Recently, the Hudson Institute, a prestigious, academic think-tank in the United States, with an impressive list of associates though strongly pro-Israel roots, released a surprisingly amateurish report through its project ‘Eye on the UN’. The report criticises the United Nations for granting consultative status to the internationally respected Palestinian NGO Badil. As Yacoub Kahlen writes, their flimsy critiques are strong indications of the growing desperation amongst elite supporters of Israel that the Zionist lobby is losing the moral argument, and just like the NGO Monitor, the ‘Eye on the UN’ should not be taken seriously by anyone interested in serious analysis and a human rights perspective. Read more about Hudson Institute and 'Eye on the UN' join the ranks of gutter journalists
Azza El Hassan’s documentary Kings and Extras: Digging for a Palestinian Image chronicles the director’s journey on the trail of the lost PLO film archive that went missing in Beirut in 1982. Through the narratives of individuals whose interviews El Hassan feels can assist her with locating the lost archive, the film touches on several aspects of contemporary Palestinian life. The engaging documentary was featured in this year’s Chicago Palestine Film Festival, adding yet another dimension to the chronicling of Palestinian history. Read more about Film Review: "Kings and Extras": Digging for a Palestinian Image
This year at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival, the Balata Film Collective presented their thirty-one minute documentary Nour’s Dream. Through a visual journey of Palestinian history, culture, heritage and resistance the film demonstrates the imperative need for the documentation of Palestinian lives. As the fictional main character, Nour narrates the documentary by informing the viewer of the significance of stones within past and present Palestinian society. Read more about Film Review: The Balata Film Collective: "Nour's Dream"
If you keep lying long enough and with enough conviction, people start to believe you — or at least doubt the evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli army’s account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed, and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach in Gaza. The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing. The army’s case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western “thought” about Arabs and Muslims. Read more about The truth lies buried in Gaza sands
The screaming of 11 year old Palestinian Huda Abu Ghalia from Gaza seems not to have reached American officials. Huda’s parents and five siblings were killed before her eyes last week when Israeli artillery crashed onto the beach as they picnicked. The US was the only major power which not only refused to condemn the incident, but described it as “self defense.” Afterwards, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called Israel’s army the “most moral” in the world. Palestinian Central Election Commission Salfit coordinator, Fareed Taamallah, comments. Read more about America deaf to Palestinian screams
Some weeks ago I heard Jan Wijenberg, a retired Dutch Ambassador, speak about what the International Community could do to break with its complicity to the ongoing violations of international law and human rights by the Israeli regime. Wijenberg served over a decade as an ambassador for the Dutch government in Jemen, Tanzania and Saudi Arabia. He regularly writes to Dutch ministers and politicians to remind them of the responsibility of the Dutch government and the EU to hold Israel accountable to international law. His views are expressed in this article. Read more about Former Dutch Ambassador Calls for Sanctions if Israel Refuses to Comply with International Law
One of the most important measures that the Israeli and Palestinian architects of the Oslo agreement took in order to guarantee the structural survival of what came to be known as the Oslo “peace process” was the creation of structures, institutions, and classes, that would be directly connected to it, and that can survive the very collapse of the Oslo agreement itself while preserving the “process” that the agreement generated. This guarantee was enshrined in law and upheld by international funding predicated on the continuation of the “Oslo process”… Read more about The (Anti-) Palestinian Authority
A family is an entire world. But instead of making every effort to guard the right to a family life, the High Court of Justice decision regarding the petitions against the Citizenship Law confirmed the invasion, rending and destruction of this personal world by the state. This is a generalization, since in Israel of 2006 the right to a family life is recognized as a constitutional right, which is entitled to protection from invasive harm on the part of the state. But that is not the case when it comes to Israel’s Arab citizens who have chosen to marry partners from among their people who live under Israeli occupation. At least not according to the opinion of the majority in the High Court, which was written by the outgoing deputy president of the Supreme Court, Mishael Cheshin. Read more about Constitutional chauvinism
As a citizen of the United States, I have been an activist working to end US support for Israel’s occupation. With other anti-occupation activists, I demonstrated and wrote repeatedly against the Iraq war before it began. But once it was underway I had to make a difficult decision; would I continue as before, or focus on the long fight against our crimes in Iraq? The thought of becoming yet another person to abandon the Palestinians was abhorrent. So I stayed at my post. It remains a difficult decision today, but I do not regret it. Read more about On Boycotts, Activism and Moral Standards
“When I was a boy, my family received a bag of flour from the United States,” tells Musa Taha, a Palestinian farmer from the village of Qatanna. It was right after the Nakba or “Catastrophe” of 1948 that left between 750,000 and 900,000 Palestinians as refugees, expelled from their homes and dispossessed of their land, that Musa remembers receiving this gift. He vividly remembers the sacks themselves and the picture on the front of two clasping hands with the label “A present from the people of the U.S.A. to the Palestinian people.” Read more about Where is the hand? The shifting of Middle East perceptions toward America
