How I would teach Hanukkah to Palestinian school children, or indeed to their parents? Robert Cohen asks. How comfortable would I find it to tell this story of Jews denied the right to express their culture, identity and history? What would go through the children’s minds as I explained our annual celebration of an armed Jewish revolt against an occupying power? And could I convey convincingly the idea of on-going Jewish vulnerability in Israel, the United States, or anywhere else?
The export of wines from the Golan Heights to Dubai marks Trump’s legacy in the region: perceived legitimacy for the occupation and expanded markets for settlement businesses.
Israeli authorities have announced a temporary freeze on home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem, following legal pressure amidst a rise in the demolition of Palestinian homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Even now, 25 years after the assassination, the majority of the Israeli center and left cannot divest itself of the Oslo Accords and of the chimera of a two-states solution. They are, after all, sacred. They are what Oseh Shalom Bimromaiv planned. Any attempts to deviate from it is denying scripture. And so the devotees of Oslo and Rabin become the equivalent of monks, dead to the world and singing the sacred hymns. The divine plan has long lost any connection to reality, but anyone challenging it quickly becomes anathema.
The international community forgets the Palestinians: The Trump peace plan left out that there was an illegal Israeli occupation, and the UAE/Bahrain normalization agreement leaves it an Israeli domestic issue.
“Cry, the beloved country,” a showcase of Gil Mualem-Doron’s work from 2013 onward, is a critical look at the Israeli government’s practices and the consequences on both the Palestinian and Israeli people.
The UAE and other Arab states making peace with Israel have backed Palestinian rights. With nothing to show for it. Ever since Oslo, Israeli leaders have fought creation of a Palestinian state. In the Labor Party, it was liberal Zionist hero Shimon Peres “who most vehemently opposed the idea,” Shlomo Ben-Ami recalled.
Fifteen years ago Israel left its settlements in Gaza, and Gazans dreamed that the end of military checkpoints to protect Jewish settlers and bulldozed citrus groves and barriers to the Mediterranean Sea meant an end of occupation. What a savage illusion that was, though Emad Moussa recalls the dreams of that day.
It’s been one year since India revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, leaving the territory in a complex system of lockdowns, internet outages and rampant human rights abuses.
The occupation is almost invisible when you drive from Jaffa to the Dead Sea. The Palestinian population has been increasingly pushed into little enclaves so Jewish Israelis can build luxury homes and swimming pools on top of our hills and over our olive-tree orchards, Emad Moussa writes.