Geography Archives: Israel

The Maqusi Towers in Gaza City look a bit like US housing projects.  The neighborhood consists of several tall apartment buildings grouped together in the northern part of town.  It is also ground zero for Gaza’s growing Hip-Hop community.  On a recent evening in one small but well-decorated apartment, a dozen rappers and their friends […]

June 4, 2009 Chomsky, whose recent books include Interventions and The Essential Chomsky, sent the following to the Institute for Public Accuracy this morning: “A CNN headline, reporting Obama’s plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads ‘Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.’   Perhaps that captures his intent, but more […]

June 2, 2009 Mr. President, The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS) hopes that your speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds will contain practical steps to uphold your administration’s stated intention to seriously deal with the problems that have inflamed resentment and fostered a sense of humiliation among peoples, individuals, and ethnic and […]

Member of the Knesset, Dr. Afo Agbaria (Hadash fraction) on Wednesday (June 3, 2009) wrote to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, asking that he be allowed to assist the UN investigation on war crimes during the Israeli military’s Operation “Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip.  International prosecutor Richard Goldstone and his team of investigators arrived […]

More than four months after Gaza was devastated by a massive Israeli military bombardment, rebuilding has been slow to come.  The problem is not a lack of funding or will.  However, an Israeli-led blockade has kept all rebuilding materials, including concrete or any tools that could be used to rebuild the hundreds of homes and […]

Talks between Barack Obama and the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships over the past fortnight have unleashed a flood of media interest in the settlements Israel has been constructing on Palestinian territory for more than four decades. The US president’s message is unambiguous: the continuing growth of the settlements makes impossible the establishment of a Palestinian […]

Chicago, IL (June 3) — For the sixth year in a row, members of Jewish, Christian, and human rights organizations will be present at Caterpillar, Inc.’s annual shareholder meeting to demand that Caterpillar end its complicity with violations of human rights and international law in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. Concerned […]

  Labour for Palestine is pleased to announce the second issue of Jafa – Labour Bulletin in Solidarity with Palestine. This second issue has a special focus on Israel’s war on Gaza.  We publish here a range of solidarity resolutions that were passed by unions around the world, analysis of the aftermath, and discussion around […]

  Dear friends, The solidarity struggle with Palestinian theatre-artist and activist Samieh Jabbarin, who is still under house arrest in Um Al Fahm, has gained significant resonance in the past two weeks thanks to the publication of journalist Aviva Lori’s extensive coverage of the affair in Haaretz weekend supplement in Hebrew (22.5.09) and English (28.5.09).  […]

May 28, 2009 If the Oval Office guest list is an indicator, President Obama is making good on his commitment to try to revive the long-dead Arab-Israeli peace process.  On May 18 President Obama received Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu; today he met with Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. As […]

  Here we publish an interview with Farian Sabahi, an Italian-Iranian professor at Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Turin.  A professional journalist, Sabahi has been writing for Corriere della Sera for several months.  She was a guest of LibrInTerra on the 26th of March, presenting her two books Storia dell’Iran [A History […]

Would Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu say the magic words “two states” after his meeting with President Obama?  All Israel held its breath.  (He didn’t).  The gap between the two is wider than those words could ever have bridged, however.  Obama, I believe, sincerely — perhaps urgently — seeks a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, a […]

The Israeli cabinet has voted yesterday (Sunday, May 24, 2009) in favor of a racist proposal to ban Nakba commemorations.  Many Arab-Palestinians commemorate the proclamation of the state of Israel as Nakba, the Arabic word for disaster. In the proposal, anyone participating in the commemoration of 15 May 1948 could face a three-year prison sentence.  […]

The Israeli government took this week a new measure in its attempt to suppress democratic rights in Israel.  The government has approved a bill banning all commemoration of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, under penalty of Imprisonment.  The bill is yet to pass in the Israeli parliament, subject, for now, to heavy criticism from many […]

  Enormous resources have been marshaled by conservative and Zionist organizations in an attempt to silence criticism of the Canadian government’s unwavering support for Israel.  The first few months of 2009 have seen a concerted campaign to shut down Palestine advocacy in Canada.  Such examples include: cutting funding to the Canadian Arab Federation (CAF) due […]

  Elkalam.com talks with Nadine Rosa-Rosso, former secretary general of the Parti du Travail (Workers’ Party) of Belgium, who has launched a Europe-wide campaign to remove Hamas from the list of terrorist organizations.  She explains the reasons for this initiative today. Why did you decide to launch an appeal for the removal of Hamas from […]

  My computer, today, is still at Tel Aviv police headquarters where it stayed after my two-hour interrogation last week.  I am not given, I believe, to conspiracy thinking but the thought crossed my mind, comically rather, whether I’d ever written anything unkind about my neighbor or his family. This morning, when I brought my […]

The United Nation’s watchdog on torture has criticized Israel for refusing to allow inspections at a secret prison, dubbed by critics as “Israel’s Guantanamo Bay” and demanded to know if more such clandestine detention camps are operating. In a report published on Friday, the Committee Against Torture requested that Israel identify the location of the […]

  The East Palestine Archipelago Above: Imagined map by Julien Bousac, graphically illustrating the Palestinians’ difficulty in getting around.  All the zones of the West Bank occupied by Israel are pictured as the sea.  Left: The legend of the map in English. Source: L’Atlas, Un monde à l’envers, Paris: Le Monde diplomatique, 2009. Download the […]

Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009). This book is a disgrace. It is difficult to understand why a reputable publisher like Yale University Press would wish to have its name on a book that is so dishonest, ill-informed, and pursues an obvious political agenda.  Perhaps the clue […]