Our Wednesday News Analysis | Netanyahu's visit is a reminder that Israel's hard-right regime has much in common with our own

Demonstrators on Whitehall in London, following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at 10 Downing Street

Source: Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/e/netanyahus-visit-reminder-israels-hard-right-regime-has-much-common-our-own

By Morning Star Editorial
Published March 24, 2023

"This is a summit of hypocrites.

The roadmap trumpets Britain’s eagerness to “promote fact-based knowledge about the history of the Holocaust” while the same country arms a Ukrainian regime that celebrates mass-murdering Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and deploys explicit neo- Nazi units in its military.

For its part, pious references to “Holocaust remembrance” by an Israeli administration whose finance minister describes himself as a fascist
can only come across as offensive.

From an Italy that prosecutes mariners for rescuing refugees from drowning to a France using presidential decrees and police violence to attack retirement rights,
the march to a more authoritarian future is clear."

HUGE crowds of protesters met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on his visit to London.

The summit between two “freedom-loving, innovative and thriving democracies,” as this week’s “roadmap” for relations described Britain and Israel, takes place as both engage in a systematic assault on democratic rights.

Protests have dogged Netanyahu for months over his legislative assault on the judiciary — the bargain the old crook having struck with his far-right coalition partners being immunity for himself in return for a weakening of the courts that will help accelerate the brutal colonisation of occupied Palestine.

Britain’s attacks on civil liberties are no less marked. Many of the huge strikes which have forced bosses to the table over the last year could not have taken place had the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Bill progressing through Parliament already come into force. The government is attacking the right to protest and the right to vote...

Read more: Netanyahu's visit is a reminder that Israel's hard-right regime has much in common with our own

ISRAELI OCCUPATION IN PALESTINE MUST END AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES

Tareq Barghouth (center) speaks to the Israeli press. (Philippe Bellaïche)

Source: +972 Magazine
https://www.972mag.com/tareq-barghout-prison-letter/

By Tareq Barghouth
Published March 23, 2023

Do I regret my imprisonment after being convicted of carrying out attacks? That’s complicated. I do regret one thing: letting them push me into a corner.

"… the outrageous absurdity came from the halls of justice —
from within the walls of the courts.

The crafts of judging and prosecuting were combined, resulting in a mixture devoid of any humane relation to the circumstances of the minors and women who were tangled up in the wave of violence.

Retribution was the goal, and every other judicial consideration
was trampled under the brash foot of ethnocracy.

I felt that I was no longer committed to this system.
It’s not that I betrayed it – it betrayed me."

The following is a letter by Tareq Barghouth, a Palestinian political prisoner who in July 2019 was sentenced to 13.5 years in prison, after being convicted of committing shooting attacks against Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank. The letter was written from inside his prison cell as a message to the occupying society.

In the world in which I am supposed to spend the next 10 years, the prisoner uses various different tricks to cheat the hands of time. The most effective trick is to recover one’s memories. In so doing, the prisoner kills two birds with one stone: on the one hand, he passes the time and doesn’t allow feelings like boredom and emptiness to take over his mind; and on the other, he examines the details of his memories and learns from them.

As the years have passed, I have immersed myself deeper and deeper in my memories. One scene stands out among all the others. The event occurred at the start of the First Intifada, in the village of Al-Eizariya (Bethany), when I turned 12. That day, I wore a special shirt: one sleeve black and the other green, most of the shirt white but with a red pocket on the left side. I sat with the kids from the village next to the market, where they had recently built a new bus stop, and we had fun sitting there, on the bench...

Read more: Israeli occupation in Palestine must end as violence escalates

THE HOLY LAND AND US: BBC NAKBA SERIES OBSCURES ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE

The BBC, like the rest of the establishment media, continues to direct our attention away from where true responsibility lies for the slaughter at Deir Yassin (Illustration by MEE Creative)

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/bbc-nakba-series-palestine-ethnic-cleansing-obscures

By Jonathan Cook
Published March 22, 2023

The documentary hides the real villains: Western governments that left Jews with only one credible escape route from European antisemitism, by dispossessing Palestinians

"Gantz's son, Daniel, and grandson, David, are taken by the programme-makers
to the site of Jimzu.

There is something deeply distasteful about the way this scene
is handled by the BBC."

The BBC’s The Holy Land and Us, a two-part exploration of Israel’s founding that concluded this week, has been what pundits like to call “brave television”. The first documentary featured testimony of a notorious massacre by a Zionist militia of more than 100 Palestinians, many of them women and children, in early 1948, weeks before Israeli statehood was declared.

In a five-star review, the Guardian newspaper termed the programme “taboo-busting”. And certainly from a Palestinian perspective, it broke new ground on mainstream television.

Unlike dozens of later massacres committed by Zionist forces that were hushed up, some of which were even worse, the atrocity at the village of Deir Yassin, just outside Jerusalem, was widely publicised at the time. In fact, the numbers of those slaughtered there were inflated, including famously by the New York Times, to more than 200 Palestinians...

Read more: The Holy Land And Us: BBC Nakba series obscures ethnic cleansing of Palestine