Category: News

A young Palestinian’s story shows peace is still possible.

By Yousef Bashir | The New York Times | Apr 26, 2019

I wish we could talk. I would tell him that I want to do my part to make peace between our peoples more possible, the way my father taught me. I would tell him that I have forgiven him.

I was born and raised in the Gaza Strip. For years, my “neighbors” were Israeli soldiers based in the Kfar Darom settlement across the road from my house. Although the settlement was illegally established, my father taught me never to feel hostility toward the soldiers. They were the children of Abraham, as were we Palestinians.

But in September 2000, when I was 11 years old, all that changed. One night after dinner, the soldiers started shooting at our kitchen windows. As we crawled to the center of the house, I could see the bullets ricocheting around me.

Soon after, the soldiers told my father that it was time for him to leave. They wanted to use our house as a command center. My father politely but firmly refused: “I am a peaceful man. I am not your enemy. There is no need for me to leave. If it is not safe for us in our own home, then it will not be safe for us anywhere.”

Continue reading “An Israeli shot me — an Israeli healed me”

The two-state solution is dead.

By George Bisharat | Los Angeles Times | May 23, 2019

Hope is a powerful motivator, and the prospect of building a just and genuinely free and democratic society — a true beacon of progress for the region if not the world — can inspire heroism in both Israelis and Palestinians.

President Donald Trump has promised he will soon unveil his “Deal of the Century” for Palestinians and Israelis. But it is unlikely to do much more than consecrate a reality that has prevailed for decades: Israelis living within the borders of historic Palestine will enjoy full freedoms and political rights, while a majority of Palestinians living within the same space will remain largely disenfranchised and voiceless.

One thing the deal will make apparent, however, is that the two-state solution is dead, laid low by a thousand cuts — or, more precisely, by the hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, whose immovable presence ensures that no genuinely sovereign Palestinian state will ever emerge there. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have both played a role in delivering the final blows: Trump with his recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and Netanyahu by promising voters prior to his recent reelection to begin annexation of the West Bank.

Continue reading “The case for a democratic one-state solution”

A letter to the members of the German government.

By Sara Roy | Counterpunch | Jun 4, 2019

By endorsing the motion that alleges that BDS is anti-Semitic — regardless of one’s position on BDS — you are criminalizing the right to free speech and dissent and those who choose to exercise it, which is exactly how fascism takes root.

To the Members of the German Government:

I write to you regarding the motion recently passed by the Bundestag that equated BDS with anti-Semitism. I also write to you as Jew, a child of Holocaust survivors and as a scholar of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

My mother, Taube, and father, Abraham, survived Auschwitz among other horrors. My father was the only survivor in his family of six children and my mother survived with only one sister in a family that was larger than my father’s. I know, without question, that if they were alive today, the motion you are being asked to endorse would terrify them given the repression of tolerance and witness that it clearly embraces. I shall not restate what others have already written protesting your action, but I do have some thoughts I would like to share.

Continue reading “On equating BDS with anti-Semitism”

Kushner’s comments expose the multiple reasons this peace plan has little chance of success.

By Andrea Germanos | Common Dreams | June 3, 2019

‘I get why people think this is going to be a deal that only the Israelis could love.’
— Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted that the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan could be seen as “unexecutable” while Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, suggested that Palestinians aren’t capable of governing themselves.

Kushner, who’s in charge of the administration’s supposed peace plan, made the comments in an interview that aired Sunday on “Axios on HBO.” He told interviewer Jonathan Swan that there is a “high bar” for Palestinians to be rid of Israeli interference.

Kushner said that before Palestinians can be seen worthy of investors’ money, they “need to have a fair judicial system … freedom of press, freedom of expression, tolerance for all religions.”

Continue reading “Pompeo admits Kushner peace plan likely unworkable as Trump’s son-in-law openly dehumanizes Palestinian people”

Please join our brothers and sisters at the Mideast Focus Ministry for their First Friday Film series.

	Date:	Friday, May 3, 2019
	Time:	7:00 – 8:30 pm
	Location:	St. Mark’s Cathedral Bloedel Hall 1245 10th Ave E Seattle, WA 98102
	Information:	Event information here →
	Tickets:	Free Admission

Event Details

There’s a quiet warmth that runs like a current through ‘Wajib,’ a new film from the Palestinian director and writer Annemarie Jacir. The title is Arabic for “duty,’ and here the obligation is shared by father and son. Abu Shadi, an aging divorcee living in a Christian Palestinian community in Nazareth, is driving around his neighborhood and its outskirts all day at the beginning of the Christmas season — he’s got ‘Jingle Bells’ as his phone’s ringtone — hand-delivering invitations to his daughter’s wedding. With him is his son, Shadi, an architect who now makes his home in Rome.
— Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

Continue reading “Film: Wajib (Friday)”

Please join our brothers and sisters at the Mideast Focus Ministry for their First Friday Film series.

