This video is created by Australians for Palestine and Women for Palestine
as an educational tool to help people gain a better understanding of the clear
principles underpinning the Palestinian BDS call and the global Palestinian
BDS movement.
OMAR BARGHOUTI, founding member of the Palestinian Campaign
for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) explains BDS
and answers the arguments against it
WATCH VIDEO HERE
Australians for Palestine BDS guidelines
Australians for Palestine fully endorses Palestinian Civil Society’s call for
Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) global movement and has decided
to concentrate its efforts on developing material and providing information
about the BDS call and how it can be implemented.Read more..
Today marks the 45th anniversary of what Palestinians refer to as the internationally recognized illegal annexation of East Jerusalem, and what some Israelis refer to as the unification of Jerusalem. It is a good opportunity to examine one recent example of how unification or illegal annexation is changing the identity and political future of the Palestinian residents of the city.
As an East Jerusalem resident, I am struck by a recent trend: many of my friends and acquaintances who hold Jerusalem identification cards – documents of permanent residency rather than Israeli citizenship – are quietly applying for and obtaining Israeli passports.
It’s not immediately clear why. Current residents of East Jerusalem – numbering over 350,000, or 38% of the city’s total population – already go about their daily lives, shop at Israeli malls, use Israeli services, frequent Israeli restaurants and bars, send their children to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and receive Israeli social and health benefits. What does “upgrading their status” from East Jerusalem residents to citizens of Israel add? Why did East Jerusalem residents refuse the Israeli offer of citizenship in 1967, and why are they actively seeking to obtain it now, especially given that citizenship requires them to pledge the controversial oath of allegiance to the Israeli state? Read More…
Throughout contemporary history, movement of people outside their own countries for long or short intervals has occurred for various reasons: education, work, marriage, family ties, fleeing hardships, and so on. Foreigners exist in every country in the world, forming their own sub-societies and clinging with varying degrees to their own cultures as they integrate into the new ones. Sometimes, the second or third generations that arise after this movement experience the drive to return to their home countries, find their roots and re-integrate into their societies of origin.
Normally, this process is a long and difficult one. It is affected, of course, by a myriad of varying factors such as the degree of comfort and cohesion of the recipient culture, the individual’s characteristics of inner strength, adaptability and persistence, the economic and social situation, and the degree of welcome extended to returning expatriates. The success or failure of the process depends on a complex interplay between all these factors, and, to a large extent, upon the individual and his or her reasons for making the move.
Even if the person is completely convinced of those reasons, moving ‘back’ is usually a challenging, overwhelming process. One leaves behind all that is familiar in their lives: their home, friends, social network, work, culture, physical surroundings, amenities such as transport, health and entertainment, and comes to a new terrain where they will have to relearn everything: from how to find their way around, to where the supermarket is, how to deal with the currency, through to the more complex business of speaking another language, picking up new cultural nuances (even if some knowledge of them is there), and forging a fit – or not – with this new/original culture.
This is difficult enough in a normal country with a relatively calm environment, stable political system and established societies and modes of living.Read More…
Author of Leila Khaled biography Sarah Irving interviewed by Maureen Clare Murphy -The Electronic Intifada - 18 May 2012
The cancellation of the Manchester launch of Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation has only brought the book broader publicity, said author and Electronic Intifada contributor Sarah Irving in an interview yesterday.
The biography has received unexpected attention after a phone harassment campaign led to the cancellation of its 24 May launch at a Manchester bookstore. Another Manchester launch has been scheduled for 26 May at the Manchester Digital Laboratory.
Perhaps it is only fitting that the legendary Palestinian revolutionary Leila Khaled is in the headlines once again today. Khaled was forced to flee the coastal Palestinian city of Haifa during the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine and eventually became involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist Palestinian party. She is most famous for forcing the world to pay attention to Palestine’s plight by hijacking two passenger airplanes in 1969 and 1970. An image of her holding an AK-47 while wearing a kuffiyeh, the traditional checkered scarf, is one of the most recognizable icons of the Palestine liberation struggle.
