Jonathan Cook

Just as Israel did — and still does — with Palestinians wanting to return to their homeland, thousands of desperate asylum seekers from Africa are being criminalized under the “Prevention of Infiltration law.”

It takes some chutzpah — or, at least, epic self-delusion — for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

Far-right Zionist groups are becoming bolder because of impunity but Palestinians can overcome apartheid.

There was one significant victory at the United Nations for Mahmoud Abbas, even if it was not the one he sought.

The newly-passed boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by Israel’s far right. The legislation’s goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.

Israel’s legal system, despite its reputation for presuming that Palestinian citizens are habitual security offenders, has neither found Sheikh Raed Salah guilty of anti-Semitism nor of directly helping terrorists. So why is Britain being even “more Israeli rather than the Israelis,” as two Arab members of the Israeli parliament caustically observed, and detaining him?

Israeli leaders have barely hidden their jubilation at an opinion article in last Friday’s Washington Post by the South African jurist Richard Goldstone reconsidering the findings of his United Nations-appointed inquiry into Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09. In reality, however, he offered far less consolation to Israel than its supporters claim.

Israel admitted this week that it was behind the abduction of a Palestinian engineer from Gaza who went missing more than a month ago while traveling on a train in the Ukraine.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers conceded last week that the Israeli prime minister is more downcast than they have ever seen him. The reason for his gloominess is to be found in Israel’s diplomatic and strategic standing, which some analysts suggest is at its lowest ebb in living memory. Jonathan Cook reports.

With the 18-year-long Middle East peace process finally pronounced dead, is the Palestinian Authority finished too? That is the question being asked by Palestinians in the wake of a week of damaging revelations that Palestinian negotiators secretly made major concessions to Israel in talks on Jerusalem, refugees and borders. Jonathan Cook analyzes.