Israel Lobby Watch

Foreign Minister of the Netherlands Uri Rosenthal has threatened to punish the Dutch foundation ICCO for its continued funding of The Electronic Intifada. However, ICCO is standing its ground and Dutch civil society organizations are condemning the minister’s tactics.

The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by US President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about US and Israeli roles in the current peace talks. Jonathan Cook reports.

The Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) canceled a 19 September visit by Israeli mayors because the delegation included leaders of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, igniting a firestorm in the Dutch parliament centered at foreign affairs minister Maxime Verhagen.

Even though they are supporting settlement activities that the Dutch government officially considers to be illegal, Christians for Israel and the Christian Friends of Israeli Communities enjoy a cordial relationship with some of the most powerful politicians in the Netherlands.

As owner of 13 percent of land in Israel, and the organization that appoints the largest number of people to the Israel Lands Authority board of directors (6 out of 13), the Jewish National Fund is the central pillar of Israel’s regime over land. Hazem Jamjoum analyzes.

A student group at Columbia called Campus Media Watch, backed by the pro-Israeli media monitor the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), recently violated university regulations while urging students to “report” on allegedly biased utterances by Massad and other professors, according to faculty members and students. Jared Malsin reports for The Electronic Intifada.

Flip through any issue of a major newspaper from the past decade and it is a safe bet you will be confronted with a warning about the dangers of religious extremism. So how could the mainstream media have failed to notice the growing influence of fundamentalists on the European Union’s relations with one of its nearest neighbors: Israel? David Cronin analyzes for The Electronic Intifada.

Under cover of a sudden interest in developing new green technologies, the Israeli government hopes to weaken the Gulf states by making their oil redundant and thereby defeating “Islamic terror.” Uzi Landau, the national infrastructures minister, outlined a vision of a world without oil this week to Israel’s most loyal supporters in Washington as he searched for wealthy American-Jewish investors and White House support for the strategy. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in the United States this week armed with a mandate from the Israeli parliament. A large majority of legislators from all of Israel’s main parties had supported a petition urging him to stand firm on the building of Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem — the very issue that got him into hot water days earlier with the White House. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

Leaders of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University have condemned and then defended statements by Martin Kramer, one of the center’s fellows, which endorsed a cut off of UN food and other humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugee children besieged in the Gaza Strip as a means to reduce the Palestinian birthrate and thus the Palestinian population.