Tag: Palestine

My review of an interesting film on Palestine for beginners

And you can watch the entire film for free here, or on Sami’s website too. Extract from my review:

The boldly titled feature-length documentary How We Can Solve The Palestinian Israeli Problem (which can be viewed online) is the work of Sami Moukaddem, a multi-talented Lebanese psychologist and musician living in Ireland.

Early on, Moukaddem speaks to the camera and says he has no experience as a filmmaker, and that he just wanted to make a film to explain the basic issues: “I simply got tired of western mainstream media presenting the Palestinian-Israeli issue as being complex,” he says. He then narrates from a first-person perspective throughout.

The strange tale of Paul Martin and the Palestinian collaborator

This tale grew in the telling (as a great storyteller once wrote). It grew and grew from a couple of paragraphs, to a blog post to this full-blow investigative feature the more we found out.

Many thanks to Maath Musleh and Dena Shunra who both uncovered key evidence. And the whole EI team, as always.

In a 2002 article about “a criminal gang” that supposedly “imposed a two-year reign of terror” Paul Martin interviewed Zohair Hamdan, describing him as the “founder of the Movement for Coexistence in Jerusalem” who was attacked by the gang (“Exiled Palestinian militants ran two-year reign of terror,” The Washington Times, 13 May 2002).

But a recent Israeli court document describes Hamdan as once claiming to have had a position “in the ministry of defense.” The Israeli media has described him as “a proud collaborator,” reported that he and his family are legally armed and noted accusations in his hometown that he works for the Shabak (Israel’s secret police, also known as Shin Bet).

My review of Tony Lerman’s book

A great read and most interesting (and incidentally nice to see Pluto put out an affordable hardback edition). This positive review by me for EI will likely be grist to his enemies’ mill, but Tony doesn’t seem too worried about that any more. An extract:

What happens when a mainstream public figure within the Jewish community develops doubts about Israel and Zionism? Can the head of an important Jewish think tank who has come to reject his Zionist convictions sustain his position as a critical insider?

These questions are addressed in The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist, a new memoir by Antony Lerman.

Born to moderate orthodox parents in Golders Green (3), London, Lerman joined the Habonim labor Zionist youth movement in his teens. Along with its youth centers, Habonim owned a remote East Sussex farm known as the hachshara (“training”) where it prepared members for life in the kibbutzim, Israel’s collective agricultural colonies (31).

He eventually went on to become leader of the movement in the UK. Although after 1967 Habonim activists still saw themselves “as guardians of moderate and liberal socialist Zionism … the vast majority of us slipped so easily into a way of thinking that legitimized the occupation” of the West Bank, Gaza and the Syrian Golan Heights (34-5).

My review of “The Palestine-Israel Conflict: A Basic Introduction”

Here’s my review for EI. The found the book to be something of a let down:

At the root of such problems is Harms’ fundamental approach, which he spells out in the preface: “I have sought to present the history of the conflict in a balanced and actual light” (xv). The aim of imposing the prism of “balance” on the fundamentally imbalanced situation of a settler movement’s ongoing colonization of an occupied land is doomed to failure. This lies at the heart of much of what is wrong with the book.

The Return of “the BBC’s” Paul Martin

Sometimes a great story is just handed to you on a plate. And so it was with Paul Martin/Paul Cainer/Paul Martin Cainer/Cainer Paul Martin/”Sayed Anwar”. I was following up some tips and unused leads for my story about him from last month, when Martin emailed me demanding I do an interview with him (“I hope you have the guts”).

And thus this freelance reporter who works for the BBC and others mainstream UK media managed to dig himself in deeper with an utterly weird performance. This article is the product of over a month’s research. Enjoy:

“Why does The Electronic Intifada attack every single western news organization?” he complained, reeling off a long list of examples. “Admit what you are: a bunch of propagandists, don’t attack the other media … I’m a journalist, you’re a propagandist … You find two things that you think are ‘questionable’… and you want to try and ruin my whole 35 years of excellent coverage,” he said.

Book review: how Israeli school textbooks teach kids to hate

I have reviewed Nurit Peled-Elhanan’s import study of Israeli school textbooks for EI. It’s been going viral online, especially on Twitter (sometimes I’m not quite sure why certain articles take off more than others). I previously blogged a video of her being interviewed too. Here’s an extract of my review:

In an important new book, Palestine in Israeli School Books, Israeli language and education professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan buries the second part of Livni’s myth once and for all.

Peled-Elhanan examines 17 Israeli school textbooks on history, geography and civic studies. Her conclusions are an indictment of the Israeli system of indoctrination and its cultivation of anti-Arab racism from an early age: “The books studied here harness the past to the benefit of the … Israeli policy of expansion, whether they were published during leftist or right-wing [education] ministries” (224).

Update: this article was pretty popular, probably my most popular book review. It has been translated into Flemish Dutch (I can’t vouch for the translation and know nothing about the website). I think it was translated into French as well, but I can’t find the link now.

