Masood Syed, a police officer who has worked for NYPD for 10 years has been subjected to a 30 day suspension without pay for refusing to shave his beard, which Officer Syed said he must keep between 1/2 and 1 inch in adherence with his Sunni faith. While Syed has been attempting to get an … Continued
BY: Kristina Perry WASHINGTON, DC: These are trying times for the United States as xenophobia threatens the underlying narrative of this nation of immigrants. Throughout the 2016 campaign trail, the stump speeches of some presidential candidates have been sprinkled with references to the assumed threats posed by refugees, religious groups, and all the usual rigmarole. In … Continued
By Yardena Schwartz
US News and World Report
JERUSALEM — Roaming the halls of a certain school in this city, one could easily mistake Jerusalem as the capital of the elusive coexistence that many have sought and failed to create in this crossroad of religion and conflict.
An Arab teacher and a Jewish teacher ask their fourth-grade students to take out their homework. The class project is “Identity” and the assignment is to research the various historical names of their city. What would be an explosive topic among adults is merely a simple history lesson among these 10-year-olds.
An Arab boy stands in front of the class and begins. “Thousands of years ago, before Palestine or Israel, Jerusalem was Ir Yabus,” he says, referring to the City of the Jebusites, the ancient tribe conquered by King David in the First Testament. A Jewish student adds that the City of David is one of Jerusalem’s nicknames. An Arab girl then tells the class that the Romans renamed Jerusalem “Aelia” after conquering the city and destroying of the Second Jewish Temple in 70 A.D.
The very existence of this temple, and the mosque that sits atop its ruins today, are why the Temple Mount is one of the world’s most disputed pieces of real estate. As the girl sits down, there is not a hint of tension in the room. Just outside, a group of Jewish and Arab high schoolers walk down the hallway, giggling.
It’s a scene that would be nearly impossible to find anywhere else in Israel, where Jewish and Arab children almost never learn together, and rarely form friendships. Although Arabs represent 20 percent of Israel’s population, Jews and Arabs grow up living separate lives – beginning with a divided education.
The school is run by Hand in Hand, a nonprofit organization that has established bilingual schools across the country. With more than 1,300 children at six schools throughout Israel, Hand in Hand is the country’s largest network of integrated education. Its classrooms serve an equal mix of Jewish and Arab students, with lessons taught simultaneously in Hebrew and Arabic by two Arab and Jewish teachers. The school’s curriculum is a mixture of government-directed core topics, such as math and science, and material that Hand in Hand develops.
Perhaps Hand in Hand’s crucial difference from Israel’s official curriculum is the two narratives it teaches. The Jewish narrative tells of 2,000 years in exile from the ancient land of Israel, the 1947 U.N. partition plan that divided British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, the declaration of Israeli independence in 1948, the immediate attacks on the new Jewish state from five surrounding Arab countries, and Israel’s surprise victory. Under the Arab narrative, this same event is the Nakba, the catastrophe, which led to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians losing their homes amid the fighting.
The belief is that knowing the two narratives will help young Jews and Arabs understand the other’s world view.
“It’s an opportunity to truly see the other side, not from afar, not from the news, and not from the rumors,'” says Lilach Rosenfeld, who graduated from Hand in Hand’s Galilee school in 2008 and remains friends with some of her Arab classmates. “You discover the culture, the religion, the traditions, the thoughts, and the world of the other side from up close.”
While there is no legally instituted segregation in the education system – Arabs can attend Jewish schools and vice versa — the vast majority of Arabs attend Arabic schools, as Jews attend Jewish schools. This dual system is not forced upon anyone, but rather reflects the divergent needs and characteristics of two segments of the Israeli population who have little in common beyond the country they live in.
Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens speak different languages, celebrate different holidays, observe different cultural norms, tell two distinct historical narratives, and typically live in different communities.
This system has been in place since the British Mandate for Palestine, before the U.N. Partition Plan led to the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. Until recently, this division was barely questioned. Most parents, including Arabs, support it, according to Yousef Jabareen, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament and director of The Arab Center for Law and Policy.
But in recent years, as hope in peace negotiations has faded, demand has grown from parents who want their children to learn with and about what many here refer to as “the other side.”
Nadia Kinani is one of those parents. As an Arab mother of three, she helped to establish the Jerusalem Hand in Hand school with Arab and Jewish friends who envisioned a shared future for their children.
