Tag Archives: arab minority

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The Nakba Law deepens apartheid in Israel

Palestine Monitor
Palestine Monitor, 26 March 2011
The ‘Nakba law’ is yet another piece of racist and discriminatory legislation which will directly target the Palestinian minority in Israel. In essence, the law stifles freedom of expression and will punish this sector of society for commemorating the most traumatic event in their recent collective history, the Nakba.

On March 22nd, the Knesset voted 37-25 in favour of the so-called ‘Nakba-Law’, or Amendment 39, a bill which has been in the works since 2009. Initiated by MK Alex Miller of the far-right political party, Yisrael Beiteinu, the law calls for—amongst other things—the reduction of state funding to groups that participate in activities that contradict the character of the state as ‘Jewish and democratic’ or that grieve Israel’s Independence day.

According to experts, the law is undeniably vague in its wording, thus leaving it open to abuse. Sawsan Zaher of Adalah, the legal centre for Arab minority rights in Israel, believes the bill threatens a broad swath of government-funded institutions. Organizations at risk include research institutions that are found to be challenging the definition of the Israeli state as Jewish and democratic; educational institutions, such as bilingual schools, which hold events acknowledging the shared history of Jews and Arabs; and state-funded community organizations, such as theatres showing plays about the Nakba.

One cannot escape the fact that the law clearly targets freedom of expression, a basic human right and an essential requirement for a meaningful democracy. ‘You are sanctioned because of your political thoughts,’ Zaher says. ‘You can have your money so long as your political attitude aligns with the ideology of the right-wing government.’

With this in consideration, one is led to understand the intention of the bill to curb dissident voices within Israeli society.

The decision to sanction those who are involved in acknowledging the Nakba because it undermines Israel’s Independence Day is a clear indicator of the extent to which Palestinians living within Israel are afforded second class citizenship. For Zaher, this unequal treatment of Israel’s citizens can be seen in plain sight, ‘It would be seen as completely unacceptable to deny Jews the right to acknowledge the trauma of the holocaust, now they are trying to deny the trauma of the Palestinian people.’

The law states that it is the Minister for Finance who will be authorized to decrease the budget for those who are found to be involved in activities that are seen as a violation of its terms. For many like Zaher, this bill further affirms Israel’s undemocratic character. Zaher highlights the fact that ‘it is a legal matter and so should be the responsibility of the judicial authorities. This is a breach of constitutional rights and an infringement on the separation of powers.’

In Zaher’s view, this law is but one element of an ongoing policy of discrimination aimed at the Palestinian minority being carried out by the Israeli government. ‘It is an undemocratic law which is part of a chain of racist legislation that serves to target the Palestinian minority and decrease their rights she asserts. ‘The Palestinian citizens of Israel are viewed by the state as the enemy, no democratic state views its own citizens this way,’ she continues. This is given weight if one looks at the stream of racist and discriminatory legislation which has been set forth by Netanyahu’s government since its coming to power.

For the right-wing coalition currently in power, the Palestinian minority and its contesting narrative serves as a substantial thorn in the side of their political agenda, the aim of which is to bolster the Jewish character of the Israeli state. The ‘Nakba law’ is therefore another crude attempt to further this objective. Zaher contends that this stifling of freedom of expression for only one sector of society is not the action of a democratic government. ‘Discriminatory policies are one thing but when you have discriminatory laws, this is apartheid.’

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Inside Lod’s Ghettos

The New Israel Fund
Palestine Monitor, 24 October 2010
Lod is the first town most visitors to Israel see, when they walk out of Ben Gurion International airport. What they don’t see is the discreet ethnic cleansing which takes place here, the state-sanctioned policies of discrimination which are destroying living conditions for the town’s Arab population. With the new loyalty oath poised to deepen the divide, Sophie Crowe visited communities that are already given daily reminders of their second-class status.

