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.
A landmark event in the politics of Palestine has just taken place: Congressional star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York withdrew from a scheduled memorial to Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who was slain in 1995 by a rightwing extremist, after critics pointed out Rabin’s human rights record. Americans for Peace Now is sponsoring the Oct. event, with host Mandy Patinkin saying, “We would have peace today had he been with us all this time, I am absolutely certain of that.”
Ahmed Erekat. Twenty-seven years old, executed on the eve of his sister’s planned wedding, two weeks before his own. He was born, lived, and died, under a brutal, merciless occupation. Honor his life, and that of all Palestinians–under occupation, under apartheid, under siege, and in exile–by not normalizing Israel’s egregious crimes.
Ahmad Erekat, 27, was killed by Israeli forces on Tuesday outside Bethlehem while on his way to celebrate his sister’s wedding. Family and friends are in shock. “It’s tragic,” Dr. Abdallah Abu Hilal, a friend of the family, tells Mondoweiss. “To see the house all decorated, and ready for a wedding. And then to see what was supposed to be the wedding hall, now turned into a wake.”
In an excerpt from her new book “Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine,” Noura Erakat tackles the Palestinian Authority and its “illusory quest” for statehood where economic perks under the promise of self-autonomy “has shaped the Palestinian leadership’s commitment to U.S. tutelage and its reticence to embark on a bolder course based on a politics of resistance.”
The cease-fire that ended seven weeks of hell in Gaza is only two days old. But the countdown to the next round began as soon as the ink dried on the agreement between Israel and the Palestinian armed factions. The deep-rooted problems bedeviling the Palestinian people and Israel have not gone away. The only question is when that next spasm of violence breaks out.