Perspectives
Biden’s Monumental Hypocrisy on Palestine
Fiercely attacking the George W. Bush administration’s case for what he called a “Hiroshima-style” aggression on Iraq in 2003, Edward Said wrote that the U.S. position was “monumentally hypocritical” for accusing the Iraqi regime of atrocities and crimes that had been “the stock in trade of every Israeli government since 1948.” The diametrically opposite U.S. positions on Palestinian…
Rep. Khanna: We Need Accountability, not Photo ops that Whitewash Israeli Apartheid
Earlier this month, Amnesty International joined a growing consensus among Palestinian, Israeli, and international human rights organizations that Israel practices apartheid toward the Palestinian people. “Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinian people wherever it has control over their rights,” the largest grassroots human rights organization in the world…
Israel Must Release Shatha Odeh and Other Palestinian Political Prisoners
Today, seven months after her arrest on July 7, 2021, Health Work Committees (HWC) director Shatha Odeh, my mother, is still held in Israeli detention. Her imprisonment and military trial resemble yet another frustrating spectacle of an inherently discriminatory Israeli judicial system against the Palestinian people, including leading civil society actors like Shatha as part of a wider escalating…
The US and International Community Must Force Israel to Reverse its Unprecedented Attacks on Our Organizations and Palestinian Civil Society
Israel’s decision, announced on Friday, to designate our Palestinian civil society organizations and two others as “terror organizations” represents a dangerous escalation of its longstanding efforts to silence criticism of its colonization of Palestinian land and apartheid system. It is part of a larger campaign of repression and intimidation intended to suffocate Palestinian civil society…
New York State Should Revoke Charitable Status of Groups that Fund Extremist Israeli Settlers
I have never known freedom. Not one day. I was born in Atuwani, a village in the West Bank shaped by Israeli military occupation and settler violence. Every day we risk beatings, incarceration, or even death, just to harvest our fields, graze our livestock, and build our homes. If you go to YouTube and search “settler violence, South Hebron Hills” you will see page after page of video…
Israel Is Imprisoning Palestinian Healthcare Workers, Including Our Mother and Sister, During a Pandemic
Imagine that in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, a nurse and human rights leader working to provide healthcare in your community is arrested and imprisoned by a hostile foreign occupying army. This we need not imagine in Palestine — under Israel’s oppressive, more than half-century-old military rule, it is our reality. Two months ago today, on July 7, Israeli soldiers barged into the home…
The Ceasefire Doesn’t End the Suffering of Palestinians in Gaza
Ceasefire. It may seem like a success of international diplomacy, and though Palestinians are celebrating, it is also a moment of mourning, reflecting, and reckoning. For the first time in weeks, Palestinians in Gaza can finally exhale the breath they held in tight, bracing for earth-shaking, soul-crushing explosions. And Palestinians outside of Palestine can also take comfort in the fact that…
No President Biden, Israel Cannot be “Jewish and Democratic”
In recent weeks, as violence flared across the region sparked by Israel’s attempts to expel Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem and provocations in Al Aqsa Mosque, Palestinian citizens of Israel were brutally assaulted by mobs of extremist Israeli Jews encouraged by hateful-anti Arab incitement from Israeli officials and even some media outlets. Peaceful protesters demanding…
Life in Gaza: Diary of a Survivor
Ceasefire. The bombs have stopped for now, and Palestinians in Gaza, my home, are slowly coming up for air, grateful they made it out alive. Many of us lost loved ones, our homes. I may be young, but I have now survived four of Israel’s wars on Gaza. You might say we have collective PTSD, but here, the trauma is never post; it’s ongoing. My city looks like a scene from a horror film; rubble…
Biden Should Support the ICC Probe into War Crimes in Israel/Palestine
Prosecution and persecution are not the same thing, although it is a standard dodge of the guilty to claim otherwise. That appears to be so of Israel’s protest against an investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced recently into possible war crimes committed by Israel in the occupied Palestinian Territories. Predictably, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked…