Some Palestinian friends in wonderful, peaceful but presently Covid-19 lockdown Melbourne, were considering celebrating International Falafel Day (12 June). The falafel is a delicious Palestinian and Middle Eastern delicacy that is a spicy, deep fried ball or patty made from ground chickpeas and/or fava beans. Apartheid Israel having stolen the whole country of Palestine has also appropriated the falafel as[Read More…]
We have a saying in Arabic that literally translates into “An unprotected property will encourage a thief.” In this case the thief needs no encouragement. This is a particular thief, well-practiced, seasoned and used to getting away with ill-gotten gains. We are speaking of course of Israel. And most particularly about the current longest serving Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu.[Read More…]
A Jewish family looks out over Haram al-Sharif compound, March 2013. (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) Netanyahu’s impending annexation of the Judaized parts of the West Bank (he says July 1st) is a transformative event for Palestinian politics, and the Palestinian people, who have long been reined in by impositions that accept Zionist myths and outright falsehoods and pay only lip-service[Read More…]
Israeli media and Zionist apologists everywhere are busy whitewashing Israel’s globally-tattered image using the rare indictment of an Israeli terrorist, Amiram Ben Uliel, who was recently convicted for murdering the Palestinian Dawabsheh family, including an 18-month-old toddler in the town of Duma, south of Nablus. The conviction of Ben Uliel by an Israeli three-judge court on May 18, is expectedly[Read More…]
On May 15, thousands of Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and throughout the ‘shatat’, or diaspora, participated in the commemoration of Nakba Day, the one event that unites all Palestinians, regardless of their political differences or backgrounds. For years, social media has added a whole new stratum to this process of commemoration. #Nakba72, along with #NakbaDay and #Nakba, have all trended[Read More…]
There, I said it. One Democratic state in Palestine from the river to the sea. Yes, that means no Jewish state, but rather a dismantling of the structures and ideologies of the colonial apartheid Jewish state of Israel and its occupied Palestinian lands (including those parts of the West Bank about to be annexed by Netanyahu) and replacing them with[Read More…]
Co-Written by Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has, once and for all, settled the doubts on the Court’s jurisdiction to investigate war crimes committed in occupied Palestine. On April 30, Bensouda released a 60-page document diligently laying down the legal bases for that decision, concluding that “the Prosecution has carefully[Read More…]
An encounter between a Jewish couple in Ijzim, Israel (south of Haifa) the the displaced Palestinians in whose house that couple resides, who are denied return to their village and property. “On the anniversary of the Nakba … a tour through depopulated Palestinian villages within Israel … and rare meetings between the owners of the original Palestinian homes and their[Read More…]
As part of an effort to be balanced in the final stages of a Phd on counter-terrorism,I recently spent six weeks in Palestine ‘to see things for myself’. I can’t think of another ‘place nor issue’ in world affairs that is more emotive, misrepresented, ‘linked to terrorism’, and further sits at the heart of grievance in the Muslim world. I[Read More…]
The postponing of an Israeli Knesset Bill that would have annexed major illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to the Jerusalem municipality is the result of behind-the-scenes US and, possibly, European pressure. But the story of the so-called ‘Greater Jerusalem law’ does not end there. Israel wants to maintain an absolute demographic Jewish majority in Jerusalem, including in[Read More…]
Part 1* “The problem with Israel thus is not a policy here or there, but its overall strategy that has not changed since 1948 and is as cruel, and far more effective, than some of the ethnic cleansers now in action elsewhere in the Middle East and in the world as a whole.” Ilan Pappé and Samer Jaber The nature[Read More…]
Early October 2016, Misbah Abu Sbeih left his wife and five children at home and then drove to an Israeli police station in Occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem. The 39-year-old Jerusalemite was scheduled to hand himself over to serve a term of 4 months in jail for, allegedly, trumped up charges of ‘trying to hit an Israeli soldier’. Misbah is familiar with[Read More…]
Israel, a rogue state if ever there was one, pursues its “security” as a Jewish Zionist entity on all of Mandate Palestine through demonizing Palestinian Arabs, whom it has long subjected to a racist campaign that defines their resistance, both violent and non-violent, as anti-Semitism on the one hand and as terrorism on the other. Thankfully, Israel’s cover for its[Read More…]
The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, seems to be championing a single cause: Israel. When Haley speaks about Israel, her language is not merely emotive nor tailored to fit the need of a specific occasion. Rather, her words are resolute, consistent and are matched by a clear plan of action. Along with Haley, the rightwing[Read More…]
