Jonathan Cook
Encyclopedia
Jonathan Cook is a British writer and a freelance journalist based in Nazareth
, Israel
, who writes about the Middle East
, and more specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
.
, England, UK. He received a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Politics from Southampton University in 1987, a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Cardiff University
in 1989, and an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies
in 2000.
and The Observer
between 1996 and 2001.
Since September 2001, Cook has been a freelance writer based in Nazareth, Israel. He continued to write columns for The Guardian
until 2007, a publication he argued in 2011 is an objectionable cult for its attacks on Gilad Atzmon
, Julian Assange
, Noam Chomsky
and others. Articles by Cook have also been published in the The International Herald Tribune
, Le Monde Diplomatique
, Al-Ahram Weekly
, Al Jazeera
,The National
in Abu Dhabi, antiwar.com
, CounterPunch.org, Dissident Voice, The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss
, AlterNet
, and Media Lens among others.
, the central thesis is that, "Israel is beginning a long, slow process of ethnic cleansing both of Palestinian
non-citizens from parts of the occupied territories that it has long coveted for its expanded Jewish state
, and of Palestinian citizens
from inside its internationally recognized borders." Cook links this strategy to the Israeli perception of two threats: the physical threat of terrorism and the demographic threat of a Palestinian majority potentialized by high Palestinian birth rates and the continued demand for a Palestinian right of return
. The Israeli leadership is also said by Cook to view the idea of a "state for all its citizens" as a threat. Rami George Khouri
describes the short book as, "important but disturbing."
In 2008, Cook authored Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East, published by Pluto Press. Of the book, Antony Loewenstein
wrote that, "Cook bravely skewers the mainstream narrative of a Jewish state constantly striving for peace with the Palestinians." According to Lowenstein, Cook argues that Israel "pursues policies that lead to civil war and partition," and that this idea of dissolving many of the nations of the Middle East
, shared by the neocons and the Bush administration, was developed by Israel's security establishment in the 1980s. Cook discusses an essay authored by Oded Yinon and published by the World Zionist Organisation in 1982 which advocated for Israel's transformation into a regional imperial power via the fragmentation of the Arab world
, "into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings that could be more easily manipulated" (p. 107). A review of the book in The Jordan Times called it, "well-researched and very readable."
Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair was published in 2008 by Zed Books
. The book is in two parts, with the second half consisting of reprints of articles written by Cook as a journalist. The first half of the book, according to a review in Electronic Intifada
, explores the thesis that, "the goal of Israeli policy is to make Palestine
and the Palestinians disappear for good." Helena Cobban
in the Boston Review
says Cook argues that to encourage voluntary emigration, Israel has made life unbearable for Palestinians, primarily via "the ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs."
Nazareth
Nazareth is the largest city in the North District of Israel. Known as "the Arab capital of Israel," the population is made up predominantly of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel...
, Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, who writes about the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
, and more specifically, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the ongoing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The conflict is wide-ranging, and the term is also used in reference to the earlier phases of the same conflict, between Jewish and Zionist yishuv and the Arab population living in Palestine under Ottoman or...
.
Background
Cook was born and brought up in BuckinghamshireBuckinghamshire
Buckinghamshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan home county in South East England. The county town is Aylesbury, the largest town in the ceremonial county is Milton Keynes and largest town in the non-metropolitan county is High Wycombe....
, England, UK. He received a B.A. (Hons) in Philosophy and Politics from Southampton University in 1987, a postgraduate diploma in journalism from Cardiff University
Cardiff University
Cardiff University is a leading research university located in the Cathays Park area of Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom. It received its Royal charter in 1883 and is a member of the Russell Group of Universities. The university is consistently recognised as providing high quality research-based...
in 1989, and an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies
School of Oriental and African Studies
The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...
in 2000.
