Category: News

A chance to make your voice heard and let them know you support restoring aid to Palestinians.

By Churches for Middle East Peace | Dec 3, 2020

Today, UNRWA is left without the funds to pay its November and December salaries for all of its 28,000 staff, including health care workers and teachers.

In 2018, the Trump administration announced its decision to cut all US aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). This agency helps administer critical services and resources such as health care, education, and emergency food assistance to Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East. UNRWA’s work is even more important now as COVID-19 greatly exacerbates the difficult conditions that Palestinian refugees endure. Without US funding, UNRWA is unable to execute its important activities that serve millions of Palestinians. Before the $360 million dollars in US funding was cut, it accounted for nearly 30 percent of UNRWA’s budget. Today, UNRWA is left without the funds to pay its November and December salaries for all of its 28,000 staff, including health care workers and teachers. US funding is critical to help relieve the financial crisis UNRWA currently faces and to help provide humanitarian aid to vulnerable Palestinian refugees.

Continue reading “Tell your Senators: Restore US aid to UNRWA now!”

A book review of Colum McCann’s novel about the complex Middle East conflict which gives insight into what seems to be an implacable problem.

By Julie Orringer |  The New York Times  |  Feb 24, 2020

‘Once I thought we could never solve our conflict, we would continue hating each other forever, but it is not written anywhere that we have to go on killing each other. The hero makes a friend of his enemy. … When they killed my daughter they killed my fear. I have no fear. I can do anything now.’
— Colum McCann, Apeirogon

APEIROGON
By Colum McCann

On Sept. 4, 1997, 13-year-old Smadar Elhanan — dressed in a Blondie T-shirt, her hair cut short, her Walkman playing Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2U” — was walking down Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem when three young Palestinian men detonated suicide belts, killing themselves, Smadar and four others. A decade later, and less than three miles away, 10-year-old Abir Aramin, wearing her school uniform and holding a candy bracelet she’d just bought, was shot in the back of the head by an 18-year-old Israeli soldier as his jeep sped around a corner. The local Palestinian clinic where Abir was treated had little working equipment, so doctors decided to transfer her to a better-equipped hospital on the other side of the wall. Her ambulance was delayed for hours at a border checkpoint, and she died two days later at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, the same hospital where Smadar was born.

Continue reading “Colum McCann gives voice to grieving fathers, one Israeli and one Palestinian”

The group Palestine Action in Britain trying to bring attention to Israeli arms maker Elbit Systems and weapons industry.

By David Cronin  | The Electronic Intifada  | Dec 2, 2020

The app would allow a commander to type details about a target on a small electronic device and then troops would open fire on that target swiftly.

Killing a Palestinian will soon be as easy as ordering a pizza.

That repugnant message – albeit couched in less explicit terms – was delivered through a recent article published by the website IsraelDefense.

It quotes Oren Matzliach, a colonel who is overseeing the use of a new app by the Israeli military. The app would allow a commander to type details about a target on a small electronic device and then troops would open fire on that target swiftly.

Ordering an attack will be “like ordering a book on Amazon or a pizza in a pizzeria using your smartphone,” Matzliach said.

Continue reading “App makes killing Palestinians as easy as ordering pizzas”

In his new memoir, Obama subtly reveals how AIPAC stymied his administration.

By Peter Beinart | Jewish Currents  |  Nov 25, 2020

‘. . .[t]here wasn’t much Abbas could give the Israelis that the Israelis couldn’t already take on their own . . . I thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.’
— Barack Obama, former President of the United States

Israel/Palestine isn’t an easy subject for Washington autobiographers. Samantha Power’s criticism of the Jewish state became a central issue in her 2013 confirmation hearings to become US ambassador to the United Nations. Yet in the index of Power’s 2019 memoir, The Education of an Idealist, the word “Israel” does not appear. It probably seemed safest to omit the subject altogether.

In his new autobiography, A Promised Land, her former boss, Barack Obama, tries a different tack. He gives the reader enough information to glimpse what Washington policymaking on Israel/Palestine is really like. He details the political realities that constrained his ability to challenge Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, and will likely constrain Joe Biden’s, too. But he doesn’t spell out the implications of his narrative, perhaps because it so closely resembles the argument of one of the most incendiary foreign policy books of the last two decades: Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby.

Continue reading “Obama and the Israel lobby”

Critics are protesting the nomination of Effie Eitam, a retired general and far-right politician, to lead Yad Vashem, a hallowed Israeli institution.

By Isabel Kershner  | The New York Times  |  Nov 28, 2020

‘An institute headed by a person with such extreme opinions and controversial human values will never be taken seriously within the global academic community,’
— Israel Bartal, professor of modern Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

JERUSALEM — For years, his name was synonymous with intolerance and right-wing extremism.

So when Israel’s conservative-led government nominated Effie Eitam to be chairman of Yad Vashem, the country’s official Holocaust memorial and one its most hallowed institutions, it prompted an uproar.

Mr. Eitam, a 68-year-old retired brigadier general and former minister, has spent the last decade in the private sector. But his provocative statements from the early 2000s advocating the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and barring Israel’s Arab citizens from politics linger on the public record.

Continue reading “Israel’s pick to head Holocaust Memorial stirs international uproar”

 A call to join One Democratic State Campaign and help build an anti-colonial, liberation movement.

