Six hundred Palestinians are currently being held in administrative detention by Israel. One of them is Abu-Sakha, a teacher at the Palestinian Circus School.
For the past few months Israelis and Palestinians have experienced a wave of terrorist attacks mainly on civilian targets. Peace education may have an answer.
A case for BDS by other means.
Palestinian activists are faced with knowing that their unarmed resistance, whilst it has attracted international civil society support, has failed to exercise any leverage over Israel.
Concerned professionals may need to move beyond their accustomed professional roles to support a genuine transformation in Israel and occupied Palestine that respects the human needs and rights of all who live there.
The ramping up of air strikes in Gaza combined with a humanitarian crisis compounded by a stalled reconstruction effort following last summer’s war, should compel us all into a heightened state of activism using BDS.
A settler screaming at an injured Palestinian child, a racist mob lynching an Eritrean, and the killing of a Jewish Israeli mistaken for a Palestinian are manifestations of a culture of hate.
To cover up its crimes, Israel needs to feed all the western stereotypes of Palestinians as violent and subhuman rather than hungry for freedom and equal rights.
For now, Israel is too powerful. An uprising may assert the right to life, land, and dignity. But it will not change the brutal facts on the ground.
What if the label of ‘Semite’ were to be readopted by Arabs and Muslims as part of their identity-formation, so that any antisemitism would also include them?
Contrapuntal reading is a way of listening to the plurality of voices of Jews and Palestinians, of seeing cultural identities not as essentialisations, but as mixed ensembles constituted with and through the Other.
There are significantly different motivations among Muslims with Palestinian, Lebanese or Turkish backgrounds. However, the experience of marginalisation and discrimination is a major element in the construction of identity.
