The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, in partnership with the TUC, and War on Want are promoting campaigns to get supermarkets to stop selling settlement produce, campaigns that JfjfP endorses…

Four Swedish government pension funds with combined assets of SEK800bn (€81.8bn) have mirrored a decision by the Norwegian Government Pension Fund and blacklisted Elbit Systems, the Israeli defence technologies firm, from their investment portfolios for human rights violations in the Palestinian territories [...]

An excoriating crtiique of developments in Israel over the last year by David Landau, founder and editor-in-chief of the paper’s English edition from 1997 to 2004: “Since last Passover, over the first year of Benjamin Netanyahu’s prime ministership, Israel has slid almost inadvertently a long way down the slope that leads to McCarthyism and racism.
Inadvertently. That must be the explanation… “

The Magnes Zionist writes:”I don’t have time to write a proper Passover post, and I don’t have the strength either. Only those who are of the “things-need-to-get-worse-in-order-to-get-better” school can take cheer this Passover…; and Sam Bahour, from Gaza, explains the six traditional items on the Seder plate and draws analogies between then and now, between the Jewish suffering in Egypt and the Palestinians in Gaza today, making an impassioned plea for Jews to speak out…

As this map of the expansion of Jerusalem shows, most of the ‘eternal and united capital’ was never part of historical Jerusalem anyway, whether under the mandate or under Jordanian rule.

Richard Norton-Taylor reports that, following a British government admission that British equipment was “almost certainly” used in the war on Gaza last year, MPs have called for a review so that “broader lessons” can be learnt to ensure British arms exports to Israel are not used in the occupied territories in future [...]

Dr Husam Zomlot is currently a research fellow of the Dubai Initiative at the at the Harvard Kennedy School was formerly based in London as political counsellor at the Palestinian General Delegation. Here he looks at the reasons for the current deadlock over the desperately needed reconstruction programme in Gaza. It can only be successful, he argues, as part of a Palestinian national state-building project including the West Bank as well as Gaza [...]

“For 43 years, the Israeli public – schoolchildren, TV viewers, Knesset members and Supreme Court judges – have been living in the darkness of the occupation, which some call liberation. The school system and its textbooks, the army and its maps, the language and the “heritage” have all been mobilized to help keep Israelis blind to the truth [...]“

A study, by Bir Zeit university masters student Buthayna Hamdan, focusing on the daily news programme World News This Evening’s broadcasts between 8 November and 8 December 2008, found external political motivations swayed coverage of Palestine only weeks before Israel launched its Operation Cast Lead on 26 December 2008 [...]

A happy pesach to all our supporters and website users! Below we include ‘Thoughts for Passover’ from Rabbis for Human Rights which arrived this morning [...]

The ongoing conflict between the US and Israel continues to dominate. Two JNews postings on East Jerusalem give the background to it; while “Crisis? What Crisis? This Crisis?” give an overview of responses in the English-language Israeli press: Haaretz, Ynet – Yediot Ahranot online – & the Jerusalem Post. A Guardian editorial takes a firm line on Israel following the cloning of twelve UK passports and Israel’s intransigence on house construction in Jerusalem. And in “The Doomsday Weapon”, Uri Avnery [...]

JNews writes: The signs from Washington are clear: the US seeks to bring about a building freeze in ALL settlements, including those in East Jerusalem, before negotiations are renewed…

Ben White reports that “Arab members of the Knesset face what looks like the criminalisation of minority representation” [...]

A 15-minute film about the Arab-Palestinian minority in Israel, made for human-rights organisation ‘Adalah’ by Rachel Leah Jones. “How many Jewish homes were demolished last year?” [...]

The Israeli press (Haaretz, Ynet – Yediot Ahranot online – & the Jerusalem Post) on current US-Israel relations. Has the Obama administration seized the opportunity of Israeli political mis-steps to regain some of the capital lost last year? Has Netanyahu really departed the US having been humiliated? Does the stalled peace process endanger the lives of US troops or US national security?

Sderot is tottering on the brink of bankruptcy – the result of the cessation in the flow of charitable donations to the municipality, which which ceased with the flow of thousands of Qassam rockets [...]

The Guardian has published an unusually firm editorial following the cloning of twelve UK passports and Israel’s intransigence on house construction in Jerusalem[...]

The Evening Standard’s Bruce Dessau reviews Parliament’s first ever stand up gig.

Diana Mason is in good form in this posting on the Lawrence of Cyberia website, 19 March 2010, In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine which gives quite specific answers as to who really made the barley fields of Beersheba bloom, or the melon patches of Jaffa, or the tobacco fields of Safad, or [...]

Ezzedine Choukri Fishere, professor of international politics at the American University in Cairo asks why EU policy towards Israel has failed so badly. He answers: “no matter what blandishments are showered upon Israel, when push comes to shove it is the ability to use power – not charm – that determines whether an outside power has a say in advancing Arab-Israeli peacemaking…”