Harry’s Place

This is a guest post by S.O.Muffin
The late Golda Meir famously said that “peace will come once Arabs love their children more than they hate ours”. Since then the pithy quote has been endlessly repeated and recycled (recycling of quotes being a great contribution of blogdom to saving the environment), mostly as a convenient discussion […]

Deborah Fink gave up on her idea of a naked bike ride to protest Jewish self determination in Israel.  
Instead, she dressed up in a “Mad Mel” wig and made a keening noise. The police quickly bundled her off, while she screamed “fascists” at them.

We are very fortunate to have opponents like Deborah Fink, whose activism […]

Read these extraordinary excerpts from a piece by the Syrian journalist Abi Hassan– for whose safety I devoutly wish– which appeared on the liberal Arab website Al-Awan.
(Hat tip: lbnaz)

There was a celebration of the re-foundation of the State of Israel on Sunday. I missed it, because I was too busy blissing out in the lovely sunshine at Glastonbury.
However, I’m not sure if I’d have gone. Apparently, this counter demonstration was planned:
Meanwhile, another threat was exposed on the JustPeaceUK website, where a Jewish critic […]

A recent poll reported in Haaretz showed that 77 per cent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than any other country. This encouraging news was accompanied by the statistic that 94 per cent of Arab citizens want Israel to be “a country in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal […]

After a year or so of dismal news about trade unions approving or threatening various “boycotts” of Israel, there’s some good news which I hope signals the beginning of a trend.
The Alliance for Workers’ Liberty reports:
The 2008 Annual General Meeting of the RMT transport union voted by a more than two-thirds majority for a two-states, […]

I didn’t listen to Eva Figes on the Today programme but the furore does not surprise me. The BBC is frequently criticised here and in the Jewish press for its coverage of Israel and Jewish issues. I don’t intend to go into the rights and wrongs of that prickly subject now, but I thought it […]

The dominant narrative of the Israel-Palestine tragedy is that of the European Shoah on the one hand, and the Palestinian Arab Nakba on the other. But, in the Arab and Persian world, there was also a Jewish Mizrahi Nakba: coincidentally equal in proportion to that of the disaster that befell the Palestinian Arabs.
Lyn Julius, a woman of […]

(This is a guest post by Mira Vogel)
I feel baffled and alarmed by the amount of time and money lavished on mainstreaming the academic boycott of Israel in my trade union (University and College Union, or UCU). Boycott is a very serious thing to ask British academics to undertake. It’s a request to discriminate against fellow […]

You will probably have read about the secret and “unofficial” meetings between Syrians and Israelis - including, significantly, Dr. Alon Liel -  which took place between September 2004 and July 2006, at which certain understandings for a peace agreement between Israel and Syria were formulated.
The Yaba Yaba blog has what it claims to be a September 2007 […]