PETER MASON applauds the revival, 39 years later with the same team and cast, of Manfred Karge’s version of Brecht’s 100-year-old play, Mann Ist Mann
A cogent alternative to Israel's apartheid system
SUE TURNER recommends a book promoting a powerful political programme for a unified democracy in the country, along with a strategy to achieve such change
BARRIER TO PEACE: The apartheid wall
MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds a fearless attempt to bring to the stage the 1984 toxic gas disaster in Bhopal, India
ALEX HALL applauds the account of a dogged, traumatic and punishing campaign for justice that has lasted from 1998 to the present day
NICK WRIGHT laments the political bias of an epic attempt to tell the history of the liberation of France from the Nazis, that excludes both the decisive contribution of the Soviet Red Army, and of the French communist party itself
JOE GILL traces the ideology and method of contemporary imperialism back to the greed, hubris and violence of the late 15th century Portuguese
Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism and the Case for One Democratic State
by Jeff Halper
(Pluto Press, £14.99)
THE IDEA of a single democratic state as a political solution for Palestine is nothing new. It was the policy of the Palestinian liberation movement, enshrined in the PLO Charter and only abandoned by the PLO in 1988 in favour of the two-state solution.
In this book Jeff Halper, a founder member of the recently established One Democratic State campaign, argues that Israel never intended the two-state solution to be a solution at all — instead, it was employed as a useful tool for managing the situation rather than solving it.
Meanwhile Israel has consolidated its repressive regime by splintering Palestinian lands with Israeli settlements linked by exclusive superhighways, policed by countless checkpoints and barriers including the apartheid wall.
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Police crackdowns on Israeli peace demonstrators combined with court rulings and settler organisations are designed to strip Palestinian families of their homes and land. The Israeli state has tried to silence both Israelis and Palestinians who resist, according to Zo HaDerekh (This Is The Way) the Communist Party of Israel’s Hebrew-language weekly
History suggests apartheid ends not through appeals to conscience alone but through sustained economic and political pressure, says HUGH LANNING
As antisemitism grows, the labour movement must recommit to defence of minorities while navigating the complexities of Gaza and global politics, argues NICK WRIGHT
Bezalel Smotrich’s measures to extend Israeli property law into the West Bank are a continuation of a decades-long project to dispossess Palestinians and preclude statehood, argues HUGH LANNING