“Arabs have no security here” says Omar Azbarka, president of an Arab youth organisation in Lod’s Sapir college, in an area totally segregated from the Jewish population. Gabi, a resident of Lod who works for the Arab citizens’ board and for the Arab Tajamoa party in the Knesset, feels his family are not safe living in Lod.

Crime has been allowed to develop in Arab areas without police investigations. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu visited Lod last week claiming he wanted to remove all the weapons from gangs here but such statements carry little promise of action. Israeli authorities have been happy to allow Arab communities to deteriorate on the margins.

As part of a containment policy, Arabs are denied permits to build on their own land and homes are routinely demolished should the police decide they are illegal. Al-Mahata was a mainly Bedouin suburb in Lod until the state claimed the houses were old and must be torn down. This neighbourhood was then developed into new apartments and allocated to Jews. The Bedouin inhabitants were given a little money and relocated to the dilapidated area of Nevej Shalom. The local government has surrounded their properties with boulders to ensure they cannot expand and build more homes.

Transferring Arabs out of their homes and away from the Jewish areas is part of the authorities’ Judaisation project, for which the Arab minority is an obstacle. The state has introduced incentives for Jews to migrate to Lod with new low-cost housing, as the presence of Arab communities has kept many away. A three metre high separation wall was built to keep the Arab inhabitants of Shanir, another Arab ghetto, segregated from an adjacent Jewish town. Organisations like the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency, which seek to appropriate and develop land in Israel for the benefit of Jews alone, take an official role in planning and development in Israel. Their position amounts to state-sanctioned discrimination.

The effects of their policies can be seen in Al Sikkeh, an Arab suburb, one of the worst-maintained ghettos in Lod. Al Sikkeh is denied the most basic municipal services including rubbish collection, electricity and street lights. Sewage flows openly through the streets here.

Nearby Jewish neighbourhoods are new and comfortable: the roads lined with trees, the inhabitants provided with good schools and community centres. Arabs are not permitted by the municipality to buy apartments in these areas. When Gabi’s brother attempted to move to one of these neighbourhoods, he was forced to go to a court in Jerusalem. After winning the case for his right to live there, his Jewish neighbours threw rocks at his house. Gabi feels “ethnic discrimination underlines Arab suffering” through state policies towards minorities.

Maha El Nakib Shaqledy works for an Arab party in the Knesset and participates in activism in Lod. She claims business people and shop owners cannot protest during times of tension between Israel and Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, such as the assault on the Gaza Strip in 2009, for fear of losing Jewish customers. Jews rarely employ Arabs and it is difficult for Arabs to buy properties to run businesses from, reducing their economic opportunities. Maha claims the municipality actively oppresses the Arabs through its attempts to crush them with social and economic methods. The state moved the financial centre of Lod away from an Arab area, leaving it with virtually no services.

Buthaina works for Shatil, an advocacy group for minority rights. “Lod is a microcosm of the Arab position in Israel”, she says. Officially, Israeli Arabs have full citizenship though in practice they experience discrimination at both state and society level. When Arabs protest to the municipality, they are met with the assertion that since the majority of Arab houses are seen as illegal, “they are not entitled to municipal services”. The Arab parties in the Knesset try to help the situation for Arabs in Lod and elsewhere by raising awareness but ultimately, Buthaina claims, they are powerless in “a fascistic Knesset”.

At the very top, laws are handed down that keep communities like Lod’s on their knees. It must seem bitterly ironic to Arab Israelis that while they are being asked to display their loyalty to the state, it is forcing them into the gutter.

 The New Israel Fund-Shatil Mixed Cities Project

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Israeli forces test transfer scenario

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth, 14 Oct 2010

Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.

The drill was intended to evaluate the readiness of the civil defence units, police, army and prison service to contain large-scale riots by Israel’s Arab minority in response to such a deal.

The transfer scenario echoes a proposal by Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s far-right foreign minister, for what he has termed a “population exchange”.

