Painting Fakes

Nauru is back in the Australian news which can only mean one thing - Australia is about to exile some more refugees there.  Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke went to Nauru last week for a series of meetings that culminated in a deal for Nauru to provide permanent residence for up to 280 asylum seekers.  In return, Australia has agreed to pay the Nauru government a one-off $400m and then $70m per year thereafter.  It's not clear how long this nonsense will continue but if we assume it will last for five years, it will cost the Australian government a total of $750m, or $2.7m per asylum seeker. Nauru from the air. It just so happens that I went to Nauru for a few days some years ago.  I can't tell you what I did there, but I can tell you that it was a depressing place.  There were a lot of asylum seekers there at the time, living under a regime known as 'open detention'.  That is to say, they were free to roam the island at will.  Some were still living i...

Following reading and writing for my series of posts on the long-running war on Palestine, I followed up on a recommendation from a friend* to have a look at Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and read his book, The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories, published in 2017. Ilan Pappe was born in Haifa, Israel in 1954, and studied and taught history at the University of Haifa.  However, his writings led to personal attacks in the media and threats to him and his family, so he left Israel and now teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK.  To say he's not a fan of Zionism is an understatement.  He is on record as supporting a unitary state in Palestine in which Jews and Palestinians have equal citizenship, and the right of return for the descendants of Palestinian refugees of the Nakba. The Biggest Prison on Earth  examines the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.  But first of all he provides a quic...

This is the final post (I promise!) in a series about the history of the war on Palestine.  Part 1 told the history of the conflict from the beginnings of Zionism to the Nakba and the creation of Israel.  Part 2 covered the formation of the PLO and its guerilla campaign.  Part 3 covered the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords, and Part 4 discussed the Palestinian Authority and the rise of Hamas.  In this final post I want to look at the wider context of Zionism, and the implications for where we are at right now.   One of the slogans frequently used by Zionists in the 19th  and 20th  centuries was ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’.   The phrase was first coined by Christian Restorationists (what we now more commonly call Christian Zionists) in the mid-19th  Century and was later picked up by some of the Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi.   At one level, the firs...

In Part 1 of this series I dealt with the rise of Zionism, the British Mandate in Palestine, the Nakba and the creation of Israel.  Part 2 dealt with the creation of the PLO and its guerilla warfare against Israel, leading to its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982.  Part 3 dealt with the First Intifada and the Oslo Accords.  Here I bring the story up to the present day. With the implementation of the Oslo Accords in 1994, the war shifted decisively into Palestine itself.  The PLO leadership moved into the occupied territories and took up the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA).  They clearly hoped that this was the first step on the road to nationhood and a lasting settlement, but they were quickly disappointed.   Administrative Zones as per the Oslo Accords - this is a simplified version Rashid Khalidi characterises the PA’s role as primarily related to security – Israel retained effective control of water supply and electricity, border contro...

Part 1 of this series outlined the history of the Zionist project from the late 19th century until the creation of Israel in 1948 with its attendant expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba.  Part 2 discussed the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, its guerilla campaign of cross-border raids from Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon, and the blowback it received both from the Israelis and its Arab hosts.  This phase took a decisive turn in 1982 when Israel invaded southern Lebanon, with massive loss of Lebanese and Palestinian lives, and the PLO was ejected from Lebanon.   The Israelis were highly satisfied with what they had achieved with the Lebanese invasion, thinking they had dealt a decisive blow to Palestinian resistance.  This wasn’t how it worked out, as Rashid Khalidi tells us. A modern David and Goliath With the PLO’s evacuation from Beirut, the Palestinian cause appeared to have been gravely weakened, and Sharon seemed to have achieved all of his ...

In Part 1 of this series I provided a quick precis of the emergence of Zionism and its adoption by the British in the administration of Palestine between the two World Wars, concluding with the Nakba – the ‘catastrophe’, in which over 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from Palestine - and the creation of Israel in 1947-48.   The Nakba initiated a period in which the primary locus of Palestinian activism was outside the country.  The largest Palestinian populations were now refugees in the various Arab states – Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt (Gaza was at that point Egyptian territory) and to a lesser extent Libya, Syria and other Arab countries.  They began to organise themselves both politically and militarily in these various nations.  They used their communities in Egyptian-ruled Gaza, Jordanian-ruled West Bank and the south of Lebanon and Syria as staging-posts for cross-border raids, many of which targeted Israeli civilians.  This led to savage and o...