Jewish Chronicle reveals top-secret plans by JfJfP to destroy Israel!!! It’s obviously the silly season and the JC is short on news. Having been ignored for months on end JfJfP now makes the front page and a leading article on page 2 by Jeremy Newmark, chief executive of the Jewish Leadership Council as the JC [...]

The British Jewish community must move beyond the idea that being ‘loyal’ means placing Israeli policy is beyond criticism
Seth Freedman writes on Comment is Free, in the Guardian 31 July 2009:
“I’ve just spent a month in the heart of the north-west London bubble, running the gauntlet of pro-Israel zealotry almost every time the Israel/Palestine issue reared its head. Accusing dissenters of being self-haters, traitors and of washing Israel’s dirty linen in public is the bread and butter of the diehard Zionist brigade – and that’s just to those Jews daring to speak out against Israeli policies and crimes. [...]

Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, together with Acri, it has sent an open letter to Attorney General Mazuz, reproduced in this posting, calling on him to “cancel the land swap agreement between the Israel Land Administration and the Jewish National Fund as it violates the rules of public law and the right to equality”.
As the JNF puts it: “The fidelity of the JNF is not given, and cannot be given, to the entire Israeli public. The JNF’s fidelity is reserved for the Jewish people only – on whose behalf it was founded and on whose behalf it operates. […]

AHAVA, an Israeli cosmetics company, is violating the basic principles of international law and Jewish ethics by profiting from the occupation of Palestine. Using resources from the ancient waters of the Dead Sea, AHAVA manufactures beauty products in an illegal Israeli settlement in Occupied Palestine. [...]

A new position paper by PHR-Israel expresses our opinion on torture in Israel and physicians involvement in its use. The paper briefly describes the background of PHR-Israel’s activism on the issue, emphasizing our struggle to change the position of the medical establishment in Israel and our ongoing efforts to engage the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) in the struggle against torture. [...]

[Ramallah, 30 July 2009] – On 29 July 2009, DCI-Palestine submitted an Alternative Report to the UN Human Rights Committee which is scheduled to review Israel’s compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) (ICCPR) in October 2009.The report focuses on the right to life (Article 6), torture and ill-treatment (Article 7), [...]

Right of Reply: Let’s talk about Operation Cast Lead Mikhael Manekin The Jerusalem Post (Opinion) July 29, 2009 When Breaking the Silence released a collection of soldiers’ testimonies about their experiences in Gaza last week, we expected to receive criticism. Operation Cast Lead was considered a success by most Israelis, so there were some who [...]

We carried a report last week entitled “You Must *Not* See This Movie? Muzzling Jewish Dissent”.
The film has now been screened and here is the report circulated by Jewish Peace News on 28 July, about the event. It shows the alarming extent to which furious and totally unfounded accusations of antisemitism are being used to muzzle criticism of Israel in the US. [...]

The International Crisis Group has produced a new report on the growing and increasingly powerful religious right in Israeli politics and a nuanced analysis of how it might be dealt with in any moves towards a settlement of the conflict. [...]

“The Bil’in Friends of Freedom and Justice” aims to build a wide network of people from all over the globe who support Freedom and Justice for all. Bil’in has led the way in developing a resolute non-violent resistance movement to the Israeli occupation and land confiscations. It continues its non-violent struggle with weekly demonstrations, supported by Israeli and international peace activists. They are invariably met with Israeli army violence, arrests and repression. [...]

We carried a report on 31 March under this the title To resist is to exist: Notes on the psychological impact of military occupation in Palestine”. It concerned an article published in Therapy Today which was pulled after criticism and then reinstated. In the July issue of the magazine online, the authors reply to their critics.

Call for support for Zaytoun oil:

We write as members of the Interfaith group for Morally Responsible Investment with respect to Israel/Palestine, to ask that you give special thought to justice and peace in Israel and Palestine when you consider your purchases both at Christmas and throughout the year. [...]

Zaytoun is a Community Interest Company founded in 2004 to create and develop a UK market for artisan Palestinian products. The company is a cooperative, and a member of the International Fair Trade Association. It sells Fairtrade Palestinian Olive Oil. [...]

The UK government has come under rising pressure from MPs to start making contact with Palestinian group Hamas.

A Foreign Affairs Committee report also said it was “regrettable” UK-supplied military items were “almost certainly” used by Israel in the Gaza conflict. [...]

Using Nazi analogies to criticise Israel or Zionism may be offensive, but should it be against the law?

Tony Lerman discusses a new report, “Understanding and Addressing the “Nazi Card”: Intervening Against Antisemitic Discourse”, from the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism (EISCA).

A very interesting debate about Israel, the settlements, settlement goods and sanctions took place in the House of Commons on 21 July 2009. There is a full report in Hansard, and some extracts here [...]

Uri Avnery writes: Netanyahu is facing heavy American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall into any of his traps.
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So what to do in order to avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution: a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache. [...]

Under this heading, the Daily Kos carries a report about the showing of “Rachel”, a film by Jewish-Israeli filmmaker Simone Bitton about the death of Rachel Corrie at the San Francisco Film Festival. At the request of the filmmaker, they have invited Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s mother to speak. Big time controversy and condemnation by a weekly Jewish magazine and even from the local Israel Consul General. [...]

According to the study by the Israeli European Policy Network, a joint project of European and Israeli scholars that explores issues on the agenda of Israel’s relations with the European Union, Jewish settlements in the West Bank received 57 per cent of their budget funds from the Israeli government in recent years. That is higher than the 34.7 per cent share of budget funds attained by Israeli municipalities as a whole from the state, the report said. [...]

Israeli embassies are being instructed to use for public relations purposes an infamous photograph of Adolf Hitler meeting a top Palestinian cleric.