On the sidelines of COP26, Israel’s Prime Minister met with Bill Gates to discuss forming working group to study potential cooperation around combating climate change. Gates’ obsession with ‘innovation’, however, might have blinded him from addressing other issues that Israel is also ‘known for’ – namely, being the world’s leading human rights violator and the destruction of the Palestinian environment.
The “Battle of Cable Street” has become part of British lore as a stand against fascism, but its true history shows the country’s enduring legacy of white supremacy and colonialism.
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.
A battle over pro-Israel censorship in the art world shows how Palestine activists can fight back and win.
University students across the UK are demanding immediate divestment from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism as a part of Apartheid Off Campus’s national day of action.
Israel’s apologists – whether Jewish or not – cannot deny all responsibility for Israel’s war crimes when they actively aid and abet those crimes.
Activists in the United Kingdom have been occupying a drone factory in Leicester for the last six days. The Elbit Systems factory produces weapons that have been used by Israel to attack Gaza. “We’re taking direct action because the UK is complicit in the colonization and ongoing occupation of Palestine,” an activist with the group Palestine Action explained.
There are liberals and those on the right who think it’s okay to fight antisemitism by encouraging Islamophobia and certainly anti-Palestinianism. You don’t fight racism with racism. We need to decolonize our understanding of antisemitism as a matter of urgency. And that means ditching the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
You wouldn’t know it from reading media reports, but the recent Equalities and Human Rights Commission report on the UK Labour Party found there was no case to be made that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.
A British Trade Union Congress motion urging members “to join the international campaign to stop annexation and end apartheid” could encourage unions worldwide to play a major role in the international Palestine solidarity movement as they did against Apartheid in South Africa.