Author: Kairos Puget Sound Coalition

As Palestinians commemorate Prisoners’ Day on April 17, the biggest demand appears to be how to safeguard prisoners from the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.

By Daoud Kuttab | Al-Monitor  | Apr 17, 2020

‘The White House and State Department have called for the release of US citizens around the world due to the coronavirus, but the consular officials in Jerusalem have not followed up on these guidelines from Washington,’
— Hind Shraydeh, American Palestinian researcher

Hind Shraydeh is very worried about her husband. Ubai Aboudi, an American-Palestinian researcher and director of the Ramallah-based nongovernmental organization Bisan Center for Research and Development, was arrested by Israeli forces at his house in Jerusalem’s Kufr Aqab neighborhood on Nov. 13, 2019. Aboudi was initially held in administrative detention at the Ofer detention center, and Amnesty International and Nobel Prize scientists around the world circulated a petition calling for his release.

Shraydeh told Al-Monitor her husband had breathing problems before his imprisonment and expressed worry about the potential spread of the coronavirus in the overcrowded Israeli detention centers. “Ubai is held in unit 22 at the Ofer detention center near Beitunia, where eight people are kept in a small room within an unhealthy prison environment and where at least one coronavirus case has been [confirmed].”

Continue reading “Saving Palestinian prisoners’ lives requires releasing the elderly and sick”

Friday, April 17, 2020 marks Palestinian Prisoners’ Day. This year, Palestinian prisoners and detainees face the additional threat of a COVID-19 outbreak in Israeli prisons and detention centers.

By Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association | Apr 16, 2020

According to Addameer’s statistics, the number of Palestinian prisoners at Israeli occupation prisoners reached around 5000 prisoners as of April 2020.

As we mark Palestinian Prisoners’ Day this year, Palestinian prisoners and detainees face the additional threat of a coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in Israeli prisons and detention centers. The Israeli occupying authorities have taken no steps to release Palestinian prisoners and detainees or to adequately mitigate and prevent a COVID-19 outbreak in prisons. Instead, mass arbitrary detentions and arrests, a staple of Israel’s prolonged military occupation and widespread and systematic human rights violations against the Palestinian people, have continued during the pandemic. According to Addameer’s statistics, the number of Palestinian prisoners at Israeli occupation prisoners reached around 5000 prisoners as of April 2020. This number also included 432 administrative detainees, 41 female detainees, 7 PLC members and 183 child detainees among them 20 under the age of 16.

Continue reading “Palestinian Prisoners’ Day … Prisoners fight imprisonment and COVID-19”

 

Efforts to contain the coronavirus are complicated by deliberate attempts to infect Palestinians.

By Ramzy Baroud | Middle East Monitor | Apr 14, 2020

…the deliberate attempt at infecting occupied Palestinians with the coronavirus is beneath contempt, even for a settler-colonial regime.

Spitting at someone is a universal insult. In Israel, however, spitting at Palestinians is an entirely different story.

Now that we know that the deadly coronavirus can be transmitted through saliva droplets, Israeli soldiers and illegal Jewish settlers are working extra hard to spit at as many Palestinians, their cars, doorknobs, and so on, as possible.

If this sounds to you too surreal and repugnant, then you might not be as familiar with the particular breed of Israeli colonialism as you may think you are.

Continue reading “Spreading the virus of occupation: Spitting as a weapon in the hand of colonial Israel”

Levelling the playing field requires critically urgent measures, such as lifting the siege on Gaza and ending sanctions on Iran

By Nada Elia | Middle East Eye | Apr 15, 2020

Levelling the playing field requires that we demand critically urgent measures, such as lifting the siege on Gaza and ending the sanctions on Iran.

When Chris Cuomo, the popular news anchor on CNN, tested positive for Covid-19, his brother, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, stressed that the virus is a “great equalizer” that knows no age, gender or race.

“Everyone is subject to this virus. It is the great equalizer,” the governor told reporters. “I don’t care how smart, how rich, how powerful you think you are; I don’t care how young, how old. This virus is the great equalizer.”

I do not intend to minimize Cuomo’s concern for his brother, and wish the latter a speedy and full recovery. But I do disagree strongly with his description of the virus as an equalizer, simply because no one is immune to it.

Continue reading “Gaza and Iran show that coronavirus is not the ‘great equalizer’”

A video chat, intended to build bridges between Israeli and Palestinian strangers, led some in Gaza to label the conversation itself an act of treason.

By David M. Halbfinger / Iyad Abuheweila | The New York Times | Apr 10, 2020

‘Let’s create a new kind of Netanyahu, a new kind of Abu Mazen,’
— Rami Aman, Gaza Youth Committee leader

For five years, a small but feisty group of Palestinian peace activists in the blockaded Gaza Strip has been organizing small-scale video chats with Israelis under a bridge-building initiative it calls “Skype With Your Enemy.”

