Amazon pulled a book by the Israeli “publicist, editor and creative specialist” Assaf A. Voll, which reduces three thousand years of Palestinian history and achievement to 132 bank pages — blank, except for a printed watermark of a Palestinian flag superimposed over Palestinian/Roman pillars. It is aimed at dehumanizing Palestinians, and erasing a proud history.
Tom Suarez introduces Paldocs.net, a website of declassified Mandate-era documents held by the British government that served as primary sources for his book ‘State of Terror.’ After facing a coordinated effort to silence him following the publication of his book Suarez writes, “the site is intended to make the Zionist creation myth do battle with the historical record itself, not with me. Its sampling of documents demonstrate that I am merely the messenger — and more importantly, it is my hope that it will whet the appetite of others to pursue this neglected area that is absolutely vital to ending the misery in Israel-Palestine, and indeed in the greater Middle East.”
What is meant by Palestine having, or having not, ‘existed’? Humans have lived and died in the region we call Palestine for about as long as our species has walked the earth, regardless of who had the biggest club, the grandest throne, or the most F16s. Palestine includes regions that are among the longest inhabited on earth.
Conference on Israel’s responsibility to international law is held in Cork, Ireland. In what Professor Oren Ben-Dor described as a “spectacular failure of the protection of basic rights,” pro-Israeli censors had successfully blocked the conference twice in the UK, and nearly sabotaged it in Cork.
The Palestine Philharmonie aims to create a cultural entity, a “City of Music”, that will offer a variety of intercultural music-related activities and events, not least by establishing Palestine’s first permanent professional orchestra in Bethlehem.
Terror was vital to the establishment of Israel. David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann planned for large numbers of Arabs to be expelled to assure a Jewish majority. When non-Zionist British Jew Robert Waley Cohen suggested that the new state should be named with a neutral geographic term, ‘Palestine’, Ben-Gurion and Weizmann were horrified at the idea.
“I will always stand up to those who challenge Israel’s right to exist”, Ban Ki-moon assures the world, handing Israel carte blanche to define just what ‘Israel’ is, a definition the world has waited for in vain since 1948. Does it extend to Ma’ale Adumim? The Jordan? The Nile? Will citizens someday be equal? It doesn’t look promising, but whatever it is, we support it!
The humiliations of occupation for Palestinians living in Hebron is clear in this brief video from Tom Suarez, in which a soldier indiscriminately throws a percussion grenade over a checkpoint.
Skunk gas, a foul substance that smells like feces and rotting flesh, is sprayed indiscriminately over Bethlehem during a routine Israeli army incursion into the village in December 2015. And young men have to ask soldiers for permission to move where they want to.
This past semester Tom Suarez was the violin and viola teacher at the Gaza branch of Palestine’s National Conservatory of Music—”though I never met my students, because Israel blocked me from entering the coastal strip. So I taught by Skype from the West Bank as best I could”