Israel/Palestine Thread

He is obviously a Zio and his wife is Jewish. Himself, Lammy and Cooper are the frontline backers of everything pro-Israel in the Labour Government. I can't say if big money is changing hands but it would not surprise me.

Powerful Haaretz editorial.

"The only democracy in the Middle East"

Pants on fire.

"The government doesn't intend to form a state commission of inquiry, whose members are appointed by the Supreme Court president, because it isn't interested in determining the truth, but in whitewashing it.

The opposition has rightly announced that it has no intention of cooperating with this.

No legitimacy should be granted to a farce in which the people being investigated appoint their own investigators and also set limits on the investigation into their failure"

Haaretz Editorial

Another powerful opinion piece from Haaretz. Violence against the Palestinians by Israelis is endemic and systemic.

Has there ever been such a violent society preying on innocent civilians

"Settler violence doesn't exist.

The violence against Palestinians in all its forms – that which is carried out by Israel's armed forces and bureaucrats and that which liberals like to imagine as taking place outside the law – isn't an irregular phenomenon but the essence of Israeliness.

As in the West Bank, so in Gaza, Jaffa, the Galilee and everywhere else.

The West Bank isn't the land of the settlers, and the attackers aren't a handful of extremists.

The attacks are the implementation of a long-established policy of ethnic cleansing that does not begin and does not end with 'extremist settlers' or 'the far-right government'"

Jonathan Pollak

I'm not an Arsenal fan but I'm intrigued…

I thought this was a very interesting post I read:

Here we go again. Another emergency meeting, another rush to City Hall - not to confront the grim reality outside its doors, but to posture, preen and perform.

This time it is a proposed special Belfast City Council meeting to express “solidarity” with Palestine Action activists on hunger strike in English prisons. Not to fix housing. Not to address spiralling homelessness. Not to deal with people literally dying on the streets of Belfast. Instead, councillors are lining up to pass a motion that will change nothing, except further divide the city and expose how detached they have become from the people they represent.

Let us be clear. These are not prisoners jailed for holding the wrong opinions. They are remand prisoners charged with criminal offences. The organisation they are linked to has been proscribed under terrorism legislation. One individual is alleged to have attacked a policewoman with a sledgehammer. That is violence, not protest, and no amount of emotive language or flag-waving alters that fact.

Yet councillors want an emergency meeting to “apply pressure” on the British government to drop charges - as though local government can override criminal prosecutions, or as though the rule of law should bend when a hunger strike is deployed as a tactic.

Step outside City Hall and the contrast is obscene.

Within minutes you will find rough sleepers curled up in doorways. British citizens - many veterans, many battling addiction or mental illness - freezing, sick and ignored. Some will die this winter. Where is their emergency meeting? Where is the urgent moral outrage when lives are being lost on Belfast’s streets?

Belfast is not a stage for ideological theatre. It is a city with urgent, unresolved problems: a housing crisis, overstretched services, rising costs and communities desperate for practical leadership. Instead, councillors expend energy on international gestures they cannot influence while local suffering is treated as background noise.

And this indulgence is not free. Special meetings, legal advice, staff time, security and chamber costs are all paid for by ratepayers - people already struggling with soaring bills and shrinking incomes. They are funding motions that carry no legal force and deliver no measurable benefit to the city.

The hypocrisy from Sinn Féin and People Before Profit is stark. They demand respect for the law when it suits them, yet are quick to undermine it when those charged align with their politics. Violence is condemned selectively, reframed rhetorically, and excused when convenient. You cannot claim to support justice while demanding charges be dropped because you approve of the cause.

Worse still, lending political support to individuals linked to a proscribed terrorist organisation does not just embarrass Belfast - it risks dragging the city back into dangerous territory. It normalises the idea that violence can be justified if wrapped in the right language. Belfast of all places should know where that road leads.

This is not compassion. It is recklessness.

While councillors indulge symbolism and moral grandstanding, people sleep rough, services buckle and trust in local government continues to erode. Belfast does not need more gestures. It needs councillors capable of focusing on the city they were elected to serve.

If they cannot tell the difference between governance and protest, they have no business sitting in that chamber.

And voters should remember every name attached to it.

tl:dr = "Bash the shinners"