Leslie Bravery

With US President Trump’s rejoicing, Israel has re-elected Netanyahu for a fifth term. An Israeli public relations firm took credit for placing hidden cameras at polling stations on election day, successfully reducing the voter turnout in non-Jewish communities. Netanyahu’s Likud Party admitted that it was behind the deployment of a reported 1,200 hidden cameras. In a previous election in 2015, the Israeli Prime Minister published a video, warning that ‘Arabs’ were “voting in droves” with the help of left-wing organisations.

While Palestinians are forced to live under such brutal, ideologically-driven Israeli military dictatorship, the mainstream news media and western politicians continue to behave as though it isn’t happening.

For the Palestinian people, 2019 has begun strictly as the Zionist enterprise intends – with no let up to its grim, discriminatory violations of international humanitarian law and implacably unjust rule.

The Israel Institute of New Zealand’s Director, Dr David Cumin, is demanding to know who was responsible for New Zealand’s abstention from voting on a procedural vote at the UN condemning the Palestinian Resistance movement, Hamas.

Subservience to Zionism’s fanatical desire to suppress freedom of speech lies behind CNN’s decision to sack one of its most popular commentators. On 28 November, Marc Lamont Hill addressed the United Nations in support of justice for the Palestinian people. On the following day, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, CNN announced “Marc Lamont Hill is no longer under contract with CNN”.

This week, the news media appeared to notice Gaza again, reporting a deadly Israeli incursion and air strikes, as well as retaliatory missile-firings by Palestinian Resistance fighters. In the public mind, the news would have created an impression of violence ‘once more’ erupting in Gaza and disturbing a period of ‘relative calm’. Nothing could be further from the reality of Israel’s determined, relentless, day-to-day (and nightly) persecution of Gaza.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu has described the Palestinian founders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) as “classical antisemites in modern garb”. Yet Arabic is the most widely-spoken of all the semitic languages. Zionism’s choice of the term ‘antisemitic’ in preference to the implied, yet far more direct expression, ‘anti-Jewish’, is strategic. The intention is to deny, or at least obfuscate, every aspect of Palestinian culture and history.