Maureen Clare Murphy

“People don’t know anything about us. That’s why we’re doing comedy,” New York Arab-American Comedy Festival co-founder Dean Obeidallah explained at the Festival’s opening night at the Gotham Comedy Club on 14 November 2006. Following sold-out shows in previous years, the 4th Annual Festival extended to six nights, featuring two stand-up comedy nights, a short film night, and three sketch comedy theatre nights (to which a fourth show was added and sold out as well). The week kicked off with a press conference held by the New York Foreign Press Center of the — no joke — U.S. State Department.

Hundreds of demonstrators - estimated by some of the organizers at 2,300 - poured into Chicago’s Pioneer Court to protest Israel’s onslaught against Lebanon and Gaza Saturday July 22. Carrying Lebanese, Palestinian, and American flags, the demonstrators marched to the Israeli consulate to make their objections be known. They were also there to tell Palestinian and Lebanese civilians under siege that while the world has not sufficiently come to their aid, “We have not abandoned you,” as one of the speakers at the rally emphasized.

In another Israeli move designed to further isolate Palestinians from the rest of the world community, it is being reported that the Israeli army will be declaring the West Bank closed to foreign nationals. The Gaza Strip has already been made virtually inaccessible to foreign nationals; those who wish to enter must apply to the Israeli authorities, weeks in advance, to receive elusive permits. The effect is that the plight of the Palestinian civilian population living under Israeli occupation becomes all the more invisible to the international community.

We are writing you regarding the Black Eyed Peas’ concert in Tel Aviv June 3rd during which you put on a spectacular performance to an effusive Israeli crowd. During the concert, Ms. Ferguson declared that Israel is “one of the most fun places on the planet.” Mr. Adams described the Peas’ time in Israel as “the best five days of our lives.” However, for your Palestinian fans living in the West Bank in Gaza, who are not allowed to travel to Tel Aviv to attend hip-hop shows, life under the thumb of Israeli occupation is anything but fun.

One day before Valentine’s Day, ‘Annan’s father went to his 13-year-old son’s school in Beitunia, Ramallah, and only found his oldest boy’s jacket and backpack on the school grounds. Along with four other boys ranging from the ages of 11 to 14, ‘Annan had been arrested by Israeli soldiers who gave him a beating that was evidenced in the bruises seen by his parents when they were finally able to see him only briefly during ‘Annan’s 15-minute court hearing two days later. He told them that the soldiers beat him with their fists and feet, as well as the butts of their guns.

The spirit of resistance has not been beaten out of Jenin, was the message at the opening of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp last weekend. Calls by speakers for the Palestinians to stand firm despite Israeli and American pressure resonated with the crowd, men on one side of the hall and women and children on the other. On one of the walls of the theatre hangs a series of photographs of the original theatre created by the late Arna Mer Khamis. Witnessing the devastating affects of the first intifada on children, Arna created a series of creative programmes to give beleaguered Palestinian children a means of expressing themselves.

Palestinians in the occupied territories are gripped to see who will enjoy the majority of the seats in the council — the ruling party Fateh or the Islamist opposition movement Hamas. Fateh has lost a great deal of support after ten years of failed negotiations with Israel, a drastic deterioration of the severe humanitarian situation endured by West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, and widespread corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and failure to uphold the rule of law that has spilled out into the streets with sharpened lawlessness and vigilantism.

“What’s going on in that head and that mind?” an American news commentator asks during a montage of media reports on the kidnapping of eleven Israeli athletes by the Palestinian Black September group. The astonished newsman is questioning the Palestinian hostage takers who end up murdering their eleven captors during Germany’s botched rescue attempt. But Munich’s director Steven Spielberg, for now, is more interested in what’s going on in the mind of the Israeli agent in charge of the state’s response to the Munich killings. However, whether we really get into the minds of the unlikely group of Israeli Mossad agents who are assembled by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir to avenge the killings is debatable. It is mostly Spielberg’s moral dilemmas that we access, but not all the questions necessary to resolving his moral dilemma are posed.