Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Jamal Kanj
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The ICJ and the dichotomy between the genocide victims and the perpetrators
The interim findings of the International Court of Justice agrees with South Africa while rejecting the Israeli motion, on the World Court’s jurisdiction to investigate charges against Israeli actions that fall “within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention.” The significance of the provisional Court’s ruling is putting on notice countries…
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Tales of hypocrisy: Israeli genocide and the International Criminal Court
The weekend before Christmas, Israel announced the loss of 17 of its army soldiers during a 24-hour period. Avenging its loss on the battlefield, Israeli jets levelled residential neighbourhoods in three refugee camps (Maghaze, Bureij and Nuseirat), killing 250 civilians and injuring dozens more. In the last 90 days, the…
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Gaza: What did Zionists learn from Jewish persecution?
Last week we witnessed what the Bible calls “you reap what you sow” when the Israeli army killed three fleeing Israeli prisoners. Israel sowed a culture of hate where the life of Palestinians, or non-Jews, was expendable. The Israeli soldiers in the neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya, Gaza, followed standard army procedures…
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From Chongqing to Gaza’s mass assassination factory
Israel resumed its genocidal war on Gaza following the brief pause last week, which was insufficient to address the plight of the thousands of missing Palestinians, most of them women and children, trapped beneath the rubble. Personally, I’ve been trying since 27 October to reach a former colleague in the…
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Mr President, you lie, and Palestinian children die
President Biden, you lied when you said that you “saw” images of decapitated Israeli children. You lied when you absolved Israel prematurely of the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital massacre and then enabled Israel to target more hospitals and ambulances. As of 5 November, Israel has attacked other healthcare centres, including Al-Shifa…
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Gaza Hospital massacre and the marketing of Israeli lies
A blast killed more than 500 civilians in the “safe” yard of Al Ahli Baptist Hospital. Within a few hours, the Israeli army concluded it was a misfired Palestinian rocket. US President, Joe Biden, soon after his arrival in Tel Aviv, adopted the Israeli story blaming “the other side” for…
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Western media: an accessory in Israeli war crimes
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This quote was attributed to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist. Today, Goebbels would envy the Israeli disinformation prowess employing Western media to willingly market the Israeli Big Lies. Claims of “decapitated…
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Cultural heist: Biblical currency and Zion-washing of Palestinian national dress
Culture encompasses a dynamic and multifaceted array of unspoken social norms handed down from one generation to the next. It shapes individuals’ mindsets and finds expression in various aspects, such as national costume, traditions, language, arts, cuisine, music and distinct behavioural patterns unique to specific regions or nations. Among the…
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New Israeli government: Far-right or Racist?
Hanukkah 2022 will be remembered as the holiday when Israeli voters snuffed the Menorah candles and welcomed darkness by electing a refurbished Jewish version of the Taliban government. Tel Aviv Mayor, Ron Huldai, characterised it as being a shift “from a [Jewish] democracy to a theocracy.” Benjamin Netanyahu, indicted on…
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Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of the Palestine question
Palestinian diaspora narratives are broad. Sheikh Jarrah is the story of Palestinian families, in one East Jerusalem neighbourhood, under the Israeli occupation. In contrast, my diaspora journey traces a family of sheep herders and farmers in the Galilee pushed to a Northern Lebanese refugee camp in 1948 and denied a…
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Faux peace between Israel and the Arab Gulf royals is a Trump stunt to win votes
Ascribing the euphemism of peace to the formal normalisation of the relationship between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Israel, and then the small island Kingdom of Bahrain with the occupation state, is an abysmal attempt to repackage Jared Kushner’s string of failures and Donald Trump’s obsession for a pseudo-achievement…
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Israel’s apartheid character…
Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom created a maelstrom in Israel by merely demanding a “credible investigation into deaths of Palestinians in order to clarify and bring about possible accountability.” Israel declared the Swedish official persona non grata for daring to demand (which no Arab official has done until now) investigations…
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The most dangerous Palestinian…
In the last week’s column, I wrote on the banned love story from the Israeli high school reading list. The Israeli education ministry claimed that young Jewish students might not comprehend “the significance of miscegenation” for “maintaining the national-ethnic identity of the [Jewish] people.” Oddly enough, the Israeli argument to…
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Forbidden love tales in Israel…
How can a two-year-old novel become a best seller? Censorship is the short answer. The most important question is, however, why would the “Jewish democracy” censor a love fiction between a Jew and non-Jew? The banned book Borderlife was based on a love story between an Israeli woman and a…
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Rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens…
Palestinian civic organisations inside Israel have declared January 30 the Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Israeli citizens. Israel was established in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 native towns and villages and the forceful displacement of approximately 780,000 Palestinians. Only 153,000 Palestinians remained under what became Israel. Of…
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Israeli self-inflicted hate…
Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean, was lynched by Jewish Israelis simply because he looked different. After being shot in the legs, a mob circled him like hyenas over a bleeding prey throwing a bench over his head and chanting the unofficial Zionist’s anthem of hate: “Death to Arabs, Arabs out!”…
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Israel’s haunted temple…
Tension in Jerusalem has escalated to dangerous levels in response to deliberate Israeli provocation at Haram Al Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary. This fragile situation was further worsened by new Israeli government decrees to blow up Palestinian homes and grant its army a free rein to deal with protesters. Since…
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The birth of the European refugee crisis
Many years ago I read Men in the Sun, a novel by late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. He, along with his young niece Lamis, were blown up by Israel in 1972. In the book, Kanafani told the tale of three desperate Palestinian refugees from Lebanon who hid in an empty…
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A day of reckoning, 39 years later…
If you are like me, I am sure you are tired of reading about the results of the last Israeli election. Or on Benjamin Netanyahu’s Hebrew pledge running up to the election and his flip-flopped English version after winning the election. I want instead to highlight the native Palestinian Israeli…
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Dilly-dallying must stop…
On January first, it will be 50 years since the start of the modern Palestinian revolution; and on the 15th it will be 10 years since Mahmoud Abbas was first, and last, elected as the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Two years after becoming a non-member UN state, the…
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Ethnic cleansing manifesto…
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and head of Yisrael Beitenu party published on November 28 a new manifesto outlining the party’s outlook for Israel. The updated platform entitled “Swimming Against the Stream” posted on Lieberman’s Facebook page demanded Israeli Arabs who identify themselves as Palestinians “… to forfeit their Israeli…
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Negotiations to end all peace…
Following the historical recognition by the Swedish government, British legislators voted overwhelmingly on a non-binding resolution urging their government to recognise the state of Palestine. Ireland’s Seanad and Spain’s parliament passed similar motions on October 22 and November 18 respectively. Sweden, the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, has positioned…
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Israeli Incremental genocide…
It goes without saying that Gaza has taught the Israeli military a new lesson: the days of swift Israeli wars are over. While mostly one-sided, Israel has never before fought a war that lasted 50 days. The Palestinians (besieged by brothers and foes) were of no military match to Israel’s…
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An Islamic aberration
Animals: was my instinctual response to photos of Syrian soldiers being executed by members of the so-called Islamic State (IS). The same gut feelings two days earlier to the news of the killing of American journalist James Foley in cold blood. My heart goes to Shirley Sotloff, the mother of…