Journalism
Cook's career in journalism began in 1988 as a reporter and editor for regional newspapers the Southampton Advertiser and the Southampton Evening Echo. He was a freelance sub-editor with several national newspapers from 1994 until 1996. He was a staff journalist at The GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
and The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
between 1996 and 2001.
Since September 2001, Cook has been a freelance writer based in Nazareth, Israel. He continued to write columns for The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
until 2007, a publication he argued in 2011 is an objectionable cult for its attacks on Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born British jazz saxophonist, novelist, political activist and writer.Atzmon's album Exile was BBC jazz album of the year in 2003. Playing over 100 dates a year, he has been called "surely the hardest-gigging man in British jazz." His albums, of which he has recorded...
, Julian Assange
Julian Assange
Julian Paul Assange is an Australian publisher, journalist, writer, computer programmer and Internet activist. He is the editor in chief of WikiLeaks, a whistleblower website and conduit for worldwide news leaks with the stated purpose of creating open governments.WikiLeaks has published material...
, Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
and others. Articles by Cook have also been published in the The International Herald Tribune
International Herald Tribune
The International Herald Tribune is a widely read English language international newspaper. It combines the resources of its own correspondents with those of The New York Times and is printed at 38 sites throughout the world, for sale in more than 160 countries and territories...
, Le Monde Diplomatique
Le Monde diplomatique
Le Monde diplomatique is a monthly newspaper offering analysis and opinion on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first created mainly for a diplomatic audience as its name implies...
, Al-Ahram Weekly
Al-Ahram Weekly
Al-Ahram Weekly is an Egyptian English-language weekly broadsheet printed by the Al-Ahram Publishing House in Cairo, Egypt.It was established in 1991 by the Al-Ahram newspaper, which also runs a French-language weekly version, Al-Ahram Hebdo....
, Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera is an independent broadcaster owned by the state of Qatar through the Qatar Media Corporation and headquartered in Doha, Qatar...
,The National
The National (Abu Dhabi)
The National is a government-owned English-language daily newspaper published in Abu Dhabi. The editor-in-chief since June 8, 2009 has been Hassan Fattah. Prior to this, and from the launch of the newspaper Martin Newland was editor-in-chief. Mubadala Development Company, an investment company...
in Abu Dhabi, antiwar.com
Antiwar.com
Antiwar.com is a website devoted to opposing aggressive war, imperialism, and assaults on freedom associated with both. The editors describe their politics as libertarian. Their stated motiviation is, "to show how the imperialistic tendencies of the American government lead to a loss of civil...
, CounterPunch.org, Dissident Voice, The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss
Mondoweiss
Mondoweiss is a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective. It was founded in 2006 by journalist and author Philip Weiss and is currently co-edited by Weiss and author/activist Adam Horowitz...
, AlterNet
AlterNet
AlterNet, a project of the non-profit Independent Media Institute, is a progressive/liberal activist news service. Launched in 1998, AlterNet now claims a readership of over 3 million visitors per month .AlterNet publishes original content as well as journalism from a wide variety of other sources...
, and Media Lens among others.
Books
Cook authored three books between 2006 and 2008. In Blood and Religion (2006), published by Pluto PressPluto Press
Pluto Press is a radical, progressive, independent publisher based in London. Pluto Press specialises in "progressive, critical perspectives in politics and the social sciences", and describes itself as "one of the world’s leading radical publishers". It has published authors such as Noam Chomsky,...
, the central thesis is that, "Israel is beginning a long, slow process of ethnic cleansing both of Palestinian
Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
non-citizens from parts of the occupied territories that it has long coveted for its expanded Jewish state
Jewish state
A homeland for the Jewish people was an idea that rose to the fore in the 19th century in the wake of growing anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation. Jewish emancipation in Europe paved the way for two ideological solutions to the Jewish Question: cultural assimilation, as envisaged by Moses...
