Al Jazeera English, May 4, 2013 Every day, investors knock on the door of a small home in Kufr Aqab, a village on the Palestinian side of the separation wall but inside Jerusalem municipal borders. The tidy, one-storey, two-room house is surrounded by new apartment buildings, some reaching nine stories high. Contractors are currently finishing …
New York Times Room for Debate, March 27, 2013 The previous secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, thought that making efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were, as one Israeli news media outlet put it, “a waste of time.” Clinton delegated the task to George Mitchell — a sure sign that she did not expect …
United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 18, 2013 Last month, an international fact-finding mission on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council found that settlements constituted a violation of international human rights and humanitarian law and called on Israel to stop all expansions immediately and withdraw from settlements. A …
United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 14, 2013 Palestine, now upgraded to a non-member observer state at the UN General Assembly, recently threatened to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel if it moves forward with E-1 (Palestine would first have to sign onto the Rome Statute that created the Court). There was much fanfare over …
Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2013 On the last day of the semester at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, I entered the classroom to find the usual graffiti on the whiteboard, save for an odd symbol. It was a triangle filled with curlicues, topped by two circles with dots in the middle. …
Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2013 The following interview was conducted with four 18-year-old Palestinian women who attend a university in the West Bank. All of the women are Muslim, though they run the gamut as to the extent of their religiosity: Nawal self-defines as liberal; Salma says that she and her family …
Al Jazeera English, December 18, 2012 Israel’s Supreme Court ruled last week that the state cannot extend its separation barrier through the West Bank village of Batir, located next to the Green Line that divides Israel from the Palestinian territories. Petitioners argued the wall would destroy Batir’s ancient agricultural terraces and unique irrigation system, both …
The Caravan: A journal of politics and culture, December 1, 2012 As is the case at most falafel stands across the country, the radio station of choice at my neighbourhood falafel stand is the Israeli Defense Forces’ Galgalatz. The station, I thought yesterday afternoon as I waited for lunch, is inescapable. It blasts from my neighbours’ …
Al Jazeera English, November 16, 2012 At a commercial center in Kiryat Malachi, a short walk from the apartment building where three Israelis were killed Thursday morning by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip, an elderly man selects tomatoes at a small produce stand. The 74-year-old man, who immigrated to Israel from Algeria with …
Al Jazeera English, November 7, 2012 To Westerners and Palestinians, Gaza “is hell”, says Ali Batha. “It’s a scary place … It’s the last place in the world [people want to go].” There’s Gaza’s 30 per cent unemployment rate, and the Israeli blockade that restricts imports and exports. Clean drinking water is increasingly scarce. Fuel …