Middle East Near You

UN resolutions on Palestine are given more prominence than the Palestinian people themselves. What happens within the UN premises sets an agenda that is difficult to challenge, mainly because...

December 8, 1949 marked the establishment of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Despite the recent Israeli-US conspiracy to eliminate the agency, as well...

Israel marked the International Day of Persons with Disabilities by donating three paediatric wheelchairs to the UN Human Rights Council. The aim, according to Israel’s Permanent Representative in Geneva,...

State violence against indigenous populations is arguably the most visible of human rights violations and, conversely, of the least concern to the international community. After the military coup in...

When, in December 2017, US President Donald Trump unilaterally recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the protests in Palestine swiftly ignited a ripple of international solidarity. Activists in many countries...

During the Berlin European Council summit in 1999, the European Union declared “its readiness to consider the recognition of a Palestinian state in due course” and conditionally dependent upon...

Normalising Israel as a Jewish state absents “Palestinian experience, history and identity claims”. Yasmeen Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan, Palestinian and Jewish authors of “Israel, Palestine and the Politics...

In an unsurprising move which exposes the ongoing US commitment to establish new paradigms for Israel in which Palestine is completely eliminated, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared Israeli...

Renewing the mandate of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) halted the aggressive campaign by Israel and the US to close the agency and alter...

The resumption of Israel’s targeted assassination of resistance leaders in Gaza has been met with widespread acceptance and tacit agreement, especially by the international community. During both of this...

Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s silence would be preferable to the ceremonial appropriation of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle. On the 15th anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, or possible murder,...

“The rain was not in a docile mood.” Huzama Habayeb’s opening sentence of her novel Velvet (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), beckons the reader to delve into intertwining worlds: the extravagance...

The olive harvest in Palestine is an annual reminder of Israeli settler vandalism and violence. In 2018, the Israeli NGO B’Tselem reported on the extensive damage inflicted upon the...

Since allegations about the misconduct and corruption of some staff members at the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) came to light, both defences and criticism...

It would be good if the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, defined his statement to the UN Security Council regarding Gaza, and which...

The Palestinian Authority’s promotion of its disengagement from Israel’s military occupation is mostly diplomatic jargon tied yet again to the two-state compromise. Whatever inference to resistance Prime Minister Mohammad...

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. True to form, UN, EU and Palestinian Authority representatives abandoned...

There is one thing the UN and its personnel would do well to keep in mind when pontificating about the purported peace process and to promote Israel’s security narrative:...

For decades, Palestine has been framed by international law. This convenient perspective, rendered mainstream by the international community and the Palestinian Authority, has made international law a weapon to...

The Zionist erasure of Palestinians from their landscape is no longer contested in the international arena. The dispossession of Palestinians is treated as a historical fact removed from their...

It was only a matter of time before the Palestinian Authority would renege on its word and accept the deducted tax revenues from the Israeli government. After all, the...

The European Union’s incoming Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell has already signalled a continuation of the bloc’s prevailing politics when it comes to Palestine – preserve the two-state compromise...

US conspiracies against Palestine and the Palestinian people are allegedly for their benefit. In the words of outgoing US Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt though, with reference to all...

Before the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle became fragmented by concessions to Israel and the international community, Palestinian prisoners were considered an integral component of the struggle for liberation. After the...

Gardner Thompson’s book, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel (Saqi Books, 2019) opens with a brief observation that contradicts all mainstream propaganda which spouts the...

The torture suffered by Palestinian prisoner Samer Arabeed at the hands of Israel’s Shin Bet interrogators has proved, once again, that the prohibition of such treatment as enshrined in...

The media has profited from pointing out the blunders of US President Donald Trump, yet it has failed persistently to draw attention to the connections between them which have...

The Joint List members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, have endorsed Benny Gantz to lead the next Israeli government following last week’s General Election. This is another betrayal...

The closest the international community ever got to an unequivocal condemnation of Israel’s settlement expansion since 1967 was through the UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (2016), albeit containing the...

The latest report on Palestine by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) displays the increasing deterioration of the Palestinian economy as a result of dependence upon...

Literature about Palestine by Palestinian authors is like a deluge of insights into what is missing from what we proclaim to know. Our knowledge is dominated by news reports...

If elected again, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, and the international community is scrambling to issue statements pointing out...