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Welcome to the Jonathan Cook website
Archive I am a British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. This site includes my articles on the Middle East published in international newspapers, English-language Arab publications and specialist magazines since 2001.
Click here for my full Index of Articles
My most recent articles can also be found in or search this website
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Newspapers, Websites and Journals My articles have been published in: The Guardian, Observer, Times and New Statesman (London) The International Herald Tribune and Le Monde diplomatique (Paris) Al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo) The National (Abu Dhabi) Al-Jazeera English language website (Doha) The Daily Star (Beirut) The Middle East Report and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (Washington) Przekroj (Warsaw) The Irish Times (Dublin)
Websites with links dedicated to my stories include: Palestine: Information with Provenance, ZNet, Selves and Others and Anti-War
Translations of some of my articles can be found on Tlaxcala (French, Spanish, Italian)
Books
In ‘Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair’, published by Zed Books in autumn 2008, I examine the enduring themes of Zionist colonisation of Palestine. I argue that Israel has developed and refined policies to disperse, imprison and impoverish the Palestinian people in a relentless effort to destroy them as a nation. The West Bank and Gaza have been transformed into laboratories for testing the infrastructure of confinement, creating a lucrative 'defence' industry by pioneering technologies for crowd control, surveillance, collective punishment and urban warfare. The goal of these ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs is the disappearance of Palestine.
'Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East', published by Pluto Press in January 2008, has been praised as 'superb' by John Pilger and 'compelling' by veteran Middle East reporter David Hirst. In it, I argue that Israel's desire to be the sole regional power in the Middle East has shaped the Bush Administration's objectives in the 'war on terror'. The book examines a host of inter-related issues, from the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the Second Lebanon War to the role of Big Oil and the demonisation of the Arab world. The current chaos in the Middle East, far from being a disastrous mistake, is the true goal of the neocons and Israel.
My first book, entitled 'Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State', was published by Pluto Press in spring 2006. It concerns Israel's treatment of its Palestinian citizens during the second intifada, and the real reasons for the policies of territorial separation evident in the Gaza disengagement and the building of the West Bank wall. It argues that, threatened by predictions that the combined Palestinian population inside Israel and the Occupied Territories will soon outnumber the region's Jews, Israel decided to create an expanded fortress state, where only Jewish blood and Jewish religion count
To find out more about my books, click here
Why my reporting is different I have chosen to position myself in the region in two ways - one professional, the other geographical - that distinguish me from colleagues. This approach gives me greater freedom to reflect on the true nature of the conflict and provides me with fresh insight into its root causes.
Professionally, I am one of the few journalists regularly writing about the region who work as an independent freelancer. I choose the issues I wish to cover, so I am not constrained by the ‘treadmill’ of the mainstream media, which require an endless flow of instant copy and analysis. I am also not tied to the mainstream agenda, which gives disproportionate coverage to the concerns of the powerful, in this case the Israeli and American positions - in the US media to a degree that makes much of their Israel/Palestine reporting implausible. I also rarely accept commissions, restricting myself to topics that I consider to be the most revealing about the conflict.
Geographically, I am the first foreign correspondent to be based in the Israeli Arab city of Nazareth, in the Galilee. Most reporters covering the conflict live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, with a handful of specialists based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The range of stories readily available to reporters in these locations reinforces the assumption among editors back home that the conflict can only be understood in terms of the events that followed the West Bank and Gaza’s occupation in 1967. This has encouraged the media to give far too much weight to Israeli concerns about ‘security’ - a catch-all that offers Israel special dispensation to ignore its duties to the Palestinians under international law.
Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.
From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism's appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.
Short Biography Born in Buckinghamshire, England in 1965
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Jonathan Cook News Archive, last updated on Thursday, 04 February 2010 |
My new book is
"Disappearing Palestine"
