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Creating new perspectives since 2009

 

Ramona Wadi

Ramona Wadi is an independent researcher, freelance journalist, book reviewer and blogger. Her writing covers a range of themes in relation to Palestine, Chile and Latin America.

 

Items by Ramona Wadi

  • Netanyahu and Bolsonaro find common ground in oppressing indigenous populations

    While the Amazon forest burns and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro continues to trade insults and blame, indigenous communities face displacement and annihilation. These communities pose the biggest obstacle to Bolsonaro’s intent to allow access to local and international exploitation of the country’s natural resources. In a message to counter the...

  • The PLO endorses the humanitarian paradigm

    At the G7 summit in Paris, US President Donald Trump speculated publically about the purported “deal of the century”, which infuriated the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). If one had to rely on the PLO’s statements, though, it would seem as if there were no precedents that permitted Trump to...

  • Palestinian narratives must be protected from PA exploitation

    Official Palestinian media are playing a major role in disseminating Palestinian narratives, according to Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh, that is. Departing from the fact that the Palestinian Authority and its media still portray Israel’s colonisation as a mere “conflict”, there is a discrepancy between the people’s concept of Palestinian...

  • Calls to depoliticise humanitarian aid threaten Palestinians’ political struggle

    With the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) facing a financial deficit of $150 million, PLO Secretary General Saeb Erekat is calling upon the UN Secretary General to hasten the investigations into the allegations of corruption and misconduct at the agency. Now that the Netherlands, Belgium and...

  • The PA’s ‘rights’ rhetoric normalises US-Israel violence against Palestinians

    The Palestinian Authority’s diplomatic meetings with the US are a form of normalisation. In the last two years, the US has enabled Israel to fast-track its colonisation process, while Palestinians have been coerced into living the deterioration of their prospects and political rights. On Tuesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh...

  • Will the UN act if the US recognises Israel’s sovereignty over West Bank?

    The UN has advanced no further than acknowledging that Israel is seeking to “advance a claim of sovereignty” over settlements in the occupied West Bank. As the Israeli elections approach, the main contenders – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli army Chief of Staff Benny Gantz from...

  • The PA’s support for international agendas shuns the Palestinian right of return

    The Palestinian Authority has not ceased to display where its compromised loyalties lie. With each public statement or declaration, it is evident that the PA is working for diplomatic conjectures and, as a result, against Palestinian freedom. In a meeting in Ramallah with the Dutch representative to the occupied Palestinian...

  • The Palestinian Idea. Film, Media and the Radical Imagination

    The colonisation of Palestinian landscape and minds, author Greg Burris argues, is imbued with spaces in what he terms “the radical imagination” that breaks through Israeli impositions. Film and media are perceived as the medium with the “capacity to break the Israeli stranglehold on reality and open a window...

  • Washington is facilitating further collective betrayal of Palestinian political rights

    Palestinians want their land and rights restored; it’s a simple demand which the international community has succeeded in mangling in order to promote colonial agendas. US President Donald Trump has contributed to the external scheming by adding speculation over what concept of a “state” is envisaged for the Palestinians,...

  • 1967 must not be the only reference point for Israel’s colonial presence

    Various Israeli politicians over the years have justified settlement expansion as being necessary for peace. The Oslo Accords facilitated this propaganda with an interminable “interim” period during which settlement construction has continued unhindered. The definition of “peace”, meanwhile, has largely been left to Israel and the US, with the...

  • The UN is playing a role, not fulfilling its mandate

    Action by the US and Israeli against Palestine is nothing new. The Palestinian Authority, however, has been pointing out this alliance lately as if it has just discovered it. In keeping with its penchant for dissociation, the PA is isolating decades of history from the present circumstances. The net...

  • Reclaiming Palestinian rights from Palestinian narratives

    US Middle East Envoy Jason Greenblatt has made a series of remarks at the UN Security Council regarding the “fictions of international consensus” when it comes to a solution for Palestine. What he does not acknowledge is the fact that the UN’s collusion in enabling Israel’s colonial project is...

