The environmental situation in Gaza is dire at the moment. (credi: via ActiveStills.org)
A review of work using graphic representations as applied to Israel/Palestine environmental issues.
By Jim Miles | The Palestine Chronicle | Jan 23, 2022
The most compelling statement made during the discussion on cartography was “…the settler-colonial imperative is to create private land…for profit” – a strong summation.
A recent seminar from the group “Visualizing Palestine” served to present four graphic representations of environmental problems within Israel/Palestine.
The graphics are self-explanatory and need no review here – they are after all graphic, and speak well for themselves. The discussion talked around the graphics, what they emphasized and how they are necessary for a clear understanding of environmental issues in Palestine.
President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020, in the East Room of the White House to unveil details of the Trump administration’s Middle East Peace Plan. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
A revealing new interview peels back yet another layer.
By David Remnick | The New Yorker | Dec 21, 2021
It’s no surprise that Trump is willing to trash foreign leaders in the most vivid terms. What seems to have shocked some American readers is that he trafficked so fluently in traditional tropes about Jewish power, conspiracy, and disloyalty.
When hundreds of hours of tapes from the Nixon White House became public, two decades ago, the full extent of Nixon’s prejudices, including his contempt for Jews, came into sharp focus. “The Jews are all over the government,” he told his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, at an Oval Office meeting, in 1971. What’s more, “most Jews are disloyal.” Nixon made allowances for some of his useful advisers, including Henry Kissinger and William Safire, but, he said, “generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards.”
Peter Beinart speaking at Temple De Hirsch Sinai, Seattle, Washington, May 23, 2019 at an event sponsored by J Street (CC by Joe Mabel via Wikimedia)
Shifting media developments are giving Palestinian voices more access to shape the Israel-Palestine conversation.
By Peter Beinart | The Beinart Notebook | Jan 3, 2022
In recent years, the gulf between traditional and social media has narrowed… And so for Palestinian commentators, social media has become a backdoor into the establishment media from which they were long barred.
For my entire adult lifetime, the mainstream American conversation about Israel-Palestine—the one you watch on cable television and read on the opinion pages—has been a conversation among political Zionists. Its participants have argued over how the Jewish state should behave, not whether it should exist. Last year that began to change. Palestinians entered America’s public discussion in an unprecedented way, and with their entrance, anti-Zionism entered too. In 2021, the terms of US discourse began to shift. The ramifications of that shift will likely be with us for decades to come.
Palestinians take part in a protest against the Israeli decision to declare six Palestinian human rights groups as “terror organizations”, in Gaza City on November 10, 2021. (credit: Mahmoud Nasser / APA Images)
2021 was a watershed year for Palestinians. The struggle for Palestinian freedom and liberation saw unprecedented levels of global solidarity and unity amongst Palestinians despite their forced fragmentation
By Yumna Patel | Mondoweiss | Dec 28, 2021
From the streets to the digital sphere, Palestinians were suppressed and censored at every turn. And yet still, their voices were heard around the world more than ever before.
2021 was a watershed year for Palestinians. The struggle for Palestinian freedom and liberation saw unprecedented levels of global solidarity. From Jerusalem, to the West Bank, Gaza, and Palestinian communities inside Israel, Palestinians rose up together in defiance of the Israeli occupation, and demanded a better future. The fight against forcible expulsion of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan reached the global stage, and more human rights groups joined the calls to end Israeli Apartheid.
Despite the strides made towards justice and equality this year, 2021 was not without its challenges for Palestinians. Palestinians entered the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, and like much of the global south, struggled to get their hands on the life saving vaccines being hoarded by the world’s richest countries.
Orthodox Christians mark Holy Saturday at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in East Jerusalem on May 1, 2021. (credit: Mostafa Alkharouf / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Church leaders in Jerusalem raise concerns about ongoing assaults and vandalization of holy sites.
By Alia Shoaib | Insider | Dec 19, 2021
Church leaders warned that radical groups continue to “acquire strategic property” in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem with the goal of diminishing the Christian presence.
Church leaders in Jerusalem warned that Christians had become the target of “frequent and sustained attacks by fringe radical groups” across the Holy Land in a strongly-worded statement.
The Patriarchs and Heads of Local Churches in Jerusalem pointed to “countless incidents” of physical and verbal assaults and the vandalizing of holy sites and churches.
In March of this year, the Romanian church monastery in Jerusalem was vandalized and its entrance set on fire. It was the fourth such attack on the monastery in a month, Daily Sabah reported.
Rasha Ghabayen explains to a group of students the history of Native American Literature. (credit: Yousef Aljamal, Palestine Chronicle)
A look at the ways literature crosses borders and unites people in a common anti-colonial struggle.
