Author Archives: Arab America

Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed piece in Sunday’s New York Times, “Winds of War in Gaza,” bears witness to what Gaza looks like today. Kristof should be commended for going to Gaza and writing about what he sees. It is not often that writers for the New York Times openly acknowledge how the Israeli blockade on Gaza continues, and it is refreshing that Kristof has written this piece. However, after leading us through his time in Gaza, Kristof stops short of going into significant analysis of what is really happening in Gaza and Israel’s larger goal to keep the Palestinian people under occupation.

At first Kristof’s piece might seem like an Op-Ed that actually portrays Palestinians as a people rather than as an “other.” He is shown in a photo taking a “selfie” with some Palestinians. He describes how many Gazans remain homeless, cramped, and cold. He agrees with the statement that Gaza is “an open air prison.” He even argues that the suffering in Gaza “has multiple causes,” emphasizing the Israeli “siege” as one of these causes.

Then, in a bait-and-switch twist, after having led us through these descriptions of the current situation, he commends Israel’s strategy of punishing all of Gaza as a viable solution:

Yet I have to acknowledge that Israel’s strategy of collective punishment may be succeeding with a sector of the population. Gazans aren’t monolithic in their views any more than Americans, but many said that they were sick of war and of Hamas and don’t want rockets fired at Israel for fear of terrible retribution.

Kristof is suggesting that collective punishment is successful because it is causing Gazan civilians to be fed up with Hamas and to be sick of war, and he quotes some Palestinians who say they are “tired of the war,” “hate Hamas,” and “don’t want resistance.” He is right, of course, that if a population is kept in an open air prison, denied basic human rights, and constantly under threat, that one of the results would indeed be people tired, without energy to fight back, and worried about retribution from Israel. Kristof’s claim that the Gazan population–or any oppressed population–is benefiting from collective punishment ignores the realities of the suffering that he himself witnessed and described in his piece. It is never OK to collectively punish whole populations.

Source: mondoweiss.net

When issues of racial and colonial discourse are discussed in the U.S., people of Middle Eastern and North African origin are often excluded. This piece is written with the intent of opening up the multicultural debate, going beyond the U.S. census’s simplistic categorization of Middle Eastern peoples as “whites.” 

It’s also written with the intent of multiculturalizing American notions of Jewishness. My personal narrative questions the Eurocentric opposition of Arab and Jew, particularly the denial of Arab Jewish (Sephardic) voices both in the Middle Eastern and American contexts.

Source: www.bintjbeil.com

Desert Jewels draws upon the rich traditions of the Amazigh, or Berbers, who live in the North African mountains and deserts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.

Source: www.metstoreblog.org

Dearborn, MI – Classes at the University of Detroit-Mercy Law School are about to get a lot of more interesting. The venerable institution has recently added a new course for the Spring 2015 semester, entitled, “Arab Americans and the Law”. Teaching it will be Amer Zahr; and, while Zahr is often first thought of as … Continued

Last week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Congress in hopes of blocking a possible nuclear deal with Iran he did not mention the Palestinians once. To officials in the West Bank, this omission showed Netanyahu would rather the occupation stay invisible.

As Netanyahu addressed Congress, high-ranking Palestinian officials were busy trying to gain momentum from the international community on a series of on-going initiatives. The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Executive Committee and Fatah Council all held day long meetings in Ramallah and the agenda was full: they discussed plans to file a war crimes case against Israel over settlements and the summer war in Gaza, launch a boycott campaign against Israeli consumer goods from shops in the West Bank, seek another resolution at the Security Council and more daringly, announced the end to security coordination with the Israeli military. Between the discussions, some senior officials made statements about Netanyahu’s speech. They were miffed that he did not talk about them and many also decried what they viewed as a call for war on Iran. In their view Iran was a distraction to the issue at hand, the occupation that they live under.