Lieberman proposes land swaps that would force many of Israel’s 1.3 million Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state in return for annexation to Israel of most of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The scheme has been widely criticised as a violation of international law.

He outlined his proposal to the United Nations General Assembly last month. Although Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said he was not consulted about the speech, he did not admonish Lieberman.

The training exercise has fuelled fears among Israel’s Arab minority that the government might be hoping to pressure Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to agree to land and population swaps as part of US-sponsored peace negotiations, which have stalled.

Dov Chenin, a member of the Israeli parliament representing the joint Jewish-Arab Communist Party, called Tuesday for more details of the exercise from the government during a speech in the chamber, although officials offered no immediate response.

Chenin said the drill was a sign Israel was heading in an “extremely dangerous direction”.

“A few years ago, only the extreme right-wing parties talked about transferring Arab citizens, but now we see that even the security forces are preparing concrete plans for carrying out such a scenario.”

Netanyahu demanded this week that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state before further progress was possible — a move seen by the Arab minority as a threat to its status inside Israel. A US State Department spokesman referred to recognition as “a core demand” and said it had Washington’s support.

Haneen Zoubi, an Arab member of parliament, said the exercise was designed to send “very clear messages” to the Arab minority and Abbas’ negotiators.

“Netanyahu is letting us know that we are not part of his vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish state and that, if we try to resist his plans, our protests will be greeted with violent repression,” she said.

“He also wants the Palestinian negotiators to understand his minimum requirements for an agreement. He is not interested in justice for the Palestinians or in creating a viable state.”

Details of the five-day drill were reported last weekend on the Voice of Israel radio station by Carmela Menashe, one of Israel’s most respected military correspondents.

The exercise envisioned extensive disturbances by Israel’s Arab citizens, one-fifth of the population, as security forces prepared to enforce border changes that would forcibly relocate many to a new Palestinian state, according to her report.

In the operation, code-named Warp and Weft, the security services established a large detention centre in the Galilee region between Nazareth and Tiberias to cope with an “unprecedented” number of arrests of Arab citizens.

The drill anticipated a rapid takeover of the West Bank by Hamas following the signing of the peace agreement with the Palestinian Authority. In the exercise, the security forces had to handle the firing of hundreds of rockets into Israel, terrorist attacks, prison riots and breakouts.

As Chenin raised his concerns, Lieberman opened a new front in his attacks on Israel’s Arab citizens, following his repeated statements questioning their loyalty to the state. While hosting the Finnish foreign minister on Tuesday, he accused groups of Arab citizens of plotting to secede from the state under orders from the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

“The Palestinians will try, through various groups among Israeli Arabs, to overturn the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state and will work to create different autonomous areas within the state,” he said.

Aluf Benn, a senior columnist for the Haaretz newspaper, wrote yesterday that Netanyahu was “hiding behind” Lieberman and that the prime minister was the “true instigator” of the wave of anti-Arab policies and laws the government was promoting.

On Sunday the cabinet approved a bill that would demand a loyalty oath from non-Jews seeking citizenship.

In the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, Ahmed Tibi, an Arab MP, accused Netanyahu of being behind “a gradual ethnic-cleansing scheme — removing as many Arabs as possible while creating a Jewish, homogenous Israel”.

Opinion polls among Israel’s Arab minority have repeatedly shown strong opposition to any plan to revoke their citizenship or force them into a Palestinian state.

The Association of Civil Rights in Israel, the country’s largest human-rights group, wrote to Netanyahu this week calling the media reports “alarming” and demanding assurances that there were no plans for “population transfer”.

It added that the impression was being created that “an issue which is completely illegitimate — the forced revocation of the citizenship of some of the country’s Arab citizens — is perceived by the government as a reasonable and even likely possibility”.

Some observers have speculated that the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, who is a member of Lieberman’s Yisraeli Beiteinu Party, may have been the driving force behind the exercise.

However, Chenin said such an extensive drill involving so many different branches of the security forces could not have been carried out without the involvement of other government ministers, including Ehud Barak, the defence minister.

