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Palestine-Israel
Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists
![[Bruce Robbins in Tulkarem. Image from author's archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Tulkarem.jpg "[Bruce Robbins in Tulkarem. Image from author's archive]")
In the spring of 2002 I helped run a campaign to gather the signatures of American Jews who took some sort of independent line on Israel. The initiative came from the physicist Alan Sokal, who had emailed me along with some other people and attached a draft text called “Peace in the Middle East: An Open Letter from American Jews to our Government.” The idea was to send the text out far and wide, collecting enough checks along with the signatures so as to take out an advertisement in the New York Times and perhaps other papers as well. The campaign worked better than we could have hoped; we very quickly took out a half-page advertisement, and then got more ...
Keep Reading »Romance, not Romanticized: Three Stories of Love and Loss from the Boston Palestine Film Festival
Love During Wartime, directed by Gabriella Bier. Sweden, 2010. Paradise Lost, directed by Ibtissam Mara’anah. Israel-Palestine, 2003. 77 Steps, directed by Ibtissam Mara’anah. Israel-Palestine, 2010. All three films are playing at the Boston Palestine Film Festival this week. In their films, Ibtissam Mara’anah and Gabriella Bier both focus on romantic relationships that cross the Palestinian-Israeli divide. Bier’s Love During Wartime follows a married couple grappling with bureaucrats and policies that deny them permission to live together, while Mara’anah’s autobiographical works Paradise Lost and 77 Steps chart the factors that lead her to leave her Palestinian ...
Keep Reading »Prisoner Exchange Levels Hamas, Fatah Playing Fields
![[Image from 972mag.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Prisoners-families-large1.jpg "[Image from 972mag.com]")
News that Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) had reached agreement on a prisoner exchange instantaneously displaced the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) bid for full United Nations membership from the headlines in mid-October. Arguably, Hamas and Israel had a common interest in this regard. More importantly, the Palestinian Islamists, no longer relegated to the margins of the Palestinian UN initiative by the rival leadership in Ramallah, can now resume reconciliation talks from a position of relative equality. Whether reconciliation and the incipient internationalization of the Palestine question will be fused to form the basis of a new national ...
Keep Reading »Collage of Images from Social Media Today
![[Collage from social media. Images from various sources--see below]](/content_images/3/sm_jadalimages1020.jpg "[Collage from social media. Images from various sources--see below]")
. . . . . . . By: Eirs Bors "Wuroud Qasem" Hurwitt Eyad Shataiwe
Keep Reading »Boston Palestine Film Festival (21-30 October)
![[Image from bostonpalestinefilmfest.org]](/content_images/3/sm_bpff333.jpg "[Image from bostonpalestinefilmfest.org]")
The fifth Annual Boston Palestine Film Festival features over 50 films from international filmmakers, many of whom will be present. Themes include: Work of Elia Suleiman; celebrating the legacy of Edward Said; recognizing women filmmakers; honoring past revolutions and witnessing the new Arab Spring. Venues: Museum of Fine Arts, Berklee College of Music; Harvard Law School, Cambridge and Brookline Public Libraries. Opening Film: The Time That Remains, with Elia Suleiman in attendance, MFA October 21, 6:30 pm. Reception featuring Shusmo band follows at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Avenue of the Arts, 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts ...
Keep Reading »The Deal Behind the "Shalit Deal": Prisoners, Power, Racism
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_prisonerswap.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
If the prisoner exchange deal announced on 11 October 2011 between Hamas and the Israeli government is fully implemented without major hitches, there is little question who “won” this five-year war of wills. The deal will constitute a major victory for Hamas and the resistance-oriented political forces in Palestinian society, while simultaneously representing a significant retreat for Israel and its historical doctrines of forceful coercion and rejectionism vis-à-vis the Palestinian people and their rights. Make no mistake about it; the tangible accomplishments and historical precedents embodied in this deal rival, if not exceed, other prisoner deals in recent memory. ...
Keep Reading »Call for Global Hunger Strike in Solidarity with Palestinian Prisoners (12 October 2011)
![[Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_palhungstrk.jpg "[Image from unknown archive.]")
Many Palestinians and their supporters will go on a mass hunger strike worldwide for 24 hours on Wednesday, October 12. Show your support by tweeting the following: Join Us! RT: My name is ( ) and I'll go on a hunger Strike on Wednesday in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners. Follow the strike on on twitter: #TweepStrike & #HS4Palestine #RightsPrisoners #HungerStrike In some cities those going on hunger strike will organize gatherings and sit ins to raise awareness. Background (from Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association): On 27 September 2011, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons announced the start of a campaign of ...
Keep Reading »The Shibboleths within Albert Memmi's Universalism
Albert Memmi, Decolonization and the Decolonized. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. “What? Post-colonialism? Have they left?” - Aborigine activist Bobbi Sykes’ comment at an academic conference on post-colonialism[1] Is there a place for “Muslim” or “Arab” peoples in “Western” “universal” values of equality, freedom, democracy, rights, and so forth? Both categories frequently subsume religious and/or ethnicized (mis)conceptualizations in current Western discourse. Every day in the news, there is at least one item that reveals (again) the hypocritical duality that bifurcates “West” from Other. The duality undergirds debates and ...
Keep Reading »Threat: Palestinian Prisoners in Israel
Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (eds.), Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel. London: Pluto Press, 2011. There are many harrowing passages in the excellent new edited volume by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar on the processes of administrative detention and imprisonment of Palestinians in Israel; some of them are even in the book’s academic chapters. But the most harrowing, and paradoxically the most hopeful, is the account Osama Barham gives of his endless arrests, detentions, and interrogations. These began in 1979—when he was detained for flying the colors of Palestine in a flag partially made of his mother’s blouse—and ended in 2008, when he was released after a ...