What began as a classroom of 20 students is now the only school in Israel where Arabs and Jews learn together from kindergarten through 12th grade. This year it had 650 students, with 150 on the waiting list.
“The more difficult and hopeless the situation is, the more people look for something that will give them hope,” says Kinani, who is now the school’s principal. Two of her daughters have graduated, the third is in 10th grade, and Kinani says they are all more open and tolerant than their peers who attended mainstream schools.
“Usually when something bad happens between Jews and Arabs, the city’s people divide along lines. Here, we come in and talk about it together,” Kinani says, adding that her daughters have close Jewish friends.
In a nation of 8 million people, some say there aren’t enough of these schools to go around. After all, aside from Jerusalem, no other Hand in Hand school runs through 12th grade. Rosenfeld’s school ends after the sixth grade.
Although Hand in Hand schools are public and receive government funding, that support is just enough to finance half of their operations, which require double the number of teachers compared to non-bilingual schools. With waiting lists at every school and dozens of parents requesting that Hand in Hand open schools in their communities, the organization hopes the Israeli government will eventually boost funding. Until then, half of their financing comes from donations, available through their website, and fees from parents.
That Hand in Hand thrives in a city like Jerusalem is proof that it can thrive anywhere, Kinani argues.
Still, the idea of co-educating Arabs and Jews is such a threat to some Israelis that last school year, two first-grade classrooms in Hand in Hand’s Jerusalem school were set on fire by Jewish extremists who painted the walls with this message: “There’s no coexisting with cancer.”
That didn’t stop Hand in Hand. In Kinani’s words, “It strengthened us.”
Ninety-eight percent of children came to school the next day, and their burned classrooms were rebuilt within weeks. Thousands marched through Jerusalem in solidarity. A month later, U.S. President Barack Obama invited students from the school to the White House to light Chanukah candles.
What the extremists failed to anticipate was that the media attention they sparked led thousands of Israelis to hear about an alternative school system they never knew existed. Calls from new parents skyrocketed, and Hand in Hand has more children on its waiting list than ever before.
Kinani and other parents hope that one day, with enough schools, they won’t need any more waiting lists.
Source: www.usnews.com
By Lawrence Pintak Foreign Policy American Islamophobia is as old as Plymouth Rock. But we’ve never seen anything quite like this before. They are “terrorist savages” and “mongrels,” part of the “rubbish from the desperate and criminal populations of the Third World” who have “backfilled” America. We are talking, of course, about Muslims. It’s the … Continued
BY ORIE GIVENS
Advocate.com
Mirna Haidar sounds exhausted but determined. And she and her community of LGBT and allied Muslims are overwhelmed, both personally and as a group of people working to represent for themselves in the face of Islamophobia while in solidarity with fellow communities in grief. And it’s the holiest month on the Islamic calendar, Ramadan, a time for fasting, reflection, and study.
“So many things are frustrating about this,” Haidar, a board member for the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, tells The Advocate. “It’s taking a lot away from us and moving us backward instead of forward.”
She’s volunteered to be a spokeswoman for the organization, to ensure that the media narratives are fair concerning queer Muslims and the Muslim population in general. This is a job that, sadly, must be done each time someone of Arab origin commits a criminal act.
As an advocate for LGBT people and a gender-nonconforming Muslim, Haidar would rather be supporting the victims and the communities she feels are most vulnerable.
“I blame Islamophobia,” Haidar says as she bikes to another vigil across New York City. “It’s distracting us from the real problems we need to deal with … trans Latina lives, access to guns in the country, and lack of access to mental health for people of color.”
Islamophobia comes from a lot of places. At a rally, when she was trying to show solidarity and speak for her community, a heckler screamed at her. The commotion interrupted her speech, but the crowd shut the heckler down with chants of “No hate.”
Haidar wants to counter not only the media narrative that erases or others LGBT Muslims but also the mainstream’s resistance to respecting the intersectionality and existence of LGBT Muslim identities. The speeches, reports, memes and social media posts after the Orlando massacre have only intensified her effort to affirm that Muslim doesn’t equal terrorist.
“When the United States is dealing with this horrible thing, we’re focused on the language of extreme jihadism or extreme Islamism, rather than focusing on the root problem,” says Haidar, who works with the Arab American Association of New York as well as on MASGD’s steering committee. “That’s what Islamophobia is doing, it’s distracting us from the real problems we should be dealing with.”
