Nazareth

Katie Ramandan’s collection of photos currently on exhibition in Nazareth explores the meaning of home and the boundaries between private and public space.

Just as Israel did — and still does — with Palestinians wanting to return to their homeland, thousands of desperate asylum seekers from Africa are being criminalized under the “Prevention of Infiltration law.”

It takes some chutzpah — or, at least, epic self-delusion — for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

There was one significant victory at the United Nations for Mahmoud Abbas, even if it was not the one he sought.

The newly-passed boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by Israel’s far right. The legislation’s goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.

A leading human rights activist from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority was charged yesterday with the most serious security offenses on Israel’s statute book, including espionage. Prosecutors indicted Ameer Makhoul, the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization for Arab human rights groups in Israel, with spying on security facilities on behalf of Hizballah after an alleged meeting with one of its agents in Denmark in 2008. Jonathan Cook reports.

Israel faces unprecedented pressure to abandon its official policy of “ambiguity” on its possession of nuclear weapons as the international community meets at the United Nations in New York this week to consider banning such arsenals from the Middle East. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

Israel’s Palestinian minority staged a procession to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. In a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, EI contributor Jonathan Cook reports that the march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police.

“It is a reflex question for Palestinians, always posed early in the Arab greeting ritual, to ask a stranger, even another Palestinian, ‘Where are you from?’ before enquiring: ‘Where do you live?’ Few Palestinians live where they feel they belong. ” Jonathan Cook introduces us to a new generation of Saffuriyeen who are keeping their ties to the destroyed town of Saffuriyya strong and vibrant.

Twice in a row, my friend Maha and I have been lucky at the Kalandia checkpoint: A breeze provided occasional relief from the blazing mid-day sun, and the wait to get through was only an hour each time. Regardless, Kalandia was very disturbing.