Chief Palestinian Negotiator Saeb Erekat said, “In his speech, Mr. Netanyahu wanted to shift the attention from the core of the conflict by not mentioning Palestine. It seems that the impunity granted to Israel by the U.S. Congress allows him to continue violating Palestinian rights without fearing any response. We also declare that Palestine supports a Middle East free of nuclear weapons, and in order to achieve that goal, Israel must allow the presence of international teams to check on Israel’s nuclear facilities.”

Dr.Mustafa Barghouti, the head of the Palestine National Initiative, said Netanayhu was “selling an old product that no one is buying, he is selling fear.” Dr. Barghouti and his party represent Palestinians immersed in the non-violent struggle, weekly protests against Israel’s separation wall. His group has tried to diversify the Palestinian struggle, where the grassroots can participate when collapsed negotiations yield little hope.

“It is really amazing how such a man has the guts to stand in front of congress in and the entire world with out mentioning the Palestinian issue, the most important issue for Israelis,” he said.

Spokesperson for the PLO Ashraf Khatib added, “It will be a mistake to give it [the speech] much importance. Netanyahu went to Washington because he has started an election campaign and he wants to inflate the region with more tension, and his agenda is an agenda of war.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addressed the speech indirectly. Last week he did weigh in on Israel’s upcoming elections on March 17th. Netanyahu’s Iran talk was regarded as campaign plug, although Israeli polls showed he made little gains from the internationally televised event. Abbas took a lighter tone than other Palestinian officials, “At this time Israel wants to put everything in hold because of the elections. It is unfortunate that Israel is doing this. But I say clearly and plainly that we have no business with the Israeli elections and we do not wish to express own view on whom we wish to be the next Prime Minister of Israel. Whomever the Israeli people will elect we will consider a peace partner and negotiate with,” he said on Thursday.

Yet future negotiations seem unlikely. On Sunday Netanyahu’s Likud party published a pamphlet relaying that the prime minister is done with supporting any sort of Palestinian statehood. The reason, like Netanyahu’s Congress speech, was Iran.

“[T]he situation that has arisen in the Middle East, any evacuated territory would fall into the hands of Islamic extremism and terror organizations supported by Iran. Therefore, there will be no concessions or withdrawals, they are simply irrelevant,” the pamphlet said

Source: mondoweiss.net

After 30 years of patient determination, the Bethlehem Museum for History, Heritage and Culture finally opened on February 28, 2015. The Arab Women’s Union of Bethlehem (AWU) initiated the Museum in 1977, but it was held from completion due to a variety of obstacles. The Holy Christian Ecumenical Foundation (HCEF) saw the Museum’s potential and … Continued

The Nakba Museum Project of Memory and Hope aims to finally tell the Palestinian refugee story, one that has been silenced or ignored for too long. By creating a virtual and physical space to feature these stories, using arts, films and oral history. We launched our project in June 2014 and have received enormous encouragement and engagement. 

Source: www.indiegogo.com

Somewhere between stepping off the school bus and climbing into the go-kart, Sandra Ibrahim, 14, took off her pink hijab. She was on a trip to an indoor amusement park in New Rochelle, N.Y., with her Islamic weekend school, surrounded by other Muslim children, parents and teachers. She knew the adults would like her to keep the head scarf on. But there she was, zooming along the track, her dark brown ponytail swinging freely behind her.

Sandra wants to wear the hijab when she is ready, because she wants to follow the guidelines of her religion. She thought she was ready in fifth grade, when her parents rewarded her with a Barbie video game and other prizes for each week she kept it on. But there was teasing and bullying, her family said. Students at her public school yanked it from her head at least twice. So she took it off. She tried again in the middle of sixth grade, and again in seventh. This year, in eighth grade, she had not even tried.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Palestinian activists are welcoming the cancelation of a lucrative deal in which the Palestinian Authority would have purchased at least $1.2 billion worth of natural gas from an Israeli consortium over the next twenty years.

The news is likely to add to pressure on Jordan to cancel a similar deal from which Israel would reap vast profits.

