Home > > Tagged: Comment Is Free

Israel’s laws of persecution

Posted on: September 8, 2009

Nimer Sultany | The Guardian

8 September 2009

Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.

In the first, a policeman who shot and killed an Arab citizen in 2006 was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. The unbearable leniency of the sentence is more evidence of the total disregard for Arab life inside Israel, where ethnicity of the victim is a … Continue reading


Updated on September 8, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: ,

Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene

Posted on: August 18, 2009

Slavoj Zizek | The Guardian

18 August 2009

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on 1 … Continue reading


Updated on August 18, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: , , , ,

Taking over Jerusalem

Posted on: August 5, 2009

Matt Kennard | The Guardian

5 August 2009

A couple of months ago I spent a fortnight in Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement – activists who help Palestinians non-violently resist Israeli oppression. The most pressing of many issues during my stay was the attempts by an Israeli settler company, Nahalat Shimon, backed by the Israeli courts, to cleanse East Jerusalem of its Arab population, focusing its efforts at that time on the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah.

I spent a week sleeping on a floor in the house of the Hanoun family – a husband and wife and their three children. Longer-term … Continue reading


Updated on August 5, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: , , ,

The blue velvet hills of my youth have been destroyed

Posted on: July 6, 2009

Raja Shehadeh | The Guardian

5 July 2009

I can remember the appearance of the hills around Ramallah in 1979, before any Jewish settlement came to be established there. In the spring of that year I walked north from Ramallah, where I live, to the nearby village of A’yn Qenya and up the pine-forested hill. A gazelle leapt ahead of me. When I reached the top I could see hills spread below me like crumpled blue velvet, with the hamlets of Janiya and Deir Ammar huddled between its folds. On top of the highest hill in the distance stood the … Continue reading


Updated on July 6, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: , ,

Israel pushes out its own people

Posted on: June 13, 2009

Dimi Reider | The Guardian

10 June 2009

Whenever Barack Obama speaks of the Middle East these days, there’s one thing that worries “senior Israeli officials” most. “He didn’t say ‘Jewish state’,” they mutter to reporters. “He had all the time to say these two words, and didn’t. Why didn’t he?”

Binyamin Netanyahu himself utters this phrase at every opportunity. He even went as far as turning this coveted idea into a precondition for negotiating with the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, before being shushed by Washington.

But why this sudden insistence on what is supposed to be an internal Israeli matter, … Continue reading


Updated on June 13, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: , ,

A recipe for resentment

Posted on: May 26, 2009

Ahmad Samih Khalidi | The Guardian

26 May 2009

The Obama administration is gearing up for its impending and ­possibly decisive moves ­towards relaunching the Middle East peace process, with a series of consultations with Arab leaders, including the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, later this week. After ­meeting with Barack Obama in ­Washington last week, the Israeli prime ­minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, pressed his demand that the Palestinians should recognise Israel as a Jewish state, ­posing it as the sine qua non for any ­future agreement. This demand seems to be gaining some traction in the US and in western capitals.

But … Continue reading


Updated on May 26, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: ,

1967: Abandoned and rejected

Posted on: June 7, 2007

By Ahmad Shaheen | Guardian: Comment Is Free

I was born in a tent and I’m living in a tent, but I hope I won’t die in a tent.

I’m a middle-aged journalist and a human rights advocate. My children are grown up and college educated – three of them married with children. I’m far from them though, living with my partner in a desert refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Through friends I managed to get word to my brother to phone me on a borrowed mobile, from a shop in our refugee camp in Gaza last week. I was … Continue reading


Updated on January 10, 2009
Posted under: In the Media
Tags: , , , , ,