Barak, leader of the Labor party, has presented himself in Washington as a moderating influence on Israel’s right-wing government.

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

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‘Vague’ law used to lock up activists

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth, 22 Sept 2010

A vague security offence of “contact with a foreign agent” is being used by Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to lock up Arab political activists in Israel without evidence that a crime has been committed, human rights lawyers alleged this week.

The lawyers said the Shin Bet was exploiting the law to characterise innocent or accidental meetings between members of Israel’s large Arab minority and Arab foreign nationals as criminal activity.

The chances of such contacts have increased rapidly with advances in new technology and opportunities for Israel’s Arab citizens to travel to the wider Arab world, said Hussein Abu Hussein, a lawyer who represents security detainees.

The lawyers’ criticisms come at a particularly sensitive moment, as Israel has been widely accused of hounding two prominent political activists. Both were arrested on the grounds that they spied for the Lebanese militant group Hizbollah.

One, Omar Said, was released last week after a plea bargain in which the Shin Bet reduced a serious security charge of “aggravated espionage” to “contact with a foreign agent”.

The evidence it revealed suggested that Said had attended the meeting in Egypt unaware that his contact was a possible Hizbollah agent and that he had turned down an alleged offer to spy for the organisation.

Amnesty International has termed the continuing prosecution of the other defendant, Ameer Makhoul, as “pure harassment”.

As he was freed, Said, from Kfar Kana, near Nazareth, accused Israel of persecuting activists whose politics it does not like.

Abir Baker, a lawyer with the Adalah legal centre, said cases such as Said’s were intended to have a “chilling effect” on Israel’s Arab community, which comprises one-fifth of the population.

She said his arrest should be seen in the context of efforts by Israel to limit the right of Arab citizens to strengthen cultural and political ties to the rest of the Arab world.

Several of Israel’s Arab political parties, including the one Said belongs to, have been trying to inform the Arab world about the minority’s campaign for democratic reforms to end Israel’s status as a Jewish state.

A 2008 law removed the diplomatic immunity from Arab members of the Israeli parliament to visit Arab countries defined as enemy states.

One MP, Said Nafaa, who is to be tried over a visit to Syria with a party of Druze clerics in 2007, faces charges of contact with a foreign agent for meetings he held with Syrian politicians.

“There are laws to stop us from visiting countries classified as enemy states such as Syria and Lebanon, but Israel uses this particular offence to make us afraid to talk to any Arab national, whether at international conferences or online,” said Baker. “Israel wants to make us invisible.”

Khaled Ghanayim, a law professor at Haifa University, said misuse of the offence of contact with a foreign agent had grown with the right wing’s ascendance in Israel.

“Paradoxically, the Soviet Union advanced a similar policy for decades to prevent Jews in the Eastern bloc from meeting Israeli Jews. Israel and the West denounced that policy as a violation of their human rights, but today Israel is doing the same to its Arab citizens.”

Abu Hussein said the offence was particularly hard to challenge because, uniquely in Israeli criminal law, the onus to prove that the meeting did not harm state security rested with the defendant, not the prosecution.

The Shin Bet was unavailable for comment. But the agency is believed to be concerned that Hizbollah, which fired thousands of rockets into Israel during a month of hostilities in 2006, is trying to recruit spies among Israel’s Arab community.

According to the Shin Bet’s website, Hizbollah is particularly keen to identify the sites of Israeli security facilities in the north that might be targeted in a future confrontation and gauge the Jewish public’s mood.

Gideon Ezra, a former deputy head of the Shin Bet and now a member of parliament, said: “The state of Israel does not seek to put people in jail, but to carry out proper investigations. There is always a gap between what is known at first and the final outcome.”

Baker, who is studying the use of the “contact” offence, said there was a clear pattern in which the Shin Bet started its investigation with a serious security violation, such as transferring information to the enemy, which carries a life sentence, in addition to the allegation of contact.

