Month July 2016
John Reynolds: For those seeking to draw tactically on international law to confront the Nakba, the international legal prohibition of apartheid can be useful in going further than the prohibition of colonialism.
Majd Kayyal: The catastrophe that took place on 5 June 1967 boils down to one fact: it sealed the consequences of the Nakba. It marked the defeat of political projects that promised an Arab rebirth and refused to accept the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
As part of an ongoing dialogue with the Native rights movement in the United States, Adalah USA Representative Nadia Ben-Youssef recently sat down with Melanie Yazzie and Nick Estes, scholar-activists and founders of Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students and community organizers advocating Native liberation. They discussed the points of intersection between Palestinian and Native histories and consider ways forward to reclaim memory as a force for collective liberation.
Nick Estes: While the Nakba was taking place in Palestine, Native peoples in the United States faced what is known as “the era of termination.” Termination was meant to forcibly assimilate Native peoples into white culture while in Palestine, Zionism emphasized segregating Jews and Arabs instead. But in both places, dispossession and expulsion were the order of the day.
Amjad Iraqi: The conditions of many Arab towns in Israel remind visiting American activists of color of impoverished ghettos in American cities; segregationist laws in land and housing echo those of the Jim Crow south; and in particular, the stories of police brutality sound starkly like those in the U.S.
The current issue of State Crime Journal takes up the theme of “Palestine, Palestinians, and Israel’s State Criminality.” The journal is paywalled but the editors, along with Richard Falk, presented its findings on a recent panel at Queen Mary University in… Continue Reading →
A Dutch citizen who moves to a settlement in the West Bank receives higher pension payments from the Dutch government than if he stayed in the Netherlands. This is only one particularly egregious example of how other states sponsor Israel’s colonization of Palestine and the ongoing Nakba.
On 14 July in Acre, Mada al-Carmel — the Arab Center for Applied Social Research will host its second annual international conference on the theme of “The Illusion of Justice in the Settler Colony: Palestinian Women, Law and the State.”… Continue Reading →