Category Archives: Electronic Intifada

Can Planting Trees Really Solve the Israel-Palestine Conflict?

Posted on February 3, 2011 | 1 Comment

There is this strange place where the green environmental movement and the Israel-Palestine conflict meet which I find simultaneously inspiring and problematic.

Inspiring because some good must come out of the tree-planting co-existance stuff even if it is hard to quantify and mostly seems to be feel-good vibes for international funders. Problematic because there are sinister undertones to some of the ‘green’ actions that, for example, diminish the gulf of inequality between Palestinians and Israelis, ignore the political dimension (causes) of the ecological conflict or fail to see that some tree-planting is just plain old ‘greenwashing’. Continue reading →

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Posted in climate change, Climate Justice, Electronic Intifada, Environment, History, Human Rights, Identity, Israel, Middle East, Occupation, Palestine

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Electronic Intifada: The Holocaust, Palestine and the Arab world

Posted on January 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Read my interview with Gilbert Achcar- a professor of Development Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies-  on Arabs, the Holocaust and Palestine.

Gilbert Achcar: Most people in the Arab world would agree that the Holocaust was an awful crime perpetrated by the Nazis. The best illustration of this is the fact that Zionism is widely compared to Nazism — of course, this comparison is over the top but it shows that people see Nazism as an insult. People should also know other stories, like that of the West Bank villagers of Bilin who dressed in striped pajamas similar to those of concentration camp inmates in order to protest against the Israeli army in January 2009, during the onslaught on Gaza. Again, the comparison is certainly over-exaggerated but the demonstrators’ intent was clear. This was a way of identifying with the Jewish victims and saying: “We are the Jews of the Middle East who are oppressed by the Israeli state in the same way that European Jews were oppressed by the Nazis.”

Read the full article here.

Image via simone.onofri on Flickr.

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Posted in Electronic Intifada, History, Human Rights, Islam, Israel, Jerusalem, Middle East, Occupation, Orientalism, Palestine

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Electronic Intifada: The Great Book Robbery of 1948

Posted on November 13, 2010 | Leave a comment


A new documentary reveals a hidden chapter in the history of the Nakba — the Palestinian expulsion and flight at the hands of Zionist militias as Israel was established in 1948 — which saw the systematic looting of more than 60,000 Palestinian books by Israeli forces and the attempted destruction of Palestinian culture.

As the violence which came to mark the formation of Israel erupted, Palestinian families living in the urban centers and villages of the country fled their homes in search of safety and refuge. One Palestinian family after another escaped, and believing that they would soon return, many left behind their most precious belongings. As Palestinian homes sat silent in the haze of conflict, however, a systematic Israeli campaign was underway to enter the homes and rob them of a precious commodity — their books.

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Posted in Apartheid, Crime, Electronic Intifada, History, Human Rights, Identity, Islam, Israel, Occupation, Orientalism, Palestine, West Bank

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Electronic Intifada: JNF plants trees to uproot Bedouin

Posted on October 25, 2010 | 1 Comment
Bedouin near al-Araqib village protest land confiscation by the State of Israel and the Jewish National Fund, April 2009. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills

Israel has exploited the country’s natural environment for its own political ends for decades. Since 1948 olive trees have been uprooted, quarries mined, the most fertile lands taken for settlements and water illegally extracted.

However, in the Naqab (Hebraized as Negev) desert and the Galilee this ecological occupation takes on a very different form. Instead of uprooting trees, they are planted in huge numbers by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), a Zionist organization setup in 1901 and which displaced Palestinians during the 1948 dispossession or Nakba, and has since planted more than 24 million trees covering more than 250,000 acres of land in the country.

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Posted in Apartheid, Architecture, Climate Justice, Crime, Electronic Intifada, Environment, Green, Human Rights, Identity, IDF, Islam, Israel, Middle East, Muslims, Occupation, Palestine, Protest, Public Sphere, Separation Wall, West Bank

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War Crimes in Gaza Report

Posted on December 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

With December now under way, we are fast approaching the first anniversary of the war on Gaza during December 2008- January 2009. The 22-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip- which is most densely inhabited place in the world- wreaked havoc on the region and killed over 1,400 Palestinians.

I was commissioned by Friends of Al Aqsa to write a report on the war, which looks at the lead up to the conflict, international complicity, the full extent of the devastation to the civilian infrastructure, medical services and also the aftermath as Gaza remains under siege.

You can download the entire report for free or you can view it here. It’s a really useful primer with all the fact and figures you need to know about the conflict and its various dynamics.

Hope you find it useful.

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Posted in Apartheid, Architecture, Bush, Children, Crime, Development, Economy, Electronic Intifada, Environment, Food, Friends of Al Aqsa, Handala, History, Human Rights, Identity, IDF, Islam, Israel, Jerusalem, Jordan, Middle East, Muslims, New Internationalist, Obama, Occupation, Orientalism, Palestine, Protest, Separation Wall, Stop the Wall, Water, West Bank, Women, Youth

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West Bank water access mired in politics

Posted on May 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

Arwa Aburawa, The Electronic Intifada, 26 May 2009

Workers from the Israeli water authority backed by armed soldiers take water samples in the occupied West Bank town of Qalqiliya. (Khaleel Reash/MaanImages)

 

Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) is calling for the replacement of committees, which control the West Bank’s water, for having “failed both sides” with “catastrophic” consequences.


“It is time to replace the failed mechanism of the Joint Water Committees established under Oslo [the peace accords of the mid-1990s], with an institution where Palestinians and Israelis are true partners in both water supply and management responsibilities,” said Nader Khateeb, the Palestinian Director of FoEME. This denouncement follows a recently published World Bank report which also found that the Joint Water Committees (JWC) “fall short of the needs of the Palestinian people.”

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Posted in Electronic Intifada, Friends of the Earth, Middle East, Palestine, Water, West Bank