Jonathan Cook

Writer, journalist, self-appointed media critic. Winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism
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Location: Bristol / Nazareth
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Last Notes

2026-07-01 11:21:15 UTC

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Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel’s carefully veiled system of apartheid.
Read my latest here: https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/israel-is-an-apartheid-state-and
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2026-07-01 11:20:18 UTC

Notionally, Israel confers on all its citizens – Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze – equal rights as citizens. But with a sleight of hand, it then undermines those equal rights by conferring superior “national” rights on one group only, Jews.
If there is a conflict between a citizenship right and a Jewish “national” right, you’ve probably already guessed that the Jewish national right takes precedence.
Education is a good illustration. All Israeli citizens enjoy a right to have their children educated, because education is a citizenship right. But lots of veiled manoeuvres – like extra budgets for National Priority Areas, special subsidies for Jewish religious schools, funding from the diaspora, and bigger tax disbursements from central government for Jewish local authorities – mean Jewish schools are far better funded than “Arab” schools.
Education for Israel’s Palestinian citizens – whom Israelis dismissively calls "Israeli Arabs" – has been underfunded for eight decades. So even though Israel’s apologists will claim the funding gaps are slowly narrowing, the continuing shortfall simply compounds a decades-long historical injustice.
Arab schools are so far behind they can never catch up without aggressive additional funding Israel clearly has no intention of ever providing them with.
There are massive shortages of classrooms and staff in dilapidated school buildings. Old books are often grossly outdated and poorly translated into Arabic by the state.
Palestinian educational leaders – "Israeli Aabs" – have no input into the curriculum the community’s children are taught. There are strict controls by Jewish (usually racist) officials over what can be taught and who can teach.
And on top of all this, huge cultural biases in qualifying tests make it far harder for Palestinian citizens to gain entry to universities in Israel.
There are many other problems in education. For example, nearly one in 10 Palestinian children in Israel live in historic communities built on lands that the Israeli state now wishes to “Judaise” – reserve for the Jewish population – and are therefore denied all recognition.
Treated like criminals, these children rarely have schools in their communities because no permanent buildings are allowed. What buildings there are cannot be connected to the electricity or water grids.
Even children of kindergarten age must typically travel long distances – sometimes close to 60 km a day – to get to a licensed school.
The forms of discrimination in education alone are endless. But they do not stop there. The discrimination is replicated in all major facets of life for Israel’s more than 2 million Palestinian citizens through Israel's conceptual and legal contortions over religion, citizenship and nationality.
None of this should be a surprise. It is exactly what you would expect in an apartheid state like Israel.
This is an extract from my latest article Israel is an apartheid state – and its weird marriage laws show us how. Find a link to the full article in the reply post ⬇️

2026-06-11 22:53:56 UTC

Israeli lawyer Ben Marmarelli says Palestinian prisoners he represents beg him not to visit because they're raped each time he is due to meet them.
This is a scene from Al Jazeera's shocking new documentary on Israel's systematic use of rape.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2065205692974198784/vid/avc1/854x480/O-HaBfAPJbkGea16.mp4

2026-06-01 00:16:13 UTC

Israeli journalist Gideon Levy:
"Now that [Gaza] has been destroyed almost completely, Israel is advancing confidently toward the next phase: making the entire population permanently disabled, injured, sick, hungry, homeless and unemployed."
It's the prelude, says Levy, to mass expulsion.
"No society can function without teachers, doctors, social workers, engineers and clerks. And without a functioning society, it's easy to expel Gaza's residents to the four corners of the earth."
Source: https://archive.ph/bd9kL

2026-04-01 15:00:56 UTC

A new book rips the mask off Israel's role pioneering extrajudicial assassinations:
Western security agencies secretly helped Israel select targets on their soil, sometimes Palestinian officials engaged in talks with the West;
Those same agencies shared details of investigations so Israel could "improve" its assassination techniques;
The West increasingly saw Israel's assassination programme as something to emulate, preferring drones over exploding mattresses.
More here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n06/andrew-cockburn/beware-the-mattress

2026-03-23 23:50:55 UTC

BBC News reports that at least 20 hospitals and medical centres in Iran have been targeted in air strikes – each a grave war crime – but forgets to mention in the entire segment who is actually targeting them.
https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2036228460423815168/vid/avc1/960x540/3quUgnWbe_oK80OC.mp4

2025-07-18 09:20:41 UTC

Yet again the Israeli media tells us what the western media shies away from: satellite data shows Israel's genocidal destruction of Gaza is even worse than previously thought.
More here: https://archive.ph/v3DOm
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GwISHdCW0AA3R0O.jpg

2025-07-03 11:11:01 UTC

It's now clear why the BBC dared not air the documentary Doctors under Attack. It shows beyond doubt that Israel is systematically destroying the health sector in Gaza as part of a campaign of genocidal violence.
In the UK, watch the film here: https://www.channel4.com/programmes/gaza-doctors-under-attack
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gu7blVwXoAAP1vP.jpg

2025-04-01 18:43:35 UTC

New research shows Israel's slaughter in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Yugoslav Wars, the Afghanistan War and the Ukraine War COMBINED.
More: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2025/Journalists
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GneHPv1XsAAJUu2.jpg