Abdul Rahman Katanani’s art is not an identification with the refugee camp’s misery, but an attempt to show all that is beautiful and painful in it, showing the camp to those who can’t enter it, those who don’t want to, and those who fear it.
I witnessed the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre, carried out with Zionist complicity as a preview for the “final solution to the Palestinian problem.” With the present Israeli government, this goal is within reach.
Amena al-Ashkar avoided writing about the Sabra and Shatilla massacre even though she grew up a kilometer away. On the massacre’s 40th anniversary, she finally made the painful pilgrimage. “We have talked about this for so long now, but nobody cares that we were slaughtered like chickens…I am not going to do this right now, or ever again,” a Palestinian woman who survived the Sabra and Shatilla massacre tells her.
The Rev. Don Wagner’s memoir of five decades as an activist leader celebrates how liberation theology led him to a deep connection with the Palestinian spirit of resistance.
Liberal Zionists are celebrating Israel’s new rightwing prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Why? Although many secular Zionist leftists may not see him as “Our guy”, they may still identify with him on his militarism and the startup ideology, and this may be enough to sanitize him for them, as a pragmatic partner whom they can emotionally accept.
The documentary “The Occupation of the American Mind” describes the successful effort by Israel to sell its brutal military policies as self-defense against Palestinian terrorism. A panel featuring Sut Jhally and Diana Buttu will discuss the film on Sunday.
There are certain profound events in a nation’s history that leave an indelible mark on all its people. The massacre in two Palestinian refugee camps outside of Beirut, Sabra and Shatila, on September 16, 1982 stands as one of those events.
Israa M. Khater on her visit to the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon: “My nation has been reduced to human trash. We are simply meant to be sustained, contained, but never returned. So comes the international aid, a humanitarian initiative by no other than those who stripped us of everything we owned. It comes preconditioned on our admission of defeat, on our acceptance of what cannot be logically accepted. Can one be grateful to what amounts to nothing compared to what has been lost?”