The Wound Before Winter” is the prelude to the impressions which I have attempted to convey in this selection. Painted in the aftermath of US President Donald Trump’s declaration on Jerusalem, the colors used, as well as the focus on land, seek to convey the ramifications upon Palestinian territory, rather than an isolated focus as…
Category: COMMENTARY
Humanitarian aid is overtly politicised, just not in favour of the Palestinians
The 2019 humanitarian plan for Palestinians in the occupied territories will allocate $350 million for aid intervention, according to Ramallah’s Minister of Social Development Ibrahim Al-Shaer and UN envoy Jamie McGoldrick. The people of Palestine remain divested of their legitimate human and civil rights in order to retain the imposed status of near-total aid dependency….
A Fragmented Palestinian Resistance
Whether in Gaza or the occupied West Bank, Israel has perfected its strategy of normalising violence against Palestinians. As attention shifts away from the Great Return March protests in Gaza, in which participants continue to be injured or murdered by Israeli forces on the border, there is a lull in the frenzied reporting about Palestinians…
How Israel manipulates Palestinian narrative through Syria’s refugee crisis (2015)
Europe has emerged as a protagonist in this story, as refugees from Syria attempt to escape civil war and Islamic State group brutality. Member countries are reluctantly offering refuge, while others are constructing fences to prevent families from exercising their right to seek asylum. The European narrative of influx and escalating statistics tends to be a recurring…
Seeking protection for the Palestinians at the UN empowers the criminals
The debate on whether Palestinians should be granted international protection continues. Adalah’s November 2018 Report to the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territories says that, since Israel “failed to exercise its criminal jurisdiction over those responsible for the violation of such serious crimes”, thus upholding impunity, there is a…
Mapuche murders not just a right-wing issue
The killing of Mapuche youth Camilo Catrillanca earlier this month triggered outrage throughout Chile and the resurgence of a prevailing fear that the country is becoming increasingly militarised. President Sebastian Pinera has indeed acted upon his electoral promises, which included restructuring the dictatorship-era anti-terror laws in order to make it easier to criminalise the indigenous…
Italy’s Salvini said what the international community knows it can’t say: ‘Support Israel’
It is no secret that the right wing has appropriated and manipulated the definition of “peace” in today’s poisonous political climate. Peace is now synonymous with power, and little is being done to challenge this notion on a political level, to the point that one can speak of collusion between the right wing and the…
The Farce of Arab Humanitarian Aid in Palestine
In recent months, Gaza’s humanitarian situation has been under intense, albeit useless scrutiny. There is no disagreement that deprivation has reached unprecedented levels. Yet this consensus was also the product of an international effort that supports the Palestinian Authority (PA) regaining complete control over Gaza. In the words of UN Special Coordinator Jamie McGoldrick, the PA “would…
Jared Kushner, the US and the elimination of Palestinian refugees
The revelations contained in Jared Kushner’s correspondence which seek to terminate the Palestinians’ refugee status has been the source of much controversy this past month, with little recognition of how Israel has been lobbying for such a violation to occur. In an internal email to other senior US advisors, Kushner wrote: “It is important to have…
How the MLI is normalising Israel through selective narratives
The Shalom Hartman Institute’s Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI) barely manages to conceal its agenda. Launched in 2013, it has strived to marginalise Palestinians through its programme that emphasises fabrications of “conflict” to justify the prevailing Zionist colonial narrative. The institute’s choice of manipulation tactics lies in how to apply selectivity and disseminate the results to…
RAMONA WADI 