, and of Palestinian citizens
Arab citizens of Israel
Arab citizens of Israel refers to citizens of Israel who are not Jewish, and whose cultural and linguistic heritage or ethnic identity is Arab....
from inside its internationally recognized borders." Cook links this strategy to the Israeli perception of two threats: the physical threat of terrorism and the demographic threat of a Palestinian majority potentialized by high Palestinian birth rates and the continued demand for a Palestinian right of return
Palestinian right of return
The Palestinian right of return is a political position or principle asserting that Palestinian refugees, both first-generation refugees and their descendants, have a right to return, and a right to the property they or their forebears left or which they were forced to leave in what is now Israel...
. The Israeli leadership is also said by Cook to view the idea of a "state for all its citizens" as a threat. Rami George Khouri
Rami George Khouri
Rami George Khouri born 22 October 1948, in New York City to an Arab Palestinian Christian family. His father, George Khouri, a Nazarene journalist in what was the British mandate of Palestine had traveled with his wife to New York in 1947 to cover the United Nations debates about the future of...
describes the short book as, "important but disturbing."
In 2008, Cook authored Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East, published by Pluto Press. Of the book, Antony Loewenstein
Antony Loewenstein
Antony Loewenstein is an atheist Jewish-Australian political activist, freelance journalist, author and blogger who is based in Sydney.Loewenstein has written for The Guardian, Haaretz, The Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Sydney's Sun-Herald, The Bulletin, ZNet, The Big...
wrote that, "Cook bravely skewers the mainstream narrative of a Jewish state constantly striving for peace with the Palestinians." According to Lowenstein, Cook argues that Israel "pursues policies that lead to civil war and partition," and that this idea of dissolving many of the nations of the Middle East
Middle East
The Middle East is a region that encompasses Western Asia and Northern Africa. It is often used as a synonym for Near East, in opposition to Far East...
, shared by the neocons and the Bush administration, was developed by Israel's security establishment in the 1980s. Cook discusses an essay authored by Oded Yinon and published by the World Zionist Organisation in 1982 which advocated for Israel's transformation into a regional imperial power via the fragmentation of the Arab world
Arab world
The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
, "into a mosaic of ethnic and confessional groupings that could be more easily manipulated" (p. 107). A review of the book in The Jordan Times called it, "well-researched and very readable."
Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair was published in 2008 by Zed Books
Zed Books
Zed Books is an independent non-fiction book publishing company based in London.Founded in 1977 under the name Zed Press, Zed publishes academic books covering areas such as politics, economics, gender studies, development studies, and the environment....
. The book is in two parts, with the second half consisting of reprints of articles written by Cook as a journalist. The first half of the book, according to a review in Electronic Intifada
Electronic Intifada
The Electronic Intifada is a not-for-profit, independent online publication which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective, "aimed at combating the pro-Israeli, pro-American spin" its editors believe exists in mainstream media accounts.-History:EI was founded by Ali...
, explores the thesis that, "the goal of Israeli policy is to make Palestine
Palestine
Palestine is a conventional name, among others, used to describe the geographic region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and various adjoining lands....
and the Palestinians disappear for good." Helena Cobban
Helena Cobban
Helena Cobban is a British-American writer and researcher on international relations, with special interests in the Middle East, the international system, and transitional justice. In March 2010, she founded a new book-publishing company, Just World Publishing, LLC...
in the Boston Review
Boston Review
Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...
says Cook argues that to encourage voluntary emigration, Israel has made life unbearable for Palestinians, primarily via "the ever more sophisticated systems of curfews, checkpoints, walls, permits and land grabs."
Books
- (2006) Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State. Pluto PressPluto PressPluto Press is a radical, progressive, independent publisher based in London. Pluto Press specialises in "progressive, critical perspectives in politics and the social sciences", and describes itself as "one of the world’s leading radical publishers". It has published authors such as Noam Chomsky,...
