– Edward Said
The late Palestinian scholar, Edward Said, remarked that Palestinians had been denied permission to narrate their history and speak of the day-to-day experiences of life in the margins. Here, we reclaim that permission to narrate our own stories.
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Mohammad al-Qiq is on the verge of death. The 32-year-old Palestinian journalist was imprisoned by Israel without charge or trial. In protest of his extralegal administrative detention, al-Qiq has refused food for more than two months. This week marks more than 65 days on hunger strike.
Just before Christmas, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, sent the White House a box of holiday gifts with a pointed political message. Inside were items (body lotion, halvah, olive oil) produced in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Or rather, as Mr. Dermer put it in an accompanying letter, in Judea and Samaria — the term used by religious nationalists who see the settlements as no less a part of Israel than the Galilee or Tel Aviv.
The Israeli military is preventing non-residents from entering the city of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. Only residents, senior Palestinian officials and humanitarian cases will be allowed through the checkpoints that have been set up until further notice.
The settlers told me that the great political development of the last year or two is that the Tel Aviv elite now concede that the settlers are never leaving. The elites give lip service to a Palestinian state because the world wants to hear that. But few in Jewish Israeli society even want that to happen; it would tear the country apart.
United Nations — In Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, 2016 has begun much as 2015 ended — with unacceptable levels of violence and a polarized public discourse. That polarization showed itself in the halls of the United Nations last week when I pointed out a simple truth: History proves that people will always resist occupation.
“Sixty years after her grandparents’ exile from Jaffa, Soraya (Suheir Hammad) leaves Brooklyn to live in her homeland. Discovering that her family’s bank account was frozen after the Arab-Israeli War, she becomes determined to reclaim her birthright, through whatever means necessary.
The growing delegitimization of Israel is this country’s own handiwork. Should Israel decide to end apartheid, it will return to being legitimate in every respect.
The US State Department has moved to back America’s ambassador to Israel in a febrile and escalating row over his remarks on Monday that Israel applied law in the occupied West Bank differently to Palestinians and Israelis. Ambassador Daniel Shapiro’s unusually critical comments drew harsh criticism from ministers in Israel’s rightwing government – including from the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
What is required of a saint is a radiant reflection of the holy and a capacity for miracles. What is required of a political saint is an intimate familiarity with the interrogation room. Ayman Odeh, the foremost leader of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, has read deeply in the lives of the political saints—Martin Luther King, Jr., especially—and he is not shy about suggesting comparisons, if only as a matter of aspiration. The Shin Bet, the Israeli internal intelligence agency, first pulled him in for questioning when he was a kaffiyeh-wearing teen-ager in the thick of an uprising. He is now a middle-aged politician in a suit, a legislator preaching the coexistence of Arab and Jew in a time of dashed hopes, almost daily acts of terror, and regional chaos.
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