Geography Archives: Israel

  • 5,000 Arab and Jewish Peace Activists Rally in East Jerusalem against Settlers

    Some 5,000 Arab and Jewish peace activists rallied tonight (Saturday, March 6), among them several members of Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality – Communist Party of Israel), in the Palestinian Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem in order to protest against the settlement of Jews in the area and the eviction of […]

  • The Butcher of Gaza Is Coming to America

    Attention all US law enforcement agencies!  Be on the lookout: a war criminal is coming our way.  The Butcher of Gaza is coming to America. One year after the war on Gaza, during which the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) murdered 1,400 Palestinians including 400 children, the IDF and war criminal Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi will […]

  • Israeli Apartheid Week: Beirut

    Two months ago a few students got together at the American University of Beirut and started planning a week of conferences, workshops, and actions based on the model offered by Israeli Apartheid Week which started six years ago in Toronto.  A list of speakers was drawn up, and with nothing much to offer except the […]

  • Israeli Apartheid Week Sweeps Cities Worldwide

    March 1-7, 2010, Worldwide, with U.S. events in: Bard, NY; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; CT; Davis, CA; Iowa City, IA; New York, NY; San Francisco, CA; Seattle, WA; Washington, DC. The 6th annual Israeli Apartheid Week is currently taking place in cities across the globe.  This week, human rights advocates around the world will host […]

  • Syria’s Strategic Ties to the Islamic Republic: Diplomacy in the Post-Iraq/Post-Peace Process Middle East

    Last week, just after we had completed our regional tour to Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his own journey to Damascus, for highly publicized meetings with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, HAMAS Political Bureau chief Khalid Mishal, and a “resistance” summit with Assad and Hizballah Secretary General Shaykh Hassan Nasrallah.  Ahmadinejad’s trip […]

  • Germany’s Fear of Finkelstein

    Renowned Scholar and Descendent of Holocaust Survivors Prevented by German Israel Lobby from Speaking about Gaza Norman Finkelstein, an internationally renowned scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was due to talk about the state of the decades-old conflict and the situation of Gaza one year after the Israeli assault in Munich and Berlin last week.  His […]

  • The Israeli Agenda

    Does Israel want another war in Lebanon and/or Gaza?  Certainly, the Israeli posture toward both Lebanon and Gaza has grown increasingly provocative.  Violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli military aircraft are not new, but have increased dramatically in recent weeks.  For the past several weeks, Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri has been warning of escalating […]

  • PA Security Forces Arrest PFLP Comrades in Nablus

    Palestinian Authority security forces arrested a group of comrades in Nablus, on February 25, 2010, as part of their “security cooperation” with the Israeli occupation.  Comrade Khalida Jarrar, member of the Political Bureau of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, strongly denounced the arrests, saying that this action serves only the interests of […]

  • Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court

    On March 10, in the Israeli city of Haifa, American peace activist Rachel Corrie will get her day in court.  Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are bringing suit against the Israeli defence ministry for Rachel’s killing by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. Four key American and British witnesses who were […]

  • The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel’s Undermining of International Law

    The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years.  It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR […]

  • Thanks to the University of Tehran

    We just returned from a trip to the Middle East, which included stops in Lebanon, Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  We will be writing about our meetings, discussions, and observations on this trip in future posts.  First, though, we want to express our gratitude to the Faculty of World Studies at the University […]

  • Why Iran?

    Iran continues to be the privileged member of the “Axis of Evil,” a notion formally but not really abandoned by the United States.  It is accompanied by Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, in addition to North Korea, among others. Why Iran?  The criteria mentioned by Hillary Clinton make no sense.  Risk of possessing conditions to manufacture […]

  • No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War Crimes

      Burlington, VT, February 19, 2010 — Human rights activists from Vermont, New York and Israel interrupted a performance of the Israel Ballet at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, VT calling attention to the dance company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes. Using two banners that read “No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War […]

  • A Socialist View of Sexuality and Liberation?

    Sherry Wolf.  Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation.  Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009.  333 pp.  $12. The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag.  Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes.  Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is […]

  • Letter from Ofer Military Prison: “Missing the Five-year Anniversary of Our Struggle in Bil’in Will Be Like Missing the Birthday of One of My Children”

    It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. For those of us in Ofer, imprisoned for our protest against the wall, this victory makes the suffering of being here easier to bear. After actively resisting the theft of our land by the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements every week for five years now, we long to be standing alongside our brothers and sisters to mark this victory and the fifth anniversary of our struggle.

  • Chutzpah, Inc.: “The Brave People of Iran” (versus the Disappeared People of Palestine, Honduras, Afghanistan, Etc.)

    It is almost a commonplace, at least for the real — as opposed to the cruise-missile — left, that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy.  If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and […]

  • How Wars Are Made

    In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week, Hillary Clinton said that Iran “is moving toward a military dictatorship” and continued the Administration’s campaign for tougher sanctions against that country. What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric?  It seems unlikely that the goal was to support […]

  • A Dangerous Liaison: The Iranian Greens and the West

    In the 1979 Revolution in Iran the liberal forces made a fatal mistake: they adopted the old dictum of the enemy of my enemy is my friend and allied themselves with just about every force that opposed the tyrannical rule of the shah.  The result was helping to replace one form of despotism for another: […]

  • Israel’s Region-wide Underground War

    Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost universally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state.  Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or […]

  • Israel Is at an Impasse: It Can Make Neither War Nor Peace

    The Main Points of the Speech We reiterate on this occasion our condolences for the loss of our dear martyrs, and our congratulations as well, for they are ultimately the first victors.  They are our glory and pride. I will discuss current challenges and our strategy for addressing them.  When we remember these leaders and […]