Palestinians in Gaza don’t have enough aid, and hospitals in northern Gaza are still not receiving fuel. Israel appears determined to continue their assault on Gaza despite U.S. pressure for an extended truce.
I have known the Tamimi family for 13 years and have seen how Israel systematically targets non-violent activist and movements. Ahed and Bassem Tamami are currently being detained because they stand for Palestinian freedom.
Israel ignores calls for a ceasefire as the civilian death toll rises in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, where an Israeli airstrike killed three children. Former child prisoner Ahed Tamimi was among 70 Palestinians arrested in the West Bank.
Adrian Kreutz reflects on his visit to Palestine to join in Al-Haq’s International Law Summer Program.
A highlight of the Israel lobby conference held at the National Press Club by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs last Friday was a speech by singer/songwriter Roger Waters in which he read from letters to musicians urging them not to play Israel in line with the call of the BDS campaign. When Australian singer Nick Cave performed in Israel in 2018, he rejected Roger Waters and Brian Eno’s call to respect the BDS boycott campaign, saying it was “cowardly and shameful.” Waters says he responded to the “louche” artist with disbelief, rage and sorrow. “We hurl our glasses in the fire of your arrogant unconcern and smash our bracelets on the rock of your implacable indifference.”
“In Hebron, I saw what to me looked like two Americans coming towards us, but they were escorted by four or five Israeli soldiers with rifles. And I was hoping to have a conversation with them. But before I got too close– the rifle kind of came out, to push me away, when it was clearly evident that I’m a tourist. It was an unnecessary reaction. Because I wasn’t at all threatening. But these were American dignitaries, and I think it was part of the deal. To illustrate this is a dangerous place. ‘Okay, we’ll take you to Hebron, but you need to have a five-soldier escort.’ That’s the narrative that is played up. Our security is paramount no matter what happens.”
Israeli activist Yifat Doron took a stance of solidarity with Ahed Tamimi, icon of Palestinian resistance, by slapping a military prosecutor. And she will pay the price: 8 months in prison. Her sentence echoes Tamimi’s sentence for a similar action in occupied Nabi Saleh.
A Palestinian family victimized by illegal Israeli settlers is suing Benjamin Netanyahu and his American abettors, including Jared Kushner and Sheldon Adelson, in a D.C. federal court. The suit is the branchild of Martin McMahon and relies on legal precedent regarding South African apartheid’s dehumanization of a civilian population and the universality of war crime law stemming from the Eichmann case.
Looking back on this year, it is difficult to choose one moment, one tragedy, or one political decision that stands out among the rest. Palestinians witnessed a tumultuous year in 2018, as they saw hundreds killed from the West Bank to Gaza, their rights slowly stripped away inside Israel, and the heart of Palestinian identity, Jerusalem, pushed further out of reach. But as evidenced by the ongoing fight for the rights of refugees in Gaza’s Great March of Return, the fight against expulsion in places Silwan and Khan al-Ahmar, and the fight for equal rights as citizens in Israel, the fight for Palestinian rights continued as well.
On Democracy Now! released Palestinian prisoner Ahed Tamimi says the occupation and checkpoints and conflict are a product of Zionism, which is not Judaism. ‘Liberal-Zionists’ are going to have a hard time with this one. They have been insisting that the 1967 occupation can be reversed without addressing Zionism. In fact, they believe that reversing it is essential to maintaining the Zionist Jewish State.