Given that “unconditional support” for Israel remains the official policy of the ruling coalition government of Social and Christian Democrats, a position that has been given particularly crass utterance on several occasions by Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union), a recent opinion poll suggests that the gulf between government and citizens on this issue is vast and growing. Raymond Deane analyzes for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Are Germans getting fed up with Israel?
In April 2003, the 21-year-old Tom Hurndall was shot in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. The Israeli authorities absurdly claimed “that a Palestinian gunman wearing fatigues had been shooting a pistol at a watchtower and had been targeted by a member of the Israeli Defense Force [‘IDF’].” His mother Jocelyn, the author of the harrowing memoir, My Son Tom - The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall (with Hazel Wood), travels to Israel. At the Soroka Hospital in Beersheva she recognizes her comatose son “despite the bandages surrounding [his] dreadfully swollen head, covering [his] eyes.” Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about "My Son Tom": Mother continues the solidarity that Israeli bullets cut short
Israel’s one-sided war on the Palestinian people continues unabated while mountains books on the subject are being written, published, read and sometimes reviewed. EI contributor Raymond Deane assess whether two new volumes on Israel’s occupation, Neve Gordon’s Israel’s Occupation and Saree Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out, present a radically new perspective or have the potential to influence public opinion in the right direction. Read more about Book review: Israel's occupation, inside out
In his foreword setting the historical and political context for the book, a useful and important document in itself, Jonathan Cook describes A Doctor in Galilee as “a key text for scholars, diplomats and journalists.” This it certainly is, but it is a very great deal more. It is, in fact, a work of literature of the highest quality. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Book Review: "A Doctor in Galilee"
At a time when many feel that the Palestinian cause is dying, the death of the poet Mahmoud Darwish following open-heart surgery acquires added poignancy. Variously described as “the Palestinian national poet” or “the Arab poet laureate, Darwish was 67, exactly the same age as his friend Edward Said when he died five years ago. Both men were seen as embodying the aspirations of their people, both served on the Palestinian National Council, and both resigned in protest against the Oslo Accords which, as they rightly anticipated, sold out Palestinian rights for no tangible result. Raymond Deane comments. Read more about A guest of eternity: Mahmoud Darwish in memoriam
Because its contributors — sociologists, historians, legal experts and cultural critics — work from within an activist perspective, the new volume Thinking Palestine should be read closely by serious pro-Palestinian activists wishing to sharpen their conceptual tools in the ceaseless battle against Zionist propaganda. Raymond Deane reviews for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Book review: "Thinking Palestine"
Cumbersome though it already is, the subtitle of the new book The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism, and the One-State Solution could have been expanded to include “The Right of Return,” the title of the second of its four long chapters, thus doing fuller justice to its impressive sweep. Raymond Deane reviews Raja Halwani and Tomis Kapitan’s new book for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Book review: Philosophical essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s speech to the Israeli Knesset was lauded as historic, as she spoke of her country’s “shame” for the Holocaust. EI Contributor Raymond Deane subjects Merkel’s words and German reactions to them to a searing analysis. Deane argues that with her distortions, omissions and indifference to their plight, Merkel covers up the reality that it is the Palestinians who are paying the penance for Germany’s past crimes. Read more about Scapegoat upon scapegoat: Angela Merkel addresses the Knesset
Jeff Halper’s new book is, in part, the story of the evolution of a “white moderate” peace campaigner to a radical Israeli campaigner for justice for the Palestinians. En route, he maps his development from “ethnic Jew to Jewish national to Israeli,” disregarding his grandmother’s warning that “Israel is no place for a Jewish boy!” Raymond Deane reviews for EI. Read more about Book Review: "An Israeli In Palestine Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel"
Much debate on conflict in the Middle East is beset by contradictions and unanswered questions. In his second book, Nazareth-based English author Jonathan Cook seeks to cut these Gordian knots, and in the process proposes an uncompromisingly grim diagnosis of what is happening in the world’s most unstable region, and why it is happening. Raymond Deane reviews for EI. Read more about Book review: "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations"
