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
“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
Nick Pretzlik, now in Jenin, reports on local responses to the Road Map, noting that Palestinians “have suffered too much and too long to accept a plan which permits the apartheid walls and electrified fences to remain, a plan which leaves settler roads and key settlements in place, and allows Palestinian water resources, airspace and borders to remain under Israeli control. Even if the current generation can accept that, I doubt that their children will.” Read more about Peace is a long way off
The exhilaration of some over Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s utterance of the word occupation after over three decades of iron-fist military control of the Palestinian people and their land has, like Israel’s conditioned acceptance of the U.S.-drawn road map, received much undeserved credit. Samar Assad comments. Read more about Sharon's Unique Definition of Occupation
“It was an all too familiar scene in Afula on 19 May 2003. Screams, sirens and blood stained ground. When Hiba Daraghmeh detonated the explosives strapped around her just outside a shopping mall, she took the lives of three innocent people in a most brutal fashion. The American media was quick to report that the recent bombings would hurt the peace process, but they gave little note to the numerous obstructions that Ariel Sharon’s government has placed, or the Israeli army’s continued unprovoked attacks on Palestinian cities.” Ben Granby reports. Read more about Violence and the Road Map: The US Media's Double Standard
“The relocation policy of shifting the Bedouin population into official settlements has the added benefit of creating a cheap source of labour for the Jewish economy. Life for the Bedouins is made as difficult as possible in order to pressure them into making that move. With the help of the legal ‘hocus pocus’ involved with the 1965 Planning and Construction Law, Unrecognised Villages became ‘de-legalised’ — existing buildings were unable to obtain permits and those which already possessed them, schools for example, had them rescinded. Whole communities became illegal.” Nick Pretzlik details the vast array of injustices committed against Bedouin citizens of Israel since 1948. Read more about We reap what we sow
The Israel Democracy Institute presents its 2003 “Democracy Index” at a conference today. The Index concludes that “Israel is not a substantive democracy” and notes that “more than half (53%) of the Jews in Israel state out loud that they are against full equality for the Arabs; 77% say there should be a Jewish majority on crucial political decisions; less than a third (31%) support having Arab political parties in the government; and the majority (57%) think that the Arabs should be encouraged to emigrate”. EI founders Arjan El Fassed and Nigel Parry report. Read more about Israel discovers that democracy is not an Israeli value
ISM activist Tom Hurndall who was critically shot in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli sniper on 11 April 2003. The following speech was made by Sophie Hurndall, Tom’s sister at a Palestine Rally in Trafalgar Square, London, on 17th May 2003. Read more about Trafalgar Square speech by Tom Hurndall's sister Sophie
The soccer field at Haifa Sports Club was once full of the sounds of children playing. Now, this playground has been remade into a tent city for Palestinian families made homeless by war and prejudice. On the field stand 63 new, white tents set up by the Iraqi Red Crescent Society in order to lodge some 240 families left homeless since the collapse of the former government. Read more about Haifa Sports Club in Iraq: The Latest Palestinian Refugee Camp
“On May 9, 2003, at approximately 12:40 pm, the Israeli military entered the media office of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Beit Sahour, Palestine. Present were myself — Kristin Razowsky (“Flo”) — an international from Austrailia who is working with Human Rights Watch, and a local Palestinian woman from Beit Sahour.” Kristin Razowsky reports on her arrest and deportation. Read more about ISM: Report of the Beit Sahour IDF raid from Kristin Razowsky