For some time now, the discourse on Israel has been shifting from a place where Israeli “hasbara” disinformation had the upper hand no matter where one turned, to a place where Israeli criminal policies are more frankly discussed and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which is now championed by some academic associations, church groups and labor unions[Read More…]
Once more, the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 is taking center stage. Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas insisted during his speech before the recently-concluded Arab League Summit in Jordan, that the Initiative is the only solution on the table; asserting that it will not be changed or even tweaked. But why is this Initiative, which was put forward by Saudi Arabia 15 years[Read More…]
Since 1948 the state of Israel has celebrated annually its independence as a nation, though it is not clear from what or whom it has declared independence. The UN had portioned Palestine in November of 1947 and the British Mandate had made clear that its last day in Palestine would be May 15, of 1948. The Zionists determined that[Read More…]
“To them that walk in power; to exceed is madness, and not wisdom” Antigone The creation and slow demise of the two state solution in the Palestinian tragedy of the 20th and 21st centuries has been brought about by the hubris of the main antagonist, Israel. “Hubris, Ate, and Nemesis are three minor Greek deities, mostly remembered today for their[Read More…]
Australian PM Turnbull has trashed Australia’s international reputation and isolated a pariah Australia from Humanity by making Australia second only to the US as a supporter of nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, grossly human rights-abusing, ultra-violently anti-Semitic, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel. Turnbull has embraced Apartheid Israel with praise, falsehood and racist exceptionalism on the occasion of the visit to[Read More…]
The President of the United States can hardly be taken seriously, saying much but doing little. His words, often offensive, carry no substance, and it is impossible to summarize his complex political outlook about important issues. This is precisely the type of American presidency that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, prefers. However, Donald Trump is not just a raving[Read More…]
That the New York Times demonstrates a systematic editorial bias in favor of Israeli state power and against Palestinian rights is old news. Whether it is reporting on the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement, the deadly Gaza flotilla raid, cease fire violations between the IDF and Hamas, or any other aspect of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,[Read More…]
The doctor studied the test results, raised her head and smiled. “Pregnant,” she said. “Congratulations, you are pregnant!” All I could muster in response was: “Why?” Joy, excitement and fear knotted inside me. My husband and I would soon have a baby, filling our life with love and noise. But a storm of questions raged in my head. I immediately[Read More…]
Empirical historical evidence combined with little common-sense are enough to tell us the type of future options that Israel has in store for the Palestinian people: perpetual Apartheid or ethnic cleansing, or a mix of both. The passing of the ‘Regularization Bill‘ on February 6 is all we need to imagine the Israeli-envisaged future. The new law allows the[Read More…]
US President Donald Trump promises to be pro-Israel in every aspect. ‘I’m the best thing that could ever happen to Israel,’ he boasted at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Presidential Forum in Washington DC, in December, 2015. For a brief moment, Trump appeared as if rethinking his unconditional support for Israel, when in February 2016, the Republican presidential nominee pledged[Read More…]
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has launched a series of provocative moves against the Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and inside Israel itself. His aim is to distract public attention from the corruption probe that could force his resignation and bring down his government. In doing so, he has been emboldened by strong support from the incoming Trump administration.[Read More…]
Israel is dizzy. January 20th has been like another Christmas Day and Donald Trump is jolly old Santa Claus bearing gifts. The writing is already on the wall as President-elect Trump has appointed an extremist, David Friedman, as the next US Ambassador to Israel who intends to relocate the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who supports[Read More…]
Flatly defying last week’s United Nations Security Council resolution, the Israeli government has announced that it will move ahead with thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied West Bank territories seized by force nearly 50 years ago in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Jerusalem’s municipal government was expected to approve more than 600 housing units[Read More…]
The Christmas season is when people in the Christian world are encouraged to think of those less fortunate, including of course people oppressed for no other reason than being a particular ethnic or national group by birth. And iconic in such misery are Palestinians. Palestinians are both Christian and Muslim. Few in the West know, for example, that the late[Read More…]