School “buddies” raise awareness about Palestine in UK

Go and have a read of this nice little story about CADFA I wrote for EI:

Palestinian schoolchildren come here, and British schoolchildren and teachers go to Palestine. For seven consecutive summers, children have been brought over from Palestine. The focus is educational, with the English kids learning first-hand. The children go to events together and have “amazing conversations.” At one Wiltshire camping trip during this soggy-wet English summer, the kids came back as “ambassadors for the Palestinians,” she said.

Perhaps the main strength of such low-key, unglamorous projects is that they involve people beyond the usual activist suspects. By “always reaching new people,” as Dowson puts it, they help raise awareness about Palestine at a local level.

 

Is the UK’s pro-Israel lobby starting to lose?

I was pleased to be invited to be August’s guest writer for MEMO, the Middle East Monitor. I was asked to write about the Raed Salah case, so used the opportunity to revist some of the evidence. The focus of the article is what the case taught us about the waning power of the Israel lobby in the UK:

In Palestine solidarity circles the debate around the pro-Israel lobby often focuses on the chicken-or-the-egg problem: are Western governments supportive of Israel because the lobby is so influential, or does the lobby only seem influential because governments are so supportive of Israel?

A focus on this question neglects another, more crucial, aspect of the debate: how can we win? How can the tide be turned against Western governments’ support for Israel?

In April, a Palestinian political and religious leader won an important victory in the British judicial system. Sheikh Raed Salah’s successful appeal against deportation gives us a glimpse of how to answer this question.

My review of a new film from the makers of Budrus

So yea, short version: I didn’t like it, sorry.

Maybe the Palestinians in East Jerusalem love being swamped by hordes of young liberal Israelis banging drums in their front yard. But we simply can’t know because the Israelis in the film are too are busy explaining their feelings.

Bacha’s earlier film Budrus was also problematic in similar ways, but at least you could learn about Palestinian stories and struggles, and at least it succeeded as a film in itself, even if it did overly pander to American liberal sensibilities. My Neighborhood has all the negative aspects of Budrus, magnified but with few of the redeeming features.

Read the whole thing here.

The Palestine lobby?

EI published my latest feature this morning, on Palestine in mainstream politics. Here’s the intro:

On Wednesday, 4 July, a public meeting took place in the British Parliament’s Grand Committee room. Speaking on the panel of members of parliament were a Conservative former career soldier, a senior minister in two previous Labor governments, and a member of Labor Friends of Israel. What could they all possibly have had in common?

They had assembled to speak at a meeting about the reality of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation in the West Bank. This followed a trip they had participated in, organized by the Council for Advancing Arab-British Understanding.

Earlier that same day, during a Westminster Hall debate, the Foreign Office minister responsible for relations with the Middle East had — for the first time — strongly hinted that a ban on importing goods made in Israeli settlements could be on the way.

The events of that day were only the latest examples of how views critical of Israeli policy have entered the mainstream of UK politics.

Read on…

My review of Norman Finkelstein’s new book

 My review of Knowing Too Much was published by EI yesterday. Here is a short extract:

The best chapter in the book is the one dedicated to giving Benny Morris a good kicking. Morris gained fame as one of the “new historians” who dived into the Israeli archives and reassessed old Zionist myths about the establishment of Israel. Morris’ exposure of the deliberate and calculated nature of Israel’s mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 remains significant.

…

If Knowing Too Much had come out in 2008 (as originally intended), the central argument may have been more controversial, but as Finkelstein notes it has by now almost passed into conventional wisdom (299). A more interesting question, though, is why this shift in liberal opinion has happened, and here Finkelstein is most unconvincing.

Flame: the Israeli propaganda war spreads to cyberspace

My new special feature on the Flame cyber-weapon was published by The Electronic Intifada last night. I take an in-depth look at who may have been behind the computer worm that snooped on thousands of computers from the West Bank to Iran. I bring to light evidence that Israel’s teasing intimations it created Flame may be more about propaganda and regaining its lost “deterrence” capabilities against Arabs. Here’s a brief extract:

World-renowned security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier told The Electronic Intifada that Flame was “much more sophisticated than the typical worm.” Over email, he commented that while it “seems definitely the work of a large, well-funded, well-coordinated team” there was also “some hype” about it on the technical level.

…

Flame is able to take screenshots, switch on the microphone and record audio conversations, snooping on Skype calls, for example. Screenshots are triggered when sensitive information is likely to be revealed: such as when instant messaging software is running. It can intercept keystrokes, search for passwords and steal files.

Flame zeroes in on certain files: images, photos with geographic data, presentations, project files and PDFs. Later, more detailed analysis by Kapersky revealed that Flame’s controllers seem especially interested in stealing digital blueprints: “the attackers seem to have a high interest in AutoCAD drawings,” the report said (“The Roof Is on Fire: Tackling Flame’s C&C Servers,” 4 June 2012).

I will be following-up on this story, looking at the possibility that Flame could be used for more aggressive purposes than spying, so watch my EI blog for that later in the week.

UPDATE: the follow-up story on my blog is here.