Photo: Palestinian waving flag at demonstration against occupation in West Bank.
The Israeli parliamentary Law Committee has recently approved a law proposal the (“Nakba bill”) that, if passed by the Knesset, would impose economic sanctions on the organizers of Nakba commemorations. Every year in May, Palestinians and supporters of their right of return commemorate the Nakba of 1948, which marks the single most traumatic and far-reaching event in the long and ongoing process of forced displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. Nakba commemorations are important events in Israel, where some 335,000 Palestinians, citizens of Israel, continue to be denied their right to return to their homes, lands and communities, and are forced to live as internally displaced persons within their own country.
Carleton students have released a report detailing how the Carleton University Pension fund invests in companies involved in violations of human rights and of international law.
The report was created by Students Against Israeli Apartheid (SAIA Carleton), who are launching a campaign to end Carleton’s unethical investments and adopt a socially responsible investment policy.
letter from Bil’in’s Abdallah Abu Rahmah was shared from his prison cell to his lawyers
Dear Friends and Supporters, It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. For those of us in Ofer, imprisoned for our protest against the wall, this victory makes the suffering of being here easier to bear. After actively resisting the theft of our land by the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements every week for five years now, we long to be standing along side our brothers and sisters to mark this victory and the fifth anniversary of our struggle.
Did you know that the Gaza Freedom March — a group of over 1300 peace activists from 43 countries — is protesting the continued siege of Gaza, on the anniversary of the brutal Israeli assault that killed over a thousand people last year? (There is also a separate effort to bring a convoy of relief aid to the Gazans, under the auspices of the group Viva Palestina).
Did you know that the Freedom March is now stuck in Cairo, because the Egyptian government has denied them permission to travel to Gaza? The Mubarak regime has its own issues with Hamas, and it is also dependent on U.S. economic and military aid. Israel and the United States don’t want the adverse publicity that the Freedom March might generate and are perfectly content to let the Gazans suffer, so needless to say Washington isn’t putting any pressure on Egypt to let the convoy through.
Nahr al-Bared, Lebanon – More than two years after their refugee camp was destroyed in a war between the Lebanese army and the Islamist militant group Fatah al-Islam, Nahr al-Bared refugees Wednesday witnessed the start of the camp’s reconstruction. Their relief is mixed with scepticism, however.
Established in 1949, the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon’s Akkar region has become home to more than 30,000 residents. In the summer of 2007, the camp was totally destroyed as the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) fought a group of well-equipped, mostly non-Palestinian militants who had taken over the camp.
Photo: Sabrien Amrov Solidarity demonstration with Palestine in downtown Montreal.
Ever since the Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip last December the global debate surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified with both sides upping the ante, and the stakes of the framing battle increasing almost daily.
One of the most recent — but almost totally unreported — developments in Canada is something called the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism (CPCCA). It is not an official parliamentary body but is a multi-party, voluntary association of 13 MPs. It is currently holding an inquiry into anti-semitism because, it says, “The extent and severity of anti-semitism is widely regarded as at its worst level since the end of the Second World War.”
1. The justification of the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions is quite simple and quite clear: the victims of a sovereign brutality instantiated in racial-military domination have come to an overwhelming consensus, in the very shadow of the state that has come to exemplify The State and its exception, that boycott is the most immediate form of international support they require. To be in solidarity with the Palestinian people is to enact and support the boycott. However, the significance of the boycott is a slightly more complicated matter. Arguments against the boycott that go beyond the rejection of whatever form either of criticism of Israel or Palestinian resistance or the sometimes open/sometimes veiled assertion of an assumed Israeli exception and exemption, focus on the negative impact the presumed isolation and withdrawal of support for Israeli dissidents will have, already a morally obtuse argument insofar as it shifts our primary political and ethical concerns away from the actual victims of racial-military domination.
November 14, 2009 Faster Times Interview with Palestinian Author Ghada Karmi
Ghada Karmi is a Palestinian physician and author based in London. Since her autobiography In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story was first published in 2002 by Verso Books, it has been translated into forty languages. The late Edward Said described the memoir as “…the story of a fascinating woman…humanly rich and interesting.” On a speaking tour throughout the US to promote the newly-released second edition of In Search for Fatima, Mrs. Karmi visited Columbia University at the behest of an Arab cultural group, Turath. While there, she sat down with TFT associate editor Aseel Najib to discuss her wok.
George Habash, the late leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), called China Palestine’s “best friend.” Indeed, he was on an official PFLP visit to China when the conflict between Palestinian forces and the Hashemite Kingdom erupted in Jordan in 1970, the events later known as “Black September.”
Habash had good reason to appreciate China’s friendship at the time. According to Dr. Yukiko Miyagi of the UK-based Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), one characteristic of the People’s Republic’s policy toward the Arab states and political movements in the 1960s was high-profile support for the Palestinian liberation movement.