By Benay Blend | Palestine Chronicle | Dec 5, 2021
…what both Palestinians and Native Americans have in common are “white saviors,”
In the past few years, several articles and books have focused on the ties between Native American and Palestinian activists/scholars. See, for example, Steven Salaita’s ‘Internationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine’ (2016), ‘Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan’ (2006), and Marion Kawas, “Solidarity Between Palestinians and Indigenous Activists Has Keep Roots” (2020).
Louise Erdrich does not draw these links in her most recent novel ‘The Sentence’ (2021), but it nevertheless brings to mind several commonalities as well as differences between the Palestinian solidarity movement and various forms of Native activism. Moreover, Erdrich highlights those moments in 2021 that called for alliances between various movements for social justice, including climate change and the murder of unarmed black men by local police, in particular George Floyd, so it makes sense to look for lessons regarding the Palestine solidarity movement that could be taken from the book.
The differing interpretations of boycott legitimacy.
By Katherine Franke | New York Daily News| Nov 28, 2021
Yet in the same week that the Biden administration signaled that it was inclined to boycott China over its human rights violations, the governor of New York announced that she plans for state government to divest from the company that owns Ben & Jerry’s over the ice cream manufacturer’s decision to restrict sales in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Last week, Republican members of Congress issued adamant calls on the U.S. government to boycott the Winter Olympics in Beijing to protest the Chinese government’s abuses of the human rights of Uyghurs and the crackdown on protesters and journalists in Hong Kong. The Biden administration has signaled an inclination to do so. Meanwhile, the Women’s Tennis Association threatened to pull all of its tournaments in China after the disappearance of Peng Shuai, a top female tennis player was who has claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a Chinese government official.
Palestinian advocates say President Joe Biden is not doing enough to increase the pressure on Israel. (credit: Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
In an interview, Israel’s interior minister dismisses U.S. plans to reopen a consulate in Jerusalem and downplays reports of Israeli settler violence against Palestinians.
By Nahal Toosi | Politico | Nov 19, 2021
Palestinian advocates say Biden is not doing enough to increase the pressure on Israel, especially if he is serious about seeking a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict — something Trump said he could live without.
Soon after taking office, President Joe Biden and his aides began using a new talking point when discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — part of an effort to rebalance a U.S. policy the previous U.S. administration had skewed heavily to favor Israel.
“Israelis and Palestinians,” the phrase usually goes, “deserve equal measures of freedom, dignity, security, and prosperity.”
In recent weeks, however, a series of Israeli actions against Palestinians have exacerbated tensions with the Biden administration while testing how serious the U.S. president is about respecting the rights of everyone in the conflict.
TALMON, WEST BANK – MARCH 23, 1989: A Jewish settler armed with an Uzi machine gun watches as settlers move caravans and equipment March 23, 1989 to establish the new settlement of Talmon north-west of the nearby Palestinian town of Ramallah in the West Bank. As of December 2003, the left-wing Israeli Peace Now movement said that Talmon had over 1,600 residents. (Photo by Maggie Ayalon / GPO via Getty Images)
In a widely condemned move, the Israeli government has banned the group I founded. This is how it enforces impunity for its illegal policies of occupation.
By Raja Shehadeh | The New York Review | Oct 27, 2021
Throughout the more than four decades since Al-Haq’s founding, the organization has continued to serve the objectives for which it was established: documenting and resisting through the law Israeli human rights violations, including the mistreatment of prisoners, the economic exploitation of the Occupied Territories’ natural resources, and the illegal settlement building.
In 1978 I returned to Ramallah from my legal studies in London brimming with ideas about the importance of the rule of law and the possibilities for resisting the Israeli occupation using international law. The following year, I and two colleagues, a Yale graduate named Charles Shammas and the American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, established an organization we called Al-Haq (Arabic for The Right) as an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva. It was one of the first human rights groups in the Arab world and the first and only one of its kind in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Al-Haq’s first major activity was to document the extensive changes in local laws in the occupied West Bank mandated by Israeli military orders. These, in violation of international law, were designed to enable Israel to carry out illegal acquisitions of land for the building of illegal Israeli settlements. In a study Jonathan and I authored, titled The West Bank and the Rule of Law, published in 1980 jointly by Al-Haq and the ICJ, we pointed out that these orders were withheld from public view. That Israel was thus using secret legislation to break international law was a national embarrassment, though it was denied by the government and initially challenged by a number of Israeli journalists. After investigating the matter, these journalists learned that we had not exaggerated and that these orders indeed had not been published.
Road signs directing to Nazareth and Nof Hagalil (credit: Wikimedia)
Palestinian students are forced to leave the mixed Israeli city of Nof Hagalil to attend school in nearby Nazareth because local schools refuse to accommodate Arab students.
By Dr. Reem Khamis-Dakwar | Mondoweiss | October 27, 2021
For over 20 years now, Arab residents of Nof Hagalil have demanded the establishment of a local Arab school.
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