. ISBN 0-7453-2555-6 - (2008) Israel and the Clash of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran and the plan to remake the Middle East. Pluto Press. ISBN 978-0745327549
- (2008) Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair. Zed BooksZed BooksZed Books is an independent non-fiction book publishing company based in London.Founded in 1977 under the name Zed Press, Zed publishes academic books covering areas such as politics, economics, gender studies, development studies, and the environment....
. ISBN 978-1848130319
Chapters in books
- (2005) "Unrecognized Villages: Indigenous 'Ayn Hawd versus Artists' Colony 'Ein Hod," in Nur Masalha, Catastrophe Remembered: Palestine, Israel, and the Internal Refugees, Zed Books, ISBN 1842776231
- (2006) "Israel's Glass Wall: The Or Commission," in Joel Beinin and Rebecca L. Stein. The struggle for sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993-2005. Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804753652
- (2008). Foreword in Hatim Kanaaneh, A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel. Pluto Press. ISBN 0745327869
Articles
- (2003) Declining to Intervene: Israel's Supreme Court and the Occupied Territories, Middle East Report, August 4, 2003.
- (2004) Israeli Constitutional Committee Faces Double Bind, Adalah's Newsletter. Volume 7, pp. 1–7, August 2004.
- with Lagerqiust, Peter. (2005) Crime and Punishment on Israel's Demographic Frontier, Middle East Report. No. 237, pp. 46–64, May 2005.
- (2006) Israel’s “Demographic Demon” in Court, Middle East Report, June 1, 2006.
- (2009) When and How Was the Jewish People Invented? Letter from Nazareth, review of Shlomo Zand's book, Holy Land Studies. Volume 8, pp. 113–117, May 2009.
- (undated) The Stand-Tall Generation, review of Dan Rabinowitz and Khawla Abu-Baker, Coffins on Our Shoulders (2005) in Holy Land Studies. Volume 5, pp. 121–124.
External links
- Jonathan Cook's website, accessed November 27, 2009.
- Cook's profile page at The Guardian with links to his articles from 1999–2007.
- Bistrich, Andrea. "Israel kennt keine Gleichheit", interview with Jonathan Cook (German), July 1, 2006; edited English translation "Hurtling Towards the Next Intifada", Dissident Voice, August 31, 2006, accessed November 27, 2009.
- Gore, Jeff. "From Boycotts to Bilin: An Interview with Jonathan Cook", Electronic IntifadaElectronic IntifadaThe Electronic Intifada is a not-for-profit, independent online publication which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective, "aimed at combating the pro-Israeli, pro-American spin" its editors believe exists in mainstream media accounts.-History:EI was founded by Ali...
, October 9, 2009, accessed November 27, 2009. - Humphries, Isabelle. "Book Review: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State", Islam Online (original in Holy Land Studies: A Multidisciplinary Journal), accessed November 27, 2009.
- Lendman, Stephen. "Jonathan Cook's Blood and Religion", The Baltimore Chronicle, March 27, 2008, accessed November 27, 2009.
Audio/Video
- Abunimah, AliAli AbunimahAli Hasan Abunimah is a Palestinian American journalist and co-founder of Electronic Intifada, a not-for-profit, independent online publication about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Born in Washington D.C., he spent his early years in the United Kingdom and Belgium before returning to the...
and Murphy, Maureen Clare. "Audio: Interview with journalist Jonathan Cook" (33 min), Electronic IntifadaElectronic IntifadaThe Electronic Intifada is a not-for-profit, independent online publication which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Palestinian perspective, "aimed at combating the pro-Israeli, pro-American spin" its editors believe exists in mainstream media accounts.-History:EI was founded by Ali...
, May 4, 2007, accessed November 27, 2009. - Jonathan Cook - Blood and Religion: Unmasking the Jewish and Democratic State, interview with Cook, December 28, 2006, accessed November 27, 2009.
- Jonathan Cook - “Israel is regional bully with nuclear weapons”, Russia Today Interview with journalist Jonathan Cook 22 July 2010.