Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi is the Director General of League of Parliamentarians for alQuds (LP4Q).
Items by Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
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- January 11, 2019 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
The Middle Eastern mud house
Two days ago, I attended to a seminar on the legal background and implications of the dissolution of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) by President Mahmoud Abbas. Two of the renowned Palestinian experts – Dr Ahmad Al-Khaldi and Dr Anis Al-Qasim – concluded that Abbas’ decision has legal grounds....
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- January 4, 2019 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Abbas and his suicidal decisions
On 22 December Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). He did so despite the fact that the law does not give him the power to dissolve the council. To sidestep this obstacle, Abbas to formed the Constitutional Court – without...
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- December 27, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel’s systematic arrest of mothers shows its contempt for Palestinian women
On 16 December 2018, an Israeli court in the occupied city of Jerusalem sentenced Suzan Abu Ghannaam – the mother of 20-year-old Palestinian martyr Muhammad Abu Ghannaam – to eleven months in prison on account of “incitement” in a Facebook post. Her son had been killed while protesting against...
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- December 19, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Demolishing houses as collective punishment
About a month ago my wife asked me, “Have you seen that two-story house they demolished in the West Bank. Such a pity, it was such a beautiful house, made of white stone. Why did the Israelis destroy it? What did its owners do?” Her question hurt me very...
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- December 12, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Palestinians await both their relief and their downfall from the US
The Trump administration has made Mahmoud Abbas do what no other ally has done before – renounce America’s role and turn his back. Mahmoud Abbas declared that the Americans have lost their impartiality and thereafter their eligibility as caretaker of the peace negotiations. In response, Trump closed the PLO...
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- December 6, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel displaces, locks up and kills Palestinian children
What does it take to make someone wield a screwdriver and attack a fully armed, well-trained, well-protected soldier, knowing that if he got injured no ambulance would take him to hospital, and if he is lucky he will spend the best years of his life behind bars? Thaer Abu...
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- November 28, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel’s open secrets
Is Israel a nuclear power? In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli former nuclear technician, revealed to the British media details of Israel’s nuclear power programme and was eventually jailed for 18 years – he spent more than 10 of those years in solitary confinement. He later converted to Christianity...
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- November 23, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel doesn’t survive because it’s strong; it succeeds by weakening its enemies
The result of the latest round of fighting in the besieged Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army tried to carry out a covert military operation even while the Egyptians were in the final stages of mediating a ceasefire between armed factions in Gaza and the Israeli government, proved that...
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- November 14, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
When murder is permissible: Israel’s ‘targeted assassinations’
One of the anomalies of political Zionism is that, while it was founded as a response to murderous pogroms against European and Russian Jews as a means to rescue them from such treatment by having a safe haven to go to, the founding fathers of the State of Israel...
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- November 3, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
An Alliance of Despotism
Until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-religious, right-wing party came into power, we Palestinians used to have a lot of difficulties convincing the rest of the world that Israel is not a modern, democratic country as Zionists continue to claim. It is, rather, a reactionary, religion-based, race-based,...
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- October 25, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
The Israeli Myth of the Uncivilised Palestinian
Recently, in another shocking incident, Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev was outraged by a Palestinian children’s novel written by Walid Dagga, a Palestinian prisoner who spent more than thirty years in jail for resisting the occupation. In her opinion, he is in jail not to write novels but to...
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- October 19, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Netanyahu, the armed prophet of the clash of civilisations
If US President Donald Trump can be visualised as King Cyrus, then Benjamin Netanyahu is the prophet out to save the modern Israelites in a hostile environment. His message is to cast the clash of civilisations theories of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington into a religious mould. The battle...
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- October 11, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Netanyahu’s adventures in the AIPAC wonderland
Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the 2018 conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are key to an understanding of how Israel is run. The Israeli leader is not only his country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, but is also different from his predecessors in many ways. One difference has...
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- October 4, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
America wants to annul the legitimate Palestinian right to return
There are many in the Arab world who fell about laughing when the US ambassador to the UN started to lecture them about how rich Arab countries did not do enough to help their Palestinian brothers. “The US provided $364 million to UNRWA and another $300 million in bilateral...
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- September 26, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Imran Khan’s mission to balance relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran
The visit of Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan to Saudi Arabia last week raised many questions related to his country’s foreign policy and the changes that could be made during his tenure, especially with regard to its major partners in the region, such as the Kingdom. Pakistan is under...
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- September 18, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
It’s clear the US and Israel favoured Abbas. It’s also clear he failed.
A few years after Arafat assumed the leadership of the Palestinian national movement he tried to tempt the West to offer him something in return for what he called peace. Many people still remember him with his white sweater, in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, saying: “I...
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- September 11, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel’s failed quest for security
“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” Strong words, but not, as you might think, from...
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- September 4, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
On both anti-Semitism and peace, Israel speaks with a forked tongue
The President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, is on a four-day visit to Israel, the first such trip by any Filipino leader. Even though he declared during the 2016 election that he would be “happy to slaughter drug addicts on the scale of the Nazi leader’s Jewish genocide,” that...
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- August 3, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
One land, two laws: Welcome to the ‘Jewish state’ of Israel
Few people in the Arab World and Palestine had heard of Darin Al-Tatur before last Tuesday. This Palestinian poet has rarely caught the attention of critics, or literary magazines, till an Israeli court in Nazareth decided to sentence her to five months in prison. Her house in the Upper...
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- July 25, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Israel kills witnesses to its crimes, and doesn’t want us to know
Does one crime justify another? Israeli officials seem to think so. Whenever they are criticised for committing crimes against humanity by wiping Palestinian neighbourhoods off the map; bombing hospitals, schools and places of worship; and targeting ambulances, TV stations, power and water plants, roads and bridges, Israelis simply say,...
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- July 3, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
‘Deal of the century’ or flop of the century? Trump’s Middle East policy
This year marks the 70th anniversary of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland — the Nakba — by the Zionist Movement, which established the state of Israel on the land of our forefathers. Since then, Palestinians have not only suffered displacement but also continuous aggression and oppression...
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- March 20, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Malaysia’s unwavering support for Palestine
Two incidents represent turning points in Malaysian support for Palestine: the Mavi Marmara “Freedom Flotilla” incident, and the visit of Prime Minister Najib Razak to the Gaza Strip. The first took place in 2010 and boosted public support in Malaysia in an unprecedented way. Malaysian activists were on board...
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- February 27, 2018 Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
Palestine and Islamic influence on resistance: a response to Mehdi Hasan
Suspense created by the uncovering of hidden secrets attracts people, especially when it comes to established facts. Hence, Mehdi Hasan is keen on showing his audience the hidden side of the picture, or confirming that it doesn’t exist if that is the case. In his Intercept programme, “Blowback”, Hasan wanted...