Nobel laureate JM Coetzee has declined to attend an upcoming literature festival in Israel, writing a excoriating letter to organisers citing the country’s “genocidal campaign” in Gaza, stating: “It will take many years for Israel to clear its name”.
The 86-year-old author, who was born in apartheid South Africa and lives in Australia, wrote to organisers of the Jerusalem international writers festival in November.
While the contents of Coetzee’s letter were described by the festival’s artistic director, Julia Fermentto-Tzaisler, to Israeli press in April, the Guardian has received Coetzee’s correspondence directly.
... full articleIsrael’s pro-American orientation exists not just among Israeli elites but also among the whole population. Come what may in Israel, it’s inconceivable that this fundamental orientation will change. Combined with its overwhelming military power, this makes Israel a unique and irreplaceable American asset in the Middle East.
For centuries, Gaza has stood at a crossroads of civilizations, linking Africa and Asia and serving as a meeting point for traders, pilgrims, and empires. The territory has been shaped by successive cultures and faiths, including pagan, Christian, and Islamic traditions, leaving behind a landscape of mosques, churches, archaeological sites, and historic buildings that reflect centuries of cultural exchange.
The Great Omari Mosque, for example, stands in the Old City of Gaza on a site that dates back nearly two millennia. When it became a mosque in the seventh century, the structure was built on land once home to a pagan temple and later a Byzantine church. Though the building has been damaged on numerous occasions since, Gaza’s oldest mosque—known for its octagonal minaret, rounded arches, and historical artifacts—continued to serve as a popular tourist destination and monument to cultural exchange and history.
... full articleThe Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.
Benjamin Netanyahu interrupted an uncharacteristically long silence over the Iran conflict this week with a video commentary insisting he had “full coordination” with Donald Trump, with whom he spoke “almost daily”.
The insistence that all was rosy in the US-Israeli relationship followed weeks of reports in the domestic press that Israel was no longer being consulted over the Iran conflict, and even less over Pakistani-brokered peace talks. Such is the scepticism over Netanyahu’s trustworthiness among the general public and independent press that the immediate reaction among observers to his video statement was speculation that the reality could be even worse than they had imagined.
... full articleMy original interest in the Nazi holocaust was personal. Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.
On April 17, Zahra al-Qusaybi woke up to news of a ceasefire in Lebanon. For six weeks, she and her two adult daughters had languished in a crowded school shelter in Saida, a city 27 miles south of the capital Beirut.
They were among 1.1 million people uprooted from their homes when Israel escalated its war on Lebanon on March 2, ostensibly to disarm the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
... full articleThere are contradictory tendencies in American society. There’s a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It’s also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people who make use of the rights and information available to them.
