That awful A-word, preceded by the adjective ‘Israeli’. Israel boosters scream ‘antisemitism’ when they hear or read the phrase. Mainstream media avoid it like the plague. The international legal community has no difficulty likening Israel’s system of governance in the colonized West Bank to the South African prototype. Listen to my conversation with Professor Dugard.
A roof over one’s head. A home. Other than food and water, nothing is more essential to human life and health. Conversely, save forced starvation, there’s no better way to eliminate a people than to reduce their homes to rubble. No one knows this better, or carried out the practice more ruthlessly and efficiently, than the State of Israel.
An extended trip to Palestine can be a recipe for despair. How else to respond to the forcible evictions, home demolitions and nighttime arrests routinely reported on social media, or witnessed first hand by the intrepid journalist or political tourist? Despair has an antidote: the realization that what brought down apartheid South Africa will also bring an end to the more advanced and sophisticated Israeli version. More and more people are heeding the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions. David Harel is one of these — albeit in nuanced fashion.
Interviews that go sideways, or south. They tend to end suddenly, in response to the question that shouldn’t have been asked. Such was the case in this conversation with Ha’aretz columnist Amira Hass, in response to a question Amira didn’t let me finish, about the international community’s declared, though deceitful support for a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Thankfully, our conversation continued. Very lively.
Is justice served by defending someone’s right to a tiny slice of judicial relief, if victory means a vastly larger act of injustice is sustained, perhaps even consolidated, or should a principled attorney walk away from such a mug’s game? For Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, the answer is clear.
Some hoaxes — the Alien Autopsy, Fiji Mermaid, Disappearing Blond Gene and Geostationary Banana Over Texas tales come immediately to mind — declare themselves at the door to all but the most pitifully gullible. Now we’ve got the “Deal of the Century,” a snake oil claim if ever there was one.
Issa Amro is a human rights defender in Hebron, in the southern Israeli-colonized West Bank. Amro currently faces a host of charges under Israeli military law — “a lot of stupid charges,” Issa tells me in this interview — all associated with his involvement in peaceful protests against the ‘separate-and-unequal’ system of laws governing Hebron’s Palestinian and Jewish settler residents.
Why is Israel so afraid of Khalida Jarrar? Does it think she threatens its existence? Or has Israel jailed the 56-year-old Palestinian legislator, feminist, and human rights activist on three occasions simply as a show of power?
Kufr Qaddum is a village of 5000, halfway between the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Qalqilya. Its agricultural lands encompass about 19,000 dunams (acres), 11,000 of which fall within Oslo ‘Area C’ and are therefore under complete Israeli military control. I travelled to to Kufr Qaddum to observe one of their weekly protests, against the closure of their ancient road.
It’s a perfect storm: horrific bone and tissue-pulverizing wounds from high velocity sniper rounds, a health care system crushed by twelve years of military siege, and traumatic wound infections resistant to all but the most powerful and costly antibiotics. Such is the tempest sweeping tiny Gaza, fifteen months after the launch of protests along the militarized perimeter of what gets called, alternatively, an open-air prison or ghetto.
One day feels like a week in Hebron.The quickest way to get to this beautiful but conflicted West Bank town, from Jerusalem, is from West Jerusalem’s cavernous downtown bus station. Read and listen to the story here.
Canadian Rabbi David Mivasair was arrested yesterday (May 3, 2019), along with other Jewish-American, Israeli and Palestinian activists, while helping to repair a road used by Bedouin pastoralists in the hills south of Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
‘Unwilling or Unable’ – a radical new theory for justifying military interventions. As Earth warms, a billion people may soon be exposed to mosquito-borne viral diseases. And, trawling the oceans for plastic.
Local Zionists tried their darndest to block Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour from speaking at an event, yesterday evening, in Canada’s prairie capital, Winnipeg. Sarsour is an antisemite, they screamed, and denies Israel’s “right to exist”! Winnipeg social justice activists pushed back. On the evening of Friday, April 26, Sorry Not Sorry: Unapologetically Working for Social Justice unfolded without a hitch, exceeding expectations.
Farmers, dyers and fabric producers from a single watershed, woven together into a fibreshed. Is ethnic cleansing a charitable enterprise? The Canada Revenue Agency will soon pronounce on this matter. And, on the 25th anniversary of little Rwanda’s hundred-day genocide, there are whispers in the hall.
It’s the ultimate green dream: some device or substance that can capture the sun’s infinite flood of energy, store that energy, release it as heat and electricity — in controlled fashion — then absorb it all over again in a continuous closed loop. A little organic molecule called norbornadiene promises to make dreams come true, in the crucial realm of home heating and cooling.
Formerly abundant insects have vanished from a lush Puerto Rican rainforest. In tiny Gaza, under crushing Israeli military siege, antibiotic-resistant microbes infect high-velocity sniper wounds. And a big green dream: Endless clean energy from a tiny compound that soaks up solar rays.
What’s going on in Venezuela? I speak to someone who’s just returned, with an alternative view on the turmoil. Carbon taxes versus regulation. What works best? Both, it turns out. And – as if over a decade of crushing Israeli military siege weren’t enough, now the people of Gaza face multi-drug-resistant microbes.
It’s a perfect storm: horrific, bone and tissue-pulverizing wounds from high velocity sniper rounds, a health care system crippled by over a decade-long military siege, and multi-drug resistant infections.
Dimitri Lascaris is a Montreal-based lawyer, journalist and human rights activist, recently returned from a week in Venezuela, covering recent events for The Real News Network. I spoke with Dimitri by Skype. Here’s that conversation.
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