Israel/Palestine

A new popular term in Israel for the country is “IsraHell”. This is popular among some left-wing football fans, radicals and so on. You might imagine the term refers to the military occupation of the Palestinian territories, but actually it is something else. It refers to the depressing quality of life in the country for its mainly Jewish citizens as capitalism sinks deeper and deeper. In the 1950s, Israel had possibly the best health care in the world, and had managed to house huge amounts of people in accommodation which was better than what Britain and France managed to build after the...

The creeping Islamisation of Gaza continues. Hamas’ latest bans include Valentine’s Day parties and male hairdressers in female salons. The BBC interviewed one of the “five or six” male hairdressers in the Gaza Strip who are affected by the ban. Jokingly Adnan Barakat suggested he might be forced to move to more liberal areas, “like Somalia or Afghanistan.” Another male hairdresser was driven out of business by bomb attacks. Hatem al-Ghoul said, “They came twice in the middle of the night and blew up my salon with small bombs, once in 2007 and once in 2008.” Al-Ghoul is not sure who attacked...

Around a dozen activists, mostly members of the AWL, made their presence felt opposite the Israeli embassy on 28 January in a picket called to show solidarity with Emelia Marcovich, the latest Israeli student refuser to be sent to jail. Emelia is a member of the Shministim, a network of Israeli high-school students and sixth-formers who face jail rather than take part in compulsory national service in the Israeli Defence Force. Emelia is also active in solidarity campaigning between Israelis and Palestinians, working on campaigns against house demolition and the so-called separation “fence”...

Click here to download pdf . In this article Robert Fine looks at working-class socialist views from the late 1930s on Palestine. The road towards the bloody debacle of 1948 — when half a million Arabs were driven out as the Israeli Jewish state established itself in war against invading Arab armies — was already clear then. Nazi persecution, and curbs by countries like Britain and the US on Jewish immigration, pushed the Jews towards Zionism and the Zionists towards anti—Arab chauvinism; Zionist advance, and the desperation of Arab peasants driven off their land and jobless, pushed the Arabs...

On 12 November Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas postponed the Palestinian parliamentary and Presidential elections due in January 2010. He said this was because of lack of progress on US-sponsored peace talks. But part of the background to the current situation is the repression of Abbas’s political allies, Fatah, in Gaza, by Hamas. Hamas has decapitated Fatah’s organisation in Gaza. Many branches of the state apparatus have been purged, or, like the security forces, rebuilt from scratch with Hamas supporters in charge. Some Fatah members have fled, and others have been detained as Fatah...

The plain facts will impart a strong bias against Israel in any simple, straightforwardly honest report of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Today it is a David and Goliath story, with the Palestinians in the David and Israel in the Goliath role. Whether measured by economic weight, by military strength, or by diplomatic clout the disproportion between the strengths of the David and the Goliath is simply enormous. To translate the natural pro-Palestinian bias which the facts of the conflict suggest into ideas that there is a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy behind US, British and...

On 24 October Fatah’s Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set the date of Palestinian elections for 24 January 2010. The announcement took place without the agreement of the Islamist party, Hamas, which rules on the Gaza Strip. Hamas denounced the announcement. In aftermath of the Gaza war, an opinion poll of Palestinians showed that Hamas (at 33% support) had made gains, and backing for Fatah had dropped (to 40%). The poll was taken in early March 2009 by Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. A similar PSR poll, taken in mid-August 2009, shows Fatah...

Israeli railway workers struck a blow against exploitation and discrimination when on 10 September a Tel Aviv Labour Court issued an interim injunction against the dismissal of Arab workers by Israel Railways. The struggle began in March 2009 when the state-owned company introduced a policy stipulating that railroad crossing guards had to have a license to carry weapons, a move the company said was based on “practical and security considerations” even though the job of railroad guard has never entailed the carrying of weaponry. Given that most people obtain such a license through military...

Avigdor Lieberman is in the news over corruption allegations. But what does the political grouping around Lieberman represent? And what do Lieberman’s number one target, Arab Israelis, think about political developments in Israel? Avigdor Lieberman leads Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), which won 15 of the 120 Knesset seats in the February 2009 Israeli general election. Yisrael Beiteinu took 11.7% of the vote and beat Labour into fourth place. During the election campaign the leftist Meretz party likened Yisrael Beiteinu to Le Pen’s French National Front. Lieberman’s hard-right policies on...

Avigdor Lieberman leads Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home), which won 15 of the 120 Knesset seats in the February 2009 Israeli general election. Yisrael Beiteinu took 11.7% of the vote and beat Labour into fourth place. During the election campaign the leftist Meretz party likened Yisrael Beiteinu to Le Pen’s French National Front. Lieberman’s hard-right policies on security and the country's Arab minority grew in popularity alongside a general swing to the right among the electorate which had backed Israel's assault on Gaza over December 2008-January 2009. During the war Lieberman suggested...