PLO

Nakba and the Question of “Palestinian Strategy”

“What is the Palestinian strategy?” is a question that I have been asked all too often, including on 15 May, the day that millions of Palestinians around the world commemorated the 67th anniversary of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1947-48.
The question itself doesn’t require much elaboration, as in, “What is the Palestinian strategy to combat Israeli military occupation, siege violence, apartheid and racial discrimination?” The painful reality is well known to many, although few take on the moral responsibility to confront it.

UN peace coordinator unwelcome by Palestinians

Image: Mladenov prays against the ancient stones of the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City , on 29 June 2010. Mladenov is considered a friend of Israel Photo by EPA/BGNES 

 

PLO negotiators continue to wait for a breakthrough by “peace” envoys that are imposed on them and appointed by the US and the UN, although they represent the occupation state. Mladenov is the most recent. He will not change anything on the ground.

 
 

Is this Palestine’s last chance?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas after addressing the 69th Session of the UN General Assembly in New York, September 26, 2014. (photo credit: AFP/Timothy A. Clary)
 
 

The way is clear for Abbas to pursue a solution based on justice instead of engaging yet again in a lopsided political fudge concocted by some of the most dishonest fixers on the planet masquerading as ‘peace brokers’.

 
 

Donors will fail Gaza again

Israel has never renounced violence. It repeatedly wages war and unleashes its instruments of state terrorism against the Palestinians under occupation. It has flagrantly and repeatedly violated every agreement signed with the PLO. It has not even reciprocated the PLO’s recognition of Israel, nor has it officially acknowledged the Palestinians’ right to establish a Palestinian state.

 
 

Palestinians Claim UN Protection and Prepare Lawsuits

As Gaza and its lovely people were being blown to smithereens by Israel’s state-of-the-art weaponry, paid for by the grotesquely unlovely US administration, I put what I thought was a simple enough question to Dr Hanan Ashrawi on Palestine’s accession to the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court (ICC) after her remarks in this TV interview.

Bombing the Paralyzed — Stars of David on Rockets Bound for the Comatose

No moral outrage, collectively, in the streets, at work, in seats of power? What a sick-sick little world the white Jewish-Christian species have become. Blowing up a facility, hospital blatantly, with patients bedridden, in rehab. I have clients with ID, DD and PD – you know, intellectual, developmental and psychiatric disabilities. The Obamas, Jews in Israel, and the military-poison-bomb-jet-drone complex, they are the ones with severe ID, DD, PD.

CNN: Palestinians Want to Die

 

 CNN, Jake Tapper interviews Diana Buttu, a former advisor to the PLO.  After failing to persuade her of Israel’s complete innocence, he tells her that Hamas is instructing women and children to remain in their homes to die as Israel bombs them. She responds by expressing doubt that people want to die.  Oh no, says Tapper, Palestinians live in a culture of martyrdom; they want to die.