Perspectives
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…
Expert Q&A: Israel’s Latest Attack on Gaza
Expert: Tareq Baconi Israel/Palestine analyst for the International Crisis Group, policy member for Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, and author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance from Stanford University Press (2018). Q&A Q: This latest escalation of violence began when Israel assassinated a leader of Islamic Jihad in Gaza early on Tuesday. Why do…
Expert Q&A: On the Latest Hunger Strike by Palestinian Political Prisoners
Expert: Qadura Fares, Director of the Palestinian Prisoner's Club. Q&A Q - The hunger strike by Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails is now in its fourth week. How many prisoners are currently on hunger strike and what are their demands? Qadura Fares - “It is difficult to say how many are on strike because we have been unable to visit the prisoners. However, according to the…
Expert Q&A: On the Final Obama-Netanyahu Meeting
Expert: Diana Buttu Ramallah-based political analyst and former advisor to Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian negotiators. Q&A Q - According to media reports, President Obama used today's meeting to press Netanyahu on Israel's construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land, which violate longstanding US policy and international law, as part of…