Keep Reading »Resistance and Revolution as Lived Daily Experience: An Interview with Leila Khaled (Part 4)
![[Graffiti art depicting Leila Khaled. Image from unknown archive.]](/content_images/3/sm_iamnotaterrorist.jpg "[Graffiti art depicting Leila Khaled. Image from unknown archive.]")
[This is Part 4 of a translated transcription of a series of interviews conducted by the author with Leila Khaled during the summer of 2007. Click here to read the Introduction to the interview, here to read Part 1, here to read Part 2, and here to read Part 3] After a brief training period in Jordan in 1969, I found myself in Lebanon meeting with Dr. Wadi Haddad. He asked me if I was ready to die. I replied that I was and asked why. He then told me that the real question is whether I was willing to spend the rest of my life in jail. I once again replied that I was and asked why. He then asked if I was ready to hijack a plane. ...
Keep Reading »New Texts Out Now: Belen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work
Belén Fernández, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work. London and New York: Verso, 2011. Jadaliyya: Why did you write this book? Belén Fernández: I asked myself this question several thousand times, particularly during my third rereading of every Friedman column published since 1995. The idea for the book came about in a far less climactic fashion than Friedman’s ideas tend to occur—i.e. it did not involve “Quarter-Pounder[ing] my way around the world,” being struck by a ...
Keep Reading »El Acuerdo Detras del "Acuerdo Shalit" Presos, Poder y Racismo
[This article was written in English by Toufic Haddad and translated/published in Spanish by www.rebelion.org] El Acuerdo Detrás del “Acuerdo Shalit” Presos, Poder y Racismo [Traducción para Rebelión de Loles Oliván] Veintiseis prisioneros palestinos incluidos en el ‘acuerdo Shalit’ ya estaban en prisión antes de que Gilad Shalit hubiera nacido. Diez de los liberados han pasado en la cárcel más tiempo que Nelson Mandela en la isla de Robben aunque ninguno de ellos es ...
Keep Reading »An Apocalyptic Air of Approaching Peril: Zionism at the United Nations
Bibi sauntered. He swaggered. He spoke freely, seemingly unguided by any text. He irreverently made circles with his fingers. He called the group of diplomats and interns assembled in front of him actors in “a theater of the absurd.” He proudly modeled his thick coat of indifference just as he called the United Nations, a “house of lies.” Indeed, so capable was the UN in presenting the false as true, Bibi gestured assuredly, they could go so far to declare that the sun set in the ...
Keep Reading »Francois Abu Salem
François Abu Salem passed away on 1 October 2011, taking his own life in what one Palestinian theatre artist described as “his last bow.” His death has instigated numerous discussions among the cultural community in Palestine on the alienation of artists from society at large and within the theatre world itself in Palestine, the role of theatre in social and national struggle, and the debate on who is a Palestinian. While the substance of François’ contribution to the theatre is debated, there is little ...
Keep Reading »List of Palestinian Prisoners Released on 18 October 2011 (Includes Names, Dates of Arrest, and Sentences )
The following is a list of Palestinian prisoners being released by the Israeli govnernment on 18 October 2011 as part of the prisoner exchange agreement. It includes the name, origin, date of arrest, sentences received, and destination of release for each of the total 477 (450 male and 27 female) Palestinian prisoners released on this date. The final stage of the prisoner exchange deal will take place in two months, entailing the release of 550 additional Palestinian prisoners. For a ...
Keep Reading »The Others, the Elsewhere of Our Here
John E. Drabinski, Godard Between Identity and Difference. New York and London: Continuum, 2008. John Drabinski’s Godard Between Identity and Difference is a rare thing in the world of contemporary academic writing: a book that reveals the author’s personal, idiosyncratic, and loving relationship with his subject. The reader comes away from this book not merely impressed by its arguments and enlightened by its readings, but also moved by its passion. One feels that one has just had an extended ...
Keep Reading »What Does a Jew Want?
Udi Aloni is a well-known Israeli filmmaker, theatre director, writer and activist, whose most recent work includes films such as Forgiveness, Local Angel, and Kashmir: Journey to Freedom. Columbia University Press just published his new book, What Does a Jew Want?: On Binationalism and Other Specters. I met with Aloni in Ramallah as he was beginning rehearsals for a production of “Waiting for Godot” with students from the Jenin Freedom Theater and continued the conversation in the United States.
Keep Reading »Film and its Voices: The DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival
Palestinian Film and Arts Festival September 26 - 30, 2011, Washington, DC Last week Washington, DC joined Chicago, Boston, Houston, Ann Arbor, and a string of other cities and communities in putting on the first DC Palestinian Film & Arts Festival. Over the past ten years, Palestinian Film Festivals produced by the Palestinian diaspora community have been popping up all over and have come to exhibit a new stage in Palestinian artistic expression and the showcasing of it. In the Middle East, the ...
Keep Reading »Hate Speech Finds a Mainstream Platform
It is not often that major international publications respond to crackpot opinion pieces in other newspapers. Yet Robert L. Bernstein’s latest tantrum against the Palestinians, which the Washington Post published instead of steering the author to an extremist website, was so far beyond the pale that The Economist felt compelled to issue a ...
Keep Reading »Abbas's Next Move
Mahmoud Abbas’s address to the United Nations General Assembly on 23 September fell considerably short of Yasir Arafat’s electrifying 1974 speech from the same podium. Nor did it compare with Haidar Abdul Shafi’s dignified – and unanswerable – call for justice at the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Yet it may come to be seen as a historic turning point in the fortunes of the Palestinian people. Abbas’s agenda was transparent. He was sending the Americans a message: grow a spine, stop appeasing Israel and ...
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