Jonathan Cook

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 studies class at Sapir College in the Negev for wearing his uniform and carrying a gun. Jonathan Cook writes from Nazareth.

On 2 October 2000, as the Israeli army was beginning its ruthless crackdown on the second intifada in the occupied territories, 17-year-old Aseel Asleh joined tens of thousands of other Palestinian citizens across Israel in taking to the streets in protest and in a show of solidarity with their kin across the Green Line. Within hours Asleh would be killed. Last week, Asleh’s family and those of another 12 Palestinian demonstrators killed inside Israel at the start of the intifada heard that those responsible would almost certainly never stand trial. Jonathan Cook writes from Nazareth.

It apparently never occurred to anyone in our leading human rights organizations or the Western media that the same moral and legal standards ought be applied to the behavior of Israel and Hizballah during the war on Lebanon 18 months ago. Belatedly, an important effort has been made to set that right. Jonathan Cook comments on a new report that unearths evidence that Israel committed war crimes not only against Lebanese civilians but also against its own Arab citizens.

After seven years of rumors and self-serving memoirs, the Israeli media has finally published extracts from an official source about the Camp David negotiations in summer 2000. For the first time it is possible to gauge with some certainty the extent of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s “generous offer” to the Palestinians and Yasser Arafat’s reasons for rejecting it. In addition, the document provides valuable insights into what larger goals Israel hoped to achieve at Camp David and how similar ambitions are driving its policies to this day. Jonathan Cook analyzes the document for EI.

Israel’s air strike on northern Syria should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on Lebanon. Although little more than rumors have been offered about what took place, one strategic forecasting group, Stratfor, still concluded: “Something important happened.” From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the “something” occurred in close coordination with the White House. But, EI contributor Jonathan Cook asks, what was the purpose and significance of the attack?

This week marks a year since the end of hostilities now officially called the Second Lebanon War by Israelis. A month of fighting — mostly Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon, and rocket attacks from the Shia militia Hizballah on northern Israel in response — ended with more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians and a small but unknown number of Hizballah fighters dead, as well as 119 Israeli soldiers and 43 civilians. EI contributor Jonathan Cook finds that many significant developments since the war have gone unnoticed, including several that seriously put in question Israel’s account of what happened last summer.

There is an interesting problem with selling the “Iran as Nazi Germany” line. If President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel’s Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews? EI contributor Jonathan Cook asks, what is the basis for Israel’s dire forecasts — the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran?

What if regime change was not the point of the sanctions on the Hamas government? And if so, what goals were Israel and the US pursuing? The parallels between Iraq and Gaza may be instructive. After all, Iraq is the West’s only other recent experiment in imposing sanctions to starve a nation. And we all know where it led: to an even deeper entrenchment of Saddam Hussein’s rule. True, the circumstances in Iraq and Gaza are different. Nevertheless, it may be that the US and Israel drew a different lesson from the sanctions experience in Iraq. Jonathan Cook analyzes the US and Israel’s designs on Palestine.

I have been arguing for some time that Israel’s ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians — including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens — will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state. EI contributor Jonathan Cook writes that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel’s next phase of conquest of the Palestinians.

Israel’s supposedly “defensive” assault on Hizbullah last summer, in which more than 1,000 Lebanese civilians were killed in a massive aerial bombardment that ended with Israel littering the country’s south with cluster bombs, was cast in a definitively different light last week by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. His leaked testimony to the Winograd Committee — investigating the government’s failures during the month-long attack — suggests that he had been preparing for such a war at least four months before the official casus belli: the capture by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers from a border post on 12 July 2006.