Wheels of Justice

When I first visited the West Bank in 2003, checkpoints were controlled by young Israeli soldiers, nervously clutching their weapons and yelling at Palestinians to stay in line. When I returned in 2005, I found many checkpoints replaced by metal turnstiles into which Palestinians were herded to wait for soldiers to push a button, letting them through one by one or sometimes not at all. Anna Baltzer writes of her experience at one of those terminals.

JERUSALEM (IRIN) - Food aid accounts for over two thirds of the 2009 $462 million requested by United Nations agencies and non-governmental organizations to fund humanitarian aid programs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Food accounts for $209.4 million; next comes cash assistance ($133.3 million), followed by protection, emergency jobs, water and sanitation.

From the very beginning, students have played an active role in the Palestinian national movement. Their enthusiasm, motivation, and hard work help them to overcome even the most daunting tasks. Organizing rallies, academic events, political debates, fundraising, cultural programs, students demonstrate the great influence they are able to assert on societies divided by war, engrossed by political strife, and weakened by economic turmoil. The Electronic Intifada contributor Raja Abdulhaq argues that the General Union of Palestinian Students must be rebuilt.

The following is a speech delivered by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Corrigan Maguire at the seventh International Sabeel Conference in Jerusalem on 19 November 2008: I am very happy to be here with you and to be invited to speak to you. I am deeply grateful to have the freedom to come here to East Jerusalem and the freedom to speak and meet with you.

The slow death that is being visited on the Palestinians in Gaza is finding its first victims in more than 400 critically ill patients who are being prevented from leaving Gaza for urgent medical attention in Israeli or Arab hospitals. Thousands of other patients are being turned away from hospitals suffering from a severe shortage of 300 different kinds of medicines. Sonja Karkar comments.

Israel's 17-month siege, tightened over the past three weeks, has forced Palestinians to find other ways to meet their basic needs. Because Israel has closed border crossings into Gaza, the 1.5 million residents lack many essential supplies including food, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and now, electricity. Rami Almeghari writes from the Gaza Strip.

25 November, women worldwide celebrate the International Day for Elimination of Violence Against Women, that had been officially adopted by the UN in 1999, as part of the effort exerted to eliminate violence against women, and to urge countries to take actions necessary to ensure women's enjoyment of necessary protection.

The saying that a man's home is his castle goes back to the 1500s. Whether it is a mansion or a mud hut, a home to which you can retreat and be safe is a basic human need. But since 2001, Abu Kamel (Mohammed al-Kurd), his wife and five children were forced to fight every day for the right to stay in the East Jerusalem home his family had lived in for decades. Pam Rasmussen remembers Abu Kamel.

The Electronic Intifada's correspondent in Gaza, Rami Almeghari, sat down with UNRWA Chief of Operations in the Gaza Strip, John Ging, to discuss how the siege, and the latest closures are affecting UNRWA and the civilian population in Gaza. UNRWA is the UN agency responsible for providing aid to millions of Palestinian refugees. On 4 November, Israel sent tanks into the Gaza Strip and carried out attacks which killed six Palestinians, breaking a ceasefire that had generally held since June.

On 30 October 2008, at 10:15am, the Israeli army stormed the faculty of the Palestine Technical College in Arroub refugee camp, Hebron and arrested students from some of the classrooms. The students were blindfolded, shackled, and then repeatedly beaten, slapped, and punched all over the body. They were then taken to Gush Etzion military detention center. None of the boys are older than 16.

On Saturday, 22 November, I toured Gaza City and authenticated the bleak reality of people through my camera. The dark streets further demonstrating the physical and spiritual fatigue experienced by Palestinians, now enduring the 18th month of Israel's siege while the world remains indifferent to their suffering. Sameh Habeeb's photographs tell a story of Gazans living without power.

The Batsheva Dance Company of Tel Aviv is touring the US and Canada in January, February, and March, 2009. A recipient of public financing since the 1990s, the dance troupe is clearly an Israeli apartheid cultural institution. Writing October 26, 2008, in The Independent of London, Jenny Gilbert reports that the dance company is "funded by Israel's government, its performers include none of Arab extraction, and it is 'proud to be considered Israel's leading ambassador.'"

Leeds University Union agreed last week, by a vote of 12 to 11, to send a motion to referendum which will label anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and silence pro-Palestinian groups on campus. The motion, shrouded in the language of combating anti-Semitism, is a reversal of a motion passed two years ago which gave Palestinian activists at Leeds University the rights enjoyed by their counterparts throughout the country. If passed, organizations which have an anti-Zionist platform, such as the Socialist Workers Party and the Palestine Solidarity Group, will be prevented from receiving funding from the union and prevented from holding many of their events.

In October 2008 the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) published a strategic position paper for the upcoming Durban Review Conference, which will be held from 20-24 April 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland. At the Conference, attending nations will assess the progress made toward the Program of Action adopted at the 2001 World Conference against Racism, which called for end racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. However, Western governments have repeatedly sidelined efforts to bring the case of the systematic violation of the rights the Palestinian people forward in the Durban review process.

A Country of Words: from the Refugee Camps to the Front Page is a remarkable Palestinian memoir, exceptional because of its abundance of compassion, humor and humility. Its author is Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Arabic-language daily al-Quds al-Arabi who also wrote The Secret History of al-Qa'ida. Individuals have their own lives and create their own narratives, and for Atwan, his story begins in Palestine. Atef Alshaer reviews for The Electronic Intifada.

On the evening of Tuesday 18 November Khalid al-Habeel sat surrounded by his wife, family, and other concerned fishermen. Until the early hours of the following day, they had no idea what charges were being laid against 15 fishermen, including two of al-Habeel's sons, Adham (21) and Mohammed (20), after they were nabbed from Gaza's territorial waters earlier that morning and taken to an Israeli interrogation center at Ashdod port. Nor did they know when or if their boats -- their livelihoods -- would be returned. Eva Bartlett reports.

Over the past two weeks, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have faced a sharply deteriorating humanitarian situation as Israel further tightened its closure of the border crossings. Virtually no food, medicine or other vital supplies have been allowed in to the territory that is home to 1.5 million people. Despite desperately needed medication, equipment, supplies, and spare parts, doctors continue to try to save lives and look after their patients at the European Gaza Hospital. Rami Almeghari reports from Gaza.

Text messages came from student protestors who had managed to get inside the lecture hall. They let the their fellow demonstrators outside know that their chanting could be heard inside over the voice of Israeli President Shimon Peres. There was clapping and stamping of feet and placards banged on the railings to make as much noise as possible, along with the constant "Free, free Palestine" which did not stop for a moment of the hour-long lecture. Abigail Humphries reports from Oxford.

The middle-of-the-night eviction last week of an elderly Palestinian couple from their home in East Jerusalem to make way for Jewish settlers is a demonstration of Israeli intent towards a future peace deal with the Palestinians. Mohammed and Fawziya Khurd are now on the street, living in a tent, after Israeli police enforced a court order issued in July to expel them. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

Canada's Museum of Civilization is part of Canadians' acknowledgement and atonement for the colonial ethnic cleansing of First Peoples. By providing space for the Jewish National Funds's Negev Dinner, however, the museum is aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing in Palestine and facilitating the celebration of these actions next to the exhibit of aboriginal culture in the Museum's Great Hall. This discredits our nation's understanding of its own egregious colonial past and raises questions about the sincerity of our apologies to aboriginal peoples in Canada.