IMEU Institute for Middle East Understanding
Photo Essays
Ramadan is a sacred time of year for devout Muslims. The holy month began days after the Israeli military killed 62 protesters in Gaza’s Great Return March. Despite the sorrow over the killings, and despite the ongoing suffering Palestinians in Gaza experience due to the Israeli-imposed blockade, four hours daily of electricity, lack of drinking water, and chronic unemployment — families in Gaza still mark Ramadan with devotion, and with dignity.
on June 14, 2018
Monday should have been Hussein Madi’s 14th birthday. Instead, his family sat mourning him in a tent in Gaza. The boy was shot dead three days earlier by Israeli troops, his relatives say, the youngest of 30 Palestinians killed in an ongoing protest at the border with Israel.
on April 10, 2018
Bassem Tamimi’s voice sounded frail and exhausted when he answered the phone. He had been answering calls about his daughter’s arrest by Israeli Defense Forces for days, “They surrounded my home,” he told Yahoo News. “Between 3 and 4 a.m., they attacked the village.” His daughter, Ahed Tamimi, 16, was arrested last month in a pre-dawn raid on the family’s home. The arrest followed another video, posted to Facebook, of Tamimi protesting the Israeli occupation by slapping an Israeli soldier outside her house in Nabih Saleh.
on January 24, 2018
Videos
16-year-old Palestinian Ahed Tamimi hasn’t seen a day of freedom. She's spent her youth protesting a foreign army that has jailed, shot, and killed her unarmed relatives. After defending her home from Israeli invasion, she now faces years in prison. Imagine if this was your reality.
on January 17, 2018
hed Tamimi was 11 when I met her, a little blond slip of a thing, her hair almost bigger than she was. I remember her grimacing as her mother combed out the knots each morning in their living room. The second time I went to a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, the West Bank village where she lives, Ahed and her cousin Marah ended up leading the march. Not because they wanted to, but because Israeli Border Police were chasing everyone...
on December 24, 2017
As a new parent, I’m now alert to a substratum of media that passed below the radar of my younger, less narcissistic, self. In the space of mild leftist parenting, this means acquiring board-book samizdat such as Click Clack Moo (cows striking for workplace benefits), and A Rule is to Break (inculcating anarchist principles in pre-literate children.) Of course, the post-colonial space of this genre (Babar notwithstanding) is pretty unpopulated, so I was excited to spot P is for Palestine by Golbarg Bashi at my local Book Culture.
on December 20, 2017
Israel is a powerful nation with the most advanced and capable military in the Middle East. It is the single greatest beneficiary of American military assistance, receiving $3.8 billion, some 25 percent of its defense budget, from American taxpayers each year. The security of Israel is obviously important to the United States, with missile defense programs like Iron Dome and David’s Sling as success stories.
on December 11, 2017
On Tuesday, November 14, Representative Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced the “Promoting Human Rights by Ending Israeli Military Detention of Palestinian Children Act.” The eight original co-sponsors included Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This piece of legislation has attracted international attention—human rights groups such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker charity, and Amnesty International, have come out in support.
on November 16, 2017
As a Palestinian human rights defender, I have been arrested by Israel more times that I can count. I have been beaten, stripped and left outside in the cold, and my family has been threatened with violence. During one of my arrests in 2015, I spent five hours handcuffed to a toilet in a filthy bathroom. The soldiers would enter, cock their guns at me and yell, “I will kill you the way ISIS kills.”
on November 15, 2017