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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

  • The humanitarian paradigm is an act of political violence against Palestinians

    The Commissioner General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, recently made another appeal for funding, this time to the Arab League. “Support to Palestine refugees is a collective obligation, including from Arab countries,” said Lazzarini, while warning that a decline in funding...

  • Beneath the rhetorical veneer of Abu Dis

    In 2019, when the Trump administration revealed the so-called “Deal of the Century”, a hypothetical capital of Palestine in the town of Abu Dis was revealed as the alternative to the Palestinian people’s claim on Jerusalem. Israel had laid the groundwork for the announcement with its earlier unilateral declaration...

  • The PA’s glorification of Israel’s colonial accomplices

    Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas never fails to blunder in his speeches. Speaking at the UN in New York on the 75th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, Abbas requested that the US and the UK address their historic responsibilities. One would think this means taking a political stance in...

  • The symbolic Nakba commemoration at the UN exposed Israel’s hatred of the truth

    “The thought that an international organisation could mark the establishment of one of its member states as a catastrophe or disaster is both appalling and repulsive,” wrote Israel’s UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan when asking UN diplomats to refrain from attending the unprecedented UN General Assembly’s commemoration of the 1948...

  • The EU really values Israel’s colonial enterprise

    The EU Delegation in Israel only has a problem with Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of National Security, and not with the existence and continuation of Israel as a colonial enterprise. The far-right minister was to represent the Israeli government during a diplomatic reception on 9 May marking Europe Day,...

  • Behind the façade of humanitarian aid and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

    The humanitarian paradigm for Palestinians is not working, the UN should be informed. On the assumption that the Institution holds a shard of respect towards human rights. For several years, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), has been warning of a funding deficit that...

  • The PA protects Israel colonial expansion by promoting the two-state compromise

    The Palestinian Authority is decades behind in its political approach. Israel is not “continuing” to destroy the two-state paradigm – it has already destroyed it. Ramallah has learnt its lines so well, however, that the international community can depend upon it to ensure nothing poses a threat to Israel’s...

  • Khader Adnan’s legacy will alter Palestinian politics among the people

    Palestinian hunger strikers in Israeli jails have suffered unprecedented levels of exploitation. At best, a hunger strike ends when Israel decides it can make a few concessions, and a victory is then celebrated. There is no real “win”, however, other than temporary respite for the individual hunger striker. Administrative...

  • Covering up Israel’s settler-colonial foundations

    With no reference to the political turbulence that Israel is currently experiencing within its settler-colonial society, let alone the horrors perpetrated by Zionist terror groups during the 1948 Nakba to establish the colonial enterprise on Palestinian land, US President Joe Biden has extended greetings to Israelis on the 75th...

  • Memory and oblivion in Israel

    To commemorate the 75th anniversary since the establishment of Israel’s colonial enterprise, the National Library of Israel has embarked upon a new project themed “Operation Diary: the Founding Generation for Israel’s 75th”. The project, which is being carried out in collaboration with Israel Hayom, seeks personal diaries of 1948...

  • On Palestine Prisoners’ Day, the PA is silent about its own detainees

    On Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, the Palestinian Authority (PA) stayed silent about its detention and torture of Palestinians in its prisons. The PA makes some prisoners more worthy of mention than others, further exploiting the Palestinian political prisoners and attempting to create rifts within Palestinian society. “The Israeli judicial system is...

  • The PA differentiates between colonial and collaborative oppression

    When Israel targeted Palestinian non-governmental rights organisations in 2021 and 2022, the Palestinian Authority embarked on its own exploitation campaign. “In a show of solidarity, President Abbas meets with Palestinian civil society organisations targeted by Israel,” one of Wafa news agency’s headlines read in 2021. Israel’s targeting of Palestinian...