On Monday, the group, the Gaza Youth Committee, drew one of its biggest crowds yet — more than 200 participants — this time on Zoom, the newly popular teleconferencing platform.

But other Palestinians in Gaza, who took umbrage at the idea of befriending Israelis, were also listening in. And the resulting public uproar prompted Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, to arrest the youth committee’s leader and several other participants.

Continue reading “Zoom call with Israelis lands a Gaza peace activist in jail”

A public records request provides a look into the FBI’s use of intelligence and national security powers to track domestic dissent.

By Chip Gibbons | The Intercept | Apr 5, 2020

‘These cases demonstrate the FBI’s unwillingness to distinguish non-violent civil disobedience protesting government policy from terrorism,’
— Michael German, former FBI agent

In 2006, ST. Louis-based activist and academic Mark Chmiel received a message on his answering machine from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI wanted to talk to Chmiel about trip three years ago that he and other St. Louis activists took with the International Solidarity Movement to the West Bank, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. When Chmiel’s attorney reached out to the FBI, they did not respond.

Chmiel later wrote that he was motivated to travel to the West Bank by Palestinians’ calls for volunteers, international organizations’ inability to deal with the occupation, and his own country’s complicity in Israel’s actions. The International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, which would be Chmiel’s vehicle, encourages international volunteers to come to the occupied territories and engage in nonviolent direct action against the occupation. During the delegation Chmiel was on, Israel soldiers opened fire on a Palestinian protest and injured one of the St. Louis activists. An aging Holocaust survivor who was also part of the delegation was subjected to a humiliating and invasive search when departing from Israel.

Continue reading “FBI opened terrorism investigations into nonviolent Palestinian solidarity group, documents reveal”

Some 12 cases have been confirmed in Gaza, as well as hundreds in the occupied West Bank and thousands in Israel.

By Fedaa al-Qedra | Aljazeera | Apr 5, 2020

The factory also has to contend with frequent power outages that are commonplace in Gaza and last for eight hours a day, a result of the blockade and tensions between Hamas and the PA in the occupied West Bank.

Gaza City, Gaza – The Unipal garment factory in the besieged Gaza Strip has not operated at full speed for more than a decade, but on a recent morning hundreds of workers hunched over rows of sewing machines here, making medical masks and surgical gowns.

As the rapid global spread of the coronavirus pandemic triggered a surge in demand for these items last month, the factory located in an industrial zone east of Gaza City changed its business from producing clothing to sought-after medical items.

Continue reading “Gaza garment factory shifts production to masks amid coronavirus”

An Easter reflection and resources for churches, organizations and faith-based communities – local, regional, national and global – committed to the justice movement for Israel/Palestine.

By Palestine Portal | April 2020

‘The current worldwide lockdowns – even if vastly different – are a moment for all of us to reflect on our lives and the lives of others.’
— Mariam Barghouti, Palestinian writer

In this issue of Palestine Portal:

• Reports and reflections from Palestine in lockdown
• Advocacy by faith leaders in response to the emergency facing Gaza and child prisoners in the West Bank
• Two powerful Lenten reflections
• An extraordinary Easter Alert from Kairos Palestine
• Links for action, including a matching challenge for UNRWA

Continue reading “Approaching Easter in the midst of a global crisis, there is much to cover”

Many bookstores are closed, but you may have one of these books on your bookshelf ready to read.

By Michael Arria |Mondoweiss | Apr 3, 2020

If you’re using your social distancing time to catch up on classics you never got around to, this book by the late, great Edward Said is a good place to start. The ‘Question of Palestine’ is nearly 30 years old now, but it’s as relevant as ever before.

Many people throughout the world are presumably catching up on their reading during this time of social distancing and self-isolation. Last week The Guardian reported that online sales at United Kingdom book chain Waterstones have risen by 400% since it closed the doors of its physical stores. Below is a list of books Israel/Palestine that we recommend.

Continue reading “Here’s 10 books on Palestine to read while social distancing”

An updated report examining the groundbreaking 1998 work by Richard Curtiss, ‘The Cost of Israel to U.S. Taxpayers,’  published in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

By  Pamela Olson and If Americans Knew Analysts | If Americans Knew  | Apr 1, 2020

 The US has, in fact, given more aid to Israel than it has to all the countries of sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean combined—which have a total population of over a billion people.
— Richard Curtiss, retired Foreign Service Officer

The U.S. gives Israel over $10 million per day of Americans’ tax money, approximately $7,000 per minute. On average, the US has given Israelis over 7,000 times more than to other people around the world. And on top of this, the US gives Egypt and Jordan large aid packages on behalf of Israel. And there is more…

Continue reading “The staggering cost of Israel to Americans: The facts”