By The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions |  Nov 25, 2020

 …the fact that more than 200 Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals and activists have participated in the process and endorsed our program, sets it on firm political footing. We must still work hard to get a broad Palestinian buy-in.
— The Palestinian-led One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC)

Our One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) has just issued a Call for people to support our initiative for establishing a single democracy between the River and the Sea — the only just and practical way to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian “conflict.” It’s a project we have been working on for several years and we’ve made some meaningful progress. Although a lot of work remains to flesh out, the outline of our program, the fact that more than 200 Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals and activists have participated in the process and endorsed our program, sets it on firm political footing. We must still work hard to get a broad Palestinian buy-in.

Continue reading “Jeff Halper introduces Call for One Democratic State Campaign (ODSC) supporters”

Beyond The Two-State Solution, by Jonathan Kuttab, is a short introduction to the current crisis in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism have been at loggerheads for over a century.

By Jonathan Kuttab  |    Nov 20, 2020 (email communication)

The Palestinian / Israeli conflict has had many ups and downs with hopes for peace, times of war, and relentless subjugation of Palestinians.  Many people including myself and Jonathan Kuttab supported the peace initiative of a 2 state-solution even though many Palestinian leaders were initially reluctant to settle for 22% of original Palestine.
— Mubarak Awad, Founder on Nonviolence International

After decades of work promoting creative nonviolence, I am about to publish a book which I hope, with your help can address the current impasse, and perhaps change the conversation around Palestine / Israel. Many activists are frustrated, despondent, and floundering with no clear vision or direction. We need some fresh out-of-the-box thinking. This is true for Palestinians, Israelis, and our friends in the international community. I’ve asked Nonviolence International, a group I co-founded and value deeply, to lead the effort to get this book into the hands of people across the political spectrum and across the world. Even with everything else already in their established plans, the team is going above and beyond to ensure this book gets the attention we believe it deserves.

Continue reading “Book Now Available: Beyond The Two-State Solution by Jonathan Kuttab”

The president-elect has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reorient US foreign policy so this country truly means what it says.

By Representative Ilhan Omar  | The Nation |  Nov 20, 2020

In truth, these aren’t peace deals as much as they’re arms sale deals to human rights abusers. And they’re less about normalizing relations with Israel than they are about forming military alliances against Iran.

his month, we begin the transition away from a Trump era and toward a new presidency based on peace and cooperation. There is no area where this renewed vision is needed more than foreign policy. Trump has taunted, mocked, and burned bridges with our allies, while simultaneously cozying up to some of the most brutal dictatorial regimes around the world—especially those in the oil-rich Middle East. The damage done by the Trump administration runs deep, and it will take hard work and a clear understanding of the extent of the damage to fix it. With foreign policy primarily driven by the Executive Branch, President Biden has a tremendous opportunity to reorient our foreign policy in the region.

Trump began his presidency by backing out of the Iran nuclear deal, which had been a major feat in diplomacy with buy-in from all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States—plus Germany and Iran. The deal was not only notable for the countries that it brought to the table, but for what it prevented: a nuclear-armed Iran that could threaten the United States and risk a global nuclear war.

Continue reading “Representative Ilhan Omar: ‘I Hope President Biden Seizes This Opportunity.’”

With a lack of ventilators, PPE, and medicine, officials say Israel’s siege is a ‘death sentence’ for Gaza’s coronavirus patients.

By Walid Mahmoud  | Al Jazeera  |  Nov 23, 2020

Early hopes that Gaza’s isolation would spare it from the pandemic were dashed as the densely populated coastal region came under severe threat with a dilapidated healthcare system that is unable to handle the onslaught of patients.

Gaza City – A rapid rise in coronavirus infections in the Gaza Strip has reached a “catastrophic stage”, with the blockaded Palestinian enclave’s medical system likely to collapse soon, health officials warn.

COVID is spreading exponentially in Gaza – one of the most crowded places on Earth – especially in refugee camps, and the health ministry has warned of “disastrous” implications.

Dr. Fathi Abuwarda, adviser to the minister of health, told Al Jazeera the recent spike in infections could soon become uncontrollable, with hundreds of people contracting the virus each day and nowhere to treat them.

Continue reading “Gaza declares COVID-19 disaster with health system near collapse”

Climate justice and human rights activists chain themselves to entrance of Israeli quarry to protest the theft of Palestinian land and destruction of local ecology.

By Oren Ziv  | +972 Magazine |  Nov 22, 2020

‘We are here to demand climate justice for all who live in this land, humans and animals, Palestinians and Israelis, women and men, from every group, from every identity,’
— Ya’ara Peretz, one of the leaders of the action

Dozens of climate justice and human rights activists blocked the entrance to an Israeli quarry in the occupied West Bank Sunday morning to protest a plan to build a new industrial zone in the area. According to the protesters, the expansion plan of the HeidelbergCement Quarry, which will also include the building of a new Israeli cemetery, will destroy the ecological corridor of the center of the country and deepen the annexation of the West Bank.

The activists, which belong to the “One Climate” group, chained themselves to the entry of the quarry and unfurled a giant sign that read “Stop the Destruction,” while preventing the entry and exit of trucks transporting cement across the country. The action caused a large traffic jam of trucks outside the quarry, with one driver estimating that the protest led to over NIS 100,000 in losses for the company.

Continue reading “Eight climate activists arrested in protest against new West Bank industrial zone”