Dream on: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that the Palestinian residents of Gaza wanted to replace the current Hamas government, and that they will eventually be successful, Army Radio reported. Speaking at a graduation ceremony in Jerusalem’s National Security College, Netanyahu said “If the Palestinians in Gaza had the power to overthrow the government,…
Showing all posts tagged Zionism
When the West Bank becomes the Wild West
My friend Joseph Dana, based in Jerusalem, on yet another week of IDF and settler lawlessness in the West Bank: Saturday was a burning hot day in the West Bank. Combatants for Peace, a group made up of Israeli ex-combat soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters, planned a protest at an illegal outpost adjacent to Shufa, a…
Gaza: flattened, occupied, sick and rootless
My following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: During a conversation last night in Gaza with a group of 20-something male students, the issue of homosexuality came up. These were university-educated, Muslim men with relatively liberal attitudes but accepting a gay lifestyle was a complete anathema to them. “It’s disgusting,” one said, a Fatah…
Hope lives in Gaza despite siege, desperation and anger
My following essay appeared this week on Mondoweiss: The drive from Gaza City to Khan Younis takes around 40 minutes. The roads are rocky and the landscape barren, with destroyed houses and factories along the way. Cars and donkey-drawn carts populate the road. Last Friday I rode in a battered taxi towards the city to…
Jews like to expand themselves illegally
An Israeli paper is reporting that the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank is now over 300,000. The daily Haaretz says the number of West Bank settlers is 304,569 – a 2.3 percent increase since January. It’s quoting statistics compiled by the military. The number of Israeli settlers has more than doubled since…
Rapping the Gazan world
DARG TeaM GaZa are the Strip’s biggest hip-hop group. I spent tonight with the band, a moderate, feisty, curious and highly intelligent bunch of guys. And soon to (hopefully) launch their Palestinian vision onto the world. The voice of a Gazan generation that is rarely heard in the West. Here’s their recent video, 23 days,…
Palestinian AIDS patients enjoy little care, little mercy
The following story was published in 2006 by my Gazan journalist friend Ahmed Aldabba: The way in which 14-year-old Osama, not his real name, caught the HIV/AIDS virus was unusual, but the reaction of the Palestinian society was not so surprising. “I got the visrus from a blood transfusion when I was 12 years old,”…
Why the web is breaking down Zionist tribalism
Following our recent video shot in Jerusalem on Americans, Jews, settlements and bigotry, one of the makers, David Jacobus, responds on Mondoweiss to some of the criticisms directed at us: As a contributor to the film Cruel but Necessary: Israeli Opinions about the Settlements and Obama, I wanted to add some perspective on the debates…
Cruel but Necessary: Israeli Opinions about the Settlements and Obama
The following article recently appeared on Mondoweiss: Antony Loewenstein and Joseph Dana write: With all the current rhetoric out of Washington regarding an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, we wanted to gauge public opinion on the streets of Jerusalem on a sunny, Sunday afternoon last weekend. What we found was…