National conversation about gun control is being detoured by Islamophobia. In one of his speeches on Orlando, for example, President Obama dedicated most of his time to touting the effectivness of his strategy to combat ISIS and railing against the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters.
“We want to be able to comfort people and say, ‘Oh, this is the problem — we identified it as this whole one body that is alien to us and we attack it,” says Haidar. She adds, “I hope we can really remember not to treat hate with more hate.”
Source: www.advocate.com
Through comic dialogues and elegant illustrations in his handwritten newspaper Abou Naddara, the late-nineteenth-century satirist James Sanua galvanized Egyptians against the political ills of their day. By Anna Della Subin and Hussein Omar The New Yorker This past February, in a speech laying out his plans to repay Egypt’s titanic debt, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi … Continued
by Omar Barghouti
Al-Shabaka
Introduction
Israel’s attacks on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and other human rights defenders living under occupation, such as Al Haq staff, have dominated the headlines in recent weeks, including the direct threats made by leading Israeli officials against BDS activists and in particular against the movement’s co-founder Omar Barghouti.
Beyond the headlines, the work goes on, as does continuous debate and discussion to further the movement amongst Palestinians at home and abroad as well as among global solidarity activists. There is much to discuss and some of the issues are difficult ones, including questions of framing. Al-Shabaka Executive Director Nadia Hijab discussed some of these issues in a wide-ranging conversation with Omar Barghouti.
Omar began by clarifying that all the views he expresses here are his and his alone; they do not necessarily reflect the views of the wider BDS movement or its Palestinian leadership, the BDS National Committee (BNC).
Omar, thanks for making the time at this especially difficult juncture (to put it mildly) for the movement and for you personally. The BDS movement’s goals – self-determination, freedom from occupation, equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return – encompass Palestinian rights under international law. But we know that the BDS movement will not on its own achieve Palestinian rights. What other movements are needed and what mix of strategies is necessary?
Boycotts have historically been one of the main popular resistance strategies available to Palestinians of all walks of life, and today, in the realm of international solidarity, BDS is the most important and strategic form of support to our struggle for self-determination. The BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to achieve full Palestinian rights under international law. Nor is it possible to expect it to deliver Palestinian rights by itself. Among other strategies are, for example, local popular resistance against the wall and colonies as well as legal strategies to hold Israel and its leaders accountable for the crimes they have committed against the Palestinian people.
In fact, one of the most significant strategies available to us that is hardly being pursued is diplomatic and political work with parliaments and governments across the world to isolate Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid and have sanctions imposed on it similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa. Taking this path is primarily blocked by a complicit Palestinian officialdom that lacks a democratic mandate, principles and vision.
“The BDS movement has never claimed that it is the only strategy to achieve full Palestinian rights…Nor is it possible to expect it to deliver Palestinian rights by itself.”
A very important component of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s regime are Palestinians in exile, who represent half the Palestinian people. We are not just talking about refugee communities, who are clearly the most important to consider, but also Palestinians, like those active in Adalah New York, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, social movements in the UK or Chile, and their equivalent across the world of Palestinian communities in exile, who play a leading role in promoting Palestinian rights, including through BDS-related actions.
Palestinian citizens of Israel are also often forgotten when people talk about Palestinian resistance, despite their crucial role not only in steadfastness in the face of Israel’s regime of Zionist settler-colonialism but also their active popular, academic, cultural, legal and political resistance to the regime and its institutionalized and legalized racist structures and policies.
Some Palestinians in exile, however, claim they are unwilling to support BDS because “Palestinians don’t ‘do’ solidarity with our own people.”
But the traditional Palestinian political discourse of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is largely gone. In South Africa, the national liberation movement remained active until the very last minute, but we have, unfortunately, lost much of what made up the Palestinian national liberation movement largely due to the Oslo agreements. The Palestinian leadership, with the explicit or implicit endorsement of most Palestinian political parties, has surrendered basic Palestinian rights and accepted dictates by the United States and European Union to adapt to most of Israel’s regime of colonial oppression.
The Palestinian people is now in a state of loss and disarray. There is no longer a Palestinian “national consensus,” if ever there was one. Even the Palestinian political parties, right and left, Islamist and secular, with almost no exception, talk of “independence” and not national liberation, often forgetting the refugees and always omitting Palestinian citizens of Israel from the very definition of the Palestinian people.
