The French Ministry of Health, the French State Secretariat for Victims and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs are co-sponsoring an international congress entitled ‘The Place of Children in the Space of Conflict’, to be held in Toulouse, France on the 21-23 of March 2005. The primary purpose of the conference is to draw attention to the suffering of Israeli children, to the exclusion of serious and needed attention to other children living in war and conflict, the context within which these children suffer, and the reason for their suffering. Read more about Protesting 'The Place of Children in the Space of Conflict' conference
Sixty-two-year-old Shafiqa Massoud is, for all intents and purposes, the head of the household. Hers is a typical peasant family that lives in the Qalqilya area directly up against the Green Line. Her husband, 66-year-old Amin Hindi is unemployed due to chronic illness and her four children are all married. In all, her extended family comprises 27 members. The rainy season should have been the best time of the year for farmers like Shafiqa’s family. But in Qalqilya, the season brought more hardship than joy this time around. Israel’s separation barrier, in this area an eight-meter high wall, formed a concrete dam, trapping the water and preventing it from flowing out west. Read more about "Damming" West Bank farmers
UNESCO’s recent support for establishing a joint Palestinian-Israeli scientific organization placies the organization at odds with the decision of the Palestinian Council for Higher Education which has repeatedly rejected “technical and scientific cooperation between Palestinian and Israeli universities.” This move also conflicts with the Palestinian call for boycotting Israeli academic institutions which was endorsed by tens of the most important unions, associations and organizations in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, including the Federation of Unions of Palestinian Universities’ Professors and Employees. This open letter to UNESCO challenges the move. Read more about Between South Africa and Israel: UNESCO's Double-Standards
On the morning of Friday, February 25, 2005 a group of approximately 300 Israelis, Palestinian refugees and international activists gathered near the highway leading out of Jerusalem towards Tel Aviv. In the valley below lay the ruins of the ancient Palestinian village of Lifta. The event was part tour, part protest, and part homecoming. It had different meanings for each of the groups involved. The organization responsible for planning the event, Zochrot (Hebrew for “Remembering”) takes Israelis on tours of depopulated and partially destroyed Palestinian villages. They bring Palestinian refugees to tell the stories of their village and plant signs in Arabic and Hebrew that explain what happened there. This event, however, was also a protest aimed at stopping the impending demolition of what remains of Lifta. Read more about Ethnic Cleansing 101: The Case of Lifta Village
On 8 February 2005, Jewish Voice for Peace Co-director Liat Weingart and Israeli human rights attorney Shamai Leibovitz spoke to an audience of members of the Presbyterian Church in Chicago. JVP was the first Jewish group to publicly support the Presbyterian Church’s decision to investigate selective divestment. “There is a silent majority of Jews in the US,” said Weingart, “who feel completely alienated from mainline Jewish groups because those groups are no longer in line with their central beliefs of justice and equality.” Read the transcript. Read more about Speaking to the Presbyterians About Selective Divestment
Michael F. Brown, Ali Abunimah and Nigel Parry1 March 2005
The population of Palestinians living in Israel, the Occupied Gaza Strip, Occupied East Jerusalem and rest of the Occupied West Bank combined now exceeds the number of Israeli Jews, a U.S. government report has revealed. The Palestinian population stands at more than 5.3 million while the Jewish population stands at 5.2 million. The figures come from the U.S. State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. The report provided population figures for each of these territorial units separately but failed to connect all the dots to arrive at the explosive new demographic reality. Read more about EI EXCLUSIVE: Palestinian population exceeds Jewish population says U.S. government
Montreal, Monday, February 27th, 2005 — After taking sanctuary at the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce church in Montreal more than one-year ago, the Ayoub family - Khalil Ayoub, 67, Nabih Ayoub, 69 and Thérèse Boulos Haddad, 62 - have won their battle to remain in Canada. In the context of this concrete victory, the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees stresses the importance of continuing to build public support and solidarity with ongoing struggle of more-than 100 Palestinian refugees, who continue to face deportation from Canada. The Ayoub family’s victory brings a sense of hope and inspiration to the ongoing struggle. Read more about Ayoub family's appeal against deportation from Canada accepted
On 5 April 2003, in the West Bank city of Jenin, Israeli troops fired at Brian and another ISM volunteer from an armored personnel carrier (APC). They were standing still, wearing bright red medic vests with their hands over their heads, when soldiers opened fire without any warning shots. Brian suffered serious damage to the entire left side of his face, jaw, mouth, teeth, nose, and eyes. He has undergone more than six reconstructive surgeries totaling over $1,000,000 in medical expenses. Two years later, Brian has returned to Israel to demand a criminal investigation be opened into the shooting, after an internal military inquiry found that the incident in which Brian was shot, never occurred. Read more about Brian Avery's day in Israel's Supreme Court
Following the recent meetings between the Palestinian and Israeli authorities, the struggle for an independent Palestinian state will probably move to the political and diplomatic front. In this new phase, the role of the international community will be of utmost importance for a successful outcome. Therefore, there exists an urgent task for Palestinian NGOs and leaders to capture world support for the Palestinian cause. Sietse Bosgra considers international opinion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the importance of international solidarity movements and the need for more mobilised activism through the Western media. Read more about Lessons from the struggle against Apartheid
Though the Security Council has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security,” it has not been able to address and resolve a number of conflicts, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the conflict in Darfur. No party in these crises has taken adequate measures to ensure the cessation of violence against civilians in spite of the many assurances made. Over 20 months since they were burned out of their villages and after numerous promises from the Government of Sudan and world leaders, people’s lives are still under daily threat. EI’s Arjan El Fassed recently visited various camps and towns in Darfur. Read more about Darfur, another failure of the international community
