By Leah Levane
Only Israel incarcerates children – Palestinian children, of course – in such numbers. Children are often arrested in the middle of the night, taken from their homes without their parents being able to accompany them. There are cases where the children have been taken from the West Bank into Israel where their parents cannot see …
In a highly critical essay, Eli Machover takes the authors of The Runnymede Report on antisemitism in the UK to task.
They had an opportunity to confront issues surrounding Jew-hatred and “Jewish safety” within the context of ethnonationalism, and the alliance we have seen between Israel in its genocidal war on Gaza and the British state.
In Machover’s assessment they missed it.
By Leah Levane
This testimony is from an interview with a Greek doctor recently returned from a month working in Nasser hospital, Khan Yunis in Southern Gaza. We felt it important to share for its clarity – despite the rather imperfect translation from the original Greek. What is clear from his experience is how children, journalists and doctors …
By JVL
What difference does good journalism make? This is one of the questions posed by the outgoing Jerusalem correspondent for the Guardian in this thoughtful article. She was in Gaza before October 7th 2023 and has been unable to be there since but life was not easy even then. She says: “Martha Gellhorn, one of the …
By JVL
Israel and its supporters try to assure us that aid is now being allowed into Gaza but few people are fooled and certainly none of the organisations experienced at distributing aid across Gaza. Not only are three of the four planned sites in the south of Gaza, the fourth is also far from the north. …
By Leah Levane
Asa Winstanley’s home was raided by police in October 2024. This week a judge ruled that this was unlawful. Winstanley is just one of the far too many journalists and activists whose homes and/or property have been raided. Since the raid and confiscation of devices more than seven months ago, Winstanley has been neither charged …
David Feldman, Ben Gidley and Brendan McGeever of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism recently co-authored a new report on antisemitism in the UK for The Runnymede Trust. It was published in January.
Through the lens of seeing antisemitism as “a reservoir of racist stereotypes and narratives about Jewish people, which are normalised and widespread”, it finds the politics of anti-antisemitism as practiced by the Jewish community, the state, and the left wanting.
It calls on the UK government and wider anti-racist organisations to “move beyond framing and discussing antisemitism in ways that pit communities against one another, prohibit solidarity and encourage division” and to adopt a “360-degree antiracism” that develops alliances between Jewish people and other racialised minorities.
Read Vashti’s interview with the authors of the report below.
We welcome a new publication from Independent Jewish Voices, Canada on the IHRA Definition of Antisemitism and its increasing weaponisation there to shield Israel from criticism, particularly during its genocide in Gaza.
This has reached a crescendo with the publication of The Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.
We repost below the introduction to the IJV critque of this handbook.
By Leah Levane
Palestinian civil society organisations have, once again written to UN Special Advisers noting that “Since your last public statement issued in the context of Israel’s unilateral breach of the ceasefire agreement, the situation for Palestinians in Gaza has only deteriorated.” They call on the advisers to publicly acknowledge the genocidal nature of Israel’s actions and …
Joseph Finlay provides a wide-ranging overview of the flurry of books which have appeared in recent years on the topic of antisemitism
Among Finlay’s many perceptive insights, here is one this editor really liked:
“There are many discourses that may be simplistic, coarse, deaf to Jewish historical suffering, lacking in strategic foresight or simply uniformed, without being antisemitic. Just because (some) Jews find something uncomfortable, that doesn’t make it antisemitic. And just because something is not antisemitic, that doesn’t make it good, wise or helpful.”