In this presentation Ambassador Zomlot clarifies the positions of the PLO Delegation with regard to UN Resolutions 242 and 338, and comments on recent announcements made by the Trump administration regarding Jerusalem and the cut in funding to UNRWA.
In light of the milestones of 2017 (100 years after the Balfour Declaration, 69 years since the 1948 nakba, 50 years since the 1967 naksa), Josh Ruebner draws on personal anecdotes and reflections, historical documents, and legal analyses to address the question: is Israel a democracy or does its separate and unequal treatment of the Palestinian people render it an apartheid state?
Palestine Center Brief No. 310 (February 9, 2018)
Almost a dozen countries have agreed to advance their annual contributions to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees to help it plug a major shortfall after a partial cut-off of U.S. funding, its chief said on Tuesday. The move by the Trump administration appears linked to a United Nations vote rejecting Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, said Pierre Kraehenbuehl, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).
The crushing irony for Palestinians today is that their cause remains widely supported by over 120 governments and billions of ordinary men and women around the world, yet the Palestinian leadership is a case study in hapless incompetence that verges on national shame. This was confirmed again this week as the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) issued a policy statement after days of deliberations that is a sad example of meaningless clichés uttered by aging men whose track record of political achievement is empty — and astoundingly so, in view of the massive and sustained support around the world for Palestinian national rights.
A major US ad firm is refusing to put up a billboard calling for the release of Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian girl who is in indefinite military custody for challenging Israeli occupation forces on her family’s property. Ahed, 16, was detained in a night raid in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh a month ago, after video circulated showing her and a cousin slapping and shoving two heavily armed Israeli soldiers following an incident in which a soldier had shot in the head and seriously injured their 15-year-old cousin.
Last week Israeli military officials for the first time echoed what human rights groups and the United Nations have been saying for some time: that Gaza’s economy and infrastructure stand on the brink of collapse. They should know. More than 10 years ago the Israeli army tightened its grip on Gaza, enforcing a blockade on goods coming in and out of the tiny coastal enclave that left much of the 2 million-strong population there unemployed, impoverished and hopeless.
Since Donald Trump excommunicated Steve Bannon over comments he made in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, American media have spoken of little else. The president declared that his former strategist and the boss of far-right Breitbart News had “lost his mind” for saying that a meeting Donald Trump Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner held with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 election campaign was “treasonous.”
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