The British government of Theresa May officially adopted on December 12 a new definition of anti-Semitism that includes legitimate criticism of Israel. The definition was adopted earlier in the year by a pro-Israeli group IHRA, although it was considered but abandoned by the European anti-racism agency in 2005. It is also a rather dangerous move which will most likely lead[Read More…]
Poor Palestine – the major Palestinian players, Fatah and Hamas have degraded and set back the liberation movement by crawling with begging bowls to self-interested, absolutely not Palestine-interested, Arab states, and furthermore both are fickle beggars switching loyalties to conform to the US volatile currents in the Middle East. Arab regimes quarter-hearted support for Palestine goes back to the Nakba,[Read More…]
Nazareth: At first glance, it looked like a generous promotional stunt by Israel to aid the Palestinians’ struggling tourism industry. Israeli military authorities published this month a video on social media publicising Palestinian attractions in the West Bank. Most are Christian, including Jesus’s birthplace in Bethlehem – now the Church of the Nativity – and more obscure locations such as[Read More…]
In July 2003, the then Palestinian Authority Chairman, Yasser Arafat, described Mahmoud Abbas as a ‘traitor’ who “betrayed the interests of the Palestinian People.” Arafat loathed Abbas to the very end. This particular outburst was made during a meeting with the United Nations envoy, Terje Larsen. The meeting took place a few months after Arafat was coerced, by the US,[Read More…]
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign has designated the week, November 25 to December 3, as the ‘biggest-ever campaign’ aimed at boycotting Israeli products and those of companies that contribute to the Israeli military occupation of Palestine. In a recently issued press release, the civil society-led group highlighted “99 actions that will take place across the world to highlight what they described[Read More…]
Fear and trepidation are slowly building up, as US President-elect, Donald Trump, is fortifying his transitional team with people capable of bringing about a nightmare scenario, not only for Americans but for the rest of the world, as well. For Palestinians, however, the signs are even more ominous. From former New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani, to Republican leader Newt[Read More…]
Don’t get too close, Omar Abu Khater warned. We were picking our way cautiously through the rubble of demolished farms and buildings on a recent afternoon in the al-Faraheen neighborhood of the town of Abasan al-Kabira in the southern Gaza Strip, east of Khan Younis. His caution was warranted. Just 100 meters away loomed a concrete wall, part of the[Read More…]
As I was growing up, I was always reassured by the sound of the ‘Muadhin’ making the call for prayer in our refugee camp’s main mosque in Gaza. Whenever I heard the call very early in the morning, announcing in a melodic voice that the time for the ‘Fajr’ (dawn) prayer was upon us, I knew it was safe to[Read More…]
Nazareth: While the United States presidential election bitterly divided the American public, most Israelis were sanguine about the race. Both candidates – Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton – were keen to end eight years of icy mistrust between Barack Obama, the outgoing president, and Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister should – at least on paper – be happier with[Read More…]
On a day that most people expected not to see, we can say few things with certainty. One of them is that Hillary Clinton would have been a disastrous president for those supporting the Palestinian struggle for their rights. Her failed campaign pitched her as the natural successor to President Barack Obama, the Democrat who just unconditionally handed Israel the[Read More…]
In response to UNESCO resolutions adopted in October that were highly critical of Israel’s protection of sacred and cultural Islamic heritage sites in Jerusalem, there is again a fiery confrontation between Israel and this UN organ whose actions have so often touched the raw nerves of Western political sensibilities. The main UNESCO resolution ‘deeply deplores’ Israel’s failure to stop a[Read More…]
Last July, the Palestinian Authority took the unexpected, although belated step of seeking Arab backing in suing Britain over the Balfour Declaration. That ‘declaration’ was the first ever explicit commitment made by Britain, and the West in general, to establish a Jewish homeland atop an existing Palestinian homeland. It is too early to tell whether the Arab League would[Read More…]
Nazareth: Israel has just emerged from its extended, three-week high holidays, a period that in recent years has been marked by extremist religious Jews making provocative visits to the al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem. Many go to pray, in violation of Israel’s international obligations. Most belong to groups that seek the mosque’s destruction and replacement with a[Read More…]
