Much as I welcome the proliferation of articles on saving the ruins of Lifta from the Israeli development industry, I would much rather read articles that focus on saving these ruins for the purpose of reconstruction by their rightful owners, many of whom are just waiting for such an opportunity, armed with deeds and architectural plans, only a stone’s throw away.
The articles one reads now advocating against Israel’s plans to hand over the site to developers seem to stress the idea that saving the ruins of Lifta from demolition will serve to enrich Israel’s cultural and historical “heritage.” …
The last thing Palestinians need is to come to terms in sorrow with our dispossession at the hands of the apartheid, settler-colonial Jewish state. The last thing we need is to be resigned to “facts on the ground.”
The most recent piece in Haaretz (this one by Gideon Levy and Alex Levak) on the violently depopulated Palestinian village of Lifta laments the impending demise of the ruins of what remains of the ancient Palestinian village and, by extension, all of Palestine. It reads like an elegy. …
Today, June 15, 2021, Israeli Jewish supremacists are marching in East Jerusalem as Palestinians call for a ‘Day of Rage’ in response.
“We call on all free people everywhere to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and its just cause and end the Israeli aggression on our people and holy places,” The Committee of Islamic and National Groups stated. “Let the world know that the continuous Israeli violations in Jerusalem will remain to be the trigger, which sparks the fight.”
Palestinians see the Israeli annual raid of the Old City (including the Haram al-Sharif complex, where al-Aqsa mosque is…
The latest crisis in Palestine cannot be set aside as another passing episode in Israel’s forever war against the Palestinian people.
We are now witnessing shocks within Israel behind the Green Line, something that Israel had hitherto been able to contain. In the process, it pretended, along with much of the western world, that it is the “longest-lived democracy in the Middle East” and that only its continued occupation of the West Bank and its harsh blockade of Gaza undermine its “constitutional ideals”- ideals now exposed for what they’ve always been: Jewish supremacist in nature.
We know, as CJ…
Pain mixed with hope; defiance in the face of unimaginable odds; celebrities show solidarity with Palestine; large protests held in solidarity with Palestinians around the world; Palestinians strike across all of occupied Palestine from the river to the sea; intifada everywhere; a sea change in public perceptions of Palestine and Israel, so much so that NPR this morning called Hamas a “Nationalist Palestinian” movement, instead of the usual “terrorist” designation.
Designations in the media matter enormously. This is the fourth destructive Israeli war on the Gaza Strip since December 27, 2008 (lasting 22 days). Distorted takes on Israel’s brutal attacks…
After Heike Schotten, Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMB), co-organized and moderated a webinar at the University of Massachusetts Boston entitled We Will not Be Silenced: The Repression of Academic Freedom and Resistance, from Leila Khaled to UMass Boston, UMB’s public records access office received a request from the Zionist Advocacy Center in New York “pursuant to the provisions of the Massachusetts Public Record Law” for emails from and to the webinar participants that use the terms “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Leila Khaled,” or “We Will Not Be Silenced” between June 1, 2020-October 25, 2020.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) has come a long way since its liberal Zionist days, finally declaring its anti-Zionist position, and has since been a staunch supporter of the Palestinian cause. But apparently there are still limits.
These limits surfaced in a recent meeting between JVP’s Executive Director Stefanie Fox and Professor Rabab Abdelhadi of AMED Studies, SFSU on the issue of Zoom’s censorship of a scheduled event by Abdelhadi.
“Is JVP National willing to help us liberate Palestine but only if we conduct our liberation struggle peacefully”?
In September, I wrote about the abrupt cancellation by Zoom, Facebook and…
As he enters his 20th year in Israeli jails on charges of leading the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (the armed wing of the Fatah movement), many Palestinians are still turning their eyes toward Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian Fatah Central Committee member and lawmaker, to lead them out of the quagmire of Oslo and the Zionist colonization and occupation of Palestine.
Nine years ago in April 2012, I was teaching at Al-Quds University when then President Sari Nusseibeh spoke at a seminar held on campus about the inspiration, hope and sumoud that Barghouti’s resistance represented in the Fatah movement, and indeed, his…
Chances are, you are unaware that Palestinian elections are in the offing. But if you are following them, there is a lot to ponder.
If you are like me, you followed the US elections with disbelief, and now, things are “back to normal.” You followed the Israeli elections with disgust, and now, “safely past another election, Israel turns attention back to de-Arabization of the Zionist state.”
As Miko Peled writes: “The Zionists openly say that they will allow Palestinians to choose whether they remain in “Israel” as residents without rights, leave, or fight and be killed by the Israeli forces…
For Palestinians, it takes a lot of courage to say, “Let’s talk about what Zionism means to Palestinians… We are not allowed to question the concept of Jewish self-determination in historic Palestine,” as Dima Khalidi, founder and director of Palestine Legal expresses below in an excerpt from a webinar hosted by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, USACBI, titled: “Weaponizing anti-Semitism: IHRA and Ending the Palestine Exception.” And once we say it, we are not allowed to boost it.
In the two-minute video clip excerpt I boosted, Khalidi is discussing how the IHRA definition…
Rima Najjar
Palestinian and righteously angry