It is up to the entire Palestinian people to determine its future and the solution to this colonial conflict. In the meantime, every Palestinian individual, group or coalition must strive to weaken the Israeli regime of oppression, as a prerequisite to attain Palestinian rights under international law. We in the BDS movement have opted for developing one, time-honored form of Palestinian resistance and the most effective form of grassroots international solidarity with it, based on rights, not political solutions.
BDS of course recognizes that there are other strategies and approaches; we’re just saying that we chose to focus on the rights, not the solutions, because for any political solution – determined by the majority of Palestinians everywhere – to be just, comprehensive and sustainable it must accommodate our rights under international law. Moreover, to be effective you need to have something close to a Palestinian consensus, and to achieve that we had to stick to the most principled and strategic lowest common denominator, to the most significant and least controversial goals of the Palestinian people that hardly anyone can object to: Ending the 1967 occupation, ending the system of apartheid, and fulfilling the right of return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and properties from which they were ethnically cleansed during and since the Nakba. And we adhere to these rights strictly.
This approach has brought us broad support amongst Palestinians. The BNC recently organized a relatively large rally in Ramallah in a show of popular Palestinian support for BDS. I personally do not see that kind of street mobilization as a decisive indicator of popular support, but my colleagues insisted we needed to do it in order to demonstrate to the world the popular appeal of BDS. There were over 2,000 people and many speakers from political parties and grassroots movements and unions, all of whom expressed strong support for BDS. One of the outcomes of that rally was to defuse the perception among some local circles that BDS was “elitist”.
There are those who don’t want to support the nonviolent BDS movement because it’s “below their political ceiling.” Being revolutionary, in my view, is not about raising “revolutionary” slogans that are not implementable and that therefore have little chance of contributing to processes aimed at ending the reality of oppression. What is truly revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and morally consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can lead to real change towards justice and emancipation. Otherwise you remain an armchair intellectual.
And yet the way the BDS movement is sometimes represented makes it sound as though it alone can actually achieve Palestinian rights. The frequent references to South Africa convey that impression, whether intended or not.
We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical to their success.
In South Africa, for example, the African National Congress-led struggle identified four strategic pillars for the struggle to end apartheid: Mass mobilizations, armed resistance, an underground political movement, and international solidarity (particularly in the form of boycotts and sanctions). There is no “copy-paste” strategy to achieve liberation and human rights – every colonial experience is different and has its unique particularities. We have been engaged in evolving our own Palestinian strategies that suit our environment of struggle for justice and dignity.
“Being revolutionary… is not about raising ‘revolutionary’ slogans … What is truly revolutionary is raising a slogan that is principled and morally consistent and yet conducive to action on the ground that can lead to real change towards justice”
In the case of the Palestinian struggle, the pillar of the underground movement is limited to Gaza, where it is isolated. International law upholds the right of any nation under a foreign occupation to resist it by all means, including armed resistance, so long as all forms of resistance themselves adhere to international law and human rights principles. Aside from that, as human rights advocates, we are obliged to consider the cost-benefit of this pillar at this stage and to measure the human price of any resistance.
As for mass mobilization, what we can do in the occupied Palestinian territory in terms of popular resistance, for example, against the Wall, is fairly limited. And it is not really a mass movement in the way that, for example, the recent teachers’ strike was popular, or the strikes against the Salam Fayyad government’s neo-liberalism or against the social security law were popular.
The whole question of the effectiveness of different forms of resistance is key and we in the BDS movement engage in the question of the effectiveness of our nonviolent, international law-abiding strategies at every stage.
Another concern is that some of the BDS movement’s discourse makes it sound as if Palestinians are on the point of achieving their rights. That comes out not only in the frequent references to the South Africa “moment”, but also in statements that say that a “tipping point” has been reached.
Yes, but when we speak of a tipping point, we mean a tipping point only in terms of the specific pillar of international isolation. The measure of effectiveness is whether you’re achieving your goals or not. BDS is one of the strategies of internal resistance and it is also the most important international strategy. We never claimed otherwise. Why, then, should BDS be held responsible, say, for the inability of the Palestinian people to achieve our goals of self-determination and national liberation? At least give us credit for being realistic.
There are many and growing critiques of the international law framework. Does that pose a problem for the BDS movement given it is grounded in international law?
