The Shin Bet is possibly best known for its interrogation methods when extracting confessions from detainees. As Kimmerling notes, the most likely result will be a “professional studies” programme relating to the Shin Bet’s work. Such arrangements are nothing new in Israeli academia, Kimmerling points out. There are strong ties between the universities and the defence industry because “some university staff join academia after [military] service and careers in the defense establishment, and not all of them manage to ‘go civilian’.” Read more about Academic Boycott: Shin Bet training program highlights academic complicity with occupation
On Wednesday afternoon, 23-year-old Sama was stepping out of a taxi in Ramallah’s bustling Manara Circle, when machine gun fire erupted. An undercover Israeli Defense Force (IDF) kidnapping mission, aimed at a senior Islamic Jihad figure, had run amok. Sama took cover in a side-street as the events unfolded. It started with youths hurling stones at the IDF agents — they were disguised as locals — and setting their car ablaze. Within minutes, about 11 armored IDF jeeps arrived, surrounding the Lo’Lo’A building on Manara, where the agents supposedly were. Two IDF helicopters came on the scene to provide further backup as the IDF made its violent withdrawal. Read more about Summer Time and the Living's Uneasy
At the present, the Western world seems still under the spell of the legend of Ariel Sharon, who, so the story goes, has brought a gigantic change in Israeli policy - from expansion and occupation to moderation and concessions - a vision to be further implemented by his successor, Ehud Olmert. Since the evacuation of the Gaza Strip settlements, the dominant Western narrative has been that Israel has done its part towards ending the occupation and declared its readiness to take further steps, and that now it is the Palestinians’ turn to show that they are able to live in peace with their well-intending neighbor. Read more about Sharon's Legacy in Action
The Palestinian people have been longing for freedom and sovereignty since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. In 1917, the British colonial power at the time dominated historical Palestine, where the Jewish state was merely a dream in Jews’ minds around the globe and the Ottoman Empire was drawing to an end, the factors that made the Palestinians hope they would eventually have their own sovereignty on their own soil. Yet, amid such great expectations by the Palestinians, the British colonial government had promised the Jews, for free, ‘a national Jewish homeland’ in another people’s land, making the Jewish immigrants also hope of practicing some kind of sovereignty. Read more about A Tale of Palestinian Sovereignty
The Israelis call it a war, but it is really a contemptible and cruel cat and mouse game, with the mouse firmly held under the cat’s paw or locked up in a cage to which the cat has free and easy access. A case in point is Israel’s death squad murder of six Palestinians in Jenin and Qabatiya last week. Yet despite the odds stacked against them, writes EI contributor Rima Merriman, Palestinians know they have no option but to hold fast and continue to demand their rights under international law, and to figure out a way to make Israel pay a moral and material price for the destruction and suffering it is wreaking on them. Read more about A cruel cat and mouse game
Today marks the 58th anniversary of the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, also known as the Nakba. With millions still living under occupation or in exile, the Nakba or the Palestinian catastrophe remains at the heart of their national identity, argues Karma Nabulsi. The predicament of life under military occupation is usually recognised in principle, but life in exile has its own characteristics, and continues to create its own bitter experience for Palestinians. Read more about From Generation to Generation
The phrase “democratic elections” can be misleading in its positive connotation, especially when the countries where the elections take place are embroiled in conflict. In the Middle East, during the past six months, we have witnessed three sets of elections. Each has further entangled an already complex situation. There were the Iraqi elections in December 2005, then the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Authority (PA), and, in March, the Israeli elections. In the first two instances, the voting took place during or just after a bloody war; the elections aspired to usher in a new era of conflict resolution. Read more about Election Backlash: Iraq, Palestine and Israel
“Suppose I were to leave my office here in Chicago and walk the short distance to the kidney dialysis unit down the road and pull out the tubes to which four elderly patients were attached, making them seriously ill or killing them.” EI co-founder Ali Abunimah argues that this, effectively, is what the so-called international community is doing to Palestinians by cutting off aid in an attempt to blackmail Hamas into changing its policies. Reports from hospitals in Gaza say that at least four people have died due to lack of medicine due to Israeli closures and the EU aid cut off. Read more about Helping Israel kill Palestinians
While the Palestinians are manoeuvring feverishly in reaction to the latest developments dropped in their fishbowl, Israel quietly but forcefully continues its sustained policy of seizing and maintaining control over the West Bank, its land and natural resources. In face of this onslaught and international apathy and complicity, writes EI contributor Rima Merriman, pleading for fulfilment of international obligations to the Palestinians is pointless. Palestinians should put all their energies, instead, into finding ways to contain and reverse Israeli military practices that target their land and natural resources. Read more about Flattening the conflict
Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is playing a dangerous game, working at every level to undermine the democratically-elected Hamas administration in the Palestinian Authority. Hamas’ landslide election victory shocked the world and the Palestinian political establishment. Because Hamas won fair and square it has been hard for those unhappy with the result to overturn it outright. So a broad-based coalition of election result rejectionists presented Hamas with a long list of demands. That such a hostile siege and boycott should come from the usual suspects of Israel and its American and EU allies, as well as Kofi Annan’s discredited UN is no surprise in our unjust world. Read more about Abbas' Dangerous Game
