Five years ago organized rock climbing in Palestine was non-existent. Then two young American climbing enthusiasts began developing rock climbing sites near Ramallah and refugee camps around the West Bank. “You know there are beautiful areas around Ramallah, but we would not go there if we didn’t climb,” local climber Momen Naeem tells Mondoweiss. “It makes people love the land, makes you love this place more.”
Susan Abulhawa reviews Anita Anand’s The Patient Assassin, the dramatic true story of a little known orphan boy who spent his life plotting a revenge that would eventually rattle the British Empire to its core: “This is a book for students of history, for lovers of thriller novels, and for anyone interested in contemporary politics, social movements, liberation struggles, biographies, or just a well-told true drama.”
Ronit Lentin’s recent book “Traces of Racial Exception – Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism”, demonstrates the importance and centrality of race in the Palestine-Israel context, an issue downplayed by Israel-apologists. Because veiling that racism in the eyes of the world is essential to maintaining the colonialist project.
Richard Falk praises Noura Erakat’s new book ‘Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine’: “What Erakat seeks and achieves is less about the emancipatory interpretation of legal norms and more about allowing us to grasp the manipulative nexus that underlies international legal discourse, and shapes political patterns of control and resistance.”
“There is no peace without equality and there is no equality without peace,” Kohavi Shemesh always said, pointing out precisely the paradox of life in a Zionist state. Shemesh, one of the founders of the Black Panthers movement in Israel, died on April 13, 2019 at 75.
“Reclaiming Judaism from Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation,” is a collection of autobiographical essays from 40 Jewish activists and scholars. These voices must contend with being called anti-Semitic and self-hating Jews by strangers as well as by family members, Eleanor Roffman writes.
Mohammed Asad’s photo essay of the most beautiful places and things in Gaza.
Walaa Ghussein speaks with other young Palestinians who have left Gaza in recent years about how they deal with the ongoing trauma of war in occupation. “I later realized that I’m never ‘post’ my traumas,” Heba Al Hayek tells her. “As a Palestinian, I’m never given a real chance to process because I’m still there even if my body isn’t.”
Gil Maguire’s new novel, “The Exodus Betrayal,” imagines a US president siding with Iran after Israel attacks Iran, and it is intended to get Americans out of love with Israel, much as “Exodus” got us in love back in 1958. “I am trying to show how harmful our relationship with Israel has become and how the so-called special relationship is based on a myth of Israel’s importance,” Maguire says.
“The night is filled with the anxiety that any interaction with Israeli security triggers. We leave all of our suspicious material on Palestine, human rights, and any evidence of an interest in justice in an extra bag in Amman to retrieve on our return, and arrive at Allenby Bridge at 7:30 am.” — Alice Rothchild on entering Palestine from Jordan.