	Date:	Friday, May 3, 2019
	Time:	7:00 – 8:30 pm
	Location:	St. Mark’s Cathedral Bloedel Hall 1245 10th Ave E Seattle, WA 98102
	Information:	Event information here →
	Tickets:	Free Admission

Event Details

There’s a quiet warmth that runs like a current through ‘Wajib,’ a new film from the Palestinian director and writer Annemarie Jacir. The title is Arabic for “duty,’ and here the obligation is shared by father and son. Abu Shadi, an aging divorcee living in a Christian Palestinian community in Nazareth, is driving around his neighborhood and its outskirts all day at the beginning of the Christmas season — he’s got ‘Jingle Bells’ as his phone’s ringtone — hand-delivering invitations to his daughter’s wedding. With him is his son, Shadi, an architect who now makes his home in Rome.
— Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

Continue reading “Film: Wajib (Friday)”

Continuing series of reports from Dr. Alice Rothchild in Amman, Jordan after attending the Lancet Palestinian Health Alliance Annual conference in March/April 2019.

By Alice Rothchild | Mondoweiss | May 25, 2019

I struggle with the concept of ‘ex-Gazans’ who arrived in 1967 during the war and are not recognized as refugees by the Jordanian government, are granted temporary two-year Jordanian passports, but do not hold a national ID number.

Even “Ex-Gazans” Have More Trouble

We Uber over to the UN Headquarters again (Uber just bought Careem in the never ending cycle of capitalism). We are heading north to Jerash Camp (aka Gaza Camp), with Julia McCahey and several Japanese and German/Iraqi interns and analysts. In the van we learn that in Jordan, where 42% of Palestinian refugees live, there are ten official and three unofficial camps which accommodate less than 18% of the total refugee population. The aspirational UNRWA microfinancing program was largely cut in the latest financial crisis. There is a Department of Palestinian Affairs in Jordan; the UNRWA camps are owned by UNRWA or rented for about 1 Jordanian Dinar per year, either from the state or leased by the state from local landowners. The EU and the Saudis are providing funding to upgrade buildings which are often dilapidated and desperately in need of renovation and repair.

It seems that financial allotments to each clinic depend on need, plus local field officers approach donors and funds get earmarked for special projects like education. The 2018 and 2019 budgets for UNRWA were $1.2 billion per year. With the budget cuts, UNRWA launched the #Dignityispriceless campaign in 2018 to raise money for health and education. The reasons for the extreme disparities of resources and structures in the different camps still feel murky to me. I suspect it’s complicated. Jerash may give us a clue.

Continue reading “In Jerash refugee camp, 2-minute doctor’s appointments and rage at American visitors”

Ensuring that the United States does not help Israel arrest a child, demolish a home or imprison a people is just about the most Jewish thing we can possibly do.

By Peter Beinart | Forward | May 20, 2019

Israelis re-elected Netanyahu because he showed them he could undermine the two-state solution with international impunity. Indeed, he made that accomplishment a central theme of his campaign.

Last month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that American aid to Israel is “something that can be discussed” in Washington. Her comments made news precisely because America’s policy of giving Israel billions in aid without expecting any policy changes in return hasn’t actually been discussed — or at least questioned — in either party in more than a quarter-century. That needs to change.

To understand why, ask yourself this question: Why did Israelis last month re-elect a prime minister who opposes a Palestinian state and — by championing settlement growth and vowing to annex parts of the West Bank — is working to make one impossible?

Continue reading “It’s time to end America’s blank check military aid to Israel”

The new normal is a constant state of deceit with support from US political leadership.

By James M . Wall |  Wallwritings | May 16, 2019

To convince the world of its success, Official Israel lives in a constant state of deceit.

Adam Shatz, writing in the London Review of Books, described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s legislative victory on April 9, as a “tribute” to his “transformation of the political landscape”. He wrote:

At no point were [the legislative elections] discussed in terms of which candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) American pressure, or the ‘international community’, to end the occupation.

This time the question was which party leader could be trusted by Israeli Jews – Palestinian citizens of Israel are now officially second-class – to manage the occupation, and to expedite the various tasks the Jewish state has mastered: killing Gazans, bulldozing homes, combating the scourge of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement (BDS), and conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.

Continue reading “Israel creates a new political normal”

Please join our brothers and sisters at the Mideast Focus Ministry for their First Friday Film series.

	Date:	Friday, May 3, 2019
	Time:	7:00 – 8:30 pm
	Location:	St. Mark’s Cathedral Bloedel Hall 1245 10th Ave E Seattle, WA 98102
	Information:	Event information here →
	Tickets:	Free Admission

Event Details

There’s a quiet warmth that runs like a current through ‘Wajib,’ a new film from the Palestinian director and writer Annemarie Jacir. The title is Arabic for “duty,’ and here the obligation is shared by father and son. Abu Shadi, an aging divorcee living in a Christian Palestinian community in Nazareth, is driving around his neighborhood and its outskirts all day at the beginning of the Christmas season — he’s got ‘Jingle Bells’ as his phone’s ringtone — hand-delivering invitations to his daughter’s wedding. With him is his son, Shadi, an architect who now makes his home in Rome.
— Glenn Kenny, The New York Times

Continue reading “Film: Wajib (Jun 7)”