Benjamin Balthaser’s review essay looks at some recent books that focus on the changing relationship of Zionism and liberalism in the USA. It is rich and nuanced account of how various writers grapple with the tensions and contradiction in this relationship. “The perversity at the centre of American Jewish liberalism, “ writes Balthaser, “is the …
By Leah Levane
In her latest Guardian column, Nesrine Malik she hails the Palestinian journalists targeted for assassination, not only for their heroism but also for the examplary quality of their work.
Ricky Hale and Council Estate Media, drawing on a series of tweets by Jamie Stern-Weiner, lambasts the BBC for a series of errors and distortions in its report on Zarah Sultana and her rejection of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. The hoary myth of left antisemitism is being clearly dusted down for re-deployment against …
A haunting evocation of the reality of Gaza today through one academic’s account of his current life: still surviving, still working somehow, and above all, still resisting – a triumph against all the odds. It is in the face of stories like this that our government’s complicity and abject failure to act will one day …
By Leah Levane
Forty students from Gaza are unable to take up their places at UK Universities because of UK bureaucracy. This seems to operate in a vacuum that does not factor in the reality that these students face. They cannot provide the biometric data the UK “requires” because the Centre in Gaza where this can be done has been has been closed since October 2023 and, of course, there is no way they can travel to neighbouring countries to get the required check
For light relief, you might like to read the latest developments in the long-running saga of a petty and spiteful campaign against Michael Rosen conducted by some self-styled campaigners against antisemitism. Michael retains a remarkable sense of irony and wit as he recounts a particularly unpleasant series of episodes in which he is trolled, targeted …
Tony Karon reminds us in this absorbing and wide-ranging essay, that the early Zionists saw violent resistance to them as a natural response of a colonised people to their dispossession. The process of centring Israeli identity on the Holocaust began later, with the show trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem, a deliberate construction of the …
Defend our Juries continue its sterling work in opposing the government’s outrageous proscription of Palestine Action.
Their latest move it to write to the Attorney General accusing Yvette Cooper of contempt of court for an article by her published in the Observer on 17 August.
In passing they commend her for one thing: describing Israel’s starvation and slaughter of the Palestinian people as ‘crimes against humanity’ .
The letter, reposted below, explains precisely why she is accused of contempt.
Genocide scholar Martin Shaw writes that the stakes are high. It is becoming impossible for Western states to continue their denial of the catastrophe that is Gaza, the genocide that is unfolding on their watch and with their complicity. They have many reasons for trying to avoid breaking their commitment to Israel and its US …
Adam Shatz discusses movingly how “memory culture” in Germany has developed in recent decades, overwhelmingly restricted as it is to German-Jewish relations between 1933 and 1945. The policy of Staatsräson, to which it is intimately linked, makes defence of Israel a central pillar of the German state. The lesson of the Holocaust seems to be …