Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Mohammad Makram Balawi
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Israel in self-destruction mode
Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi once said, “Friendship of the wise is good; a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.” I don’t know if this applies to the current Israeli political elite, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for one. One of the things that drew my attention when I read...
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Palestinians have won a moral victory, but what will happen next?
This week, the Palestinians won a moral victory. The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a report that sheds light on the killing of peaceful Palestinian demonstrators in the Gaza Strip since March last year. “Report of the independent international commission of inquiry on the protests in the Occupied...
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Gantz or Netanyahu, Israel’s policies against the Palestinians will remain the same
The Israeli General Election in April will be interesting, not only because there is a good chance that the world will see the political end of Benjamin Netanyahu and his lies, but also because it will present us with a clearer image of what Israel is and how its...
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Israel’s anti-BDS strategy simply peddles more myths and lies
Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs has released a report called Terrorists in Suits: The Ties Between NGOs promoting BDS and Terrorist Organisations. The report has a sense of melodrama, especially its pictures of BDS activists pinned to a noticeboard with red pins connected by red thread, like a scene...
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The Fence: Scenes from a Palestinian tragedy
Prologue For decades, Israeli leaders and media have insisted that Palestinians left their homes in the Nakba of 1948, leaving everything behind to become refugees of their own free will. Millions spent seven decades scattered in neighbouring countries and elsewhere, were denied the right to return to their homes in...
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Gantz' election videos shouldn’t come as a surprise
General Benjamin (Benny) Gantz, the 20th Chief of General Staff of the Israeli army, was charged in March 2010 with illegally expanding his house onto public property. Upon his appointment as army Chief of Staff, Ynet wrote: “The attorney general’s office said there were flaws in Gantz’s conduct which...
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Who burned Sondos and her children?
What was Sondos thinking as she huddled with her three children in their tent and set it on fire? Did the tears of her children not move her? Didn’t the screams of her one-month-old baby make her change her mind? It is true that they had not had food...
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The Middle Eastern mud house
Two days ago, I attended to a seminar on the legal background and implications of the dissolution of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) by President Mahmoud Abbas. Two of the renowned Palestinian experts – Dr Ahmad Al-Khaldi and Dr Anis Al-Qasim – concluded that Abbas’ decision has legal grounds....
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Abbas and his suicidal decisions
On 22 December Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). He did so despite the fact that the law does not give him the power to dissolve the council. To sidestep this obstacle, Abbas to formed the Constitutional Court – without...
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Israel’s systematic arrest of mothers shows its contempt for Palestinian women
On 16 December 2018, an Israeli court in the occupied city of Jerusalem sentenced Suzan Abu Ghannaam – the mother of 20-year-old Palestinian martyr Muhammad Abu Ghannaam – to eleven months in prison on account of “incitement” in a Facebook post. Her son had been killed while protesting against...
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Demolishing houses as collective punishment
About a month ago my wife asked me, “Have you seen that two-story house they demolished in the West Bank. Such a pity, it was such a beautiful house, made of white stone. Why did the Israelis destroy it? What did its owners do?” Her question hurt me very...
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Palestinians await both their relief and their downfall from the US
The Trump administration has made Mahmoud Abbas do what no other ally has done before – renounce America’s role and turn his back. Mahmoud Abbas declared that the Americans have lost their impartiality and thereafter their eligibility as caretaker of the peace negotiations. In response, Trump closed the PLO...
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Israel displaces, locks up and kills Palestinian children
What does it take to make someone wield a screwdriver and attack a fully armed, well-trained, well-protected soldier, knowing that if he got injured no ambulance would take him to hospital, and if he is lucky he will spend the best years of his life behind bars? Thaer Abu...
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Israel’s open secrets
Is Israel a nuclear power? In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli former nuclear technician, revealed to the British media details of Israel’s nuclear power programme and was eventually jailed for 18 years – he spent more than 10 of those years in solitary confinement. He later converted to Christianity...
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Israel doesn’t survive because it’s strong; it succeeds by weakening its enemies
The result of the latest round of fighting in the besieged Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army tried to carry out a covert military operation even while the Egyptians were in the final stages of mediating a ceasefire between armed factions in Gaza and the Israeli government, proved that...
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When murder is permissible: Israel’s ‘targeted assassinations’
One of the anomalies of political Zionism is that, while it was founded as a response to murderous pogroms against European and Russian Jews as a means to rescue them from such treatment by having a safe haven to go to, the founding fathers of the State of Israel...
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An Alliance of Despotism
Until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-religious, right-wing party came into power, we Palestinians used to have a lot of difficulties convincing the rest of the world that Israel is not a modern, democratic country as Zionists continue to claim. It is, rather, a reactionary, religion-based, race-based,...
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The Israeli Myth of the Uncivilised Palestinian
Recently, in another shocking incident, Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev was outraged by a Palestinian children’s novel written by Walid Dagga, a Palestinian prisoner who spent more than thirty years in jail for resisting the occupation. In her opinion, he is in jail not to write novels but to...
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Netanyahu, the armed prophet of the clash of civilisations
If US President Donald Trump can be visualised as King Cyrus, then Benjamin Netanyahu is the prophet out to save the modern Israelites in a hostile environment. His message is to cast the clash of civilisations theories of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington into a religious mould. The battle...
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Netanyahu’s adventures in the AIPAC wonderland
Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the 2018 conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are key to an understanding of how Israel is run. The Israeli leader is not only his country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, but is also different from his predecessors in many ways. One difference has...
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America wants to annul the legitimate Palestinian right to return
There are many in the Arab world who fell about laughing when the US ambassador to the UN started to lecture them about how rich Arab countries did not do enough to help their Palestinian brothers. “The US provided $364 million to UNRWA and another $300 million in bilateral...
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Imran Khan’s mission to balance relations with Saudi Arabia and Iran
The visit of Pakistan’s new Prime Minister Imran Khan to Saudi Arabia last week raised many questions related to his country’s foreign policy and the changes that could be made during his tenure, especially with regard to its major partners in the region, such as the Kingdom. Pakistan is under...
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It’s clear the US and Israel favoured Abbas. It’s also clear he failed.
A few years after Arafat assumed the leadership of the Palestinian national movement he tried to tempt the West to offer him something in return for what he called peace. Many people still remember him with his white sweater, in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974, saying: “I...
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Israel’s failed quest for security
“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.” Strong words, but not, as you might think, from...