British-Danish security firm G4S has been severely criticized for its operations in the occupied Palestinian territories and in prisons and detention centers in Israel, including those housing children and “administrative detainees” held without charge or trial. On 17 April Palestinian organizations called for action against G4S for its role in Israeli prisons where Palestinian political [...]
By Ramzy Baroud In an article published May 15, 2013, American historical social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein wrote, “Nothing illustrates more the limitations of Western power than the internal controversy its elites are having in public about what the United States in particular and western European states should be doing about the civil war in Syria.” [...]
By Kathy Kelly – Kabul Since 2009, Voices for Creative Nonviolence has maintained a grim record we call the “The Afghan Atrocities Update” which gives the dates, locations, numbers and names of Afghan civilians killed by NATO forces. Even with details culled from news reports, these data can’t help but merge into one large statistic, [...]
By Ali Younes – Amman A large majority of Jordanian Members of Parliament (MPs) voted last week to pass a resolution to force the government to expel the Israeli ambassador from Amman over Israeli settlers attacks and attempts to occupy the Islamic holy site Al Aqasa Mosque in Jerusalem. The resolution was sponsored by MP [...]
By Rana Abdulla An accountant by training and practice, I was forced by circumstances to learn how to cook, and to enjoy it too. My mother says that every decent woman must know how to cook, and that is where this story starts, with the search for a vast selection of my authentic recipes from [...]
By Ira Glunts Palestinian-American Raed Zidan became the first Palestinian to reach the summit of the earth’s highest mountain last Saturday, dedicating his climb to Palestinians – especially political prisoners. Zidan was one of 35 foreigners, along with 29 Nepalese Sherpa guides, intent on reaching the summit and raising a million dollars to promote education [...]
‘Sons of Lifta’ follows refugees from the village as they return to Lifta on Land Day 2013, more than 65 years after their original forced displacement. Through the eyes and actions of Lifta’s new generations, following in the footsteps of their ancestors, it becomes clear that the Zionist belief that ‘the old will die out [...]
By Pamela Olson (The following is part of an outtake from Pamela Olson’s book Fast Times in Palestine, published by Seal Press in March 2013. The full story, with photos is posted on her blog.) A friend from college named Cameron was in Israel visiting family for Passover. He was an adventurous soul, a world [...]
By Greta Berlin Three years ago, the Free Gaza movement was wrapping up final preparations for a flotilla of eight ships to head out to Gaza, determined to break Israel’s illegal siege on 1.5 million Palestinians shut into an open-air prison. Most of us were already in Cyprus or Turkey or Greece, as we were [...]
By Stuart Littlewood The Church of Scotland’s revised report ‘The Inheritance of Abraham?’ has now been released ahead of their Assembly. The Church felt obliged to change some of it after Jewish leaders sought to interfere, one complaining that it was “an outrage to everything that interfaith dialogue stands for… and closes the door on [...]
By Yousef M. Aljamal, CPDS – Gaza The Kuala Lumpur Palestine Film Festival (KLPFF), organized by Viva Palestina-Malaysia, in collaboration with the Malaysian Information, Communication and Culture Ministry and the Malaysian National Film Development Corporation kicked off on Friday 18 May, 2013 with remarkable Palestinian participation. 5 Broken Cameras, By Imad Burnat, nominated for a [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
