Berlin police raided and cut off electricity to the Palestinian Congress conference before banning the three-day event. Organizers say Germany’s antidemocratic authoritarian response to Palestine activism is growing by the day.
On November 8, 2022 Dr. Salman Abu Sitta spoke at the University of Edinburgh to commemorate the centenary of the British Mandate in Palestine. In his speech he addresses the disgraced British colonial servant Lord Arthur Balfour, and issues a call for repair and justice to the British government today.
In November 2021, Salman Abu Sitta returned to the Gaza Strip after five decades of forced absence. What he found surprised and inspired him.
As Israelis were evacuated from Jewish-only communities in the Galilee due to fires this month, Hatim Kanaaneh reflects, “Are you aware that within recent memory your own residential locales had Palestinian names and were inhabited by humans, some of whom with features not really different from your own and who were before their expulsion actually part of the best educated nation in the Middle East? They lived right where you live now but without all those fire-hazardous pines.”
Salman Abu Sitta was uprooted from his family lands near Beersheba during the Palestinian Nakba in 1948 and the trauma has informed his entire life as a refugee and scholar. “I looked back at the smoldering ruins, at the meadows of my childhood, golden with the still-unharvested wheat. What had we done to them? Who were these Jews anyway?”