Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ramona Wadi
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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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...
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Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel
Azad Essa’s book, Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, 2023), offers detailed insights into the politics of Zionism and Hindutva. With an introduction by Linah Alsaafin, the reader is introduced to India as a purported supporter of Palestine “contingent on Israeli interests”. Zionism and...
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The emerging Palestinian resistance is a warning for the PA
For decades, the international community has assumed that it could subjugate Palestinians in the occupied West Bank with financial aid and bogus state-building measures. The Palestinian Authority, which advocates for international impositions over the people of occupied Palestine, notably the two-state compromise, has lost its grip over them, despite...
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Israel isn’t anti-pogrom, it just doesn’t want Israeli collateral damage
“What happened in Huwara was a pogrom carried out by law-breakers,” said Major General Yehuda Fuchs, who is in charge of the Israeli troops in the occupied West Bank. “We were not prepared for that many people, how they came, the scale, the force of the violence they used,...
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The consequences of PA ‘happiness’ over diplomatic nothings
Last week, Palestinian Envoy to the UN Riyad Mansour said that he was “happy” about the international response to the UN Security Council Presidential Statement which replaced the draft resolution that would have explicitly targeted Israel’s settlement expansion. “The Security Council reiterates that continuing Israeli settlement activities are dangerously...
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Has the Guardian become a platform for Israel disinformation?
When 2022 was claimed to be the deadliest year for Palestinians since 2005, international human rights organisations as well as those in Israel, corroborated with statistical data. So did the UN Security Council, which called for “reversing the trends” in January this year. The Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem,...
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The UN, Israel and the PA can no longer control the Palestinian narrative
“I am continuing my engagement with all concerned parties to deescalate the situation. I urge all sides to refrain from steps that could further enflame an already volatile situation,” the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Tor Wennesland stated today, after the Israeli military killed 11 Palestinians and injured over 100...
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The PA’s capitulation to security coordination and financial aid
UN resolutions on Palestine are futile. Yet, the Palestinian Authority’s backtracking on the draft resolution which was to be presented to the UN Security Council regarding a condemnation of Israel’s recent settlement expansion is of more pressing concern. As it is renowned for, the PA accepted meagre concessions and...
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The compromised nature of humanitarian aid for Palestinian refugees
The Commissioner General of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) has described succinctly all that is wrong in politics with regard to Palestine and Palestinian refugees, in a complicit manner, of course. In an interview with Reuters in January, Philippe Lazzarini made an appeal for...