To be effective in mobilizing international pressure by groups and individuals of conscience against Israel’s regime of oppression, as well as morally consistent, we must adopt human rights principles that are as universal as possible as well as a language that can touch people across the world and inspire them to action. That’s the language of international law. We know the inherent flaws of international law as well as anyone. But we also know that it is either that or the law of the jungle, and the latter does not work for us, on principle and practically, given that we are by far the physically weaker party.
We don’t want symbolic rhetoric: We’re sick and tired of rhetorical support. We need effective, strategic action that has a chance to undermine the system of oppression in order to make it more realistic for the Palestinian people to realize our UN-stipulated rights. The minimal action people can take is to end their complicity. That’s a profound legal and moral obligation to end this injustice; it is not an act of charity.
“We Palestinians always compare our strategies and progress to South Africa and other movements for justice, self-determination and human rights – and we know that we’re missing key pillars that were critical to their success.”
What are the alternatives to international law? It’s true that the colonial empires wrote it. It’s true that it is not weighted in favor of the peoples of the world, but it is not a dogma or a static set of laws that are engraved in stone. There is a simplistic view of international law that doesn’t see it as something dynamic, as something where we, through our persistent and mass struggles, can affect the interpretation and the application. After all, we are not asking for the moon; we are simply working to consistently apply international law to Israel and to end its exceptional status as a state above the law. That is a simple yet far-reaching demand that requires years of strategic struggle.
There is lack of clarity around the normalization guidelines that is often a source of tension with activists – and especially among Palestinians who may engage in activities that are said to be “normalizing” and who don’t appreciate what seems like having their nationalism called into question.
The normalization guidelines are very clear. The reference document to that was adopted by consensus at the first national Palestinian BDS conference, held in November 2007. Normalization, in this context, is understood by Arabs, including Palestinians, to mean making something that is inherently abnormal, like a relationship of colonial oppression, appear deceptively normal. According to the BDS guidelines, there here are two main principles in order for a relationship between a Palestinian (or Arab) party and an Israeli party not to be considered normalization. The Israeli side must recognize the comprehensive Palestinian rights under international law, and the relationship itself should be one of co-resistance to oppression, not “co-existence” under oppression.
The whole point is that such relationships should not legitimize, fig-leaf or whitewash Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights. To consider an example that may not be immediately obvious, say an organization in the United States is organizing a conference and has received sponsorship from Israel or an Israeli institution that is complicit in violations of Palestinian rights. And let’s say that the US organization is willing to have a panel that would include Palestinian speakers so as to provide space for a Palestinian voice. Participation under these circumstances would mean that we are effectively normalizing Israeli sponsorship – in other words normalizing the violations of our rights. This is too high a price to pay for our voices to be heard, as important as that is, given the mainstream media’s suppression of these voices. So we work closely with partners to apply pressure to rescind that Israeli sponsorship, and if that fails we call for a boycott.
But there are still gray areas, and it is in the gray areas where problems can arise – especially as some people take it on their shoulders to speak on behalf of the BDS movement and to lay down the law when in fact they have no authority to do so.
There are always gray areas. I would say 90% of the cases that we deal with are indeed gray. When we come across a gray area, we go back to the principle and try our best to measure profit vs. loss. BDS, after all, is not intended to be a dogma, but rather an effective strategy to contribute to our struggle for our rights.
Some Palestinians want to have their cake and eat it too. They allow themselves to engage in projects and activities that clearly conflict with the anti-normalization guidelines, adopted since 2007 by the broadest coalition of political parties, unions and networks in Palestinian society, yet they reject any characterization of those activities as normalization simply because they are “patriotic” and “no one should call that into question.” In the BDS movement, we do not call into question anyone’s patriotism and we never ever label anyone or resort to personal attacks; that would conflict with our principles as a movement. We also reject any suppression of freedom of speech and the simplistic and harmful dismissal of those engaged in normalization activists as “traitors.”
“We attack positions and statements but not individuals, and we don’t believe in blacklists or any form of McCarthyism. It negates our principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s counter-productive.”
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) simply mobilizes moral pressure to expose normalization activities in order to undermine normalization. It is vital to counter normalization activities because they constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement and against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.
And sometimes we do things that are seen as ahead of their time or use language that is not yet accepted. For example, when we first used apartheid as a key facet of Israel’s regime of oppression or insisted on the right of return in our international discourse, both were frowned upon not only in the mainstream but even in some Palestine solidarity circles in the west. Also, when the 2004 call by PACBI (the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel) mentioned Zionism as a racist ideology that has been a pillar in Israel’s settler-colonial regime, this issue was hardly discussed in most Palestine solidarity circles in the west in the post-Oslo period.