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi While Australia slept, John Salisbury, a true gentleman activist from Melbourne, rose daily to the moral occasion of walking the tough 300 kilometres from the Sydney Opera House to Canberra, the seat of the Australian parliament. There, on 11 October, he presented to Maria Vamakinou MP, head of[Read More…]
In its latest act of piracy, Apartheid Israel has seized a Gaza-bound ship Zaytouna-Oliva in international waters and kidnapped, robbed and imprisoned 13 humane, anti-racist women including the Australian captain, Madeleine Habib (from my hometown Hobart, Tasmania), Northern Ireland Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Maguire and New Zealand Greens MP Marama Davidson. Apartheid Israel has repeatedly kidnapped Australian women[Read More…]
The Palestine human rights movement and its advocates in the U. S. are under a growing pressure because of their criticism of Israel’s oppressive and deadly policy against the People of Palestine.[1] The BDS campaign was the last straw that led to a coalition, which uses all available means to suppress freedom of speech. Since the BDS movement gained momentum,[Read More…]
Genocidally racist Zionist, war criminal and nuclear terrorist Shimon Peres (1923-2016) has been buried in Apartheid Israel with leading pro-Zionists, war criminals and nuclear terrorists in attendance. Known as the Butcher of Qana for green-lighting a 2001 Israeli atrocity against the UN and civilians in Southern Lebanon, Shimon Peres was a stalwart in the ongoing racist Zionist Palestinian Genocide. Peres’[Read More…]
The obituaries for Shimon Peres have already appeared, no doubt prepared in advance as the news of his hospitalization reached the media. The verdict on his life is very clear and was already pronounced by US President Barack Obama: Peres was a man who changed the course of human history in his relentless search for peace in the Middle East.[Read More…]
“De mortuis nil nisi bene” is commonly translated in English with “Speak no ill of the dead”. The headlines of German obituaries on Shimon Peres outbid themselves in adulation. President Obama, however, outbid even the Germans. He praised Peres without irony as “a champion of peace. […] As Americans, we are indebted to him”, he said. He even got metaphysical:[Read More…]
“If somebody falls overboard, all you see is their head. It’s about the size of a coconut.” With those words, Captain Madeleine Habib ensured the attention of her passengers, all now digesting the image of the vastness of the sea enveloping a human body. Habib, a Tasmanian-Egyptian and an experienced captain with Greenpeace and Doctors Without Borders, was delivering the[Read More…]
Ban Ki-Moon’s second term as the Secretary General of the United Nations is ending this December. He was the most ideal man for the job as far as the United States and its allies are concerned. Of course, there will always be other Ban Ki-Moons. In fact, the man himself was a modified version of his predecessor, Kofi Annan. The[Read More…]
Shatila Palestinian Refugee camp, Beirut: The intense summer heat was gone and the evening was breezy and cool that fateful Thursday evening, September 15, 1982, according to survivors of the Sabra-Shatila Massacre who, 34 years later, still remember and recount many details of the slaughter that was soon to follow. It was following the 9/14/1982 assassination of President-elect BachirGemayel, leader[Read More…]
Nazareth: The announcement last week by the United States of the largest military aid package in its history – to Israel – was a win for both sides. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could boast that his lobbying had boosted aid from $3.1 billion to $3.8bn a year – a 22 per cent increase – for a decade starting[Read More…]
The Obama administration has signed a $38 billion military aid pact with Israel in what the State Department boasts is the “single largest pledge of bilateral military assistance in US history.” The record agreement will provide Israel with $3.8 billion annually over 10 years beginning in 2019, up from $3.1 billion under the current deal. At a time when the US[Read More…]
Nazareth: Is Israel on the verge of civil war, as a growing number of Israeli commentators suggest, with its Jewish population deeply riven over the future of the occupation? On one side is a new peace movement, Decision at 50, stuffed with former political and security leaders. Ehud Barak, a previous prime minister who appears to be seeking a political comeback,[Read More…]
Just a few weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that he cares about the rights and lives of Palestinians in Gaza more than the Palestinian leadership does, he posted a new video message on his Facebook wall, arguing that any future dismantlement of Jewish settlements in the West Bank would amount to “ethnic cleansing.” He went on to intimate that insofar as the U.S. and other western countries support the uprooting of Israeli settlements as part of an agreement with the Palestinians, they were, in effect, supporting the cleansing of Jews
Division within Palestinian society has reached unprecedented levels, becoming a major hurdle on the path of any unified strategy to end Israel’s violent occupation or to rally Palestinians behind a single objective. Newly-appointed Israeli ultra-nationalist, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, understands this too well. His tactic since his ascension to office last May is centered on investing more in these divisions as[Read More…]