  • The road to EU diplomacy in Palestine

    Yesterday, the EU issued two press releases. One feigned belated concern at Israel’s demolition of Palestinian dwellings in Sur Baher and how the settlement expansion policy “undermines the viability of the two-state solution”. The second was a timely announcement of the inauguration of “European Road” in Barta’a Al-Sharqia in Area...

  • The Folktales of Palestine

    Palestinian memory has become synonymous with the 1948 Nakba and Palestinian resistance. Yet there are other strands of memory which are overlooked. Farah Aboubakr’s treatise “The Folktales of Palestine” argues that Palestinian memory should not be framed solely through resistance and offers a detailed analysis of Palestinian folktales and...

  • Palestinian prisoners need our attention before they die

    Since 1967, 220 Palestinian prisoners have died in Israeli prisons. The latest victim is Nasser Taqatqa, detained in June from his home in Beit Fajjar, accused of purportedly having ties to Hamas. Taqatqa, age 31, was interrogated by Shin Bet, tortured and placed in solitary confinement. On Tuesday he...

  • The UN’s 2030 agenda will fail Palestinians -the organisation always has

    The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which “seeks to strengthen universal peace in larger freedom” is an ideal dissociated from the realities perpetuated by the international community. Far from promoting sustainable development, the political actors in this charade are deciding the trajectory of human rights violations. Indeed the...

  • A Map of Absence. An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba

    Nakba-themed anthologies dispel the concept of linear time and chronology. The brutal and abrupt halting of pre-1948 Palestinian life remains a reference point in Palestinian history, memory and literature, as this collection of writings in Saqi Books’ recent publication, “A Map of Absence…”, shows. What has been disseminated is...

  • Cuba should be careful not to normalise Israel's colonisation of Palestine

    In 1947, Cuba was one of the few countries opposing the UN Partition Plan, which laid the groundwork for Israel’s colonisation of Palestine. At the time, the Cuban envoy to the UN Dr Ernesto Dihigo spoke out against Zionist settler colonialism and, with clarity, pointed out the UN’s incompetence...

  • Cutting ties with Israel might be impossible due to international complicity 

    UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk has suggested that the international community should consider cutting ties with Israel if it goes ahead with further colonial settlement expansion and annexation, according to a report by Al Jazeera. Non-binding requests or suggestions from the UN, however, are unlikely to go beyond rhetoric,...

  • America is anything but an honest broker in Palestine-Israel

    At Israel Hayom’s Forum on US-Israeli relations, US envoy Jason Greenblatt made sure that references to the Palestinian people and their history were as obscure as possible. Palestinian history and memory are not about resentment and repetitive stories, as Greenblatt implied. On the contrary, both are imbued with war...

  • The international community is facilitating Palestine’s demise

    The UN has contributed another contradiction in its assessment of Palestinian prospects following the “Peace to Prosperity” summit. Instead of highlighting how and why the UN has failed Palestine, a recent statement from Michael Lynk, the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine, emphasised the absence of an international...

  • The international community has enabled the ‘peace to prosperity’ sham

    The “Peace to Prosperity” workshop was all about making a statement on the normalisation of the colonial state of Israel. Forget simply normalising “ties” with Israel; eliminating the settler-colonial context of the state in order to dismiss legitimate Palestinian claims is the primary objective of the US. Despite divergences...

  • Decolonise Palestine to achieve liberation

    Palestinians have rejected the Manama summit taking place today for several legitimate reasons – all pointing to how the US prelude to the so-called “deal of the century” normalises Israel at an unprecedented level. This normalisation will drastically reduce Palestinian prospects for liberation, which are already precariously low, given...

  • International consensus has stripped Palestinians of their legitimate rights

    The Palestinian Authority’s spin on “legitimate Palestinian endorsement” is equivalent to its fast fading status. Since US President Donald Trump broke away from international consensus on Jerusalem and unilaterally declared the city as Israel’s capital, the PA has been seeking the limelight by rhetorically opposing US actions against Palestine. In...