The word “Quds” is Arabic for “the holy place” and is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. Al Quds Day is an annual event held on the last Friday of Ramadan when people around the world – Muslims and non-Muslims – come together to demonstrate their support for the oppressed people of the world, particularly the oppressed people of Palestine. It is a day that belongs to everyone who cares for those who suffer under the yoke of oppression. This year, al Quds Day falls on Friday 3 September.
Jonathan Cook considers the legal battle of one Bedouin to repossess his ancestral land in the Negev – a battle that could have ramifications for tens of thousands of Bedouin whose land had been stolen long ago as well as for millions of Palestinian refugees scattered across the Middle East.
Nuri al-Uqbi’s small cinderblock home in a ramshackle neighbourhood of Hura, a Bedouin town in Israel’s Negev desert, hardly looks like the epicentre of a legal struggle that some observers say threatens Israel’s Jewish character.
Inside, the 68-year-old Bedouin activist has stacks of bulging folders of tattered and browning documents, many older than the state of Israel itself, that he hopes will overturn decades of harsh government policy towards the Negev’s 180,000 Bedouin.Read More…
by Ambassador Chas W Freeman. Jr (USFS, Ret) - Just World - Oslo, 1 September 2010
Remarks to staff of the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, separately, to members of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs
You have asked me to speak to current American policies in the Middle East, with an emphasis on the prospects for peace in the Holy Land. You have further suggested that I touch on the relationship of the Gulf Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia, to this. It is both an honor and a challenge to address this subject in this capital / at this ministry.
The declaration of principles worked out in Oslo seventeen years ago was the last direct negotiation between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to reach consequential, positive results. The Oslo accords were a real step toward peace, not another deceptive pseudo-event in an endlessly unproductive, so-called “peace process.” And if that one step forward in Oslo in 1993 was followed by several steps backwards, there is a great deal to be learned from how and why that happened.
There can be no doubt about the importance of today’s topic. The ongoing conflict in the Holy Land increasingly disturbs the world’s conscience as well as its tranquility. The Israel-Palestine issue began as a struggle in the context of European colonialism. In the post-colonial era, tension between Israelis and the Palestinians they dispossessed became, by degrees, the principal source of radicalization and instability in the Arab East and then the Arab world as a whole. It stimulated escalating terrorism against Israelis at home and their allies abroad. Since the end of the Cold War, the interaction between Israel and its captive Palestinian population has emerged as the fountainhead of global strife. It is increasingly difficult to distinguish this strife from a war of religions or a conflict of civilizations. Read More…
With pundits in most capitals already predicting failure for the US-brokered Palestinian-Israeli peace talks to begin on Thursday, it seems only natural to start asking the question: “What’s next?”
To get a jumpstart on what surely will be an onslaught of new, competing narratives vying for prominence in the post-peace process era, I headed to Damascus to talk to a man who has predicted the failure of this process from the start. And yet who – against all logic – has never been invited to sit at the negotiating table.
Khaled Meshaal, head of Hamas’ political bureau, is an unassuming man who sauntered into our interview room unattended and chatted with me in English while we awaited his staff. Read More…
What an irony that the Palestinians’ arch-enemy, Israel, should also be their saviour. There is a real danger that the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks due to start on September 2 in Washington could yield a botched deal that falls far short of the needs of international law or elemental justice, and sets back the cause of Palestine for decades, if not for ever. Fortunately this will not happen as long as Israel’s obduracy can be relied on to save the Palestinians from such an outcome.
Time and again, when Israel was thrown a lifeline by Arab neighbours that could have ensured its legitimacy and security, its folly and greed lost it those opportunities. But, since they came at great cost to Palestinian rights, Israel’s obduracy had the perverse effect of safeguarding those rights. All peace proposals after 1967 were based on maintaining Israel as a regional power and forcing the Palestinians to settle for less than they were entitled to. They were repeatedly offered paltry settlements that legitimised Israel’s hold on most of their land and undermined their right of return. Had Israel agreed, the Palestinian cause would have been lost long ago.Read More…
The resumption of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) will allow Barack Obama to have his day presiding over the launch of another series of futile negotiations and, in providing an opportunity for Binyamin Netanyahu to assert his unwavering commitment to Israel’s colonial policies, will earn the Israeli prime minister further bragging rights.
But while the talks may serve immediate American and Israeli interests they will do nothing for the cause of peace. Read More…
The organizers could sense something was wrong about half an hour before the conference began last Wednesday morning.
About 60 people had been invited to what was termed a “national conference” (as opposed to a “popular” one, open to all ). But the hall in the Protestant Club in downtown Ramallah began to fill with hundreds of young men of similar appearance – well-developed muscles, civilian clothes and stern facial expressions. Some held what appeared to be rolled-up posters. They did not exactly look like senior PLO activists who oppose direct negotiations under American and Israeli pressure. Read More…
CASUAL observers of the Israel-Palestine conflict would understandably have welcomed the news that direct talks are set to resume between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The symbolism of two leaders on opposing sides of the world’s most intractable conflict shaking hands and talking directly to one another can be seductive and powerful.
Unfortunately, all is not what it seems, and there are good reasons to suspect the talks will not only fail to deliver any positive outcomes, but collapse altogether within a matter of weeks if not days — assuming they go ahead at all. Read More…
Ramallah-based writer and co-founder of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, Raja Shehadeh launched his latest book, A Rift in Time, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 14 August. Like earlier works, Shehadeh’s latest title addresses the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the failure of the international community and their own leadership to deliver justice, and the abuse of Palestinian rights by the Israeli military and civil authorities. These themes are all presented through the lens of his family’s history and his own experiences and passionate love of his land. But where Palestinian Walks, Strangers in the House and When the Bulbul Stopped Singing told the stories of Shehadeh and members of his close family, A Rift in Time takes readers back to the life of his great-uncle Najib Nassar, who edited the Haifa-based newspaper al-Karmil in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, before the First World War.
Accused of spying for the British against Ottoman Turkey and its German allies, Nassar went on the run for three years, living with Bedouin goat herders in the hills of what is now the Israeli Galilee, West Bank and northern Jordan. In uncovering his great-uncle’s past, Shehadeh explores his beloved Palestinian landscape and the damage wreaked on it by decades of Israeli occupation and exploitation, and holds up a much-vilified period in history as an inspiration for future visions of the Middle East. Sarah Irving spoke to him in Edinburgh for The Electronic Intifada. Read More…
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