Palestinians

The Guardian reports: The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is facing widespread condemnation and anger in the Palestinian territories and abroad after he publicly waived his right to return to live in the town from which his family was forced to flee in 1948, a repudiation of huge significance for Palestinian refugees. After his image was [...]

Reuters reports: Palestinians in the West Bank go to the polls on Saturday in long-delayed municipal elections that have already highlighted deep divisions in the occupied territory and stoked complaints about a lack of leadership. The October 20 ballot will hold up a cracked mirror to a political landscape clouded by financial crises, failure to [...]

Roger Waters, newest Jury member of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, explains why he supports the initiative.

Jillian Kestler-DAmours reports: For Palestinian farmer Esam Foqaha, agriculture is more than a profession, it’s a way of life. “Farming is not only a job. It’s our lifestyle and we will do it forever,” Foqaha said. Foqaha lives in Ein Al-Beida, a Palestinian agricultural village located in the West Bank’s northern Jordan Valley area. With [...]

David Shulman writes: In 1949, shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar—the doyen of modern Hebrew prose writers—published a story that became an instant classic. “Khirbet Khizeh” is a fictionalized account of the destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of all its inhabitants by Israeli soldiers in the course of the war. [...]

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means,” Michel Foucault wrote in “Society Must Be Defended” (2003), reversing Clausewitz’s well-worn dictum. Foucault’s point is that there is a continuous battle of sorts that takes place in times of peace, and the public space that hosts civil society, with all its depth, substance, [...]

Richard Sudan writes: Akram Rikhawi, one of many Palestinian political prisoners said to be held by the Israeli government, without charge and without seeing a trial, today will enter his 64th day on hunger strike. 64 days without food. As he does, 25 year old former Palestinian national team footballer Mahmoud Sarsak enters his 88th [...]

Amira Hass writes: A stout sense of humour and self-irony is the least most Israelis expect of Gazans. It is certainly true today, when they are spoken of almost solely through the hyperbole of military commentators who jump frantically from discussing the Iranian threat to the danger that the tiny, overcrowded, impoverished and besieged enclave [...]

Uri Avnery writes: On May 15, the anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, its Arab citizens observed a day of mourning for the victims of the Naqba (“catastrophe”) – the mass exodus of half the Palestinian people from the territory which became Israel. Like every year, this aroused much fury. Tel Aviv [...]

Neve Gordon writes: I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home. I grew up in the [...]