Palestine

JERUSALEM — There is a story about the Khalifa Umar bin al-Khattab, the Muslim leader who conquered Jerusalem in 637 C.E. It is said that upon entering the city he asked to see the site of the temple built by King Solomon, but could find no one who knew where it was. According to the story, he then came across a poor Jewish beggar sitting in the street. The beggar told the Kalifa that he could take him to the site where the temple once stood. When they arrived at the site Umar realized that the site had been used as the city trash dump.

Whenever, in ordinary circumstances, the subject of violence comes up, most people throw up their hands in horror and comment along the lines that it is ‘in our genes’, ‘nothing can be done about it’ or other words that reflect the powerlessness that most people feel around violence.
It is true that violence is virtually ubiquitous, has a near-infinite variety of manifestations and, at its most grotesque (as nuclear war or run-away climate catastrophe), even threatens human extinction in the near-term.

Press TV – April 25, 2019 Twenty filmmakers, screenwriters, actors, and film critics have urged film theaters in the United Kingdom to boycott the Israeli film festival Seret, co-organized by the Tel Aviv government, in protest at the Zionist regime’s atrocities against Palestinians. “We’re shocked and dismayed to see how many mainstream cinemas … are […]

British politics are being plunged into a stifling silence on the longest example of mass human rights abuses sanctioned by the West in modern history, writes Jonathan Cook. By JonathanCook Jonathan-Cook.net For decades it was all but taboo to suggest…Read more →

By Dick Callahan – 10.18.2018 “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. “The mountainsides were cut in terraces, many of them but a few yards wide, […]

As’ad AbuKhalil explains why Palestinians will see through the latest U.S. illusion of a Middle East “peace process.”   By As`ad AbuKhalil Special to Consortium News There is great speculation about the “Deal of the Century” for the Middle East,…Read more →

Seventy-eight percent of Americans live in states that have laws or policies against boycotting Apartheid Israel or Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law, according to a new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW). The report details the immense price Americans pay when exercising their free speech via their purchasing power to push back against human-rights abuses by Israel.
HRW further breaks down the number of states and which kinds of laws they have on the books:

As the 300-foot spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris tragically came tumbling down on live television, my thoughts ventured to Nuseirat Refugee Camp, my childhood home in the Gaza Strip.

As the 300-foot spire of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris tragically came tumbling down on live television, my thoughts ventured to Nuseirat Refugee Camp, my childhood home in the Gaza Strip. Then, also on television, I watched as a small bulldozer hopelessly clawed through the rubble of my neighborhood mosque. I grew up around that mosque. I spent many[Read More...]

The West Bank is under threat of annexation by Israel now; the caged Palestinians in Gaza are clamoring, at a grassroots level, for the right to return to their homes and property a few kms away in Israel, as per UN Res 194, and being pushed back with brutality. The “deal of the century” is looming darkly in the horizon. [Read More...]