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The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 2 of 2

Since the start of October, at least 61 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces (although the death toll is rising, literally as I type) and ten Israelis (often soldiers) have been killed by Palestinians – usually youths armed with knives at the absolute end of their tether.

During this time, the Israelis have claimed that increasing tensions around al-Aqsa are nothing more than mindless Palestinian incitement aimed at attacking Jews for the sake of it, and all the talk of Israeli encroachment is nothing more than Hamas and Fatah propaganda.

But the reality is very different.

A host of perfectly legal Israeli settlers’ groups openly incite for the destruction of the Mosque and have made detailed plans about the “Third Temple” they want to replace it with. Traditional Orthodox Jewish theology held the Temple Mount to be the site of the “Holy of Holies” from the Biblical stories (the physical site of God’s presence manifest on earth) so it was considered far too sacred for Jews to enter. So these efforts are nothing to do with Jewish religious freedom, and everything to do with anti-Palestinian and anti-Islamic provocation and are yet another part of Israel’s long-term project to erase the Palestinians entirely from their own homeland.

The Israeli plot to jail Raed Salah – part 1 of 2

As is quite well known, the Palestinian body politic is split between political factions. Historically, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was split between its leftist factions (foremost among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and Fatah, the Palestinian national liberation movement. Since the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Islamist factions increased in popularity, with Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, leading the way.

Various degrees of competition and animosity have ebbed and flowed over the years, with the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah even degenerating into a short civil war of sorts on the streets of Gaza in 2006 and 2007.

But the reality of the “Gaza coup” was quite the opposite of what is portrayed in Israeli propaganda, which still to this day maintains it was a coup by Hamas over the legitimate Palestinian Authority in Gaza.

In fact, the reality of the 2007 coup was that it was instigated by forces within Fatah (led by by the now-disgraced warlord Muhammad Dahlan) against the elected government of the PA – Hamas swept to power in the democratic elections of 2006.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Hamas in South Africa

Last week top leaders from Hamas, Palestine’s Islamic liberation movement, made an official visit to South Africa. The delegation, led by Khaled Meshaal himself, visited the country at the invitation of the African National Congress, the ruling party.

At a press conference, it was explained that the ANC and Hamas had signed a letter of intent aimed at fostering closer relations between the two liberation movements. The goal, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe explained, is to build “a long lasting relationship” between the two parties.

The Israeli government was unsurprisingly not happy about the invitation, and summoned the South African ambassador in Tel Aviv to protest at the conferring of legitimacy on what it claims is a “terrorist” group.

But ANC spokespeople responded that their leaders were once considered to be “terrorists” by western governments too, and that it regarded Hamas’ struggle against Israeli occupation to be a legitimate one.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Netanyahu’s Hitler remarks part of a disturbing trend

Last week Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech to the World Zionist Congress with an extraordinary claim.

“Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time” he said. He only wanted to expel them. It was, he claimed, none other Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem in the 1920s and ’30s who convinced the Nazi leader to embark on the extermination programme which ultimately led to 6 million dead.

“Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, ‘If you expel them, they’ll all come here [to Palestine].’ ‘So what should I do with them?’ he asked. ‘Burn them!’,” Netanyahu claimed, quoting an imaginary conversation between the Palestinian leader and Hitler.

And it really was imaginary: there is no record that any such conversation ever took place, and Netanyahu’s speech has been widely criticised as ahistorical.

It seems astounding that, in an attempt to vilify the Palestinians by association with an old leader (albeit one appointed by the British occupation forces of the time), an Israeli leader would stoop even to exonerating Hitler.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Egypt’s coup regime has devastated its own people in Sinai

A new report by Human Rights Watch has cast light on the scale of the Egyptian dictatorship’s crimes against its own people in the Sinai region.

The report on forced evictions in the Egyptian town of Rafah says that “at least 3,255″ homes, businesses and other local buildings have been demolished by the military since it came back to full power in the coup of July 2013. Innocent people have been forced to move out of their own homes, often at extremely short notice and with little or no compensation in return.

The report opens with a moving quotation from one of the local people who has suffered at the hands of the military in this way, reflecting on what she lost: “I myself used to make food and tea for the soldiers and they came and sat in the shade of our olive tree when the sun beat down on them… My mother told me: ‘The tree is your responsibility. I fed you from it and raised you on it. Even in times of war, we lived from its oil when nobody could find food.’ Now there’s nothing I can do but hold the tree and kiss it and say, ‘Forgive me, mom, what can I do.'”

The town of Rafah sits near the border with Palestine, close to the Gaza city of the same name. Historically, these two places were one city, but as the saying goes, these people did not cross the border, the border crossed them.

Continue reading at MEMO.

Israel is a threat to the entire region

The Zionist project represented by Israel is a fundamental threat to the entire Middle East. Despite the attempts by Arab dictators to demonise Palestinians and downplay the threat from Israel, many remain unconvinced.

In 2013, Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal told former Israeli prison guard Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview that “the threat is from Persia, not from Israel”. The increasingly open nature of the Israeli alliance with the Gulf dictatorships is helpful in the sense that it clarifies things that many have long suspected.