“You deserve to see your loved ones suffer and die. But, maybe, you would be hurt before them,” was part of a threatening message received by a staff member at ‘Al-Mezan’, a Gaza-based human rights group. The photo attached to the email was of the exterior of the activist’s home. The gist of the message: ‘we are coming for you.’[Read More…]
Reading Inside the Middle East is quite an adventure. I learned that I probably am a fairly quixotic fanatic tilting at windmills; that I need to learn how to be a critical thinker “demanding that concepts and narratives be replaced with facts and reality;” that I “need to fine tune [my] critical thinking and analytical capacities; all that so I[Read More…]
As Palestinians in the Occupied Territories begin preparations for local elections which are scheduled for next October, division and factionalism are rearing their ugly head. Palestinian political platforms and social media are abuzz with self-defeating propaganda: Fatah supporters attacking Hamas’ alleged failures, and Hamas’ supporters doing the same. What is conveniently overlooked by all sides is that the performance of[Read More…]
Norma Hashim’s engagement with the issue of Palestinian prisoners has previously produced one book — The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag — which has been described by former hunger-striker Hana al-Shalabi as “A humane, beautiful, valuable but painful book.” Hashim’s Dreaming of Freedom is worthy of a similar description. In this collection children recount their experiences of solitary confinement, beatings, torture and humiliation[Read More…]
The crackpot Israeli Hasbara* Circus featuring the four clowns of the truth apocalypse, Shin Bet, the Israel government, Shurat HaDin and the mainstream media fools, has, yet again, hit the world stage with the usual lame show of fact contortions, tight rope slander and smoke and mirrors fantasies. Taking a leaf from the Bush-Blair weapons of mass destruction hoax, Israel[Read More…]
Nazareth: Was it meant as an epic parody or an insult to his audience’s intelligence? It was hard to tell. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu took to social media to apologise for last year’s notorious election-day comment, when he warned that “the Arabs are coming out to vote in droves” – a reference to the fifth of Israel’s population who[Read More…]
On this hot Italian late afternoon, after over a week inside the literary work entitled Gate of the Sun, I am still wandering in the gossamer framework of the novel constructed by a great writer and storyteller, Elias Khoury, a 531-page “story” consisting of the stories, incidents, histories, lives and deaths narrated by the author’s canvas of countless characters. I[Read More…]
Water shortages are not new for Palestinians. Whether in the occupied Gaza Strip or the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the supply of water flowing into Palestinian homes is strictly capped or obstructed by Israel. As temperatures climb during the summer, taps run dry. Clemens Messerschmid, a German hydrologist who has worked with Palestinians on their water supply for two[Read More…]
(Based on interviews with Palestinian refugees from Syria.) The refugee camp of Yarmouk was ever present in his being, pulling him in and out of an abyss of persistent fears that urged him to never return. But what was this refugee without Yarmouk, his first haven, his last earth? How could any other spot in this unwelcoming universe ever be[Read More…]
It has been a long time since my family has had reason to celebrate. For nine years my wife Faten and I have been intermittently separated from our school-age children as we traveled back and forth between our home in Gaza and Cairo as Faten needed brain surgery and radiotherapy treatment unavailable here. Palestinians in Gaza are not able to[Read More…]
The United Nations Human Rights Council, along with the global community and many in Lebanon, has become increasingly concerned about the massive violations of Palestinian civil rights. As noted in Part I of this discussion, Palestinians in Lebanon suffer from more than two dozen targeted violations including ambiguous legal status, absence of protection; the outlawing of their right to work[Read More…]
Nazareth: The grubby underside of US electoral politics is on show once again as the Democratic and Republican candidates prepare to fight it out for the presidency. And it doesn’t get seamier than the battle to prove how loyal each candidate is to Israel. New depths are likely to be plumbed this week at the Republican convention in Cleveland, as[Read More…]
Inas Abu Muhadi cannot understand that she will never see her dad again. She remembers that her dad had a scooter. And each time she hears one, she expects to see her dad arriving home. The young girl’s father passed away from natural causes in July 2013. “Our life turned upside down after that day,” said her mother, Rajaa Abu[Read More…]
Yarmouk Palestinian camp, Damascus: In Lebanon today, Palestinians are beingthreatened by the governmentthat ISIS (Daesh) and Al Nursa are plotting to take over Ain el-Helweh and the other 11 camps in Lebanon. Palestinian factions and the residents of the Ain el HilwehPalestinianrefugee camp in Saida Lebanon know verywellthat militant jihadist groups including ISIS (Daesh) and Al-Nusra are nowdeeplyimplanted in theirmidst[Read More…]
