against anniversaries

i’ve been reading various articles and blog posts about the anniversary of the massacre of the palestinian refugee camp shatila and the surrounding neighborhood of sabra (no, sabra is not a refugee camp, but many palestinians live there). pulse media and falasteenyia both had nice posts on the subject. ma’an news posted a reflective piece [...]

on fasting

i like fasting for ramadan. in fact, i like fasting in general. i used to fast a couple of times a year for an entire week (though not without water and tea) to detox. and in either case the fact of being hungry, of being conscious of what your body feels and that your stomach [...]

on fatah

so just as i left beit lahem the city was preparing for a major fatah conference. the first signs of this were all of the black fatah suvs driving around the city like maniacs. i drove by ma’an news on my way home one night and a ton of them were out front. it turns [...]

zionist cash for spies & settlers

here are some things the zionist entity is spending your good, american, hard-earned tax dollars on: 1. Intelligence agents have been offering young Palestinians cash bribes as incentive to spy for Israel during interrogation at military checkpoints near the West Bank city of Tulkarem. A number of Palestinians told Ma’an that Israeli officers stopped their [...]

a not-so-holy land grab

those of us active in the struggle for the right of return for palestinian refugees and justice for palestinians in general are well acquainted with article 49 of the geneva convention, which reads: Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power [...]

wanted: zionist palestinians

yesterday ali abunimah and hasan abu nimah co-authored a brilliant analysis of benjamin netanyahu’s speech in electronic intifada. here is their article in full: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed [...]

colonial complicity

today nablus has been declared a closed military zone as saed bannoura reported in imemc: In an attempt to prevent Israeli peace activists from entering the Nablus area, the head of the Central Command of the Israeli Army, Gadi Shamni, declared Nablus a closed military zone. The army said that that there had been several [...]

turning point 3

i’m wondering what the first two turning points were. the last few days i’ve heard war games in the sky above beit lahem. all day long i’ve heard ominous war planes testing out the zionist entity’s doomsday scenario. here is an al jazeera report on the “defense” strategy it is testing, though for those of [...]

practicing state terrorism

on monday ma’an news posted this item about Israel will launch a nationwide military readiness drill next Sunday simulating an all-out regional war in addition to an uprising by Palestinians in the interior of the country. The ominously-named “Turning Point 3″ exercise has alarmed Israel’s neighbors, who are concerned that it could be a cover [...]

on cultural genocide

in jonathan cook’s brilliant book disappearing palestine, he documents a number of ways in which zionists ethnically cleanse palestinians from their land historically and currently. but in one section of the book he talks about other forms of genocide: “Genocide” is widely, and mistakenly, assumed to refer only to an act of mass extermination of [...]