“That way an impression is created with the public and the media that the suspect was harming state security.”

As the investigation proceeded, she said, the Shin Bet typically dropped the serious charge and sought a plea bargain on contact with a foreign agent. The charge carries a sentence of up to seven years in jail.

Defendants, faced with secret evidence and limited rights as security prisoners, were under pressure to agree, Abu Hussein said.

Baker said it was difficult to be sure exactly how often the law was being used but pointed to several notable recent cases.

In 2005, Sheikh Raed Salah, the head of the main wing of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and Suleiman Aghbaria, mayor of the city of Umm al Fahm, served jail terms of 30 months and 46 months, respectively, after agreeing a plea bargain.

The Shin Bet’s case that the pair belonged to a terrorist organisation, Hamas, and supplied it with weapons, collapsed during the trial.

In the most recent case, both Said and Makhoul claimed they were tortured while they were held without access to a lawyer.

Ghanayim said it was notable that both men were publicly involved in activities to challenge Israeli policies. Makhoul is known to have angered the Shin Bet by leading demonstrations against Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 and by heading calls for a boycott of Israel.

In the past the Shin Bet has warned that it would use all the powers at its disposal to “thwart” political activities it regarded as a threat to the state’s legitimacy.

Baker said use of the law against contact with a foreign agent had begun shortly after the start of the second intifada in 2000 to prevent Arab citizens meeting Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Last year, in a case that attracted wide attention in Israel, Rawi Sultani, a 24-year-old activist from Tira in central Israel, was sentenced to five and a half years after attending an international Arab summer camp in Morocco at which he was approached by a Hizbollah agent.

Mr Sultani was originally accused of conspiring to assassinate Gabi Ashkenazi, Israel’s chief of staff. The charge was dropped but he was convicted of giving information to the enemy by revealing that he had visited a gym used by Ashkenazi.

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

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Jerusalem politicians face expulsion

Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook in Nazareth, 29 June 2010

Israel creating loyalty test, warn lawyers

Israeli human-rights groups and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, have condemned a decision by Israel to expel four Palestinian politicians from East Jerusalem by the end of this week.

The Israeli government revoked their residency rights in Jerusalem a few weeks ago, after claiming they were “in breach of trust” for belonging to a “foreign parliament”, a reference to the Palestinian Legislative Council.

All four men belong to Hamas and were arrested a few months after taking part in the Palestinian national elections in January 2006. They remained in jail until recently as “bargaining chips” for the release of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who is being held captive by Hamas.

Observers say Israel’s move reflects its anger at Hamas’s growing hold on the political sympathies of Jerusalem’s 260,000 Palestinians and is designed to further entrench a physical separation Israel has been imposing on East Jerusalem and the adjacent West Bank.

Israel has not said where the three MPs and a former cabinet minister will be expelled to. The loss of residency effectively leaves the politicians stateless, in breach of international law, according to human-rights lawyers.

Hassan Jabareen, the director of the Adalah legal centre for the Arab minority in Israel, said a “very dangerous precedent” was being set. “It is the first time Palestinians in East Jerusalem have had their residency revoked for being ‘disloyal’ and this could be used to expel many other residents whose politics Israel does not like.

“This is a draconian measure characteristic of dark and totalitarian regimes,” he said.

The January 2006 vote for the Palestinian Legislative Council, in which Hamas won a majority of seats against its Fatah rivals, was the first time the Islamic party had participated in a national election.

Jerusalem politicians were allowed to stand only after the international community insisted that Israel honour the terms of the Oslo accords.

Unlike the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza, East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel following the 1967 war and its Palestinian inhabitants were given the status of “permanent residents”. Israel has violated international law by building large settlements throughout East Jerusalem that are now home to 200,000 Jews.

After the 2006 vote, the government of Ehud Olmert responded to Hamas’s success in East Jerusalem by initiating procedures to revoke the residency of three MPs – Mohammed Abu Tir, Ahmed Attoun and Mohammed Totah – and Khaled Abu Arafeh, who Hamas appointed as the PA’s minister for Jerusalem affairs.

