By Ghada Ageel On the 65th anniversary of the Nakba (what we Palestinians call the catastrophe of dispossession), Palestinians who were born in historic Palestine and are currently growing old in refugee camps – remain determined to return to the homes and lands from which we were expelled in 1948. My grandmother, Khadija, is one [...]
By Jeremy Salt – Ankara While all options are said to be still on the table, Barack Obama is clearly backing away from any deeper involvement in Syria now it is clear that nothing but direct intervention is going to bring down the government in Damascus. In the past few months alone the armed groups [...]
By Rima Najjar Merriman “Calamity either destroys a people or makes it stronger. In the past half century Palestinians have transformed catastrophe into strength. They have done so through education and through their exposure to the world. They have done so by rebuilding their shattered lives in exile, by recovering their history, folklore, customs and [...]
Gaza’s Interior Ministry announced a state of alert along its border with Egypt on Thursday after gunmen kidnapped seven Egyptian soldiers and police officers in Sinai. The Hamas-run ministry said security was heightened in case the kidnappers tried to smuggle the Egyptian servicemen into the Gaza Strip. Witnesses told Ma’an that Egyptian forces closed seven [...]
By Jamal Kanj Palestinians are this week commemorating the 65th anniversary of Al Nakba (the disaster or catastrophe). On May 15, 1948, Israel was declared a nation on the ruins of more than 500 townships and 800,000 expelled Palestinians. In December 1948 the international community adopted UN resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow the [...]
By Dr. Ahmed Yousef – Gaza The “Arab Spring”, as we now have come to know it, has seemingly changed the nature of politics and the balance of power in the Middle East forever. The West was caught off guard and after initially grappling with the new situation, are now dealing with Islamist parties whom [...]
By Ramzy Baroud It is an event ‘of cosmic proportions’, said one Palestinian academic, a befitting description regarding Stephen Hawking’s decision to boycott an Israeli academic conference slated for next June. It was also a decisive moral call which was communicated on May 8 by Cambridge University, where Hawking is a professor. Hawking is a [...]
Clashes broke out across the West Bank on Wednesday as Palestinians marked the 65th year since the Nakba in 1948, witnesses and Israel’s army said. In east Jerusalem, police clashed with demonstrators outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate, police spokeswoman Luba Samri told AFP, saying three policemen were injured and eight Palestinians arrested. Some 1,000 [...]
By Noura Khouri “They old will die and the young will forget.” declared, David Ben Gurion, the ideological father of the European colonial/settler project, Zionism. Few quotes so succinctly sum up the stated goal/vision, idealism and the delusional nature of Zionism – which can only reside in the realm of cognitive dissonance. Meanwhile, nothing more [...]
Reviewed by Ludwig Watzal (Francis A. Boyle, Destroying Libya and World Order, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2013, 212 pp.) This book tells the story of what happened, why it happened and what went wrong between the United States and Libya from a perspective of a professor of international law. Among the U.S. Empire’s serving international law [...]
By Ramzy Baroud Many Palestinians remember and reference al-Nakba, also known as the Catastrophe, on May 15 every year. The event marks the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians, while their villages were destroyed. The destruction of Palestine in 1947-48 ushered in the birth of Israel. Older generations relay the harsh and oppressive memory of [...]
Clashes broke out on Wednesday around the Al-Aqsa mosque compound as Israeli rightists tried to enter the holy site. Dozens of Israeli right-wingers raided the compound through the Moroccan gate, and clashes broke out at the Bab al-Hutta gate as Israeli forces escorted rightists into the mosque area. Witnesses told Ma’an that 17 Israelis tried [...]
The Center for Political and Development Studies, Gaza, Palestine Palestinians in Palestine and in the Diaspora mark the annual anniversary of the Catastrophe, also known as the Nakba, on May 15th every year as a result of the massive ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionists gangs in 1947-1948 which resulted in the displacement of almost [...]
By Deepak Tripathi Recent remarks by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss investigator of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, have changed the nature of debate on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. Momentum had been building up for months against Bashar al-Assad’s government, first on the basis of accusations that such weapons [...]
By The Center for Political and Development Studies – Gaza, Palestine 1948 witnessed the mass expulsion of the indigenous people of Palestine as a result of the massacres and the systemic ethnic cleansing operations carried out by Zionist gangs, which resulted in wiping 531 Palestinian villages and cities off the map. Some 750,000 Palestinians ended [...]
