Being a foreigner in Palestine is complicated and Nora Lester Murad’s latest book collects essays from the men and women who found themselves living in Palestine, navigating both their privilege and the occupation.
Allison Deger talks with Safwan Fayyad, a 30-year-old senior resident and internist at the Ramallah Medical Complex, about being on the front lines against the coronavirus in the West Bank. “Until now we are keeping pace with the patient load,” Fayyad says, “but if we face a serious outbreak where a majority of people would get sick that would be a disaster here.”
While electrical blackouts are common across the West Bank, scheduled outages are due to continue as the Palestinian power distributor has not paid overdue bills from the Israeli energy provider since 2014.
Mustafa Barghouti talks with Mondoweiss about the Trump administration’s Bahrain economic summit and “deal of the century.” “Everything they’ve done, and everything they’ve declared, shows they are trying to kill the two-state solution and the rights of Palestinians to have a state of their own,” Barghouti says. “They advocate sustaining occupation and apartheid.”
In Shoshana’s latest installment, what she appreciates most about Ramallah on Thursday night (party night) is how committed her friends are to partying, with no hesitancy to dance, an appreciation of letting loose. Shoshana thinks it is a world away from the tension she often encounters in Jerusalem.
In December, 39 Palestinian-owned structures were demolished or seized by the Israeli authorities, the same as the 2018 monthly average, displacing 56 people and affecting over 270 others.
“The settlers came in the middle of the night, no one knew. By morning they had paved a road up to the mountain, set up their tents, and had soldiers protecting them,” Zafer Attayah, a resident of Kfar Ni’ma told Mondoweiss. Ever since the settlers showed up two months ago, the Palestinians from Risan’s three surrounding villages have been staging weekly Friday protests on the mountain in attempts to stop the confiscation. “We have to maintain our presence in the area,” Attayah said. “They think they can just come and take the land, but we will not make it easy for them.”
Israeli forces busted through the doors of a Ramallah aid organization founded by a leading Palestinian politician in the early morning hours Wednesday, and took away computers, servers and security camera footage, and leaving behind a mess of shattered glass and tossed papers throughout the downtown office.
Last night, Israeli soldiers entered the West Bank city of Ramallah and raided a municipal library as nearly 100 Palestinian youth clashed with soldiers setting on fire tires and trash cans. Palestinians view Israeli army activities inside of the de facto capital as an escalation to an already tense few months.
“Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted, Through anger, losses,…