Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Asa Winstanley
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Israel’s inherent cruelty doomed a sick Palestinian teen to die
Israel’s so-called security services are vindictive, megalomaniacal and cruel; they are experts only in torture, kidnapping and cold-blooded murder. Their cruelty, in fact, is inherent. Last month Palestinian teenager Ahmad Hassan Shubeir died after Israeli occupation authorities sadistically blocked his exit from the Gaza Strip so that he could...
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Could Israel's love affair with Al-Qaeda in Syria be coming to an end?
Israel has for the past few years been in a tactical alliance with Al-Qaeda-led “rebels” in the south-western section of Syria known as the Golan Heights. It has been granting logistical, and maybe even military, support to an armed rebel group once known as Jabhat Al-Nusra, which was Al-Qaeda’s...
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The murder of Palestinians has been normalised by Israel
Last spring, an Israeli killer was caught on camera carefully and deliberately conversing with a colleague, preparing his weapon and then shooting dead a seriously inured prone Palestinian youth; Abd Al-Fattah Yusri Al-Sharif, 21, was shot in the head. The murderer was Elor Azaria, an Israeli army “medic”. Israel...
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Israel's global death squads
Israel’s Mossad spy agency has long had a reputation for brutality. Its agents have a history of travelling the world using stolen and fake passports of supposedly allied states, and kidnapping, torturing and murdering Israel’s enemies. In 1972, for example, the Mossad murdered the Palestinian Marxist and novelist Ghassan...
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Israel's romance with Al-Qaeda is ongoing
The Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv is an influential think tank staffed by a rogue’s gallery of Israel’s former military and intelligence top brass; its director is a former spy chief. The institute held its tenth annual conference this week; speakers included current and former senior...
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The Israel lobby film was a watershed, and it won’t go away
Al-Jazeera’s four-part film The Lobby broadcast earlier this month was event TV at its best. The undercover documentary shone a light on how the pro-Israel lobby operates in Britain, providing viewers with insights into some of its most underhanded methods. The headline finding, of course, was the discovery of...
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The ‘let them bleed’ doctrine in Syria
With the attention of the world’s media rightfully focused on Russia’s bombing of Aleppo, and with the general carnage of the war in Syria, it is easy to forget what Israel and the West are up to in the country. The war in Syria is multifaceted, complex and, above...
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GCHQ called Israel a ‘real threat’ to regional stability
New documents released from the National Security Agency trove leaked by whistle-blower Edward Snowden give insights into the intelligence relationship between Israel and Britain. According to French newspaper Le Monde, one top secret GCHQ document from 2008 stated that “the Israelis remain a real threat to the stability of...
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BDS has made major advances in 2016
Palestine’s BDS National Committee (BNC) leads and coordinates the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. It has been the biggest year yet for BDS, but it has also been a big year for anti-BDS oppression. As the BNC put it in a recent round-up of the year, 2016 will be...
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Israel is still harassing the Palestinian lawyer jailed for ‘organising demonstrations’
For more than three years, Anas Barghouti has been compelled to attend a “court” intermittently by the Israeli military regime which illegally occupies the West Bank region of Palestine. The Israelis have also summarily imposed a travel ban on him. Barghouti is a lawyer, and he represents Palestinian prisoners...
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A British citizen has been tortured by Israel's secret police
Israel’s secret police have tortured a British citizen into “confessing” to a crime which he insists he did not commit. Although Haaretz claimed last month that he had been released, it appears that Faiz Sherari remains in the custody of a “military court” run by Israel’s illegal occupation regime...
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Trump era heralds an age of pro-Israel anti-Semitism
The appointment of Steve Bannon to US President-elect Donald Trump’s White House transition team has been extremely revealing. The reaction to the appointment has vindicated the argument that anti-Zionists have made for years; that Zionism often allies itself with, and even relies on, anti-Semitism to achieve its objectives. This...
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Greenwashing: Israel's latest colonial tool against Syria
It came out last month that Israel has been using the cover of the war in Syria to entrench its colonial occupation of the south-west of the country by expanding the illegal settlement of Katzrin. It has now emerged that Israel is also using the tactic of “greenwashing” in...
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Israel imprisons Palestinian boycott activist without trial
Last week, Israel fired the latest salvo in its “war” against the non-violent boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS). This time it came on the streets of Ramallah. As happens so often with Israeli abuses against the civilian population of the occupied West Bank, the soldiers invaded in the...
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Under cover of war, Israel expands its occupation of Syria
In many ways, the war in Syria has been a gift to Israel. For reasons quite similar to the US, the government in Tel Aviv has an interest in helping to prolong the war for as long as possible. Mostly crudely expressed by the poisonous anti-Muslim demagogue Daniel Pipes...
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The new campaign from Labour Friends of Israel is a smokescreen
At a meeting of Labour Friends of Israel in parliament on Wednesday, the pro-Israel lobby group launched something of a rebrand: “For Israel, For Palestine, For Peace” is a slogan first seen at its stall at the Labour Party conference at the end of September. The new campaign’s main...
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Will we see the return of Mohammad Dahlan?
Is Mohammad Dahlan being lined up to make a return to occupied Palestine? The once-feared Gaza warlord is at the moment doubly exiled from the Palestinian Authority’s enclaves. The PA, remember, actually controls nothing; the small regions of the occupied West Bank nominally under its control are in reality...
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What are the Americans really up to in Syria?
The war in Syria rages on. Hundreds of thousands have lost their lives and millions are displaced. Although we might think that the situation could not get any worse, it can; some people have advocated recently for greater US and British involvement in the war in the form of...
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Yes, of course the word ‘Zionist’ is an accusation
A report by a House of Commons select committee published last weekend contained an unprecedented attack on freedom of speech in Britain. Despite this, the media simply used the report as fodder in its ongoing and obsessive campaign against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. The most deeply troubling aspect...
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What are the Jewish Labour Movement's links to Israel?
For more than a year, leftist Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has been the target of an extreme media campaign of vilification and smears. His socialist politics and his traditional anti-imperialist approach to international affairs are anathema to the political and media establishment. At the forefront of this campaign...
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A Sword of Damocles hangs over the PA
The US government has essentially bailed out the Palestinian Authority. In a recent story for The Electronic Intifada, my colleague Charlotte Silver detailed the case here. A US “federal court of appeals threw out a verdict by a New York jury that found the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine...
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Has the Tory government authorised Israeli ‘black-ops’ in Britain?
Israel is stepping up its war against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The BDS campaign is seen as a “strategic threat of the first order” against Israel, now replacing even Iran in the demonology of Israeli propaganda. A recent committee hearing in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, revealed the...
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Israel and the Western alliance with Al-Qaeda in Syria
Earlier this year, former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy granted a telling interview to Al-Jazeera’s Mehdi Hassan. In it, he confirmed much of what I have been reporting in this column for years: Israel has been in a tactical alliance with Al-Qaeda in Syria. Halevy made some quite frank and...
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Why the Chakrabarti report is being attacked
In early August, Shami Chakrabarti and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn were accused by anti-Palestinian campaigners of causing a “whitewash for peerages” scandal. The charge came from the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which is an organisation which campaigns along reactionary “Israel, right or wrong” lines. Corbyn had...