Britain’s pro-Israel lobby gained another victory last week after a prolonged campaign of intimidation finally pushed a major UK university into firing one of its lecturers. Bristol University dismissed David Miller, a political sociology professor, even though an official investigation had concluded that accusations of antisemitism against him were unfounded. Research by Miller, a leading scholar on propaganda, had charted networks of influence in the UK in relation to Islamophobia that included the very pro-Israel lobby groups that worked to get him fired.
Israel’s apologists – whether Jewish or not – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet those crimes.
Over the past three decades, Israel’s main effort to “Judaize” the “mixed cities” inside Israel has been waged through a war of attrition. This has included moving religious settlers into Palestinian communities, as well as using tourism and archeological preservation to take over land. The coexistence model in Israel’s “mixed cities” was always an illusion, and one that the recent protests finally served to smash.
New research charts a five-year campaign by highly partisan, pro-Israel lobby groups to mislead the international community about the nature of what has been widely described as the “gold standard” definition of antisemitism.
The Jewish National Fund is a linchpin of the system that enforces superior rights for Jews over Palestinians, whether inside Israel or in the occupied territory. A recent JNF decision to start publicly funding projects in the West Bank just makes that role more clear. Now the question becomes — will its international supporters stand by the organization?
A short video taken by a family as they picnicked in the West Bank this month may be the best field guide yet to Israel’s complex apartheid system of state-sponsored Jewish supremacy.
The unexpected decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to deny a US demand to extradite Julian Assange, foiling efforts to send him to a US super-max jail for the rest of his life, is a welcome legal victory, but one swamped by larger lessons that should disturb us deeply.
Former general turned far-right politician Effi Eitam lives in an illegal settlement in the Golan and has long advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the occupied territories, as well as the crushing of basic civil rights for non-Jews inside Israel. He is also Benjamin Netanyahu’s choice to be the next leader of Yad Vashem, the world-renowned Holocaust museum.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has run a fascinating long report this week offering a disturbing snapshot of the political climate rapidly emerging across Europe on the issue of antisemitism. The article documents a kind of cultural, political and intellectual reign of terror in Germany since the parliament passed a resolution last year equating support for non-violent boycotts of Israel – in solidarity with Palestinians oppressed by Israel – with antisemitism.