Palestine Think Tank

Illustration by Abdul-Rahman Modallal, Tulkarem from the Badil Poster Contest
As Israel ostentatiously celebrates the passage of 60 years since its creation in Palestine in 1948, more than nine million Palestinians at home and in exile are commemorating the Nakba, the violent seizure of their ancestral homeland by Zionist Jews and the dispossession, expulsion and dispersion [...]

WRITTEN BY JOHN CATALINOTTO
Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon, popular because of their successful resistance to past Israeli attacks on the country, have answered a provocation from the U.S.- backed Lebanese government and at the same time handed a sharp military defeat to rightist forces, especially in Beirut. By May 12 heavy fighting between the Hezbollah-led opposition [...]

WRITTEN BY IBRAHIM TURNER*
Today in the Parliamentary Question Time Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister answered questions about the Myanmar crisis caused by the cyclone that hit the country over a week ago. Among the measures he called for was an emergency meeting of the United Nations to call on the Military Junta of Myanmar [...]

By Tommaso Di Francesco, translated by Diego Traversa
The diverging international reactions to former American President Jimmy Carter’s initiative in the Palestinian Occupied Territories and the attention it is receiving from the Arab and Muslim world underscores a fact that has been ignored in Italy and Europe.
Indeed, what we’re facing is the arrival at an original [...]

(Arabic translation below)
WRITTEN BY ABDUL BARI ATWAN,Editor of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Translated by Adib S. Kawar
The last four days uncovered the reality of the balance of power in Lebanon, for when the pro-government leaders, such as Saad Al-Hariri and Walid Jumblatt find themselves under siege, and cannot leave their headquarters, and ask for the army’s protection, [...]

(illustration by Mazen Kerbaj - translation below*)
What is going on today in Lebanon is just an extension of the situation in the entire region. The US and its western allies are trying to show everyone that religion is the main factor of this dispute and they are trying to cover the political motivations and especially [...]

As Palestinians all over the world commemorate the Nakba and 60 years of on-going zionist ethnic cleansing, murder and apartheid, there is one aspect of our Palestinian identity that survived despite all zionist attempts of elimination: our cultural heritage. The Palestinian cultural heritage is full of popular songs, poetry, sayings, stories handicrafts and other forms [...]

The people in the press staff of the Israeli Foreign Affairs Ministry are talented science fiction writers. Almost nothing that they write has any bearing on reality, and it seems that they use Orwell’s 1984 as a guidebook for news dispatches. All that they need to do is look at the facts on the ground [...]

WRITTEN BY DAVID MORRISON (art by Carlos Latuff)
The state of Israel came into existence 60 years ago on 14 May 1948. In the months before and after this declaration, Jewish forces drove around 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Over 500 villages were emptied of their Palestinian population and most of them were destroyed [...]

The Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development has released its poll results.  The poll was conducted under strict sampling methodology (margin of error +/- 1.6%) amongst a representative population in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Lebanon and Jordan.  The full survey can be viewed here: 2008 Arab Public Opinion Survey (power point).
Key [...]