The decade-long siege of Gaza has ground the economy to a halt. “I don’t own anything else now except these debts,” says Sameh al-Madhoun, who used to own a car dealership but is now held in a Hamas jail in Gaza.
Manal Massalha writes from Gaza,”It’s disastrous to be a cancer patient in Gaza. It’s humiliating and undignified. It’s being sentenced to a slow death. Cancer treatment is not available in Gaza and access to treatment outside of Gaza is controlled by the Israelis, the Egyptians and the Palestinian Authority, none of whom seem to care, take our condition seriously or deal with us in urgency. For them we’re just numbers.”
We are very excited to announce the second publication in our series Mondoweiss in Print: Reading Maimonides in Gaza, by Marilyn Garson. Between 2011 and 2015, Garson lived through two wars as she worked for Mercy Corps and UNRWA in Gaza. Reading Maimonides In Gaza is her incredible memoir of that tumultuous time. An expanded 25-page version of Garson’s story Mondoweiss originally published online last March, the book includes exclusive new content and provides an intimate and harrowing look at the life-saving work aid organizations did in Gaza during two Israeli attacks. Mixed in with this reporting is Garson’s own process of coming to understand her connection to Judaism while under fire from Israeli warplanes. A portion of the proceeds from Reading Maimonides In Gaza will go to support We Are Not Numbers, a Gaza-based writing project for Palestinian youth.
IMEMC reports: On Friday, March 2 dozens of Palestinians, accompanied by Israeli and international peace activists, marched in Bil’in village marking the 13th anniversary of ongoing popular nonviolent resistance against the illegal Israeli Annexation Wall.
Dr. Vacy Vlazna reviews Ramzy Baroud’s new book ‘The Last Earth: A People’s Story of Palestine’ – “This is a dangerous book because by inviting us into an intimacy with the people of Palestine, it predicates compelling moral action to end the monstrous injustice; for this reason Baroud’s The Last Earth must be read and shared.”
Christian leaders in Jerusalem announced Sunday they will close one of Christianity’s most sacred sites, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, in protest of an Israeli bill targeting church-owned lands, and the repeal of the church’s tax-exempt status. “This reminds us all of laws of a similar nature which were enacted against the Jews during dark periods in Europe,” Christian leaders said in a statement.
Abbas included an off-the-cuff warning for Europe on the issue of Palestinian refugees’ right to return under international law. Abbas said, “it’s either that or they will become refugees and terrorists in Europe.”
Wasan Abu-Baker pens a reflection on growing up in Palestine as a “child of the stone” dedicated to Ahed Tamimi. She recalls when her father first came home to live with the family after years in prison. Wasan was already seven: “I still remember those days when we came home from school and then going out to the field to pick the olives, then coming back home to finish our homework. After the harvest was completed we would take the olives to our family factory where the olives were pressed to make olive oil. I remember standing next to my dad to have a taste of the freshest olive oil along with my pita bread. He used to say that once you drink olive oil it becomes part of your soul. I will never forget and miss always miss the smell of olives on those days.”
Violence / Detentions — West Bank / Jerusalem Nine Palestinians injured on 11th Friday of Rage, says Health Ministry RAMALLAH (WAFA) 16 Feb – At least nine Palestinians were injured by Israeli forces’ live bullets or rubber-coated steel rounds as the forces quelled a number of protests across the occupied West Bank on the eleventh […]
Hani, father of a daughter with cancer whose last medical permit from Gaza to Israel was denied: “I don’t even understand why, there were no reasons given to me this time, and I utilised every contact I had.”
In their manhunt for the Palestinian teen suspected of stabbing and killing an Israeli settler on Monday, Israeli forces raided Nablus on Wednesday and injured 110 Palestinians, including one man run over by a Jeep. A Palestinian youth, Khaled Walid Tayeh, 22, was killed, one of three Palestinians killed this week by Israeli forces.
