Blog Archives
Nasrallah’s blood-soaked road to Jerusalem
By Budour Hassan
In early March of this year, about 6,000 smuggled photographs of torture victims in Syrian regime jails were leaked on the internet and published on various web sites.
The eyes of parents, siblings, partners and relatives of Syrian detainees became transfixed on their screens. Sorting through pictures of hardly-recognizable corpses, they wondered if they might find a trace of their loved ones.
Known as the “Caesar” photographs, in reference to the pseudonym of the defected Syrian sergeant and forensic photographer who smuggled the images out of Syria, the photographs inevitably lead us to question the morality and ethics of disseminating graphic portrayals of dead bodies on the internet. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: The war is not over
By Mariam Barghouti
As you walk in the streets of Ramallah, with its aesthetically appealing buildings and the chaos of shoppers and street vendors the silence here is deafening.
We continue to protract this bubble deeper into the echelons of denial and complacency. The ululations in the summer for Gaza, and the metamorphosis into a population of cheerleaders continues to etch its indentation. We offered blistered tongues and Gaza offered its soul. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: Sexual Violence, Women`s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism
Nov 17 2014 by
[“Deaths.” Drawing by Suhad Daher-Nashif]They not only invaded our home, took over our space, and evicted us—they even arrested me and took me to the Maskubya—the police station. I was put in room number four, alone, for a long time. Then, a big and tall man, a police officer, entered the interrogation room. I was alone, and started shivering from fear as he closed the door, started moving things around in the room and examining me from head to toe. I was terrorized, and my heart was beating so fast. His eyes penetrated my body, as he was opening the drawers looking for something. Then, he left the room and came back five minutes later holding a box. He pulled out a pair of blue plastic gloves, and put one on each of his hands, while looking at me and saying “…Come here…” I must tell you that I was terrorized when they invaded the house and evicted us. I was extremely anxious when they arrested my son. But my fears of ‘you know what’…You know…being abused…being raped by his blue big hands and more…were the most terrifying moments of my life.[1]
These were the words of Sama, a thirty-six-year-old Palestinian woman who lost the intimate familial and physical space of her home, only to experience further terror with the threat of sexual abuse. Sama’s narrative is not uncommon, as colonized women living under severe deprivation and dispossession are subject to daily attacks against their sexuality and bodily rights. Sexual violence is central to the larger structure of colonial power, its racialized machinery of domination, and its logic of elimination. This is readily apparent in the history of settler colonial contexts, where the machinery of violence explicitly targets native women’s sexuality and bodily safety as biologized “internal enemies” since they are the producers of the next generation. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: Not in the name of the Palestinian cause
Photograph: Oliver Weiken/EPA
By Mariam Barghouti
Palestine has been a major fixation in regards to a cause fighting injustice coming in the form of imperialism and colonialism. To stand with Palestine is to stand against injustice, apartheid, colonialism and imperialism.
Solidarity is crucial in the destruction of any imperialist unjust regime, it serves to isolate it through the voice of the masses demanding it stripped of all its legitimacy to oppress.
There are however, those that use the Palestinian cause either to redeem their guilt or to mask the charade of their own injustice. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: Rejecting victimhood: the case for Palestinian resistance
By Rana Baker
We die like trees, standing up’. Courtesy of the artist Nidal El Khairy.
Seeing rocket fire from Gaza as a counter-discourse. This method of resistance is less about fatalities than undermining privilege structures in an anti-colonial context.
I wonder whether, when the settler-colonial army of Israel is pounding Gaza, Palestinians should grab guitars, pianos, and white ribbons, look up at their oppressors flying over their heads in apaches and F16s, and sing a lullaby of peace. Perhaps, then, we can impress Middle East “experts” and “non-violent resistance” -mind you, I am using the V word- butterflies. I wonder, moreover, what authority, defined by what experience, entitles these experts and butterflies to ask us, the Palestinians, to put down our arms. Nonsense. Read the rest of this entry
PART ONE: Exposing the Israeli left: The “cottage-cheese warriors”
From the Shit Liberal Zionists Say Tumblr
By Linah Alsaafin and Budour Hassan
When Israel launched its most recent aggression on the Gaza Strip, dubbed Operation Protective Edge, the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public supported the aggression. Support for the massacre was by no means limited to right-wingers and blatant fascists; the cheerleaders also included Israeli Labor party (the largest “opposition” party in the Knesset), liberal minister of Justice Tzipi Livni, and Meretz, the self-proclaimed social democrats and “only Zionist leftist party”. The latter would eventually backtrack just like they did in the 2008- 2009 massacre, even claiming that they never actually supported the war from the get-go. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: Mutual struggle, mutual solidarity
Vigil in solidarity with Gaza, in Aleppo, Syria.
Photo via: Syria Untold
By Leila Al Shami
I spent a lot of time in Gaza during the first two years of the Syrian revolution. Unlike in other social contexts, where I often hesitated to talk about Syria fearful of having to deal with stupid reactions or banal analysis, in Gaza this wasn’t an issue with people I met. Gazans who experience terror on a daily basis never failed to ask me how my family in Syria was doing, or express their solidarity with the Syrian uprising against the terror of the Assad regime. Through their own experience, they empathized with the suffering of the Syrian people, understood their desire for freedom and supported their resistance to tyranny. Read the rest of this entry
PALESTINE: Freedom for all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli occupation jails; down with administrative detention and all forms of imprisonment
On Thursday, 24 April 2014, nearly 100 Palestinian administrative detainees launched an open-ended hunger-strike to demand their immediate release and an end to the policy of administrative detention, routinely employed by Israel. Since then, the number of hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners in Israeli occupation jails has risen to more than 130, with other political prisoners, including ill and elderly prisoners, joining the protest in solidarity. Read the rest of this entry
الحرّيّة لجميع الأسرى والأسيرات الفلسطينيين/ات في سجون الاحتلال، وتسقط كافة أشكال الاعتقال والاحتجاز
الكاتب/ة: أعلن زهاء مئة معتقل إداري فلسطيني في سجون الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، إضراباً مفتوحاً عن الطعام ابتداءً من 24 نيسان/أبريل الماضي للمطالبة بالإفراج الفوري عنهم، وبإنهاء سياسة الاعتقال الإداري التي يتبعها الاحتلال الإسرائيلي بشكل ممنهج، وقد ارتفع عدد المضربين عن الطعام منذ ذلك اليوم إلى أكثر من 130 أسيراً، بعد انضمام عدد من الأسرى السياسيين الآخرين والمرضى والكبار في السن إلى الاضراب تضامناً مع الأسرى الإداريين. Read the rest of this entry
Tahrir-ICN 