*All items in this article are taken from the social and mass media during a time of conflict between Israel and Gaza and may therefore be based on propaganda-fuelled lies. Feel free to comment if you think any of my own conclusions are false – with supporting evidence, obviously, otherwise you may be made to look very silly indeed.

Norman Finkelstein, below, is having a laugh – at the expense of Israeli President Isaac Herzog. Read the tweet responding to him and see if you get the joke:

The story is that Herzog was claiming that a dead Hamas operative, found after the massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, was carrying instructions on how to make chemical weapons that were published by al-Qaeda. He claimed Hamas was working with that organisation and ISIS.

There’s just one problem: the document appears to be a fake, for the reason explained above – al-Qaeda material in Arabic was never circulated with their name spelled out in English.

Furthermore, as Jonathan Cook explains, the manual is not about how to make chemical weapons. It is a short online biography of Ramzi Yousef, who was jailed for trying to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993.

You just can’t believe a single word that comes out of the Israeli government, can you?

Suella Braverman must be fuming over this.

She’s only just spent a day or so scuttling between UK police chiefs, demanding that they arrest and prosecute anybody chanting “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, and now the Dutch have ruled that it is not anti-Semitic.

According to Novara Media,

The ruling upholds an earlier decision by a lower Dutch court… That court concluded that the pro-Palestinian slogans … “are subject to various interpretations” and “relate to the state of Israel and possibly to people with Israeli citizenship, but do not relate to Jews because of their race or religion”.

The article continues:

“From the river to the sea” is one of the most popular and longstanding pro-Palestine slogans. It’s also one of the most controversial.

In a recent Twitter thread, home secretary Suella Braverman claimed that the slogan was “widely understood as a demand for the destruction of Israel” and “remains a staple of antisemitic discourse”.

This interpretation of the chant has become definitive among Jewish communal organisations and the right wing media – and has been forcefully rejected by Palestinians and their supporters. They point to the slogan’s origins in the 1960s as part of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation’s attempt to push for a secular, democratic state in all of historic Palestine.

Today, the phrase is often used to acknowledge the fact that nowhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean sea – not in Gaza, nor the West Bank, nor Israel proper – do Palestinians enjoy full and equal rights with Jewish Israelis.

As to the claim that the slogan expresses a desire for Israel’s “destruction”, the historian of Palestine Maha Nassar has suggested that this eliminationist interpretation may derive from a post-six-day-war Israeli propaganda campaign that asserted that Palestinians wished to “throw Jews into the sea”.

So now you know: another pro-Israeli lie debunked. You’re welcome.

Once-great British actress Maureen Lipman appears to be living in a dream world of her own devising:

The right of return is a principle in international law which guarantees everyone’s right of voluntary return to, or re-entry to, their country of origin or of citizenship.

Many nations have laws conferring the right to return there on people whose ethnic origin is there – including Israel, although because that country was created artificially by the United Nations in 1948, the right to return there is conferred on all Jews and people of Jewish ancestry up to at least one grandparent.

So Ms Lipman really does need to look no further than Israel to see the right of return in action.

Keir Starmer is living in a nightmare he created for himself after alienating Muslims across the UK with his support for Israel’s war crimes – cutting off Gaza’s food, water and power, and forcing Gazans to abandon the north of the region – and his claim that Israel had a right to commit this naked aggression against innocent people because it has a “right to defend itself”.

It seems he is visiting Muslim communities in an attempt to rebuild trust… but it isn’t going well:

Oh, and he lied about what he said:

I’d say “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” – but as that’s a Christian phrase it would not be appropriate with reference to either the UK’s Muslim community or (obviously) Starmer.

The UK’s Parliament has again discussed the Israel/Gaza conflict – and this time it seems the debate became rather more spicy than previously:

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tried to repeat the already-hoary old lie that Israel is doing all it can to conform to humanitarian laws and avoid harming civilians. Here’s one post on ‘X’ that provides visual contradiction of that claim:

If you want to complain that the image on the right doesn’t show harm to civilians, just be glad I did not use images that do.

For a sensible commentary on how Israel wages war, here’s US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and I bet she spoke more sense than 99 per cent of the MPs in Westminster:

Particularly outstanding was her comment that, while we hear figures of civilian deaths that increase daily, we are given no reason to believe that any of Israel’s assaults on Gaza have neutralised a single Hamas operative.

She made a lot more sense than the leader of the UK’s own national church – Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby – who had nothing to say against the atrocities being heaped on the people of Palestine for no reason other than that they are cooped up in the same open-air prison as the terrorists the Israeli military claim to be ham-fistedly trying to find:

If he’s saying Gaza should “turn the other cheek” while Israel doesn’t just take “an eye for an eye” but everything else away from them too, then he has misread his Bible.

More than 2,000 ‘Artists for Palestine UK’, including Tilda Swinton, Charles Dance, Miriam Margolyes, Maxine Peak and Steve Coogan, have signed an open letter demanding that governments “end their military and political support for Israel’s actions”, stating that they are “not only tolerating war crimes but aiding and abetting them”.

The letter has come under heavy criticism because it does not directly mention the Hamas attack on Israel, that took place on October 7 – prompting Mr Coogan to state that it “goes without saying that what Hamas did is evil beyond imagination – it was horrific and brutal”. He added that it was in “no way inconsistent” to “express grave concern for the lives and welfare of innocent Palestinian civilians” at the same time.

That wasn’t enough for Maureen Lipman, it seems:

If anyone can provide a rational explanation for her stance, please try.

Going back to the pro-Palestine chant mentioned above, it seems Jewish people in the UK are claiming that it – as used on the pro-Palestine demonstrations that have taken place across the UK on the last two weekends – is making them feel unsafe and unwelcome here.

Why? It is a complaint against the way Israel has treated the people of Palestine, not an attack on Jews. That is clear from the Dutch court ruling mentioned above, and from the factual information provided in the report below.

If British Jews are genuinely in fear, it is extremely regrettable. Anybody putting them in such fear would be guilty of causing harassment, alarm or distress – which is a crime under UK law. I look forward to hearing of prosecutions in the future.

Here’s the clip. What do you think?

For a balancing view – and as a last entry in today’s commentary on Israel/Gaza, here’s a post that is not to be taken entirely seriously, followed by a comment on one of the characters mentioned in it:

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