“As they mourn today’s anniversary of the birth of Israel, Palestinians find themselves living through a new disaster, a mismatched struggle with the Jewish state that threatens what they have accomplished in the past eight years.” — from “A Bitter Sense of Deja Vu for Palestinians,” by MARYCURTIUS, Los Angeles Times.
Of course Palestinians are not mourning the birth of Israel, but the uprooting of 800,000 Palestinans from their land in the Nakba. Read more about Nakba widely misrepresented as an anti-Israeli protest instead of a Palestinian commemoration
Following our April 12th Action Item #11, CNN yet again portrayed the Israeli occupation as a Palestinian point of view, in a April 26th report titled, “Israel celebrates independence, Palestinians mourn deaths”: “But the Palestinians blame Israel for the violence, saying they employ heavy-handed methods to control Palestinian protesters — and that the presence of Israeli troops in the West Bank and Gaza amounts to an occupation of Palestinian territory.” Read more about CNN refers to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of Israel
Where objectivity fails, investigative and feature-oriented journalism plays a potent role. On May 31, the New Yorker published Jeffrey Goldberg’s 21-page “Among the Settlers.” Unfortunately, his essay is not more than an attempt to legitimize Zionism, an ethnically exclusive colonial project, as a liberal idea. Moreover, by eliminating the legitimate and empirical arguments against Zionism, Goldberg leaves his readers with few moral conclusions. The direction he intends those conclusions to take is partly revealed in his omission of the most convincing anti-Zionist argument: the right of return. Read more about The New Yorker’s Israel: Where Objectivity Fails
With the construction of the ‘Separation Wall’ in the West Bank being brought before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, for the very first time an aspect of the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been transferred from the usual forums of international debate (the UN Security Council, General Assembly, and subsidiary bodies) to an international judicial body. This novelty raised considerable optimism on some sides. Andreas Mueller, argues however that these expectations have to be closely examined in view of the legal and political limits of the ‘World Court.’ Read more about Crippled Justice: Limping Towards the Wall
Like every other aspect of Palestinian life, art and culture, though not destroyed, have been crushed under the heavy weight of the Israeli occupation’s tanks and curfews. The documentary films Writers on the Borders and Remembering Palestine feature international writers and artists who visit Palestine and find a shocking landscape of destruction. But, as the narrator Dominique Dubosc explains in Remembering, the question is not so much one of succeeding to restart art schools in the West Bank and Gaza, as being there to bear witness. Read more about Film review: Remembering Palestine and Writers on the Borders
Boldly using one of the most misused words in the U.S. press as its title, a word that strikes at the greatest anxiety of Americans towards Islam, the new feature film Jihad! informs its viewers that what the word is really about is zeal and struggle. Following Ed, a young Palestinian New Yorker who struggles between his homeland’s tradition and the American lifestyle, the film stresses that the most important jihad is the struggle within oneself. Read the review of Palestinian-American Muhammed Rum’s film, to be premiered at the Chicago Palestine Film Festival this week. Read more about Film review: Jihad!
One year after the murder of activist Rachel Corrie by the Israelis in Gaza, her local community has not forgotten her. Ms. Corrie continues to inspire and lead in Olympia, it may even be possible that she has become more powerful in death than in life. There is some solace in this ability to affect change postmortem, to have truly achieved martyr status, but it is an aching solace tinged with loss. At the same time, there is this harsh and parallel realization that Olympia has lost but one life to the Occupation. It is sobering and hard to truly imagine the sorrow of the Palestinians who have lost so many and so much. candio. reports from Olympia. Read more about "In our hearts and in our work": The continuing influence of Rachel Corrie in Olympia
In the aftermath of the horror that has been visited upon Rafah over the past two weeks in particular but the past three years in general, Americans across the country are asking their congress people to stop military aid to Israel. On Friday 21 May 2004, there were sit-ins and other similar actions at congressional offices in San Francisco, Louisville, New Orleans, Albuquerque, Olympia, New York, and more. Following a week of calling representatives, Senators and the White House, Bostonians marched to the campaign office of John Kerry. Tom Wallace reports for EI. Read more about Taking a call for justice in the Middle East to Kerry's doorstep
