Articles |

Nov 24

A desperate throw of the dice

Thirty years ago, Israel minister Ariel Sharon told Knesset members that while they “shouted” about the settlements, “we lay another foot of pipe, another mile of road and build another house.” Successive Israeli governments have agreed with the country’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion’s own view that the “precondition for discussion with the Arabs” is to “establish a great Jewish fact in this country.” Now, however, the talk is of Palestinian “unilateralism.” This began with the appointed Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announcing his two-year plan for statehood in August, but has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks. Fayyad’s plan is still on the table, and although he has stressed that the emphasis is on institution-building, some reports have linked the initiative to a unilateral declaration of independence. Read more

Nov 22

Palestine: the other schism

While the Western world was marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were taking matters into their own hands, physically breaking through two sections of Israel’s Separation Wall in Ni’lin and Qalandia. As this was happening Ramallah’s political elite was busy digesting and assessing the latest developments with regard to Mahmoud Abbas’ future, the official peace process, and prospects for elections. Read more

Nov 13

Fragmenting Palestinian land

Twenty-one-year-old Palestinian student Berlanty Azzam was seized by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the West Bank last month. Bound and blindfolded, she was forcibly deported to the Gaza Strip. Berlanty was in her final semester at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, and was returning from a job interview in Ramallah.

The problem was that she had an ID card registered in Gaza, and the Israeli occupation, in the words of the human rights organisation, B’tselem, “almost completely forbids the movement of Palestinians between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip”. Read more

Nov 8

Sussex Uni Boycott Israeli Goods

In an unprecedented development for the Palestine solidarity movement in the UK, last week the student union at Sussex University in Brighton ‘yes’ to boycotting Israeli goods. The referendum saw high levels of participation, with the vote tally coming in at 526 votes in favour of a boycott, and 450 against.

University rules meant that campaigning was restricted to a few days immediately preceding the referendum, which was carried out using an online voting system. Both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ campaigns actively pushed their positions with the student population – those opposing the boycott move adopted the slogan ‘Build bridges not boycotts’. Read more

Oct 31

Book review: ‘Poets for Palestine’

In his introduction to the book he edits, Remi Kanazi describes the moment in his own life when he “realised that Palestinians were not so ‘other’ after all,” that “there exists a substantial ‘we’ of people alienated from our own lands across the globe”. Poets for Palestine, whose publisher – Al Jisser Group – means ‘the bridge’ – is a beautiful celebration of the creativity and defiance of the Palestinian people, and a testimony to the spirit of resistance found in many different human struggles for justice. Read more

Oct 23

Free Mohammad Othman

The Occupied Palestinian Territories is not a place where it is easy to hold on to hope. For decades, Palestinians have been living under Israel’s brutal military rule; their land colonised and subject to an apartheid regime of separation.

Yet one of the most inspiring developments in the West Bank over the last few years has been the emergence of a grassroots non-violent resistance movement amongst Palestinians, targeting Israel’s Separation Wall. Read more

Oct 20

‘Sleepwalking to segregation?’

Nissa Finney and Ludi Simpson
Policy Press, 218pp

ReviewsSegregation Two months after British citizens exploded bombs in rucksacks on London’s public transport system, the head of what was then the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, warned that British society was ’sleepwalking to segregation’. Four years on, while the national conversation is perhaps less emotive, claims born out of a time of polarisation have become assumed ‘truths’ for some: ‘Muslim extremists are thriving in ghettoes’, ‘Whites are becoming a minority in their own country’.

‘Sleepwalking to Segregation’? confronts scaremongering, speculation and flabby rhetoric with hard statistics and pointed questions. It aims ‘to set the record straight’. Finney is a Research Fellow at Manchester specialising in ethnic group population patterns, while Ludi Simpson is Professor of Population Studies there. Read more

Oct 15

Will Fatah – as much as Israel – be the target of the next intifada?

For the best part of half a century, Fatah dominated Palestinian politics. Israeli attempts to extinguish the movement failed; rivals were co-opted or sidelined. But gradually, as the Oslo years gave way to the Second Intifada, the peace process went up in smoke and Hamas emerged as a genuine contender for Palestinian political loyalties, serious and critical divisions within the movement have come to the surface. This piece examines the current crisis facing the Fatah movement, and possibilities for the future: critical issues facing the movement — internal divisions, differences over strategy often sharply focused on the question of resistance and/or negotiations, the relationship with Hamas, as well as some of the different options facing Fatah in terms of a way out of the crisis, and approaches being suggested as solutions to the crisis. Read more

Oct 3

Fatah and Hamas set for surface unity

After half a dozen unsuccessful attempts, there is now a strong sense that Egypt has managed to negotiate a national unity deal between Hamas and Fatah. Reports indicate that at the end of October, Palestinian factions will gather in Cairo to finalise an agreement, the result of a breakthrough in recent weeks. Next week, Mahmoud Abbas is expected to support the plan after meeting with senior Egyptian officials. Read more

Sep 28

Real reform in Israel is a distant prospect

Once again, issues like the settlement “freeze” are dominating the official peace process, ignoring not only core questions like Israel’s “matrix of control“, but also the status of Palestinian citizens of Israel. While the increasingly overt racism of Knesset members has got its fair share of headlines, other important developments have escaped scrutiny outside the region. Read more