The phrase “right to exist” entered my consciousness in the 1990s just as the concept of the two-state solution became part of our collective lexicon. In any debate at university, when a Zionist was out of arguments, those three magic words were invoked to shut down the conversation with an outraged, “are you saying Israel doesn’t have the right to exist??”
Of course you couldn’t challenge Israel’s right to exist – that was like saying you were negating a fundamental Jewish right to have…rights, with all manner of Holocaust guilt thrown in for effect.
Except of course the Holocaust is not my fault – or that of Palestinians. The cold-blooded program of ethnically cleansing Europe of its Jewish population has been so callously and opportunistically utilized to justify the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab nation, that it leaves me utterly unmoved. I have even caught myself – shock – rolling my eyes when I hear Holocaust and Israel in the same sentence.
What moves me instead in this post-two-state era, is the sheer audacity of Israel even existing. Read More…
Before I start, I’d like to make it clear that not all views/takes on the subject will be mentioned in this piece. I will not talk about the ‘views from Mars’ (actually if there is ‘people’ on Mars they will probably be offended by the comparison. So if you do indeed exist, please forgive me) of certain ‘Palestinian People deniers’ US politicians that manage to be lunatic and mainstream at the same time. The fact that those views are hardly challenged and condemned in mainstream US politics and media says a lot about the ‘land of the free’.
The easiest way to define Palestinian is to say that ‘a Palestinian’ is either someone coming from historical Palestine, born from a Palestinian mother or a Palestinian father or someone born from a Palestinian father and mother but leaving outside of Palestine. A land, in its historical sense, extending from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
A land full of history, conflicts and occupations. Read More…
On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority.
Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o’ bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 February by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel.
Ironically, on 30th February Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist gang, Irgun, brazenly announced the Zionist immutable dogma, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised… Jerusalem was and forever will be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.” Read More…
Be’er-Sheva, Israel - I first heard about the Nakba in the late 1980s, while I was an undergraduate student of philosophy at Hebrew University. This, I believe, is a revealing fact, particularly since, as a teenager, I was a member of Peace Now and was raised in a liberal home. I grew up in the southern city of Be’er-Sheva, which is just a few kilometres from several unrecognised Bedouin villages that, today, are home to thousands of residents who were displaced in 1948. I now know that the vast majority of the Negev’s Bedouin population was not as lucky, and that, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most Bedouin either fled or were expelled from their ancestral lands to Jordan or Gaza.
How is it possible that a left-leaning Israeli teenager who was living in the Negev during the early 1980s (I graduated from high-school in 1983) had never heard the word “Nakba”?
How, in other words, is collective amnesia engendered?Read More…
British rock musician and Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters spray-paints the words “No thought control” on Israel’s West Bank separation barrier in Bethlehem. (Photo: AP)
As the world watched the Arab Spring, many Palestinians saw traces of Palestine’s revolution, particularly of the first Intifada—the popular uprising of 1987—and in the beautiful spirit of the young revolutionaries.
The fall of the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt was celebrated in Palestinian households not only because it promised a return of Arab resistance, a constant dimension of the Palestinian cause but hijacked by the dictatorships for so many years, but also because it was a reminder that Palestine continues to bring people together: those struggling in many places around the world against injustice of all kinds.
As we continue to watch the revolutions unfold—from Wall Street to Madrid, from London to Seattle—we can see Palestine in every Tahrir Square. The Egyptian spring is partly a result of the previous regime’s heavy complicity in maintaining Israeli occupation and colonization; the Egyptian student mobilizations in solidarity with Palestine during the second Intifada, in 2000, were important precursors to January 2011. Read More…
For 64 years the Palestinians have patiently and steadfastly continued their struggle for justice, enduring the longest occupation in modern history.
Recently, however, other events throughout the region have dominated the world’s press. First, the ‘war on terror’, then the invasion of Iraq, apprehension about a nuclear Iran, and now the turmoil of the Arab revolutions.
Has the Palestinian cause been side-lined, or even forgotten, in the clamour for democracy and the horror of so much violence? Read More…
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