A long article published in last weekend’s New York Times revealed that Israel is a high-priority target for NSA spy operations. Scott Shane wrote of documents showing NSA’s “tracking of ‘high priority Israeli military targets,’ including drone aircraft and the Black Sparrow missile system”. It is the latest tantalizing glimpse into the complicated intelligence relationship between Israel and America
The NSA papers revelations continue:
In a Le Monde article co-written with a French journalist, Greenwald revealed that Israel had almost certainly been behind a May 2012 hacking attempt on the French president’s network. According to an unnamed expert quoted in Greenwald and Jacques Follorou’s article, the attack “was not part of an act of sabotage… [but aimed] to be permanently installed invisibly at the centre of the Presidency”.
Read the rest of my article over at MEMO.
Me on the psychology of of BDS:
The very fact the bogus story spread around so quickly before being debunked (even making it onto popular American blog The Huffington Post) tells us something about the successes to date of the BDS campaign. It is having a far-reaching impact amongst Israelis, showing that BDS activists are punching way above their weight, compared to their modest means.
My latest column, on the centrality of the Right of Return to the Palestinian struggle:
For all the tragedies and hardships faced by the Palestinian people today there is one constant root, exacerbating or causing all the others in turn: Israel’s block on the refugees’ right to return to their homeland. In every war, the office of the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has as its primary goal “to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily”. But the UNHCR does not have primary responsibility for Palestinian refugees: there is a whole separate UN agency for them, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
On why Zionist anti-Semitism is a thing:
To return to Brummer’s comments, there is a more sinister element to what he told the Today programme – something that went almost entirely unnoticed by commentators. As proof the Mail could not possibly be anti-Semitic he said it was “one of the most pro-Israel papers on Fleet Street.” This statement is itself anti-Semitic, since it implies all Jews are responsible for the actions of Israel. If that was not bad enough, he made this vile equation more explicit, claiming that the other papers’ “demonis[ing]” of Israel ipso-facto “demonise[s] the broader Jewish community”. There you have it: according to Brummer “Israel” is equivalent to “the broader Jewish community”. This is a disgusting anti-Semitic statement, but it is a common argument for Zionists to make.
On the influence of Christian Zionism:
Pew found that 82 percent of white evangelicals “believe God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people” compared to less than half of many of Jewish Americans who believe the same. In fact, the proportion of Jews who believe as much (40 percent) is actually lower than the general public in America.
With Israel doing everything it can to market and present itself as “the Jewish state,” this may all come as a surprise. But take a step back and consider some other salient facts.
Said was a moral inspiration, not least because of his refusal to be bowed or intimidated by systems of power. These systems included Arab regimes, as well as imperial America and colonial Israel.
Time and again as one reads through Said’s collected newspaper columns (which you can do in books such as “Peace and its Discontents”, “The End of the Peace Process” and his final collection “From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap”) a constant theme is denunciation of the brutal and corrupt dictatorships that rule in the Arab world. He ridiculed and denounced subservient Arab intellectuals and journalists, the court stenographers of oil sheikhs and dictators.
In that respect, Said pre-empted 2011’s popular Arab uprisings by decades (although I am personally convinced that he would, like me, have disliked the Western imposed label “Arab spring”).
The “moderate” Saudi regime’s alliance with Israel is now in the open:
The two regimes are both military dictatorships in very different ways. The two regimes are also theocracies, each in their own way. The extreme Wahhabist religious vision of the sprawling Saudi royal family which dominates the country may lead you to think it would hate the so-called “Jewish state”. Not so.
On the latest Greenwald-Snowden revelations:
This means Israel is spying on America – its biggest ally — more than most other states in the world. If this was a Facebook friendship, it would be listed as “It’s complicated”.
This week’s column over at MEMO. An extract:
Claiming that all the killing in this war is being done by Assad alone, is a way to increase the propaganda beat of the war-drums against Syria. If in fact the vast majority of the 100,000 had been killed by the regime, it would imply a one-way massacre, not the reality of this dirty civil war. Mousab Azzawi, the pro-NATO leader of the SOHR splinter group even claimed to Western media that there is a “genocide” going on in Syria. Freedland seems to be implying the same.
Here we are again. A decade on from the American-British war of aggression against Iraq, the cruise-missile liberals are demanding that “something must be done” about Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “Something” inevitably amounts to bombing.
Israel’s system of racist political imprisonment does not care about the methods Palestinians use to resist Israel, so much as the fact of resistance to Israel. Anyone who lifts a fist of protest or a pen of dissent are as guilty in the eyes of Israel’s kangaroo military courts system as one who lifts the freedom fighter’s rifle.