And on the Palestinian front, vigilance is needed to defeat long-term efforts by Israel and the Palestinian Authority to give Israel ultimate control of the rich gas fields off Gaza’s coast.

Palestine’s Boycott National Committee (BNC) welcomed the announcement last week that the Palestine Power Generation Company had withdrawn “a few months ago from the agreement with the developers of the [Israeli] Leviathan natural gas field.”

The gas would have supplied a planned power plant near Jenin in the occupied West Bank.

Mahmoud Nawajaah, general coordinator of the BNC, the largest civil society coalition in Palestine and the steering group for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign, said: “The import of Israeli gas would contribute to entrenching our economic dependency on Israel and strengthen the Israeli economy at a time when Israel’s international isolation is growing.”

Source: electronicintifada.net

Source: www.aaiusa.org

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Nentayhu has come and gone – and it was ugly. But you still have the opportunity to engage with your Members of Congress to let them know that this issue is important to you.

There were more than 50 Senate and House Democrats who stood up to Netanyahu and skipped his speech; a few key leaders even held a 45 minute press conference to explain why they did not attend. 

Join AAI in thanking your representatives if he/she skipped the speech. If your elected Senators of Representative attended the speech, join with us in demanding an explanation.

The March 8 women’s demonstration in Rabat, Morocco, was impressive. The organizers and the official authorities will report different figures, as usual. An informal and conservative assessment would, however, be that they were in the upper tens of thousands, which is far from the one million called for by the organizers.

The organization of the event was also impressive, given the tremendous amount of coordination it must have taken among groups that do not usually cooperate to bring activists from all over the country. Likewise, political differences were too few and too minor to be mentioned, and the overall management and supervision of the demonstration is to be commended. Slogans were freely expressed, although they tightly complied with the agreed upon watchword.

The driving theme of the women’s march in Rabat was parity. Among the other recurrent themes in the slogans were equity, equality, fairness, equal opportunity, the end of misogynistic government, and the destitution of the Prime Minister.

The interviews given by the leading figures of the organizing teams repeated that the current government is “womenophobic”, that it distorts Islamic principles, and that it adopts an abusive interpretation of Islam’s founding texts to impose illegitimate and anachronistic limitations on women’s social, political, and cultural rights, and on the dignity they are entitled to.

The current government continues to reject the concept of marital and domestic abuse. Despite the comfortable majority it enjoys in the parliament, it has been unwilling to activate provisions of the constitution by enacting laws that protect women and guarantee their rights.

According to these interviews, the government’s decisions to create benefits for poor widows and divorced and deserted women is a populist electoral propaganda for upcoming elections. They denounce this political opportunism and the immorality of this discourse at the eve of the elections.

For the women I have been able to talk to, they said that they continue to be the most vulnerable population to the powers of the economy and finance, both in urban and rural areas. They are the first to suffer from economic crises and all kinds of shortages, and they are the first to lose benefits. They are still the most illiterate category of the population. Women with handicaps are in much worse situations than males with similar handicaps.

Source: www.moroccoworldnews.com

Taroudante- “Fever”, a film by Moroccan director Hicham Ayouch, won the Golden Stallion award, the most prestigious award at the Festival of African Cinema on Saturday in Ouagadougou.

During the closing ceremony of the 24th Pan-African Festival of Cinema and Television in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Moroccan director Hicham Ayouch was presented the Golden Stallion, also known as the “Golden Stallion of Yennenga”, by the transitional President of Burkina Faso, Michel Kafando.

The film “Fever” tells the story of 13-year-old Benjamin, who went to live with his father Karim. Karim, who himself lives with his parents, finds himself completely helpless against the boy, who disrupts his life.

“As you have noticed, my skin is white, but the blood that runs through my veins is black. My father is Moroccan, my mother is Tunisian, African, and I am proud to be so,” Ayouch said during the award ceremony.

“I am African and proud to be so, because my culture is beautiful, powerful, poetic, and we must do everything to change attitudes through art, imagination and through education,” he added.

Source: www.moroccoworldnews.com