It’s important not to conflate opposition to Zionism and to Israel’s regime of colonial oppression and apartheid as being an opposition to Jews: It is absolutely not. The BDS movement has consistently and categorically rejected all forms of racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. The fact that 46% of non-Orthodox Jewish-American men under 40 support a full boycott of Israel to end its occupation and human rights violations, according to a 2014 poll, partly attests to the inclusive, anti-racist character of the movement.
Can you give an example of what you do when there is a gray area?
We never take decisions as individual members of the BNC or of its academic and cultural arm PACBI when there’s a gray area; we always go back to the group and decide collectively, based on the agreed upon principles, not the personal opinions and biases of each of us. We don’t give our advice or recommendation until we reach consensus. If we have a deadlock we say to the person seeking advice that we don’t have clear advice to give them. We pick our battles. We don’t chase everything, and we ignore so many targets based on cost-benefit calculations.
We don’t issue edicts; rather, we issue advice. We never say “thou shalt”.
“It is vital to counter normalization activities because they constitute a key weapon that Israel has used against the movement and against the Palestinian struggle for rights in general.”
And we never use ad hominem attacks – we have never done so since BDS was founded in 2005. We attack positions and statements but not individuals, and we don’t believe in blacklists or any form of McCarthyism. It negates our principles, it’s an abuse of power, and it’s counter-productive. Personally, I’ve never engaged with anyone who, for example, attacks us as “agents of imperialism” or similar ultra-left nonsense. We pick our battles, as I said earlier, and we keep our eyes on the real enemies.
When we engage to stop a normalization activity, our objective is always to first and foremost convince the person involved to stop normalizing. You can’t use ad hominem attacks and expect that person to side with you. And in fact many Palestinians who were engaged in normalization 10 years ago are now BDS supporters, and that’s partly because we avoid personal injury. It’s wrong on principle and it’s pragmatically wrong.
When someone has a question, we recommend seeking advice from PACBI or the BNC, or one of our partners in any given country and we seek to resolve it through interactive debate. We now have much better mechanisms to implement the guidelines.
There is a gray area that was cited to me as an example of something Palestinians don’t understand, and indeed find problematic – that of Arab passport holders entering Israel on a visa issued by an Israeli embassy being treated as normalization, as opposed to getting a permit issued by the Israelis at the request of the Palestinian Authority (PA). People don’t get the difference because Israel issues both.
That is a sticky point and a very difficult one. After extensive debates, community meetings and discussions with many Palestinian artists and cultural organizations, we concluded that when an Arab passport holder receives an Israeli visa he/she is normalizing Arab relations with the regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid by treating this regime as if it were normal. Whereas obtaining a permit from the Israeli occupation authorities through the PA is not, despite the problematic nature of the PA’s role, to put it mildly, because Palestinians under occupation are in a coercive relationship with Israel: Palestinians have no choice to receive family or friends from the Arab world without dealing with the Israeli authorities. But such dealings do not per se recognize Israel’s regime as normal. Still, we recognize this as a difficult area, and we admit that it is not the most robust or irrefutable of our guidelines.
My question is this: Why don’t Palestinian BDS critics at home or in exile write to us if they seek clarification or want to share their criticisms in a constructive way that strengthens our collective movement? We get hundreds of emails daily from solidarity activists but very few from Palestinians. A few Palestinians attack BDS without bothering to first write to the BNC and express their critique in a way that can help make this already effective movement better and more able to handle the many challenges facing it. We are open to and we sincerely encourage discussion and debate among Palestinians in our diverse communities. I beg those with questions, criticisms, or comments to communicate with us – just write to pacbi@pacbi.org or info@bdsmovement.net. Despite the workload we, as volunteers, have to deal with, we do our utmost to respond to every email we receive, especially one coming from a Palestinian sister or brother.
