Asa Winstanley’s blog

Huge police force fails to stop students disrupting Israeli diplomat's speech at Scottish university

On Wednesday evening Edinburgh University’s Students For Justice in Palestine (SJP) manged to attend and disrupt a lecture by Daniel Taub, the Israeli ambassador to the UK. Taub was hosted by the university’s student politics society, and protected by what one activist told EI was the largest police presence anyone could remember. 

JNF's loss of half UK charity revenue good news for Palestinians

A little over one week ago, the Jewish Chronicle led with a huge story about the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund: “JNF loses half its revenue,” the front page story said. Oddly enough, the story seems not to be available on the JC website. Pro-Palestinians activists have been sharing the story online via social networks. 

Before Their Diaspora -- Palestinian scholar's monumental pictorial history now available online

In a landmark new project, the Institute for Palestine Studies (IPS) has made available online Palestinian scholar Walid Khalidi’s immensely important work Before Their Diaspora: A photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948 in its entirety for free. Not only that, but the IPS has gone to the trouble of fashioning an innovative new interactive website around the work. 

New film on unsolved terrorist attack that murdered Palestinian-American leader nearly three decades ago

The Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) last week marked 27 years since the murder by bombing of Alex Odeh with a minute of silence and a call to action. Odeh, a Palestinian originally from Jifna, a West Bank village near the university town of Birzeit, was the ADC’s leader in California. In a press release, the ADC promoted this new short film which gives a good overview of the case, which remains unsolved to this day. The ADC said in an email to EI that the film was made by an ADC activist. It’s well worth a watch as it contains contemporary TV news reports about this 1985 terrorist attack. 

BBC's Palestine hoaxer Paul Martin tries to cover his online tracks

Paul Martin is a BBC-linked journalist who I exposed as a fraud last month, in a major investigative feature. Although a freelancer, Martin has been described by Newsnight as “our correspondent” at least once. The problem is that Martin has a bad habit of using false identities and making up stories, as my article showed. Since this story got out, Martin (whose real name seems to be Paul Cainer) has been trying to cover his tracks. 

As Israel haemorrhages British political support, its supporters watch impotently

Speaking to Israeli TV earlier this month British ambassador Matthew Gould said Israel was increasingly losing support among middle-ground politicians in the UK because of its aggressive settlement policies. His comments confirm other indications of increased mainstream support for Palestine in the political mainstream, as I showed in a feature for EI last month. 

Asa Winstanley's picture

Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist who lives in London. He is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada and co-host of our podcast.

He is author of the bestselling book Weaponising Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2023).