Geography Archives: Palestine

The emergence of Arab art in New York City has surprised many.  Most importantly, the Made in Palestine exhibit, which opened at the Bridge Gallery in March of 2006, drew large crowds.  The battle of bringing the show to New York, however, was no surprise.  Fearing a strong backlash from the pro-Israel community, galleries and […]

[Since the initial publication of this essay in The Electronic Intifada (6 June 2005), Mahmoud Abbas has set a date for a “referendum”: 26 July 2006; and Hamas has called for its boycott.  After an Israeli attack that killed eight Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Hamas ended the truce mentioned below that had lasted for sixteen […]

  Introduction by Socialist ProjectThe passing of a resolution on 27 May 2006 by the Ontario Division of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in support of the Palestinian peoples has sparked a great deal of notice across the North American labour movement, and, indeed, the international labour movement.  Resolution 50 clearly states the case […]

MAY 6, 2006, New York City Stew Albert Photo by Robert Altman © 2006 Stew Albert was our troubadour, poet, writer, our cherished moral center. On May Day 1971, in Washington DC during the May Day antiwar demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of activists to shut down the city, Stew Albert and Judy Gumbo […]

5 June 2006 marks the 39th anniversary of the beginning of the war that led to Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  In observation of this event, the Institute for Middle East Understanding talked with five prominent Palestinians who have experienced the occupation since it began.  We asked them for their […]

In June 2004, the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), resolved to consider a phased, selective divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation.  Subsequently it came under intense pressure from Jewish organizations (and their allies) and will consider rescinding the resolution at the next General Assembly meeting on June 15-22 in Birmingham, Alabama.  To firm up […]

  The Palestinian gay and lesbian community has yet to leave the closet, but it’s on its way.  Today it’s possible to go to parties of gays from the Occupied Territories and see young residents of the West Bank perform drag.  They have not told their mother about this, but one day they intend to […]

At the annual convention of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario, held 24-27 May 2006 in Ottawa, the union passed a resolution of historic importance.  Resolution 50 — adopted unanimously by the 900 delegates at the largest convention in the union’s history — expressed support for the global campaign against Israeli apartheid.  The […]

Erik C. Nisbet & James Shanahan, “MSRG Special Report: Restrictions on Civil Liberties, Views of Islam, & Muslim Americans,” Media & Society Research Group, Cornell University, December 2004 Actual mass murderers are higher on my watch list than those who just think or shout hateful beliefs.  But you would be mistaken if you thought the […]

The present crisis concerning Iran’s nuclear program cannot be reduced to merely the ongoing rivalry between Tehran and Washington.  Rather, it reveals all the new parameters of the post-Cold War world order that American strategists want to avoid. Iran’s Machiavellian diplomatic brinkmanship has succeeded so far, not only because the Ahmadinejad administration is exploiting the […]

The aim of this paper is to try to understand the Israeli industrialists’ strategy in the globalization process in the course of the recent years.  The new strategy was implemented in the days of the first Intifada (the Palestinian uprising) in the late 80s.  At that time voices were heard in the Association of Israeli […]

On the 58th anniversary of the Nakba, or the “Catastrophe,” prominent Palestinians share their thoughts on the day when more than 700,000 of their brethren became refugees.  The Institute for Middle East Understanding asked the panel, ranging from business leaders to comedians, what comes to mind on the 58th anniversary of the Nakba and why […]

Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, the author’s mother, after the war in Austria.  She was in a Displaced People camp. Every night as we watched the news on television my mother would avert her eyes and raise her hand to block the screen when scenes from Vietnam flashed across it.  After a few moments the question would […]

You and your friends are invited to attend the San Francisco debut of HOPE UNDER SIEGE, a collaborative photo exhibition depicting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and people.

[John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s essay “The Israel Lobby” (London Review of Books 28.6, 23 March 2006) rekindled the smoldering controversy over the relations among US foreign policy, Israel, and the Israel lobby in the United States.  Norman G. Finkelstein‘s comment on the controversy below provides a very useful analytical perspective on the subject. — […]

The opening of the 39th Parliament of Canada on 3 April 2006 quickly revealed what should now be plain to all.  Under the Conservative Party leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canadians are faced with a government with an unambiguous right-wing agenda.  The outlines of the “Harperism” project can readily be discerned: there is a […]

A few years back, I was talking with a young socialist organizer about books.  He had just asked me why I wasted my time reading fiction when there was so much non-fiction that needed to be read.  Culture, I replied, reflects and illuminates a society just as much as, if not more than, history or […]

“Filipino writers in the Philippines [and the United States] have a great task ahead of them, but also a great future.  The field is wide open.  They should rewrite everything written about the Philippines and the Filipino people from the materialist, dialectical point of view — this being, the only [way] to understand and interpret […]

Michael Lerner, The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006). Jim Wallis, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005). Dearly beloved leftists and friends.  It’s 2006 and we’re gathered here together uncomfortably discussing why so few of us are […]

Men cannot be sacrificed to the machine.  The machine must serve mankind, yet the danger to the human race lurks, menacing, in the industrial region. — Scott Nearing, Poverty & Riches Scott Nearing was a frequent contributor to Monthly Review.   His column “World Events” ran in Monthly Review from 1953 to 1972. Bhagat Singh, 23 […]