that the Israeli government has purchased a new software system which will enable it to “plant” its propaganda online. The system, created by an Israeli company called Buzzilla, will allow ministries “to monitor social media in general and specific users...
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An Israeli minister has threatened genocide in Lebanon, but where is the outcry?
Picture, if you will, what the front pages of the British newspapers would look like if Russia threatened to target the civilian infrastructure of a neighbouring country and send it “back to the Middle Ages.” The uproar is not too hard to imagine. Indeed, the condemnations would flow thick...
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Why does Israel spy on its allies?
A report in Le Monde last weekend revealed new details of how Israel spies on the most enthusiastic state-supporters of its war crimes and apartheid against the Palestinian people. The newspaper reportedly revealed details of how Israel’s Mossad spy agency may have infiltrated French intelligence, possibly even at its...
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Not content with wiping Palestine off the map, Israel has done the same to part of Syria too
For several years, throughout the height of Israel’s anti-Iran war-mongering and propaganda, we were told that a nuclear Iran threatened to wipe the Zionist state “off the map”. In fact, this claim was based on a mistranslated statement by the then Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What he had actually...
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The failure of Brand Israel
More than a decade ago, the Israeli government launched a new strategy that it dubbed “Brand Israel”. This began in 2006 as an effort to improve Israel’s negative image overseas, “by downplaying religion and avoiding any discussion of the conflict with the Palestinians.” This was no simple effort to...
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How Arab Jewish children were kidnapped in Israel
A scandal has been brewing in Israel that has been decades in the making. During Israel’s foundational years, thousands of babies born to Jews from Arab countries were kidnapped from their parents and given to white, Ashkenazi families for adoption. The affected families were mostly Jews newly-arrived from Yemen,...
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BDS and ‘commercial reasons’
When the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s chair Hugh Lanning was denied entry to Palestine by Israeli occupation officials last weekend, he seems to have been the first activist denied entry under a new Israeli law aimed at fighting the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). Gilad Erdan’s anti-BDS ministry...
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A new Jewish Defence League?
The formation of the so-called alt-right and its closeness to the new American president is a worrying phenomenon. The “alt-right” is little more than the old white nationalism beloved of neo-Nazis. While its leading figure Richard Spencer denies being a neo-Nazi, the whites-only state he advocates for the US...
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Israeli annexation of the West Bank will bury the two-state solution
To the extent that there is any serious discussion of the Israeli occupation of Palestine in the mainstream media, it is mostly focused on the issue of settlements across the West Bank and Jerusalem. “Settlements” may sound like a relatively benign, even neutral term. A “human settlement” in the...
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Almost 20% of Palestinian youth have faced arrest after online postings
A recent survey of Palestinian youth has revealed the depth of Israeli spying on the indigenous population of historic Palestine. The poll by the Arab Centre for Social Media Advancement (7amleh — “Campaign”) indicated that 19 per cent of 15 to 25-year-olds reported being arrested or pulled up for...