Nidal al-Azza, 50, is a Palestinian activist and leading advocate for Palestinian residency and refugee rights. Al-Azza sat down with Mondoweiss to discuss the current US foreign policy in Israel and Palestine, and the effects of Trump’s political decisions on the Palestinian people, Palestinian leadership, and the future of the Palestinian cause.
Every year, in late August, Palestinians begin celebrating the grape harvest, a quintessential part of Palestinian life and heritage. For farmers, a years worth of intensive labor has led up to this moment, when they cut the grapes off the vines and take their wares to markets and street carts. For most, the profits made off of a year’s harvest will support their entire family financially until the next year. This year’s harvest, for many farmers across the occupied West Bank, is bittersweet, marred by the violence of months past.
As the US declares it will stop assistance to UNRWA, the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem was fraught with worry. “Do you think the kids will go to school tomorrow?” a woman asked. “May God help us,” another could be heard saying.
An Israeli district court sentenced Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, 36, to five months in prison and a six-month suspended sentence on Tuesday for posting a poem she wrote to social media in 2015.
“Today I carry a not real coffin for one who was killed by the Israelis. Maybe these scouts will carry my real coffin or I will carry a real coffin one day,” 13-year-old Marah Al-Abadseh says during a children’s memorial to slain Gaza children at the Gaza border, July 27, 2019.
Israeli forces shot and killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Deheisha refugee camp in an overnight raid early Monday morning near in the southern occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.
Just outside the walls of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem, a years long demographic battle between the Israeli state and Palestinian residents of the city has found new life in recent weeks. Last week Israel advanced a bill allowing residential settlements to be built inside areas zoned for national parks in East Jerusalem. Jawad Siyam of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center tells Mondoweiss: “This is all done with the intention of emptying Jerusalem of Palestinians and part of the plans to make Jerusalem a Jewish-majority city.”
Israel finally built an access road to the West Bank village of Khan al-Ahmar last week, after half a century of delays. But the only vehicles allowed along it are the bulldozers scheduled to sweep away its 200 inhabitants’ homes. As Bedouin resident Ibrahim Abu Dawoud observed: “For us, leaving the desert is death.”
Palestinians took to the streets of Ramallah city Sunday night, demanding that the Palestinian Authority end its sanctions on the besieged Gaza Strip that have exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in the small Palestinian enclave. The crowd chanted “With our souls and blood, we will save you Gaza” and “Shame on you, you sold Gaza in dollars.”
Protests have taken ahold of Haifa over the last few days as Palestinian citizens of Israel demonstrate against the actions of the Israeli military in Gaza. They were met by police who rights groups say used excessive force, including breaking the knee of one protester. “The first reaction of the police to stop the demonstration was to use violence,” Bashar Ali, 22, told Mondoweiss. “We can’t be surprised by this when at the same time Israeli soldiers are using deadly weapons on nonviolent demonstrations near Israel’s separation fence in Gaza.”