AMNESTY’S conclusion on apartheid is wrong. It changes the term to suit their contention. It creates an absurd comparison between democratic Israel and apartheid South Africa when the truth is that Arab citizens of Israel enjoy full democratic rights. This is a one-sided report that undermines its credibility by solely blaming Israel for the situation…
Labor leader Anthony Albanese and opposition arts spokesman Tony Burke have refused to take a stance on the anti-Israel boycott disrupting the Sydney Festival, despite some ALP colleagues ¬privately voicing opposition to the campaign. Since December, the city’s premier cultural event has been embroiled in controversy after organisers approached the Israeli embassy and accepted a…
The Sydney Branch of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) congratulates artists for their principled stand in withdrawing from the Sydney Festival in support of the Palestinian people. “Solidarity with the Palestinian struggle has long been close to the hearts of many, many maritime workers,” said Sydney Branch Secretary Paul Keating. “By responding to the…
Dear Peter Gabriel, As a teenager in a cold and grey North Shields in the 1970s one of my treasured possessions was a red hooded sweat-shirt into which my friend Eddie Thomas had sewn the titles of Genesis albums in beautiful, flowing, many-colored silken threads. After school and paper rounds, we’d sit listening to Foxtrot…
100 artists including Ken Loach, Mark Rylance and Susan Sarandon have signed an open letter indicting Israel as an illegitimate ‘settler colonial’ society. Fathom editor Alan Johnson sets out the reasons why it isn’t, in the form of an open letter to one of the signatories, his culture hero Peter Gabriel. Dear Peter Gabriel, As…
Why Palestinians prefer to work for Israeli employers, Palestinian Media Watch, Tuesday, 19 October 2021 Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip are excited. Israeli authorities have decided to allow thousands of them to work in Israel. The news about the Israeli decision spread like wildfire, prompting tens of thousands of Palestinians to converge on the…
Worker power is essential to building our economy from the COVID-19 crisis better than before and developing the economy from the bottom up and the middle out. On Labor Day, President Joe Biden announced, “When unions win, workers across the board win.” Although Biden outlined the achievements of the US labor movement over history, he…
Firstly, let me say this is not a conventional book review. It is more so an ongoing critical reflection on what the anti-Zionist Left (i.e. those who reject Israel’s continuing existence as a Jewish state even within the Green Line borders, and instead advocate so-called universalistic solutions which in the current political culture of the…
A Federal Court decision handed down on August 31 confirmed that University of Sydney staff have a legal right to be protected from disciplinary action when exercising intellectual freedom. The decision resulted from an appeal brought by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and Dr Tim Anderson, a former Political Economy academic, against the University of Sydney. Anderson was sacked…