Before the revocations could take effect, however, Israel arrested the men, as well as dozens of other Hamas legislators, in retaliation for Sgt Shalit’s capture four years ago.

Since their release, all four politicians have had their Israeli identity cards confiscated and been told they must leave the city within a month.

Mr Abu Tir, 60, was supposed to leave on June 19, but has so far evaded expulsion. “I will not willingly leave the place my family has lived for 500 years,” he said last week.

The deadline for the other three expires on Saturday.

Unusually, the plight of the Hamas politicians has won the support of Mr Abbas, who also heads Fatah and has been seeking to overturn Hamas’s rule in Gaza.

Calling the expulsions one of “the biggest obstacles yet on the path to peace”, Mr Abbas has vowed to put pressure on the US to reverse Israel’s decision.

During a meeting with three of the men last week, he said: “We cannot stand idly by while people are expelled from their homeland, which we consider a crime.” Mr Abbas is reported to fear that Israel is hoping to establish a new precedent for expelling thousands of Palestinians from the city.

Hatem Abdel Kader, Fatah’s minister for Jerusalem affairs, was warned this month by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, that he would have his residency revoked if he continued his political activities in the city.

Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, said Israel was issuing “a very clear warning to Hamas and all those who promote terror” that they would face a “backlash”.

Lawyers for the four Hamas politicians petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court this month for an injunction on the expulsions until a hearing can be held on the men’s residency rights. Last week, however, the court declined to stop what it called “deportations”, saying it would issue a ruling at a later date.

Mr Jabareen, whose Adalah organisation is advising the politicians, said he was “astonished” by the court’s position, and that in all previous expulsion cases an injunction had been issued before the expulsion took place.

He added: “Under international law, an occupying power cannot demand loyalty from the the people it occupies. Palestinians in East Jerusalem are ‘protected persons’ in law and cannot be expelled.”

Israel has based its decision on the Entry into Israel Law of 1952, which governs the naturalisation process for non-Jews. It allows the interior minister to revoke citizenship and residency in some cases.

“The purpose of this law is to oversee the entry into Israel of foreigners,” said Mr Jabareen. “The Palestinians of East Jerusalem did not enter Israel; Israel entered East Jerusalem by occupying it in 1967.”

The revocations of the politicians’ residency comes in the wake of a rapid rise in the number of Palestinians who have been stripped of Jerusalem residency on other grounds, usually because Israel claims the city is no longer the “centre of their life” and typically because a resident has studied or worked abroad.

In 2008, more than 4,500 Palestinians lost their Jerusalem residency, interior ministry figures show. The number has been steadily rising since 1995, when 91 Palestinians were stripped of their rights. According to Israel, a total of 13,000 Palestinians have had their residency revoked since 1967.

The loss of residency is seen by the Palestinians as part of a wider Israeli strategy to weaken their hold on East Jerusalem and its holy sites.

Israel has built sections of its separation wall through Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem, cutting off some 60,000 residents from their city.

It has also shut down all Palestinian political institutions in Jerusalem associated with the Palestinian national movements, and banned events – including a literature festival last year – that it claims are financed with PA money.

Last week police forced the closure of Hamas’ political office near the Old City. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, had earlier accused Hamas of trying to buy property in Jerusalem.

In early 2006, shortly before they were arrested, Mr Abu Tir and Mr Abu Arafeh were revealed to have established a diplomatic channel with several prominent Israeli rabbis to negotiate Sgt Shalit’s release and the terms of a possible peace deal. The talks were effectively foiled by their arrests.

In a related move, Israeli officials have also been threatening to revoke the citizenship of Palestinian leaders inside Israel, including Haneen Zoubi, the Israeli MP who was onboard last month’s aid flottilla to Gaza that Israeli commandos attacked, killing nine passengers.

  • Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
  • A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.