The One Democratic State campaign will launch in the Fall, a groundbreaking alternative to the stagnation of the two-state solution. Here is a behind the scenes look at how organizers debated their political positions and hashed out practical steps to to move idea of a democratic solution to the center of political discourse.
Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour is to be sentenced for incitement for her Facebook posts on July 31. The case began with a mistaken arrest, but her conviction was no mistake, reflecting Israel’s need to punish any proud Palestinian. “Terrorists are always everywhere in Israeli consciousness wherever Palestinian resistance is mentioned,” writes Yoav Haifawi.
Yoav Hifawi visits Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour to see how her story fits within the context of the Palestinian Nakba. What he discovered is Dareen is the descendant of Palestinians who were displaced from their villages during the Nakba, one of which fell after a brutal massacre.
On March 21, activist Yifat Doron slapped a military prosecutor during a hearing in the case of Nariman Tamimi, mother of Ahed Tamimi, who will spend 8 months in prison for slapping an Israeli soldier in her occupied village. Doron spent only two days in jail, because she is classified by the state as Jewish. The double standard speaks volumes.
Hundreds of Palestinians are arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to Israeli prisons for their pronouncements made on Facebook each year. But the most absurd case of them is that of poet Dareen Tatour. Yoav Haifawi reports from an solidarity event with Tatour in Jaffa: “the wall of silence and denial on the part of the Israeli government fell altogether when supporters of Dareen Tatour called for an artistic solidarity event in the Jaffa (Yaffa) Theatre on August 30, 2017. And when the walls fell, we faced a wave of threats and inciting language from top Israeli politicians printed in Israeli mainstream media.”
In retaliation for an upcoming event planned in solidarity with Palestinian poet Dareen Tabour, the Israeli Ministry of Culture has requested the Treasury to examine whether Yaffa’s (Jaffa) “Arab-Hebrew Theater” has violated the Nakba Law. Yoav Haifawi writes, “The common knowledge in Israel is that even as Palestinians are persecuted for anything or nothing, the freedom of expression for the Jewish population was more or less secure. Now the event in Yaffa may become a test case of the new laws and the old assumptions.”
Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, faces the possibility of eight years in prison for “incitement” and support to a terror organization – for a Youtube poetry video and two Facebook posts.
It was exactly one year ago that Dareen Tatour’s ordeal began. In the pre-dawn hours of October 11, 2015, Israeli police and border guards stormed into Palestinian poet’s family home without a warrant or an explanation for the shocking and disturbing intrusion. They arrested, interrogated, and eventually charged Dareen Tatour with the crime of ‘incitement to violence’ for posts she made on Facebook. A year later, there is no end in sight.
On the evening of October 9, the news keep coming about new clashes with the Israeli Occupation police flaring up in more and more Israeli towns, from Rahat in the Naqab desert in the South, through Taibeh, Ar’ara and Um-Al-Fahm in “the triangle” and till Nazareth, Kfar-Kana, Arabeh, Sakhnin and Majd-Al-Kurum in the Galilee.