A Very Healthy Country

Introducing Maurice Hirsch: Director of Legal Department, Palestinian Media Watch (2017- today)Senior Military Justice Consultant, NGO Monitor (2017-2018)Head of Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria, Israel Defense Forces (2013-2016)Head of Legal Advice to the Navy, Air Force, Ground Forces and Home Front (2010-2013)Deputy Head of the Military Prosecution for Judea and Samaria (2007-2010)Head of the…

PARTING WORDS FROM A UN HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICIAL

Andrew Gilmour, departing UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, on Israel's repression of popular protests against the siege in Gaza: I don’t believe that any of those actions [by Palestinians] could possibly justify the frequent targeting by snipers who know exactly what they are doing and are aiming with immense accuracy – sometimes to kill,…

Israel Has No Right of Self-Defence against Gaza

Human rights groups and UN bodies have condemned Israel's "excessive" and "disproportionate" use of force in Gaza. But this does not go far enough. In a new essay for Jacobin, Norman Finkelstein and I argue that Israel cannot claim a right to use any force in Gaza — whether moderate or excessive, proportionate or disproportionate; whether…

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: IMPOSE ARMS EMBARGO ON ISRAEL

Amnesty International (27 April 2018): "The time for symbolic statements of condemnation is now over. The international community must act concretely and stop the delivery of arms and military equipment to Israel." "[M]any" Palestinian fatalities "were deliberately killed or injured while posing no immediate threat" "Israeli soldiers are using high-velocity military weapons designed to cause…

THE POWER OF MASS NONVIOLENT RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE – PART 2

Part 2 of 3. The previous instalment of this article traced the impact of the First Intifada—a mass nonviolent Palestinian civil revolt that erupted in December 1987—at the United Nations. This section examines the impact of the Intifada on a second component of the international consensus which today prevails on Palestine: international human rights organisations.…

Norman Finkelstein on Bernie, Palestine and Politics

The great Norman Finkelstein has been interviewed on Bernie, Palestine and Politics. Among other things, he talks about how Israel has successfully defanged human rights NGO coverage of Israeli crimes: most human rights organisations sat out Operation Protective Edge (2014), while Amnesty reverted to its pre-1987 apologetics. This is an extremely dangerous development, since the human rights…

WHAT RESONATES

Some years back I argued in Mondoweiss that the case for Palestine ought to be made on the basis of justice rather than national interest. This position received empirical support in a November 2015 U.S. poll, which found that respondents' concerns about Israel-Palestine were principally related to 'human rights or international law' rather than 'America's interests'. This was particularly true of…

DOCUMENTARY RECORD VS. RECORDING DOCUMENTARIES

Sam Harris riffs off Alan Dershowitz: The reality is that the Israelis, for all their faults, have been more restrained in their use of force than the U.S. has—if for no other reason than that they are more vulnerable to world opinion. Every Palestinian child the IDF kills inches Israel ever closer to the brink…

GUARDING THE GUARDIANS

I interviewed Norman Finkelstein on the role of human rights organisations in the struggle for justice in Palestine: As always in politics, the issue is not what you’d in an ideal world prefer; the issue is choosing between the givens. Of course, politics is also about transforming those givens. But I think you cannot transform a…

HOW ISRAEL FOUGHT IN GAZA

First published at New Left Project. The only international fact-finding delegation granted access to Gaza following Israel’s 2014 assault on the territory, Operation Protective Edge, found evidence of grave legal violations by Israeli forces. These included ‘heavy and unpredictable bombardments of civilian neighbourhoods in a manner that failed to discriminate between legitimate targets and protected…