Israel’s Defense Minister Amir Peretz announced today that Israel is preparing a global “propaganda offensive” to counter the recent barrage of news reports and writings that condemned Israel for the recent killing of 10 civilians, including 5 children, on a Gaza beach. In political and media lingo this is called spin, to twist and turn an event so as to give an intended interpretation, and Israel excels at it. Sam Bahour writes from Ramallah/Al-Bireh, occupied Palestine. Read more about Israel Spinning Out of Control
Jonathan Cook’s new book “Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State” focuses attention on the descendants of Palestinians who managed to remain in “sovereign” Israel during the ethnic cleansing of 1948. In this book review, EI contributor Raymond Deane says Cook meticulously analyzes the political basis for the daily discrimination exercised by the Jewish state against its Arab citizens. Cook lays bare the Zionist ideal of a state that is racially pure, and demonstrates how successive generations of Israeli politicians and soldiers - the former tending to be enlisted from the ranks of the latter - have sought to bring about this regressive aim. Read more about Book Review: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State
We are writing you regarding the Black Eyed Peas’ concert in Tel Aviv June 3rd during which you put on a spectacular performance to an effusive Israeli crowd. During the concert, Ms. Ferguson declared that Israel is “one of the most fun places on the planet.” Mr. Adams described the Peas’ time in Israel as “the best five days of our lives.” However, for your Palestinian fans living in the West Bank in Gaza, who are not allowed to travel to Tel Aviv to attend hip-hop shows, life under the thumb of Israeli occupation is anything but fun. Read more about Black Eyed Peas: Celebrating South African freedom while normalizing Israeli apartheid
I have for years loved your clever musical routines. I first enjoyed you on NPR. My fiancé, shortly after we first began dating gave me a bunch of your CDs and actually took me to a New Year’s Eve performance in Rochester, NY, where I first saw you live. In more recent years, I have begun to wince whenever you refer to people of Middle Eastern origins, but since these slurs usually only appeared once in half hour radio shows, I let them slide. I left the theater that evening feeling deep grieved and angry. Read more about Open Letter to the Capitol Steps
Najwa Najjar’s short feature film, Yasmine’s Song, 2005, uses the story of Yasmine, a young Palestinian woman living in a small Palestinian village, to articulate the even greater difficulties Palestinians are facing as their land, villages, communities and families become increasingly divided by the wall. In her film, Najjar examines the stifling effects of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian life through the most universal subject, love. The narrative of the film revolves around the love story of Yasmine and Ziad (a young man from her village). Read more about Film Review: "Yasmine's Song"
Hoda, age 12, with her brothers and sisters, running happily, giggling, racing to reach the beach, her dad and mum busy carrying the picnic basket. It is Friday and Hoda’s family, like other Palestinians, were trying to enjoy a little fun. Suddenly, the moment shattered. An Israeli gunship suddenly fired at random against the beach, while army tanks fired artillery shells and Apache helicopters crossed the sky. 40 civilians were injured, 10 killed. I watched Hoda on the local TV, shocked, yelling, shouting, crying, “ya baba ya baba!” (“Dad, Dad!”). Read more about Gaza: On the beach
The tears have not yet left the innocent face of one astonished girl, Huda Ghalia, 12, who lost 7 members of her family yesterday, while they enjoyed their weekend at the shore in the town of Beit Lahia, north of Gaza. Huda and her sisters and brothers were happily enjoying their first weekend together without thinking of homework, as they recently completed their school exams. The Ghalia family went to a less populated area at the northern part of the beach, where white sand dunes and little wild plants were scattered. Read more about Black Weekend, Bloody Mud, and White Sand
Israel kills with purpose. Following the rise to government of the hard line Hamas movement to the Palestinian government, Israel is optimizing on the US led campaign to bring a full collapse of the democratically-elected Palestinian government, by killing on a daily basis of what the world’s media has sadly accepted as “targeted assassinations.” There is a clear political agenda in the latest round of Israeli attacks. Israel is begging for Hamas to react in kind by breaking its one sided truce that Hamas has held for over a year, despite Israel’s continued provocations. Sam Bahour writes from El-Bireh. Read more about Begging for a Response: Israel's ongoing air strikes on Gaza are politically motivated
I think that poetry tries to make a connection between the absences and the losses that I feel in my person, and make the connection to the body feeling detached or feeling displaced, and the reality of land and shelter and the idea of the continuity of citizenship and the idea of ancestry. I think reclaiming is an ambitious agenda - if you’re beginning to write a poem, will you actually be reclaiming the rights to a land or a nation and other rights to citizenship? So I think the work succeeds more when it’s about illuminating this detachment. Read more about Interview with Suheir Hammad
Lost in the discussion of peace processes, military raids, Qassam rocket fire and unilateralism carried out by the Israeli government for ‘security purposes,’ is the climate of fear that is the defining feature of Israeli and Palestinian life. It does more damage than anything else. The threat of coercion, of bureaucratic reprimand, the hold up of paperwork, the threat of home demolitions and a myriad of other policies force normal people in to silence even when their rights are violated. Read more about The Right to Live Without Fear
