As a 10-year-old growing up in Johannesburg, I celebrated Israel’s birth, 60 years ago. I unquestionably accepted the dramatic accounts of so-called self-defensive actions against Arab violence, to secure the Jewish state; the type of indoctrination South African cartoonist Zapiro so bitingly exposes in his work, raising the hackles of scribes such as David Saks… Read more »
From July 15th to July 28th, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) will host its sixth annual summer work camp in Anata. This year, we will rebuild the home of the Elayyan family, which was demolished by the Israeli authorities oin April 21, 2004. For daily reports of the camp, see www.icahd.org The Elayyan… Read more »
“A year after my tour with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, I did it again – this time with a very different mindset….” A year more in the life of Seth Freedman since he last “went into siege mentality” on an ICAHD tour has done something to dramatically disarm his resistance to the ICAHD… Read more »
This Thursday was the official launch of Jeff Halper’s new book, “An Israeli in Palestine”, at a public event in Hampstead. Extra chairs had to be put out for the numbers of people who came to listen to Jeff in conversation with Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English Literature at Queen Mary College, University of London…. Read more »
Israeli Independence Day 2008, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the rise of the Jewish State, should be cause for sober reflection and re-evaluation as well as celebration. Indeed, we Israeli Jews have much to celebrate. But something, it appears, is amiss. Israelas 60 Year gala appeared exaggerated, the joy expressed through the blaring loudspeakers somewhat… Read more »
In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of… Read more »
Independent Jewish Voices (www.ijv.org.uk) are placing this advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle in the UK on May 9, 2008: 60 YEARS – WE WISH EVERYONE COULD CELEBRATE It is 60 years since the creation of the state of Israel, celebrated by most Israelis and many Jews around the world. But which Israel is being commemorated?… Read more »
Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh has combined art and politics, his love of walking with his political activism and human rights, to produce a lyrical account of the changed and still changing West Bank countryside, and its effects on the lives of the Palestinian population, since Ariel Sharon declared in 1980 that he would “alter the… Read more »
Tomorrow, the testimonials of 39 Israeli ex-soldiers, veterans of military duty in Hebron, are to be published by the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence. They speak of how they and many other Israeli “youths” have been brutalised by performing or witnessing acts in an environment where “the proper-normative becomes despicable, the inconceivable becomes routine”, where… Read more »
It was another of those routine tragedies that are never publicized. At eight in the morning we at ICAHD (the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions) received a call that the Border Police, Israeli police and Jerusalem Municipality bulldozers were massing below the Palestinian village of Anata, poised to begin another day of home demolitions. (Link… Read more »