Jonathan Cook

The window through which Salam Amira, 16, filmed the moment when an Israeli soldier shot from close range a handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainee has a large hole at its center with cracks running in every direction. "Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time," she said. The shattered … Continue reading “Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror”

Yehudit Genud hardly feels she is on the frontier of Israel’s settlement project, although the huddle of mobile homes on a wind-swept West Bank hilltop she calls home is controversial even by Israeli standards. Despite the size and isolation of Migron, a settlement of about 45 religious families on a ridge next to the Palestinian … Continue reading “Israel’s Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State”

In the first hours of dawn, Nader Elayan was woken by a call from a neighbor warning him to hurry to the house he had almost finished building. By the time he arrived, it was too late: a bulldozer was tearing down the walls. More than 100 Israeli security guards held back local residents. The … Continue reading “The Struggle Against Jerusalem’s Quiet Ethnic Cleansing”

It must be the smallest Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories: just half a house. But Palestinian officials and Israeli human rights groups are concerned that it represents the first stage of a plan to eradicate the historical neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, cutting off one of the main routes by which … Continue reading “The Smallest Settlement”

The following is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on June 21. In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favor sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit … Continue reading “Zionism’s Dead End”

It has been a week of adulation from world leaders, ostentatious displays of military prowess, and street parties. Heads of state have rubbed shoulders with celebrities to pay homage to the Jewish state on its 60th birthday, while a million Israelis reportedly headed off to the country’s forests to enjoy the national pastime: a barbecue. … Continue reading “On Independence Day, Israeli Arabs Reminded of Their Place”

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the … Continue reading “Two-State Dreamers”

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a shoah – the Hebrew word for the Holocaust – was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli … Continue reading “Israel Plots Another Palestinian Exodus”

In the strange world of Israeli academia, an Arab college lecturer is being dismissed from his job because he refused to declare his "respect for the uniform of the Israeli army." The bizarre demand was made of Nizar Hassan, director of several award-winning films, after he criticized a Jewish student who arrived in his film … Continue reading “Academic Freedom? Not for Arabs in Israel”