Palestinian teenage poet Mohammad al-Kurd talks poetry and politics to Mondoweiss: “Being ‘apolitical’ is a privilege. Dinners in Palestine consisted of politics served and tabled before any food was. Expressive arms, opinionated and stubborn, persuaded and challenged whichever person had an opposing voice.” Al-Kurd’s first full-length poetry collection, “RIFQA” will be published later this year.
The Great March of Return began on Land Day and ends on Nakba Day. In the process it is demonstrating that each period of Palestinian dispossession is connected — it is an ongoing saga where the Nakba never ended. The protest is also showing that when Palestinians seek to make the world remember them, they are killed with impunity. Still, Jonathan Ofir says the Israeli response has exposed Israel “as the monster that it was destined to be.”
Monday Marwan Odah Qdeih, 45, from Khuza‘a in the southern Gaza Strip, died after succumbing to injuries he sustained after Israeli soldiers shot him in Friday’s Great March of Return. Qdeih became the 30th person killed in the border protests, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
Liberal Zionist Michael Koplow has condemned Israeli actions at the Gaza fence but called on the left for “balance” in acknowledging the terrorist threat to Israel in the protests. Robert Herbst says the power differential is so unbalanced in Palestine that it is unfair to state “that 30,000 unarmed protesters cannot march and expect to return home alive and uninjured unless they are prepared to take on the impossible task of identifying and removing the few ‘troublemakers’ who may also show up.”
Fifty student organizations at New York University have issued a statement endorsing BDS: “We support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement for Palestinian human rights as it is a non-violent method of resisting Israeli apartheid from abroad. We call on NYU to divest its holdings from companies and funds that are complicit in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. “
A video clip in which an Israeli sniper filmed himself shooting an unarmed Palestinian across the Gaza fence and then celebrating drew international outrage last night. The two Palestinian targets in the video appear simply to be walking around near the fence.
Jehad Abusalim examines how Gaza came to be trapped “from the fence to the fence” by looking back at the Strip from the British Mandate period to present date: “The fence is the history that Palestinians in Gaza never want to forget, and no amount of aid can induce them to do so.”
The latest footage by Palestinian filmmaker Yasser Murtaja, who was killed by Israel at the Gaza border fence on April 6, is a ravishing demonstration of Murtaja’s powers as a filmmaker. Ain Media of Gaza, which he cofounded, thanked international press for its support and vowed to “knock on all doors and will continue with legal institutions to hold the Israeli occupation accountable for this heinous crime…”
The family of Ahed Tamimi, the 17-year-old Palestinian activist who was imprisoned in December for slapping and kicking an Israeli soldier, released footage of the teenager’s interrogation during a press conference in Ramallah on Monday. The footage shows Tamimi resisting all efforts by the Israeli interrogators to coerce her into confessing to a number of charges and giving information about her family. “All of these tactics were used to try to break the symbol, the embodiment that Ahed has created through resisting the occupation,” Ahed’s father Bassem Tamimi said.
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman justified the killing 30-year-old Yaser Murtaja by Israeli snipers even though he wore a flak jacket clearly marked PRESS. Lieberman said: “I don’t know who is and who isn’t a photographer . . . We won’t take any chances.”