Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians

November 25, 2012

Clear lessons from operation Pillar of Defense
 
1- The worst enemy of Zionism is peace: this is why Israel killed Jabari, the Qassam leader, who had agreed and installed the latest truce three days before he was killed.  For the same reason, Israel killed Arafat and Rabin, and hates Abbas.

2- Always Israel-started wars are in self defense and to protect its citizens: the current bombing, the Cast Lead war, the siege, the Lebanon war(s), 1967, 1956, 1948 and all major assaults in between. Always the responsibility for killing civilians including children falls on the terrorists, meaning Arabs. 


Play.

Sunday November 18, Northampton, Massachusetts

by ANGELA DAVIS

The controversy generated by Newt Gingrich’s outrageous statement last year that Palestinians are “an invented people” should have led to greater caution in the formulation of politicians’ public statements on Israel and Palestine. However, this seems not to have been the case: Mitt Romney recently offered the judgment that “Palestinians have no interest in peace” as if he were making an uncontested factual observation. This was the moral equivalent of saying that African Americans were never interested in ending Jim Crow or that black South Africans did not want to see Apartheid dismantled.

Jon Simons reports on the bizarre process that saw the establishment two weeks ago of a new university in the settler town of Ariel in the occupied West Bank, and argues this represents another step in the legitimation of the Israeli occupation.

Jon Simons is an Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University.
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Quebec: Photograph: Olivier Jean/Reuters

The Story of the Quebec Student Strike.

Chile

Karma Nabulsi is an Oxford academic and a former PLO representative.
London Review of Books, October 2010

...Exactly 50 years ago, Palestinians were at a similar stage of social and political fragmentation brought about by defeat and dispossession and the anomie that followed the Nakba of 1948. Without a country or the protection of a sovereign state, they were confronting, on the one hand, Israel, and on the other, sundry Arab regimes: between them they controlled every aspect of Palestinians’ social and civic lives as well as their physical space. They lived deep in the dust and disease of tent cities, without personal papers or property. In 1955, a young Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani, moved to Kuwait from Syria, where he had been a teacher at a school set up for refugees by the UN, after himself being expelled from Palestine with his family in 1948. One of his people’s most perceptive chroniclers, he described their mood in his diary: ‘The only thing we know is that tomorrow will be no better than today, and that we are waiting on the shore, yearning, for a boat that will not come. We are sentenced to be separated from everything – except from our own destruction.’
But what appeared to Kanafani to be the collective end was in fact its extraordinary beginning. By the end of the decade, the revolution had found a language and a form. For the first time in a century of rebellions and uprisings against foreign rule, Palestinians could mount a collective challenge to international, Israeli and Arab coercion, and unify sufficiently to represent themselves...
...For Palestinians, whose national politics were undone in an instant over a single year in 1948, it took the concerted actions of tens of thousands of cadres across the region to hold the people together while at the same time putting sufficient pressure on those governments, both Western and Arab, that would have preferred to see us capitulate to Israel. The mood of that short period, as I remember it, was profoundly popular and democratic: pluralist, multi-party, universalist, secular and highly progressive...

Article

Waiting for Solutions in Uncertain Times: Palestine Refugees in the Middle East Context
 
Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford

16 November 2011

My presence here indicates your acknowledgement of the 4.8 million Palestinians registered as refugees with UNRWA in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and in the occupied Palestinian territory...(as well as) the millions of Palestinians contributing to life across the globe, who for reasons of personal choice and circumstance are not registered with UNRWA, yet nevertheless partake of the historic experience of exile triggered by the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948.

We take the firm view that there can be no just and durable peace in the Middle East unless Palestine refugees are brought out of their state of dispossession and exile. The UN bid does not in and of itself tackle the plight of the refugees. Therefore, UNRWA will continue to advocate that the refugees’ legitimate rights and aspirations must be achieved in the context of discussions between political actors, including the parties - discussions that must be based on international law and UN resolutions and reflect the informed views and choices of the refugees...
We therefore maintain our insistence that any strategy to resolve the conflict and specifically to address the refugee issue must include as a central frame of reference the realization of the rights and entitlements of the Palestine refugees.  Any genuine efforts to wrest peace from the prevailing gloom must recognize the pivotal importance of the refugee constituency, and take the bold and principled steps required to harness its potential.  This will advance the refugees’ own interests, and serve the regional and universal good.  It also makes eminent sense, I may add, in a context where “Arab Spring” movements have at their heart the aspiration of all people to justice and rights.
The refugees have a crucial role and position in the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict. Given the centrality of the Middle East in our history, past and present, providing them with real reasons for hope will contribute to improve the chances that our shared future will be a better one.
Lecture.

November, 2, 2011,The Guardian
Article was written by Alaa Abd El Fattah on 1 November 2011 from cell No 19, the Appeals Prison, Bab el-Khalq, Cairo. It is has been published in Arabic by the Egyptian newspaper Al Shorouk and in English by the Guardian.
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November, 2, 2011, The Guardian
Egyptian junta pledges to free hundreds after damning prison letter is published
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