Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Amelia Smith
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Depicting the future of Palestine
Abdulrahman Katanani was born in Sabra refugee camp just after the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre when 2,000 Palestinian refugees were killed by Lebanese Christian militia in collaboration with the Israeli army. Despite the fact that his artwork has received international acclaim, Katanani still lives in the camp, in a…
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The Speed Sisters: Palestine’s first female racing team
On international women’s day an interview with Amber Fares, the director of Speed Sisters Amber Fares was living in Ramallah when a friend invited her to a street car race at Yasser Arafat’s old helicopter landing pad. It was here, amidst the crowds, the music and the cars revving that…
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‘We have a great deal to gain if we start to understand Syria’
An interview with the authors of Burning Country: “I think that’s the big story, that they’re practicing democracy and organising themselves to run things in really difficult circumstances and that’s the story that’s been largely unheard or ignored, strangely.” Until now the Syrian story has been a fabrication of assumptions…
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Artists challenge the blockade by building a virtual bridge between Gaza and London
“Art is a threat because it’s a non-violent form of resistance and even non-violent forms of resistance are a threat; sometimes actually they are a greater threat.” At Home in Gaza and London is a digital, cross-border art project that offers an intimate look into people’s personal lives. In one…
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Rodney Dixon QC on the Mavi Marmara case and seeking justice at the ICC
In November 2014, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Fatou Bensouda held that there was a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes had been committed on board the Mavi Marmara ship, but concluded they were not of sufficient gravity to warrant a formal investigation. It was…
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Sisi’s latest crackdown proves Egypt is far from stable
Today marks five years since Egyptians took to the streets to demand Hosni Mubarak stand down as president. Eighteen days later he did just that. In the five years that followed Egypt has been ruled by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), had its first free and fair…
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Blessing the state: How Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church betrayed the Egyptian revolution
This is the second article of a two part series examining the role Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church played in the Egyptian revolution and the five years that followed it. Read Part I here. Part II: Al-Azhar When Egyptians are sentenced to death their papers are forwarded to the Grand…
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This Christmas there are 19.5 million refugees worldwide
This week the UK met its commitment to resettle 1,000 men, women and children from refugee camps around Syria before Christmas in the first stage of a government pledge to receive 20,000 Syrians by 2020. By UK standards, it’s a dramatic improvement given that in September we had taken just…
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Director Richard Platt on Poppy: ‘It’s not an anti-Israeli piece, it’s anti-war’
One windy day out at the seaside Poppy spends most of the time asking her parents when it’s time to leave; a normal day for a teenage girl until she discovers military fatigues, meets a young lady in Gaza trapped beneath the rubble and eventually soldiers raid her home. Her…
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A journey through Britain’s Imperial past
In a work by the Irish painter George William Joy, set during the Anglo-Egyptian administration in Sudan at the time of the British Empire, General Charles Gordon looks down onto an uprising led by the Mahdi army, each member of the revolt advancing upwards towards him with spears in their…
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Deaths in Egyptian prisons have trebled in the last three years
Ayah El-Ghandour says that her father was murdered. Arrested and taken from his home in the middle of the night Dr Tarek El-Ghandour was everything that the Egyptian regime despises: anti-government, anti-regime ideology, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood and professor of dermatology and venereal diseases at Ain Shams University, an…
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Elias Sanbar on photographing Palestine: ‘It’s a long story of love and hate’
During the ideological battle between the Church of England and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth century, photographers believed that history, as it was recounted in Genesis, could be proved by travelling to Palestine and bringing back images that confirmed the story of divine creation. Along with Egypt, where fascination with…
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A guide to Palestine in the British media
On a trip to Cuba in May, I had to look twice when an elderly man selling newspapers walked past the restaurant I was eating in. On the front page of one was a huge photograph of an Israeli soldier holding a Palestinian boy by the neck, the boy’s face…
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Interview with Ru Freeman: “You can’t let words be co-opted by a certain group”
As Iberia flight 3316 approached Ben Gurion airport last week the pilot provoked fury on board when he announced the aircraft’s imminent arrival in Palestine. One passenger summed up why when he told Israel’s Channel 2 TV, “We live in the State of Israel and he should have said ‘Israel’.”…
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Hunger striker Soltan: Sisi’s regime is ‘Mubarak on steroids’
In the months following the July 2013 coup in Egypt Mohamed Soltan, who was working with the media team at the Rabaa pro-democracy demonstrations, visited a prosecutor’s office for legal advice. “Don’t waste your breath,” the prosecutor told him, “the country’s ours we can do whatever we want. We are…
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‘We have to eliminate this paranoia about sect in Lebanon’
Last Thursday, protestors in Lebanon made their way to Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut where they have been gathering since the summer. During the 1975–1990 Lebanese Civil War, the square formed the demarcation line between the largely Christian east Beirut and Muslim west Beirut. Twenty-five years after the official end…
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Profile: Anwar Sadat (25 December 1918 – 6 October 1981)
Shortly before his visit to Jerusalem in 1977, then Egyptian President Anwar Sadat said he would go to “the ends of the earth” to obtain peace; as promised, he went on to negotiate the first peace accord Israel would sign with an Arab country. In the American media Sadat was…
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Profile: Edward W. Said (1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003)
During a lecture at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1997, Edward W. Said made the following statement about Islam as it is defined by Europe and the United States: “What is described as Islam belongs to the discourse of Orientalism, a construction fabricated to whip up feelings of hostility and…
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On the anniversary of Sabra and Shatila: ‘We should talk about what we did to each other’
When a Canadian editor specialising in the testimonies of genocide survivors starts to receive anonymous accounts of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, her investigation takes her to a small village in the Lebanese mountains and brings her closer to Ali, a Palestinian who grew up in the camps. Flashbacks to…
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Hope for Syrian refugees to be housed in Malvern
When members of a local Amnesty International group tabled a proposal to house 12 Syrian families in the English spa town of Malvern, the district council voted unanimously to investigate it. But when the initiative reached Worcestershire County Council the answer was a clear ‘No’. They were to be resettled…
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Business as usual for Egypt-Israel relations despite major gas find
In the aftermath of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, pipelines carrying gas from Egypt into Israel were repeatedly sabotaged. Many Egyptians regarded the pipelines to be symbolic of normalisation between the two countries, their anger exasperated by reports that Egypt was selling gas to Israel at significantly below market value and…
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Profile: Yasser Arafat (24 August 1929 – 11 November 2004)
The cliché one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter may well have been written for Yasser Arafat, for during his lifetime and the years beyond his death he has drawn considerable attention from both those who revere him as a symbol of resistance and those who despise him for taking…
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Samar Yazbek: ‘Writers need to be part of the change in Syria’
Syrian writer Samar Yazbek describes Daesh as “the biggest Satan ever”, and “an occupation” created by the brutality of Assad’s regime and the international community’s failure to take action. Their Hollywood-style videos continue to make front-page news in the west; so much so that horrendous massacres by the regime have…
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Inside Egypt’s child torture chambers
Inside a filthy police van near Al-Azhar University an officer points to a fragment of light shining through a tiny opening: “See this bit of sun?” he asks Amena Yasser and the 16 other young men and women inside. “We’re going to put you behind it and we’ll see if…