  • The international humanitarian paradigm keeps failing Palestinians

    The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has been operating since 1 May 1950 under repeatedly renewed mandates in the absence of a political solution. In recent years, UNRWA has reiterated that lack of funding is rendering it incapable of meeting the demands of Palestinian refugees...

  • Israel resents being called out for its colonialism

    Israeli media are swift to react to the slightest criticism that lays bare the farce of Israel’s security narrative. Recent comments on Twitter by the UN’s Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, prompted an article in the Times of Israel lambasting her tweets and taking issue...

  • The farce of UNHRC Agenda Item 7

    The UN and its affiliated institutions have come up with various futile initiatives purportedly aimed at holding Israel accountable for its human rights violations. Agenda Item 7 is no exception, despite being a standing agenda item for every UN Human Rights Council meeting. On Monday, the council voted in...

  • The implications of ‘defending’ the two-state framework

    When the Palestinian Authority speaks about the “support” it receives from the international community it would do well to revisit the blatant hypocrisy at the UN Security Council briefing last March by France’s Permanent UN Representative, Nicolas de Riviere. Far from speaking of Palestinians’ rights, de Riviere insisted upon...

  • Transitional (in)Justice and Enforcing the Peace on Palestine

    Brendan Ciaran Browne’s contribution to the literature on Palestine is not only welcomed, but sharply focused. Veering away from the mainstream discourse that protects the two-state compromise at the expense of Palestinians, Transitional (in)Justice and Enforcing the Peace on Palestine (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) discusses the convergence between transitional justice...

  • Colonialism allows no space for the colonised to speak

    At the 52nd session of the UN Human Rights Council, the Palestinian human rights organisations, Al Haq and Addameer drew attention to the systematic torture of Palestinians prisoners in Israeli jails “as part of its settler-colonial and apartheid regime against the Palestinian people”. While Al-Haq and Addameer are meticulous...

  • There is a pretence of opposition to only one form of Israel’s colonial violence

    Last month, Israel’s National Security Minister, the far-right extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir, sought to facilitate the process for Israeli civilians to obtain firearms, citing a rise in applications since 2022 and the recent rise in Palestinian anti-colonial resistance against state and settler terror. “We have the duty to speed up...

  • Israel’s new cycles of forcibly displacing Palestinians

    US President Joe Biden placed much emphasis on rhetorically opposing Israel’s settlement expansion. Hence the reaction from Washington over the Israeli Knesset passing the second and third readings of the Disengagement Law that would allow resettlement of Jewish Israelis in four previously vacated illegal settlement areas in the occupied West Bank. Israel’s Ambassador to the US Mike Herzog...

  • The erasure of Palestinians is becoming part of Israel mainstream discourse

    Israeli Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, did not take long to issue another treacherous statement after explicitly calling for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be wiped out. During a private memorial service in Paris, Smotrich stated that Palestinians are an invention. The Palestinians, according to Smotrich, invented “a fictitious...

  • The US feigns being ‘disturbed’ by Israeli settler violence

    Last week, US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin acknowledged the current Israeli settler violence against the Palestinian people following a meeting with his Israeli counterpart Yoav Gallant. “The United States firmly opposed to any acts that could trigger more insecurity, including settlement expansion and inflammatory rhetoric,” Austin told reporters....

  • The PA foreign minister’s contradictions support Israeli settler-colonialism

    When the Palestinian Authority speaks about Israel’s settler-colonialism, it dilutes any possible impact immediately by mentioning the two-state compromise. During a joint press conference with his Italian counterpart Antonio Tajani in Ramallah, for example, PA Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Maliki praised the Italian official for upholding the two-state paradigm. To...

  • The PA is wrong to suppress Palestinian mourning

    While the emerging Palestinian resistance has declared its opposition to Israel, the Palestinian Authority has unleashed its security services on the Palestinian people. On Wednesday, the PA security services violently dispersed the funeral procession of 49-year-old Abdelfattah Kharousheh in Nablus, who was affiliated to Hamas and killed by the...