Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ramona Wadi
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The UN offers no protection to Palestinians per se, let alone journalists
When the UN does nothing but perfunctory duties, human rights and civil society organisations are brought to full stop; a dead end. Earlier this week, the Palestinian Centre for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) called upon the international community to adopt the UN Security Council Resolution 2222, agreed in...
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The international community invalidates its purported support for Palestine
A recent report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) places Israel in 10th place when it comes to the share of global arms exports from 2017 to 2021, with its primary recipients being India, Azerbaijan and Vietnam. Israel placed 14th in arms imports, its main suppliers being...
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The latest UN report highlights international leniency towards Israeli apartheid
UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk has issued one of his strongest condemnations yet of Israeli apartheid in a report to the 49th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council for Agenda Item 7; the session which, claims Israel, singles it out unfairly. Referring to various statements, including those...
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The Palestinian Authority and the US are on the same page
US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, gave additional proof that Palestine is far from a priority for the Biden administration. During a press briefing in Ramallah following a meeting between Blinken and Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, the discrepancies in diplomatic expectations could not have been more evident. The PA...
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PA appeals to the international community are only for its own survival
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh and Finance Minister Shukri Bishara met with World Bank senior directors this week in Ramallah, urging that pressure should be placed on Israel to release the tax revenues that the occupation state is withholding. The PA’s financial crisis, despite diplomatic efforts by the...
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Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World
Maurice Ebileeni’s study of Palestinian literary narratives and the imaginings of the Palestinian homeland highlights the need to rethink both. Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World takes the reader on a multifaceted journey through land, continents and languages as these intertwine with Palestinian authors’ perceptions, imaginings...
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The US should be reminded that Israel’s settlement expansion is a war crime
US Ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, engaged in further diplomatic contradictions, as he fluctuated between asserting the Biden administration’s stance purportedly against Israeli settlement expansion, yet making concessions for earlier encroachment upon Palestinian land. “We can’t do stupid things that impede us from a two-state solution,” Nides reportedly told Americans...
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Protection for Palestinians and international complicity with Israel
Calls for the international community to step in and protect the Palestinian people from Israeli violence are always juxtaposed against a complex web of complicity with Zionist colonisation of their land. This week the Arab League called upon the UN Security Council to assume such responsibilities, after the Israeli...
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Palestinian refugees are more politically isolated than ever
Financial support for the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is dwindling, despite the renewed mandates and financial contribution pledges by world leaders. “The almost unanimous political support expressed by the UN General Assembly to the Agency is not translated into matching financial resources,” UNRWA’s Commissioner-General,...
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Israel’s selective humanitarian façade
Once again, Israel feels entitled to play the humanitarian card, with only Palestinians pointing out its selectivity when it comes to opening its doors to refugees. In February, The Jerusalem Post reported that 10,000 Jewish Ukrainian refugees would be entering Israel. The move was confirmed by Israel’s Ministry of...
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The PA mirrors international hypocrisy over Palestine
The Palestinian Authority has caught up belatedly with the international community’s double standards when it comes to professing support for Palestine while upholding the impunity with which Israel is allowed to act. However, the PA is still a long way from acknowledging these tactics in its own politics, which...
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The Other End of The Sea
“Palestine revealed itself to me in layers,” reflects Becky Klein, the Jewish American protagonist and narrator in Alison Glick’s novel, The Other End of the Sea (Interlink Books, 2021), near the beginning of the novel. She discovers that a voyage to gain insight into her Jewish heritage leads her...
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UNRWA’s existence points to the UN’s failure to implement the Palestinian right of return
As important as the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) is in terms of providing essential services for Palestinians, its existence is also a stark reminder of the international community’s failure to implement the legitimate Palestinian right of return. On Tuesday, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas met...
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The two-state paradigm is not a ‘legitimate political process’
“There is no substitute for a legitimate political process that will resolve the core issues driving the conflict,” the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Tor Wennesland, warned recently during a briefing with the UN Security Council. Sadly, though, Wennesland’s statement is built around the preservation...
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The international community’s opportunity to emphasise Israel’s colonial violence
Israel’s human rights violations have become more prominent since human rights organisations have taken it upon themselves to speak of the settler-colonial state’s apartheid practices. Needless to say, Israel is unleashing its usual non-compliance with international organisations, the latest being its refusal to cooperate with the UN Human Rights...
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Denying apartheid does not invalidate the designation
At the slightest criticism of Israel, disarray ensues. Built upon the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, Israel’s colonial narratives are entrenched in violence and yet so fragile, because what sustains the colonial enterprise is the Israeli government’s expertise in disseminating and enticing the world to adopt its security...
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The EU’s report evades Israel’s settler-colonial origins
Yet another report has been published, portraying how Israel is increasing its destruction of Palestinian property and, as a result, continuing the cycle of dispossessing Palestinians. The EU’s recent “One Year Report on Demolitions and Seizures in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem” for the entire year of 2021...
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America’s return to UNESCO will work in Israel’s favour
In 2017, the Trump administration announced its withdrawal from the UN Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), citing “mounting arrears at UNESCO, the need for fundamental reform in the organisation, and continuing anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.” A few hours later, Israel followed suit, with then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin...
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UN’s Guterres ensures Palestinian independence remains elusive
“There is no Plan B.” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ favourite catchphrase wormed its way into his address at the opening session of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. His speech was a reminder that, despite all talk of independence and rights,...
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The PA shouldn’t need an Amnesty report to prove Israeli apartheid
Palestine is always defined by an indefinite present dissociated from its past, a bludgeoning lie against which Palestinians are always struggling. Ever since the UN recognised Israel’s colonial project as a state and projected the humanitarian paradigm onto the Palestinians driven out of their homes and land, it has...
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PA reform can be termed as PA acquiescence to the US and Israel
US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken’s recent call to Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, has been largely described in mainstream and Israeli media as based upon the need for reforms within the PA. The US Department of State’s official statement mentioned the need for reform without expanding on detail,...
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Palestinian prisoners are synonymous with resistance, not PA collaboration
According to his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh, Palestinian prisoners are important for Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas. As reports circulate in Israeli media about Abbas’s request for the colonial-occupation state to release 25 Palestinian prisoners from its jails, the PA’s official news agency Wafa deemed it pertinent to clarify...
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Publicising the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar is not political support against displacement
Israel has announced new plans for the village of Khan Al-Ahmar in the occupied West Bank, which has been demolished and rebuilt several times, and which attracted international attention in 2018 after the Israeli Supreme Court approved its destruction. For a brief period in 2019, Khan Al-Ahmar’s impending destruction...
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The PA views Palestine through the lens of collaboration and Israel’s security
The Palestinian Authority continues to attract negative publicity and erode its own standing with the Palestinian people. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas’s recent meetings with Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz reaped nothing but a trickle of symbolic concessions for the Palestinian people. As always, this was against a backdrop of...