By Susan Abulhawa Al Jazeera Stream contacted me a few days ago asking if I would participate on a show commemorating the Nakbe. I would be the only Palestinian, the producer said, “to balance things out” amidst various Israeli voices. Here’s the exact excerpt of the email: “We are looking for a unique angle with [...]
By Stuart Littlewood “The political and humanitarian situation in the Holy Land continues to be a source of pain and concern for us all,” says the introduction to the Church of Scotland’s report The inheritance of Abraham? A report on the ‘promised land’. It is the Church’s latest reflection on the “questions that need to [...]
By Eric Walberg Pakistan’s elections come at a key junction in the region’s geopolitics, with the public firmly opposed to the US ‘war on terror’ being conducted on Pakistani soil with no regard for its sovereignty. Pakistan’s new prime minister has a mandate to take his country in a new direction, but will he use [...]
A Facebook page promoting Nakba commemoration events in Jaffa was temporarily blocked overnight, Palestinian activists said Monday. Fatima Huleiwi, an activist with Jaffa Youth, told Ma’an that it was not the first time that Facebook had blocked the group’s user page. “When we published material urging people to support hunger striking prisoners, our pages were [...]
By Tamar Fleishman “Ana Wahad Wa Talatin…” – I am number thirty one - the man answered the question as to his identity, which came from inside of the post. At the checkpoint at the outskirts of the village Al-Jib a person’s identity and name are erased. Over here he is no more than a [...]
By Jamil Toubbeh Following exposure of the break-in in June of 1972 at the HQ of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., an event that captured US public attention for months, a child of school age was asked to comment on this mesmerizing phenomenon that became known as the [...]
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan The Palestinian issue is a political and humanitarian man-made tragedy where the indigenous Palestinians have been dehumanized and their rights have been delegitimized; and the policy makers of the World’s Superpower created conditions where the afflictions of the Palestinians today is almost beyond a peaceful solution. The Palestinians used to own [...]
By Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba Following the recent investigative report by Max Blumenthal, a journalist affiliated with the pro-Palestinian online site Electronic Intifada, a seemingly disturbing account of a list of sponsors and sources of funding of two organizations (The American Islamic Congress and Free Arabs) came to light in rather great, and quite [...]
Influential Muslim cleric Yousuf al-Qaradawi on Friday called on the Palestinian resistance to hold onto its arms in a sermon at a Gaza City mosque. “I advise all the people of Gaza to be patient and continue to build their country, and continue resistance,” the sheikh told worshipers at al-Omari Mosque. “We will not give [...]
By Jonathan Cook – Nazareth Washington’s reputation as an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in tatters after four years of indulging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence. The Obama administration desperately needs to resurrect a credible peace process. Faced with a diplomatic impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, John [...]
Israeli “segregation policies” have caused deep economic isolation and left more than 80 percent of Palestinian children in east Jerusalem wallowing in poverty, the UN said in a report. “Palestinian poverty in Jerusalem has risen steadily over the last decade,” the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) said in a statement on Thursday. A [...]
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said he will depart in two weeks on another trip to the Middle East to push peace between Israel and the Palestinians as he seeks to breathe fresh life into the talks stalled since late 2010. Kerry met with Israeli Justice Minister and chief negotiator Tzipi Livni in [...]
Twelve of 13 Palestinian resistance fighters deported to Europe in 2002 following an Israeli invasion of Bethlehem mark 11 years in exile Friday despite promises they would be repatriated after two years. In April 2006, during a major Israeli incursion into the West Bank Israel named Operation Defensive Shield, Israeli forces besieged the Nativity Church [...]
By Jamk Kanj US Secretary of State John Kerry has succeeded in tailoring yet another peace initiative to appease Israel. But it took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no time to effectively reject the offer, telling Kerry and company it was not occupation – it was all “about a Jewish state”. American diplomacy in the [...]
Reviewed by Ludwig Watzal (Zionism – The Real Enemy of the Jews, by Alan Hart, Clarity Press, Atlanta 2009-2010, Vol. I-III) Alan Hart’s trilogy on the devastating impact of Zionism not only on the Palestinian people but also on Judaism is the most comprehensive and best analysis that has ever been written on this subject. [...]
