Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Ramona Wadi
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The PA should show real solidarity with human rights groups, not exploit their predicament
The Palestinian Authority has found another issue to attach to its political agenda in an attempt to divert attention away from the fact that its leadership has lost all credibility. Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz’s decision to designate six Palestinian civil society groups as “terrorist organisations” elicited widespread condemnation....
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Israel’s introspection will be used to justify its impunity
Israel’s concern with its public image was on display yesterday, when local media reported that former Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Major General Nitzan Alon has described this year’s bombing of the high-rise building which housed the Associated Press (AP) and other media offices in the Gaza Strip as a...
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Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics
If Palestine is treated as an exception, the settler-colonial narrative is legitimised. Marc Lamont Hill and Mitchell Plitnick’s book, Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics is an accessible, in-depth analysis that takes US politics to task for normalising both Israel’s colonial violence and, as a result, the...
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The EU rewards Israel’s human rights violations
As Israel continues to approve illegal settlement construction in the occupied West Bank, Irish politician Chris MacManus, a member of the European Parliament for Sinn Féin, has criticised the EU’s silence. “I believe it is about time the EU stood up to Israel and made it perfectly clear that...
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Settler violence and Israel’s impenetrable web of impunity
As happens each year during the Palestinian olive harvest, Israel’s illegal settlers are destroying olive trees and attacking Palestinian farmers. The International Committee of the Red Cross has said that in the year to August this year, over 9,300 olive trees were destroyed by Israeli settlers; the damage peaked...
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The PA is recycling its options
“We’re trying to avoid having confrontations with the US administration,” Palestine’s Ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, stated in a recent interview with the Times of Israel. Obviously, US President, Joe Biden, did not turn out to be the expected alternative to Donald Trump, after all, and the Palestinian...
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The PA and the illusion of symbolic recognition
Depoliticising the Palestinian people when it comes to their rights is a tactic Israel endorses and utilises. Palestinians “are our neighbours, they are not going anywhere,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said to outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, during a joint press conference in Jerusalem. Merkel reciprocated in kind....
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Abbas is fooling nobody with his complete reliance upon the US
A political crisis that has cast the spotlight on the illegitimacy of the Palestinian leadership cannot be swept under the carpet by a speech to the UN General Assembly. Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, however, is very partial to diversions if the outcome means that he can hang on...
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No alternatives to the two-state from the PA’s compromised position
Building upon his speech to the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority leader, Mahmoud Abbas, warned that if Israel rejects the two-state compromise, which it has already given the colonial expansion and suspended plans for annexation, Palestinians will opt for political alternatives—the UN Partition Plan of 1947, or a single...
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"UN report exposes the failings of two-state diplomacy"
Each year, the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) provides proof of the fallacy upon which the two-state compromise in Palestine-Israel is based. Palestine’s economy is tied perpetually to donor funding and Israel’s existence. “Recovery in 2021 and beyond hinges on actions that will be taken (or not)...
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Abbas’s political rigmarole at the UN General Assembly
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas’s long rigmarole at the UN General Assembly provided only a partial historical reckoning. The link between colonialism and the UN, notably within the context of UN Resolution 194 and the Palestinian right of return, was bypassed by regurgitating the outdated concept of an international...
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The PA keeps losing its authority, through its own actions
Recent statistics corroborate the growing resentment in the occupied Palestinian territories against the Palestinian Authority and its leader Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) carried out a poll at a time when the PA persisted in proving how unsynchronised it is with the Palestinian...
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The PA has a plan: it will ‘pause’ while Israel colonises more Palestinian land
A few weeks after Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz dangled the promise of a few concessions to strengthen the Palestinian Authority’s illegitimate rule, Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh has articulated – belatedly as usual – that Israel’s plan is to continue its colonisation of Palestinian territory. As if Palestinians don’t...
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Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary and Decolonial Perspectives
The decolonial approach in this collection of studies offers an important and at times over looked perspective of how Palestinians have become ensnared in a settler-colonial and neoliberal project. “Political Economy of Palestine: Critical, Interdisciplinary and Decolonial Perspectives” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) illustrates how Palestinians live between erasure and endurance...
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The UN’s scrutiny of Israel deflects from its complicity in its ongoing occupation
The American Jewish Committee (AJC) is spearheading an initiative ahead of the 76th session of the UN General Assembly, urging governments and diplomats to reject the so-called anti-Israel bias at an international level. Through the Brussels-based Transatlantic Friends of Israel (TFI) which was founded in 2019, 313 lawmakers from Europe and North...
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How sickening can PA hypocrisy get over the Palestinian prisoners’ issue?
What does the Palestinian Authority care about the conditions of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails? If the rhetoric of Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh is all we have to go on, the narrative is no more than a façade. He has appealed to the International Committee of the Red Cross...
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The PA has no business speaking about Palestinian rights
The recent meeting between Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas established that Palestinians are being exploited in order to provide for the PA’s stability and stronger security coordination with the colonial-occupation state. With the unfortunate expectation that Palestinians will be facing additional repression from...
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Will political accountability be established in the light of Banat’s murder?
The Palestinian Authority’s stances in the aftermath of Nizar Banat’s extrajudicial killing at the hands of its own security services have ushered in no promise of accountability. While the people were protesting against the murder and the PA’s ruthless authoritarianism, the upper echelons in Ramallah were busy silencing its...
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The Palestinians have new narratives for unity and resistance
In terms of state-building and diplomatic negotiations, the occupied West Bank has been perceived in starkly different terms from Gaza. With the international community funnelling financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority in the former, the concept of a fragmented Palestine has been duly enhanced. To the undiscerning, the PA...
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Saving two-state diplomacy and the PA’s authoritarianism
Yesterday’s meeting between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz has irked both Israeli and Palestinian officials. The Israelis have suggested that Gantz might be trying to bring down the government, while Palestinian factions denounced the meeting because Gantz tweeted later that he told: “Chairman...
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Bennett’s rhetoric can’t conceal Israel’s colonial land grab
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is playing with words to advance the colonial state’s de-facto annexation of the occupied West Bank. In an interview with the New York Times, Bennett used spin about compromise which amounted to nothing other than promoting colonial expansion while retreating on formalising another land...
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HRW indirectly promotes Israel’s colonial narrative and aggression
There is a stark difference in the language used by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its April 2017 report which describes Israel as having committed crimes of apartheid, and its more recent July and August reports on Gaza, which cast doubt on whether Israel committed war crimes in its...
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The UN is only ‘deeply concerned’ about protecting Israel
So “deeply concerned” is the UN at the Israeli raid of the offices of Defence for Children International-Palestine (DCIP), that the belated official statement by the special rapporteurs suggests that Israel – a colonial, military occupation and apartheid regime – should instead be protecting the organisation and its work....
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Palestinians are threatened by colonialism and complicity in the colonial project
Another call by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh for international protection for the people of occupied Palestine speaks volumes about Ramallah’s complicity in violent acquiescence, rather than the PA leadership having the people’s interests as a priority. Following the Israeli army’s killing of four Palestinians in Jenin, Shtayyeh...