RAMALLAH, PALESTINE — Mohammad Sabaaneh’s incisive artwork has earned him a barrage of antagonism from Israel and Palestinian political factions. In February 2013, he was issued an administrative detention order by Israel and jailed for five months for alleged association with Hamas through his artwork. Some of his cartoons were published in a book written by…
Tag: ISRAEL
“The wound before winter” – Impressions of Palestinian Memory in Watercolour
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…
BOOK REVIEW: Hamas, Jihad and Popular Legitimacy
Veering away from the disparaging rhetoric that characterises the West’s intentional misrepresentation of Hamas, Tristan Dunning’s informative treatise Hamas, jihad and popular legitimacy (Routledge 2016) employs a rigorous dissection of how resistance has shaped recognition of the movement in Palestine. He looks at this both as an alternative to the corruption embodied by the Palestinian Authority, as…
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…
BOOK REVIEW: Hamas and the Media – politics and strategy
Wael Abdelal’s informative treatise, “Hamas and the Media: politics and strategy” draws upon the issue of counter-hegemony to portray the relevance and importance of resistance media, in this case, the role which the media has played to further the politics of Hamas. The counter-hegemonic narrative is paramount in this study. As the author describes, the…
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…
BOOK REVIEW: Mahmoud Darwish. Literature and the politics of Palestinian identity
Far from accentuating the glorification that is synonymous with Mahmoud Darwish and his beautiful poetry, the new biography “Mahmoud Darwish: literature and the politics of Palestinian identity” by Muna Abu Eid (I.B. Tauris, 2016) is a competent exercise in revealing the intricacies of Palestinian collective memory combined with the complex persona of the man himself….
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…