Zaina Arafat joined Mondoweiss Associate Editor Allison Deger to discuss her novel, YOU EXIST TOO MUCH.
On Wednesday, Israeli forces arrested five Palestinian children, ranging between the ages of 8 and 13, in the South Hebron Hills as they picked the seasonal wild flowers to bring back home to their families. Eyewitnesses say the children were first attacked by Israeli settlers, and then detained by Israeli soldiers at the settlers’ demand. “This was obviously an attempt by the settlers to intimidate the boys by using the soldiers,” eyewitness Basel Adrah tells Mondoweiss. “They didn’t steal or damage anything. All they were doing was picking akoub. Is this a crime?”
Joe Biden is dithering on his promise to return to the Iran deal, under pressure from Bob Menendez and other Democrats beholden to the Israel lobby. The lobby’s ability to influence the White House’s definition of the American interest in the Middle East in Israel’s favor is a longstanding tradition, and it’s just a pity the media continually fall for it.
The State Department briefing is turning into a forum for reporters who are impatient with the charade of a two-state solution. Said Arikat asks what the US is doing about his cousin Ahmed Erekat’s killing at an Israeli military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank last June, and the “torment” of his family because Israel won’t release Ahmed’s body.
Palestinian-Americans were turned back from an Israeli vaccination clinic at a checkpoint outside Ramallah because they held Palestinian ID cards, and the U.S. Embassy won’t help them. “It would be different if all U.S. citizens here were being treated the same,” Wafaa Jallaq tells Mondoweiss. “But when Israel, or being Israeli, is basically the distinction between who gets vaccinated and who doesn’t, that’s when it becomes frustrating. The U.S. has let go of its responsibility towards its citizens in the West Bank.”
There are liberals and those on the right who think it’s okay to fight antisemitism by encouraging Islamophobia and certainly anti-Palestinianism. You don’t fight racism with racism. We need to decolonize our understanding of antisemitism as a matter of urgency. And that means ditching the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
On August 18, 2020, CBC’s current affairs program “The Current” carried an interview with Joe Sacco where the host used the word Palestine. The word was deleted in an online version and apologized for the next day, and now an Ombudsman says the program was “at odds with the CBC’s usual practice,” but producers should have left it as it was.
The two elections in Israel and Palestine this spring are meaningless because they only reinforce an unequal structure in which Jewish nationalists contend on one side, Israel, and dictate the terms of the election to the subject population in occupied Palestine. And that’s the news. There’s no news under the burning sun of the Apartheid state.
The book is an epic novel that follows Palestinian ex-pat Adam Dannoun and his brush with Blind Mahmoud that spurs an exploration of the past, and what happened to his hometown, the “ghetto” of Lydda in 1948.
Israeli Labor leader Merav Michaeli on the ICC move to investigate Israel for war crimes: “It is a very, very problematic decision. It does not promote peace in any way. It does not promote a solution for the two state solution. It escalates the conflict.” Though Michaeli says the two-state solution is “completely not on the agenda” for voters in the March 23 election.