Tag: Palestine

Don’t be fooled by Israel’s “negotiations”

The farce that is the “peace process”:

Israel’s own housing minister, Uri Ariel is himself a settler who lives the West Bank colony of Kfar Adumim, between Jerusalem and Jericho.
Indeed, the main Israeli negotiator is “justice” minister Tzipi Livni. She has in the past has had to skip the UK to avoid arrest on suspicion on war crimes. In 2011 the Palestine Papers revealed that she once said: “I am a lawyer … But I am against law — international law in particular. Law in general.” In her own words: Israel’s justice minister is “against law.”

Israel’s new plan of ethnic cleansing in the desert

I write on Prawer:

The latest incarnation of this on-going Nakba is Israel’s Prawer plan. Passed by its parliament in June as the Prawer-Begin law, this new wave of ethnic cleansing aims to empty the southern Naqab desert (known as the Negev in Hebrew) of tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins.

These Palestinians are nominally citizens of Israel, but are not treated as equals to Jewish Israelis. Varying estimates state that between 30,000 and 70,000 Bedouin citizens will be removed if Prawer is fully implemented. In their places will come new Jewish developments.

Read the whole column over at MEMO.

The peace process merry-go-round

Yes, they are still playing this stupid “peace process” game:

The 13th of September will mark 20 years since the White House lawn signing ceremony between Yasser Arafat and Yitzak Rabin, flanked by former US President Bill Clinton. The signing of Declaration of Principles initiated the related series of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization known as the Oslo accords – named after the city where it was secretly negotiated.

Right away, late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said denounced the agreement, although he had long been a supporter of a two-state solution. “So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles,” he wrote in Al-Hayat a month later.

Read my whole column over at MEMO.

Palestinians of all faiths face persecution by Israel

MEMO column on Zionism’s sectarian conspiracies:

Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre dates back to the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine. It a cruel irony that tourists often have far more access to the church than the indigenous Christians of the land.
Meanwhile, Jews from all around the world have more rights and more access to all of occupied Palestine than any Palestinian. Under Israel’s racist “Law of Return,” any Jew from London or New York can “return” to live in the land, regardless of whether or not he or she has any historical connection there.

Read the whole thing here.

Egypt’s military regime demonizes the Palestinian people

Updating the site with my recent MEMO columns.

In these turbulent times, many things remain uncertain. But there seems to be one reliable constant: the oppression of the Palestinian people throughout the region.
Despite widespread popular support for the Palestinian cause among the Arab peoples, regimes all over the region have used vulnerable Palestinians as easy scape-goats, abusing their human rights in various ways.

Read the whole thing here.

My review of Shlomo Sand’s new book, “The Invention of the Land of Israel”

A fascinating read. Here is my opinion on it.

In 1897, the same year as the first Zionist congress, Israel Belkind (“the first practical Zionist”) drew a map: “ ‘The Jordan splits the Land of Israel in two different sections,’ asserted Belkind, whose assessment was subsequently adopted by most [Zionist] settlers of the period” (216).

For the future first prime minister of Israel David Ben Gurion, these borders “were too expansive and untenable, while the borders of the Talmudic commandment were too narrow.” In 1918 he gave his own take: “In the north — the Litani River, between Tyre and Sidon [in Lebanon] … In the east — the Syrian Desert. The eastern border of the Land of Israel should not be precisely demarcated … the Land’s eastern borders will be diverted eastwards, and the area of the Land of Israel will expand” (217).

Not for nothing were the borders of the new state unmentioned in its declaration of independence (233).

UPDATE: Someone has translated my review into French.

How Israel’s supporters are attempting to shut down boycott debate in UK unions

The second article in my series about the Zionist legal campaign against the UCU for discussing academic boycott — and against the BDS movement in general. Extract:

Antony Julius had taken on Fraser’s case pro bono, he said in a phone call.

Julius defended the readiness of his case, and what he said was an “ironic” comment about his chaotic references: “look at the written submissions and the range of witnesses that were deployed to see how ludicrous it is to say we were not prepared.”

He denied the case was receiving any support from the Israeli government: “I’m sorry to disappoint your fantasy of a conspiracy, but no it isn’t … Why would you assume it’s being supported by the Israeli government? … The question itself can only come from a person who is in thrall to such a fantasy.”

But one of Julius’s own witnesses was boasting to the Israeli press earlier this year about just such a “fantasy.”

Part one is here, but both articles work independent of each other.

Politics of Palestine’s everyday captured in stunning debut film

My new review of a this little gem of a film:

The film’s title comes from a poem by the late Mahmoud Darwish, “Mural”:

Two meters of this land are enough for now.
A meter and seventy-five centimeters are enough for me.
The rest is for a chaos of brilliant flowers to slowly soak up my body.

Darwish wrote here about what would happen to his body after his death. The final scene takes place at his grave, where two of the dancers have absconded, bored with all the waiting.

UK lawsuit challenges college union’s right to boycott Israel

The first in my new series of articles looking into the Zionist legal campaign against the UCU for discussing academic boycott — and against the BDS movement in general. Part two likely to follow soon after Christmas. An extract:

The director of Academic Friends of Israel is suing his own union in an employment tribunal. Ronnie Fraser accuses the 120,000-member-strong University and College Union of “institutional anti-Semitism” after its congress passed motions calling for members to discuss the Palestinian call to boycott Israeli universities.

But according to one court document seen by The Electronic Intifada, Fraser follows a definition of anti-Semitism that seems to include any criticism of Israel. It says he considers “anti-Semitism” to include comments “targeting specifically the State of Israel which was conceived as a Jewish state.”

UK dance troupe al-Zaytouna retell Shakespeare through dabke

Here is my new arts feature about al-Zaytouna dabke group. Their show is this weekend, don’t miss it!

One of Shakespeare’s more famous plays, Henry V is known for the famous speech in which the eponymous king urges on his warriors: “we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Try picturing it, then, re-imagined through the medium of dance theater, and amalgamated with the story of the Palestinian struggle against Israel. It sounds like an unlikely combination, but it’s exactly what UK dance troupe al-Zaytouna have set out to do with their innovative new production Unto the Breach, which debuts this month.

My review of “5 Broken Cameras”

My review here:

Anyone visiting the demonstrations against Israel’s wall in the West Bank village of Bilin over the last six years will have likely seen Emad Burnat and his camera, filming everything — anytime he was not in prison or in the hospital, at least.

Five Broken Cameras is the product of years’ worth of Burnat’s footage from these demonstrations. Co-directed by Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, the film takes the viewer through five years of the life of the village as the popular resistance against the wall begins.