13 June 2003
One week after the Aqaba summit, the Israeli-Palestinian death toll climbed into the dozens with no sign of the violence slowing. EI’s Ali Abunimah says that Sharon and Hamas have formed a strategic partnership against peace, but blame for the disaster does not stop with them. Read more about Enough blame to go around
11 June 2003
Israel is doing everything possible to derail the road map, and the Palestinians’ Mahmoud Abbas is powerless to stop them. Regular EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah argues that more concessions from a leader who already made too many will neither halt the bloodshed nore bring peace with justice. Read more about As the Road Map unravels...
10 June 2003
Following the 4 June Aqaba summit between President Bush and Israeli and Palestinian leaders, the US media fell quickly into the pattern of ignoring or severely downplaying Israeli attacks on Palestinians, and playing up Palestinian counterviolence as a threat to a budding “peace process.” The media, rather than correcting the record, simply amplify the distortions. Palestinians are unjustly blamed for ‘reigniting’ a cycle of violence that in reality never paused for a single day. EI’s Ali Abunimah reports. Read more about US media ignore Israeli violence after Aqaba summit
6 June 2003
The occupation of Palestine has festered for thirty-six years too long. Despite Canada’s official position that Israel must withdraw from all the land it occupied in 1967, the Canadian government has done nothing as Israel illegally installed entire cities on the territory it stole by force. Now, under the guise of security, the Israeli government is building a multi-billion dollar prison wall that will effectively annex up to 40 per cent of the West Bank, yet Canada remains silent. Gordon Murray from ISM Canada comments. Read more about Thirty-six years of silence
4 June 2003
President Bush’s two days of Middle East summitry are being hailed in the United States as a diplomatic and political triumph. And indeed even by bringing Arab and Israeli leaders to Sharm al-Sheikh and Aqaba, Bush did more than many people thought was possible. But, writes EI founder Ali Abunimah, the elation is likely to be short lived as the carefully crafted final statements by Bush, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinians’ Mahmoud Abbas paper over the lop-sided concessions made by each side. Read more about The Road Map: Where next after Aqaba?
4 June 2003
With the twin summits in Sharm Al Sheikh and Aqaba underway, many believe that the likelihood of a major breakthrough in the efforts to break the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence and resuming serious talks towards a settlement are realistic. Yet while optimism may be justified in the short run, regular EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah argues that it is only a matter of time before the whole scheme falls apart right in front of everybody’s wide open eyes. Read more about The Road Map -- a matter of time
Zababdeh, Palestine 1 June 2003
“The Easter tradition among the churches of Palestine and Israel is unique. On Holy Saturday, the day before Orthodox Easter, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the tomb of the Holy Sepulchre. After a moment of prayer, he emerges with the Holy Fire, passing it on by candle to the gathered faithful. From there, with shouts of Christos Anesti! (‘Christ is risen!’), it is spread to the churches of this land, a symbol of the miracle of resurrection spread throughout the world. In past years, someone would go down from Zababdeh to Jerusalem to bring the light back. It has been three years since that has happened because of travel restrictions on Palestinians in the occupied territories.” Elizabeth and Marthame Sanders, Americans living in a Christian Palestinian village in the West Bank, describe the twists and turns of an amazing journey under occupation. Read more about Holy fire
3 June 2003
Anti-Semitism, like some plague-inducing virus, is “evolving” — or so warns Holocaust scholar Daniel J. Goldhagen in the American Jewish weekly The Forward. According to the author, the lessons of the Holocaust are slowly being forgotten and a “free-floating” globalised hatred of Jews is being spread via the Internet and television. EI contributor Jonathan Cook looks at the realities. Read more about The new anti-Semitism?
31 May 2003
While working as a journalist in Israel, Patricia Naylor, a Canadian TV producer, met a number of Palestinian video cameramen and still photographers who cover the frequent clashes in Hebron. These journalists work for Western media companies. Cameramen Mazen Dana and Nael Shyouki of the British news agency, Reuters, and their colleagues are accustomed to the risks of photographing street protests and riots. But displaying their wounds, they all told Naylor they had become targets of Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets and even live ammunition. The excellent Frontline documentary is being rebroadcast on 5 June 2003 on PBS. Read more about PBS documentary "In the Line of Fire" to re-air on June 5th
30 May 2003
“On May 22, at 2 P.M., the lectures and the audience arrived at hall 715 in the university. The doors were locked. In the corridor stood the university’s chief of security forces and ten of his henchmen, all armed with pistols and walkie-talkies. I was pushed into a side room by the chief and his lieutenant and handed a personal letter from the president, Yehuda Hayut. This was done in front of my wife and my colleagues, who watched helplessly as the macabre scene unfolded. Outside the corridor, my wife heard two other lieutenants of the chief informing the president over their walkie-talkies, ‘We caught him!’ They also said to each other, ‘High time! They should do the same to all the leftist lectures in the university!’” Dr. Ilan Pappe, a professor at Haifa University, prevents a chilling account in clinical detail of heavy-handed repression of academic speech at his university. Read more about The President, the Dean, and the Historiography of 1948 Palestine