A few days ago, I was driving through Qalandiya checkpoint for the first time since I came back to Jerusalem. My dad, sitting next to me, had to yell “stop here!” at me as I was queuing behind a car at the checkpoint. “You’re too close,” he said, “stop and wait for them to call you, otherwise they’ll shoot[Read More…]
Taybeh is the last all-Christian and self-sufficient community in the occupied state of Palestine. “Taybeh” means delicious when referring to food or drink. “Taybeh” means “kind” and “good” when referring to people or places. Following the signing of the Oslo Peace Agreement [1993] and inspired by their late father, Canaan David Khoury, David and Nadim returned to their home village[Read More…]
Last year, I wrote an article that made many readers unhappy. As soon as it was published, I began receiving messages of abuse and angry, threatening calls. I hesitated about reporting the threats to the local police in Washington State and, in the end, I resolved to file the unpleasant experience under a burgeoning folder of ‘controversies’ caused by my[Read More…]
Hyped emotions, and political opportunism aside, the Israel-Turkey normalization deal, signed on June 27 is unfavorable for Palestinians – and for Gazans, in particular. There is much that is being said to blame Turkey or placate the damage of seeing Turkey – which has for years been one of the most visible backers of Palestinian Resistance – reaching out to Israel. Yet, no amount of[Read More…]
Following the stabbing of a 13-year-old Israeli girl in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba by a young Palestinian on Thursday, Benyamin Netanyahu’s coalition government moved swiftly to implement their now standard measures of collective punishment, in flagrant violation of international law. At the same time, the government is using the attack to expand the settlements and incorporate Area[Read More…]
It was a warm night in Jabaliya, northeast of Gaza City. Abu Zein and his wife were fast asleep when what the couple first thought was an earthquake shook their bed so hard, its legs buckled. They immediately jumped up and ran out of the home they had only recently moved into after getting married. But outside was quiet. No[Read More…]
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip expressed anger and dismay on Monday about the deal normalizing relations between Israel and Turkey that leaves them under a suffocating siege. An Israeli human rights group that monitors the decade-old Israeli blockade of Gaza has also confirmed that the deal does not end Israel’s tight control over the territory that has greatly exacerbated the[Read More…]
A group of Gaza fishermen were working an early morning shift when the Israeli navy opened fire. Rajab Abu Riyala and his brother Khaled were shot during that 31 May incident. A bullet had to be removed from Rajab’s knee as a result. They were among five fishermen arrested on two vessels by Israel. All were brought to Ashdod, a[Read More…]
Entire communities in the West Bank either have no access to water or have had their water supply reduced almost by half. This alarming development has been taking place for weeks, since Israel’s national water company, “Mekorot”, decided to cut off – or significantly reduce – its water supply to Jenin, Salfit and many villages around Nablus, among other[Read More…]
Ashkenazim feared that one day the Arab Jews might make a political alliance with the native population, the Palestinians. Then the Ashkenazim would be outnumbered. The Mizrahim, who came from countries as diverse as Morocco and Iraq, had a lot more in common with Palestinians than they did with the recently arrived Europeans.
Conquest and tyranny, at some earlier period, dispossessed man of his rights, and he is now recovering them. And as the tide of all human affairs has its ebb and flow in directions contrary to each other, so also is it in this. Government founded on a moral theory, on a system of universal peace, on the indefeasible hereditary Rights[Read More…]
Nazareth: In a familiar muddying of the waters, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent the past week talking up peace while fiercely criticising Friday’s summit in France – the only diplomatic initiative on the horizon. As foreign ministers from 29 nations arrived for a one-day meeting in Paris, Netanyahu dusted off the tired argument that any sign of diplomatic[Read More…]
Israeli society is constantly swerving to the Right and, by doing so, the country’s entire political paradigm is redefined regularly. Israel is now ‘ruled by the most extreme rightwing government in its history’ has grown from being an informed assessment to a dull cliché over the course of only a few years. In fact, that exact line was used in[Read More…]
“Under the cover of darkness, there is no limit to the expansion of Big Brother.” Ilan Gilon, Meretz Party (Israel), Times of Israel, Feb 4, 2016 While Israel’s central justification for its often reactionary policies is couched in hyper-exceptionalist rhetoric, nourished by the ashes of Holocaust remembrance, current interest in censoring the Internet is far from exceptional. Like a machine[Read More…]
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