On Sunday Israel demolished two school buildings in the West Bank community of Abu Nuwwar, east of Jerusalem. The buildings housed 25 third and fourth-grade students and were built in September with funds from the European Union.
Controversy has arisen in recent weeks over the 2017 film, The Insult, Ziad Doueiri’s film and Lebanon’s submission to the 2018 Academy Awards. In a review, film scholar Terri Ginsberg says the movie is a vehicle for pro-Israel propaganda.
A group of extremist settlers uprooted more than 100 olive trees from the village of Yasuf, east of Salfit, on Wednesday morning. The settlement of Rahalim is the 25th illegal settlement in the Salfit governorate.
Palestinian activists shut down a meeting in the West Bank city of Bethlehem on Tuesday between a delegation from the U.S. Consulate and Palestinian city officials, marking an escalation in the widening rift between Palestinians and the U.S. after Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in December. After interrupting the meeting with banners comparing Trump to Nazis and ISIS, and shouting “you are not welcome anymore!” the American officials abruptly walked out of a conference room at the Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
A hospital in the northern Gaza Strip suspended its services on Monday due to a lack of fuel, the hospital and a spokesperson for the Hamas-run health ministry said. “All health services provided at Beit Hanoun hospital were suspended due to power cuts and the lack of fuel for the hospital’s backup generators,” the hospital wrote in a statement posted to its official Facebook page.
Israeli soldiers shot, Tuesday, two Palestinians near Za‘tara military roadblock, south of occupied Nablus, after they reportedly attempted to stab them. On Wednesday and Thursday, 16-year-olds were shot near Nablus and Hebron, one of them as Israeli soldiers “ambushed youths.”
Human rights organizations Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch stopped itemizing Israeli crimes in the 2014 assault on Gaza, the worst of them all, Norman Finkelstein documents in his impassioned record of war crimes against the strip, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, published by the University of California Press.
Palestine was not empty. The Jewish people are not a nation with a homeland in the Middle East. Palestine was not ‘redeemed’, it was colonized. Its people did not flee, they were ethnically cleansed. Jews are not all Zionists. These are some of the myths that scholar Ilan Pappe exposes in his new book.
Israeli forces killed Ahmad Ismail Jarrar, 31, during a raid Thursday on the occupied Jenin refugee camp as a reprisal for a settler’s killing last week. But Palestinian sources said the man’s cousin, Ahmad Nasser Jarrar, escaped the attack; and he had been accused of killing the settler.
A new documentary on the conflict, In the Land of Pomegranates, suggests that Israelis and Palestinians only need to understand the other’s narratives of victimization to overcome their differences and get along. But its portraits of young Palestinians and Israelis scarred by violence shows that only outside pressure and structural political change will allow the two peoples to get along, and the film’s politics are meaningless.
Marilyn Garson reviews Norman Finkelstein’s new book ‘Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom’: “Finkelstein has set out to deconstruct the false narrative of war in Gaza, by refuting its component parts. One by one. Finkelstein is an author, activist and scholar with decades of archives and outrage to bring. ‘Gaza’ is one exhaustive act of witness.”
Ma’an News reports the Israeli army declared the central occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh — home to imprisoned teenage activist Ahed al-Tamimi — a closed military zone on Saturday, closing off all entrances and exits.
The Palestinian Health Ministry says a three-year-old child was shot in the head during an Israeli live-fire military training exercise near Tubas, in the northeastern West Bank. The child is currently in stable condition in an Intensive Care Unit. The Israeli military frequently conducts training in Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank.
Pro-Israel groups are working to save the Hebrew program at Evanston Township High School, north of Chicago, where enrollment has slipped in recent years to only 34 students. “The message of these Hebrew programs are clear: If you’re going to learn Hebrew, you’re going to learn to love Israel. No room exists for students to master the language while disagreeing with Israel’s policies”–writes Liz Rose, former Hebrew teacher in a Chicago area public school, who lost her job when she attempted to show students the Palestinian side of the story.