Israel/Palestine

The 1 July date set by Israel’s hard-right government to launch its annexation of occupied Palestinian territories passed with what Palestinian journalist Amjad Iraqi, writing in +972 Mag., called “very little fanfare.” Iraqi wrote: “Disputes and unpreparedness within the Israeli government and the settler movement, along with growing international criticism in recent weeks, appear to have stalled the annexation process.” Speaking in a webinar, Iraqi added that debates within the government may also have contributed to limiting the Israeli state’s ability to act. “There are disputes between...

No one, I think, now denies that the story of Minneapolis cops learning neck-kneeling from Israel was a fabrication. But, in the wake of Rebecca Long Bailey’s sacking from the Shadow Cabinet, some still suggest — for example, in Momentum’s 1 July Zoom report-back from Labour’s National Executive — that it wasn’t antisemitic. Denunciations of Israel (so the argument goes) can’t be antisemitic, because only antisemites can identify Jews with Israel and consider a denunciation of the Israeli state as an attack on Jewish people. But here we have a very special sort of denunciation. That it’s...

The timetable set for itself by Israel’s Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government provides for moving formally to annex to Israel large parts of the Palestinian West Bank this week, on 1 July. Annexing large chunks of what is now “Area C”, under Israel control, will create new barriers to an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel, other than in the sham form of a string of disconnected patches of land (Palestinian-inhabited cities, towns, villages) surrounded on all sides by Israeli territory and connected with each other only by Israeli-supervised channels. It still remains possible that...

A worldview which sees the hidden hand of Israel behind every social ill, and which radically inflates the power of the Israeli state, are key aspects of what Workers' Liberty and others have called "left antisemitism". The claim in the actor Maxine Peake's recent interview in the Independent, that "the tactics used by the police in America, kneeling on George Floyd's neck, that was learnt from seminars with Israeli secret services", belongs to that worldview. The claim itself is false. US police have attended conferences in Israel, and in other countries. There is no evidence to suggest the...

On Saturday 6 June 6,000 people (equivalent of 45,000 in Britain) demonstrated in Tel Aviv against the plan of the new Netanyahu-Gantz coalition government to formally annex large parts of the West Bank to Israel, thus creating a bar against any future Palestinian state being more than a collection of scattered patches of land. Netanyahu has long threatened annexation, and now the government talk of moving on 1 July. Police initially tried to ban the protest on virus-control grounds, but backed down. The Joint List of Israeli-Arab parties, the soft-left Meretz, and the grassroots movement...

Hannah Pollin-Galay (above right, in the white t-shirt, on a protest she helped organise blocking the entrance to the headquarters of Netanyahu's Likud party) is a supporter of Omdim B'Yachad (Standing Together), a left-wing Arab-Jewish social movement in Israel. She spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity. DR: The formation of a new coalition government is obviously a hugely worrying development in terms of the threat of annexation. What's your assessment of it? HPG: Saying “I told you so!” or, “things are already so bad, they can only get better”, are not productive responses to this new...

Maisam Jaljuli and Asaf Yakir are activists in Omdim B'Yachad (Standing Together), a left-wing Arab-Jewish social movement in Israel. They spoke to Daniel Randall from Solidarity about their struggles. DR: What's your assessment of the newly-formed coalition government, and how can the threat of annexation be resisted? AY: The main political parties in Israel don't have significantly differing policies, so it's not surprising they've formed a coalition. In some ways it clarifies things, as it makes clear where people stand and who the real opposition is. We need to organise in the streets...

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's incumbent hard-right Prime Minister, and Benny Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White Coalition (usually called “centrist”, but perhaps better understood as soft-right) have reached an agreement for a coalition government, with the premiership rotating between them on an 18-monthly basis. The coalition also includes the Labor Party, whose leader, Amir Peretz, will take up the role of Economy Minister. Yaakov Litzman, a religious-fundamentalist and outspoken homophobe who declared Covid-19 was a punishment from god before testing positive for it himself, will...