Let’s refresh our memory. It all started last December, when Olmert met Abbas. Olmert promised to remove checkpoints in the West Bank: “I intend to personally supervise it,” he told Abbas, “so that the Palestinian society would feel the relief” (Ha’aretz, Dec. 24, 2006). The same day, Ha’aretz reported that Defense Minister Amir Peretz and his deputy Ephraim Sneh were actually working on a plan to facilitate Palestinian movement in the West Bank. The two must have spent the whole night in their office, devising a plan for dismantling not less than “45 out of approximately 400 checkpoints.” Read more about The Legend of the Removed Checkpoints
BINTJBAIL, 23 April 2007 (IPS) - Eight months after Israeli attacks left devastation across many villages in southern Lebanon, reconstruction comes with mounting anger towards both Israel and the central Lebanese government.The war which raged between Israel and Hezbollah Jul. 12 to Aug. 14 last year destroyed many villages in the south, and left others badly damaged. Starting from within hours of the ceasefire, about a million people who had fled southern Lebanon began to return, many to wrecked homes. Read more about Tempers Rise Over Reconstruction
The title of Joseph Massad’s book The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians does not do justice to the contribution this book makes to the history of Zionism, Israel, and the Jews. Massad’s brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions. Read more about Interdependent Palestinian and Jewish Histories
What role can music play in confronting the Israeli occupation? This is the question posed yet not definitively answered in Helena Cotinier and Pierre-Nicolas Durand’s documentary It’s Not a Gun, which follows Palestinian musician Ramzi Aburedwan as he realizes his dream of establishing a music education school in Palestine as part of his al-Kamandjati (meaning “the violinist”) project. Ramzi, who grew up in Ramallah’s Al-Amari refugee camp, says, “I spent my whole childhood during the first intifada throwing stones. And then, by chance, I had the [opportunity] to play music.” Read more about Film Review: "It's Not a Gun"
The following is a speech given by Sam Bahour at the Second Annual Conference on Non-Violent Popular Resistance in the Palestinian village of Bil’in. “Israel is making sure land is not sufficient for daily life, let alone economic independence. The hand of occupation controls the lands we can cultivate and the destiny of the trees that we plant. We are forced to buy our water from the Israeli water company, paying more than Israelis buying from the same source but using less per capita.” Read more about Building Economic Independence in Palestine
The latest back and forth between Israel and the Palestinian unity government (and its regional interlocutors) will not bring peace to fruition. Many respected commentators in the Middle East have accused Israel of rejecting peace, primarily due to its refusal to fully embrace the Arab peace initiative. Yet this initiative, when entered into the international community’s trash compactor of “pragmatism,” will leave the Palestinian people with nothing more than an old, albeit neatly packaged, version of the Oslo Accords. Read more about The Perils of Pragmatism
In the midst of the relentless daily hardship that they endure, a Palestinian sports commentator says of his own people that they will drop everything they are doing to watch their beloved national soccer team play. He describes the Palestinian national team’s bid to qualify for the World Cup in 2006 as “one of our most beautiful dreams.” The commentator’s words set the tone for the documentary film Goal Dreams (directed by Maya Sanbar and Jeffrey Saunders). Read more about Film Review: "Goal Dreams"
Once again the play My Name is Rachel Corrie has been cancelled, this time in South Florida. In New York and Toronto the play was cancelled due to pressure from the Jewish community or those that claim to speak for the Jewish Community. The play was successfully staged in NYC at the Minetta Lane theater. It is currently enjoying an extraordinary run at the Seattle Repertory Theater and many more are planned. Wherever it has been staged, there has been support from the Jewish community as well as criticism. The Jewish community is not monolithic and no one speaks for “it,” though many claim to. Read more about Rachel's Words Silenced Again
UMMNASSER, 16 April 2007 (IRIN) - Hundreds of Bedouin families living in tents after their north Gaza village was flooded with sewage are in urgent need of medicine and blankets, the UN and local doctors have warned. Three hundred families are living in tents pitched on high ground near Umm Nasser, the village that was flooded after a filtration basin broke, sending thousands of cubic metres of sewage into the village on 27 March. Five residents were killed in the flood and 18 more were injured. Read more about Evacuated sewage disaster victims need medicine and blankets
The Israeli state and the Zionist movement have begun their latest assault in their century-long struggle to rid Palestine of its indigenous people and transform their country into a Jewish supremacist enclave: the persecution of Azmi Bishara, one of the most important Palestinian national leaders and thinkers working today. This case has enormous significance for the Palestinian solidarity movement. Bishara is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, one of more than one million who live inside the Jewish state, who are survivors or their descendants of the Zionist ethnic cleansing that forced most Palestinians to leave in 1947-48. Read more about What the persecution of Azmi Bishara means for Palestine