Source: al-shabaka.org
An unidentified man, wrapped in a Rainbow Flag, lights a candle during a vigil in Washington, Monday, June 13, 2016. Victoria Macchi Voice of America “This is what it looks like to be called both a terrorist and a faggot,” Hamed Sinno said from a Washington, D.C. stage early in his band’s concert Monday night, … Continued
BY: Habeeb Salloum/Contributing writer To fully realize the extensive influence of Arabic on the Spanish language and culture let us relate an imaginary journey made to Andalusia, the name itself a pure symbol of this impact. The Arabic name for this part of the Iberian Peninsula is al-Andalus – a corruption of ‘the Vandals’, a … Continued
Salon.com
After years of setbacks, Palestinians are proudly starting to move into their first planned city being built in the West Bank — a move that isn’t just about real estate but also a symbol of their quest for statehood after nearly 50 years of Israeli military occupation.
Though Rawabi is still unfinished, its glistening high-rises and shopping centers bring a rare sense of pride and excitement to the territory at a time of growing malaise over a standstill in Mideast peace efforts.
Palestinian-American developer Bashar Masri dreamed up Rawabi, which means “hills” in Arabic, back in 2007. But the construction of the city, located about 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Jerusalem, has repeatedly stalled due to political obstacles. Work only began in 2012.
Perched on a once desolate hilltop, it’s the first Palestinian city being built according to a modern urban design plan. The organized layout and modern facilities are in jarring contrast to chaotic Palestinian towns and villages in the area.
Since January, the first residents have been slowly moving in.
Mahmoud Khatib came here with his wife and three children from a nearby village because they wanted to live in a modern city. First, “it was an idea,” the 41-year-old banker told The Associated Press. Then “it became a reality.”
His wife Sanaa, 40, is thrilled about her new home.
“Here everything is organized. There is a safe playing area for the kids where you don’t feel worried when they go out. The services are central and available around the clock,” she said. “That’s the place I dreamed to live in.”
Palestinians see the West Bank, which Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast, as part of their independent state, along with east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Under interim accords reached two decades ago, the Palestinian government now rules about a third of the territory. The rest remains under Israeli control, and home to some 370,000 Jewish settlers. The last round of peace talks broke down two years ago, and prospects for resuming negotiations — much less reaching an agreement — are dim.
Masri said one of the major hurdles in starting Rawabi was getting approval from Israel for an access road and water supply to the city, which took years.
“Dealing with occupation is not dealing with a proper nation,” he said. “It’s dealing with an ugly system.”
Rawabi now has a yearly renewable permit to use a narrow road that passes through an adjacent 1-kilometer (0.6-mile) stretch under Israeli control. A pipeline, which passes through the same area, brings in 300 cubic meters of water a day — insufficient for the residents as well as the construction that’s underway.
Additional water is currently being brought in on tankers, and some people supplement their supply from a nearby village. Masri said his next battle is to triple both the width of the seven-meter (yard) road and the water supply.
He said Israelis from a nearby settlement have gone to court to curb Rawabi’s expansion.
“I’m a strong believer that a Palestinian state is in the making and part of the pillars of building a proper state is to have a strong economy and higher standard of living,” Masri said.
Israel’s defense body, COGAT, blamed the delays on the “unwillingness” by the Palestinian officials to convene a necessary Joint Water Committee but said that despite this, water connection to the city was approved and work is underway to increase supplies. In addition, COGAT said it’s working with the Palestinian developer to find solutions to the access road.
Currently 250 families live in the city. That population is expected to swell to 60,000 when construction ends in about five years.
For Masri, Rawabi has become part of history — “the first Palestinian city to be established in thousands of years” — and he is sure more cities like this will follow. The Palestinian government has envisaged a new city near Jericho, though it’s still in the planning stages.
Rawabi building costs have reached $1.2 billion so far. Funding has come from a Palestinian company run by Masri as well as the Qatari holding company Diar. A three-bedroom apartment averages about $100,000, about 25 percent less than in the main Palestinian West Bank city of Ramallah nearby.
Along with a large amphitheater that can hold 12,000 people, Rawabi now boasts also an industrial zone, schools, and the first big Western-style open-air shopping center in the West Bank. Such attractions lumped together in one city are unheard of in Palestinian areas.
There is a mosque under construction and also a church, which will serve the Palestinian Christian minority. About 10 percent of Rawabi residents are expected to be Christian.
Masri can see it all so vividly.
“I would love to sit at a café in Rawabi and watch the people going around, enjoying themselves, living in a nice clean environment and being happy,” he muses.
“We deserve some relaxation and happiness … we have been dealt a terrible deal, dozens and dozens of years. We deserve better.”
Source: www.salon.com
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