Once again Tower Hamlets is being targeted by anti-Islam campaigners, this time a revamped and radicalised version of Ukip — the far-right event is now banned by the police, but we’ll be assembling this Saturday to make sure they stay away, says JAYDEE SEAFORTH
Shifting political conceptions of Israel
From Israel’s creation in 1948 to today, views on the nature of the Jewish state have passed through several stages – but what remains constant is the projection of imperial power in the region, which is the barrier to peace and Palestinian self-determination, writes NICK WRIGHT
EXPULSION: The expulsion of Palestinian women and children from Tantura, a village near Haifa, 1948
URI WELTMANN reports on a day in the life of peace activists from Israel, travelling to help Palestinians in the West Bank harvest their olives under threat from settlers and soldiers
The independent TD’s campaign has put important issues like Irish reunification and military neutrality at the heart of the political conversation, argues SEAN MacBRADAIGH
Italian unions are mobilising against rearmament and for wages and investment – but left blunders still leave the ‘post-fascist’ Italian PM looking likely to keep her job, says NICK WRIGHT
New research into mutations in sperm helps us better understand why they occur, while debunking a few myths in the process, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
CAROL WILCOX argues for the proper implementation of the land value tax, which could see unused plots sold off and landlords priced out of landlordism, potentially resolving the housing and planning crises
FOLLOWING last weekend’s 100,000-plus Palestine demonstration, the writer Michael Rosen opened up an interesting discussion which challenges the way the Palestine-Israel conflict is seen on the left and beyond.
Challenging the narrative which assumes that Israel’s main sponsors — the United States, the EU and Britain — hold in varying degrees different objectives from the zionist state, he writes: “But objectively, the US (and its allies) have gone beyond being complicit, collaborating, and supplying. The vast tonnage of bombs, the massive use of US aircraft, drones, munitions and high-tech back-up, can, to my mind, only be interpreted as the US (and allies including us) doing this for its own reasons. What is going on is the enactment of US policy.”
The political transformations at the centre of today’s controversies about Israel’s “right to exist” are illustrated by the sharp difference between the politics of the post-war period — when Israel was established by UN decision — and its present-day role as the geographically enhanced extension of US imperial power in the region.
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