Billions of US tax-payers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid.
I left Egypt 40 years ago. They say you can take an Egyptian out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of an Egyptian. I still visit Egypt every now and then. I recently made my first visit since the January 25 Revolution of 2011.
It wasn’t easy after all these years. I was warned about the political climate in Egypt now under military rule. The martial law, the mistreatment of journalists and media. But I’ve missed lots of family funerals through the years, and my beloved brother just passed away. I needed to be there.
A seemingly ordinary news story, published in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, on January 7, shed light on a long-forgotten, yet crucial, subject: Israel’s so-called “firing zones” in the West Bank.
“Israel has impounded the only vehicle available to a medical team that provides assistance to 1,500 Palestinians living inside an Israeli military firing zone in the West Bank,” according to Haaretz
The occupation. A phrase commonly used when speaking about the injustices taking place in Palestine. It is a phrase that limits the discussion to a small part of Palestine and to only a portion of the Palestinian people. The occupation only exists in the two small areas that we are permitted to state that human rights abuses take place. There are checkpoints and road-blocks and a dual system of justice, one for Jews and another for Palestinians.
At a talk I delivered in Northern England in March 2018, I proposed that the best response to falsified accusations of antisemitism, which are often lobbed against pro-Palestinian communities and intellectuals everywhere, is to draw even closer to the Palestinian narrative.
In fact, my proposal was not meant to be a sentimental response in any way.
Bombs have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to comprehend them.
Iranian forces launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles against two military bases housing US troops in Iraq early hours of Wednesday morning. The al-Assad airbase in western Iraq was hit by 17 missiles, and 5 targeted at a base in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. No US casualties were immediately reported.
At long last, Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has uttered the long-anticipated conclusion that “all the statutory criteria under the Rome statute for the opening of an investigation (into alleged war crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) have been met”.
By killing top Iranian military commander, Qasem Soleimani, American and Israeli leaders demonstrated the idiom ‘out of the frying pan into the fire.’
In what can only be described as one in a long series of reckless, thoughtless and short sighted acts that serve only the narrowest interests, the Trump administration assassinated Iranian General Qasem Soleimani. This assassination, which was an act of cowardice, one may safely assume was concocted by Benjamine Netanyahu, another corrupt, reckless coward who is fighting for his political life. This, like the rest of the Trump administration’s Mideast and Iran policy, had to have been prescribed by the Prime Minister of Israel.