But the way Israel has behaved historically throughout the middle east will not soon be forgotten by those who have been its victims. Israel occupied south Lebanon for decades and was only driven out in 2000 by a successful armed resistance campaign (although some small border territories remain illegally occupied by Israel).

Despite the way the Palestinian struggle has become the most iconic one against Israeli occupation and apartheid, there is no denying the reality of the threat that Israel poses to everyone in the region.

Continue reading over at MEMO.

Me on CKUT radio talking Jeremy Corbyn and Palestine

Canadian community radio station CKUT has a regular Palestine programme called Under the Olive Tree. Sawssan Kaddoura kindly invited me on to talk about Jeremy Corbyn’s election victory as new Labour Party leader and his long record as a Palestine solidarity activist. You can listen in the player embedded below, or linked to on their Facebook page.

UOT interviews Asa Winstanley (September 28, 2015) – Jeremy Corbyn by Under The Olive Tree (Ckut.Ca) on Mixcloud

Israel’s dystopian dictatorship

Israel takes great pride in its propaganda claim to be the “only democracy in the Middle East”. This is something it bangs on about at sanctimonious length in every international forum it has access to.

As well as being totally false for Palestinians (more of which below) it is entirely hypocritical. In reality, Israel has long had an important role in supporting, propping up and being in tacit or open alliance with the region’s worst dictatorships and human rights abusers.

The undemocratic regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example. But it also includes the Iran-Contra episode of the 1980s in which Israel was recruited by the US to sell weapons to Iran; the profits were used to aid the terror war of the right-wing Contra army against the revolutionary government of Nicaragua (the US President at the time needed to get around Congress, which had imposed some limits on aid to the Contras after the record of their war crimes became impossible to ignore).

The Hashemite monarchy in Jordan has, despite some conflicts, too often served as a buffer between Palestinian anger and resistance, and Israel. The Black September war of the early 1970s being only one example. More recently, the Jordanian regime has played a key role in training anti-democratic, pro-imperialist forces in the region, such as when it trained and armed the Palestinian Contras led by the former Gaza warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose failed 2007 coup attempt in the Gaza Strip (backed by Israel and the US) was nipped in the bud by forces loyal to the elected Palestinian Authority government of the time (led by Hamas).

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Israel’s ‘Prisoner X2’ revealed?

In 2013, the Australian press broke the story of Israel’s “Prisoner X”. Ben Zygier was an Israeli-Australian who had become a Mossad agent. But he was effectively disappeared by the notorious spy agency after allegedly betraying its secrets.

Zygier supposedly hanged himself while in Mossad custody in 2010, though the clouds of doubt and uncertainty still hang low around the case. Such was the secrecy enveloping the case that it was only three years later that the Australian press broke open the story. The Israeli press had been totally banned from speaking about the case, and at first his name was not even known, leading to the designation “Prisoner X”.

Last week details emerged of a “Prisoner X2” – allegedly a double agent working for Iran inside the Mossad.

Ever since the Zygier case reached the world media, talk of a “Prisoner X2” has been ongoing. But this month the American journalist and blogger Richard Silverstein, citing an anonymous “knowledgeable Israeli security source”, told some of what is known about his story and revealed that “X2” was allegedly a double-agent for Iran.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Western bombing is only helping ISIS

There’s been much talk by political and media elites in recent days about the supposed need to start a bombing campaign in Syria targeting Daesh, the so-called “Islamic State”. By now, this is a depressingly familiar drumbeat for war.

In 2013, the UK parliament surprised many by derailing the prospect of British bombing of Syria, explicitly targeted at the regime. For a time, it even seemed that this decision had even put the American war machine on the back foot.

But since September 2014, the US has, in fact, started bombing in Syria – but targeting Daesh. And, more recently, the details of what appears to be a covert British role in the bombing campaign, in defiance of Parliament, have slowly emerged.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

Jailing the truth in Egypt

On Saturday, there was a surprise verdict in an Egyptian court. Three Al Jazeera journalists were jailed for three years each in a widely-covered retrial. The three had previously been imprisoned for a year for supposedly “spreading false news” in support of a “terrorist” group – in fact the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood.

The previous verdict had been overturned due to what even the court admitted was a lack of evidence, but this retrial was ordered nonetheless.

One of the three, Australian journalist Peter Greste had been released in February and deported back to Australia. His colleagues Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy are both Egyptian and so have now been sent back to prison.

Read the rest over at MEMO.

“Jewish extremists” are Israel’s own sons

Earlier this month, a strange thing happened: a Jewish extremist was held in “administrative detention” by Israel. This practise, internment without charge or trial, dates back to the British occupation of Palestine, and Israel habitually uses it against Palestinians.

But for a Jewish citizen to be “administratively detained” is highly unusual. The internee is Meir Ettinger, a 24-year-old pro-settler fanatic who is the grandson of the notorious Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defence League, a terrorist organization founded in New York in 1969. The group was responsible for a string of bombing and other violent attacks against Palestinian, Egyptian and Soviet civilian targets in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as against JDL members who quarrelled with the leadership in one way or another.

Continue reading over at MEMO.