Permission To Narrate

That Palestinian olympian is Ahmad Abu Ghosh, 20, who was born in the Al-Nasser refugee camp to a Palestinian family from the village of Abu Ghosh (which according to the article is ‘known for its hummus restaurants and convenient location on the main road connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’). According to the article, Abu Ghosh has Israeli roots because his family comes from a village conquered by Israel in the 1948 War.

Robert Gardner rarely heard anything about Israel growing up in South Los Angeles. But at UCLA, he started learning about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and seeing parallels with conflicts close to home. The African American senior likened Israeli crackdowns on Palestinian protesters to police violence against black Americans. So he joined Students for Justice in Palestine and an international movement known as BDS, which advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against companies deemed players in Israeli human rights violations.

Scattered inscriptions written with toothpaste and food on the bunks and walls of an Israeli facility at the Ministry of Interior Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) declare: ‘for each International Solidarity Movement you deport back home, ten more will come!’  Me and many before me read those words as we waited for our deportation. After hours of interrogation at the Tel Aviv Ben Gurion International Airport, we received a 10-year ban from entering the State of Israel for ‘security reasons.’ With no further explanation, we were declared a threat.

I realised that alongside our efforts to liberate the Palestinians from Israeli settler-colonialism through Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) and other means, we must also liberate our language. In fact, liberating our language might be the key to achieving liberation on the ground. In order to mobilise opposition to Israel and put our collective foot down once and for all, we need to get rid of euphemisms and false language and call what Israel does by its real name, ‘settler-colonialism’.

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — Israeli authorities have been conducting a land survey in the southern occupied West Bank near Bethlehem in order to declare state lands to build a new settlement, a move which Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah called ‘another step towards cutting the West Bank in two’ on Monday.

I’ve always wondered if a day would come when there would be a cause so important that I would be willing to get arrested for standing up for what I believe in. That day came on Friday, July 15, when I was in the West Bank city of Hebron protesting the Israeli occupation, alongside dozens of other North American and European Jews. But it didn’t turn out the way I’d expected.

The year before the formalization of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the state of Israel declared ‘independence’ within the former British Mandate of Palestine. This declaration, in a measure that sits at the heart of the current unrest within historic Palestine, dictates the state’s borders only by referring to Eretz Israel – the ‘Land of Israel’ or ‘Greater Israel’ – with no mention of the current existence or future possibility of a Palestinian state. Israel would go on to sign the Conventions in 1951. The irony of an infant state signing on to these treaties, when the state itself was established upon the ruins of hundreds of Palestinian villages and the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians, is thick.

‘The Palestinians in Gaza are the American Indians of the Middle East.’ This was the opinion of the late American Indian civil rights leader, Russell Means. In reviewing the history of the two peoples, it is clear that both Palestinians and American Indians share similar hardships. There is the common usurpation of land, loss of self-determination, and the destruction of families that plague both peoples. There is also the issue that if transgressions against American Indians and Palestinians are not addressed, there may be no solution to ending the oppression of these two peoples.