Palestine Think Tank

Palestinian students are inculcated with the idea that Jews are the original and oldest inhabitants of the land and the most attached to it. Raising Arab-Palestinian students on this idea, while not providing adequate cultural and historical knowledge to challenge it, encourages alienation from their homeland.

Feelings of alienation will later on undermine the capacity of students to tackle oppressive policies, especially in matters of land and social culture, and transform them into easy prey for the dominant Israeli political discourse which can be summarized as follows: this is the land of the Jewish people. We returned to our rightful historic homeland and built it up. You Arab-Palestinians are just passers-by, strangers to this land, and a source of annoyance to our presence. This is the discourse underlying Israeli political demands for the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

The Islamic world is obliged to undergo a deep-rooted and all-embracing change. It cannot continue in its current form. No one is denying this. However, there is a reality which both the West and our intellectuals must accept: The Islamic world can change only in accordance with its own inner dynamics and points of reference.
Attempts [...]

  
"It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."
- Edward Said
On the afternoon of November 3, 2009, the United States House of Representatives voted in favor of House Resolution 867 (H.Res.867), an AIPAC-backed bill that urges both President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to "oppose unequivocally any endorsement [...]

When I wrote and posted Part 1 of this article, I was, of course, aware that there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of President Obama speaking truth to the power of Jewish America as it was represented at the General Assembly of The Jewish Federations of North America. The words I put into his [...]

“If we kill a gentile who had sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments… there is nothing wrong with the murder,” Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira head of the Od Yosef Yeshiva in the illegal Jewish settlement of Yitzhak was quoted in the Israeli newspaper Maariv. Rabbi Shapira (no doubt an American Jew) recently published [...]

Muslim organizations and the people who run them in the US should be ashamed of themselves for what they have done to add to the misery and discrimination that Arabs and Muslims face in the United States of America.
These sad and bankrupt organizations are always the first to condemn any tragedy that happens here or [...]

Let us suppose for the sake of argument that Hamas would win the elections, even by a narrow margin. Would Fatah then cede power to the victorious party? Would the United States and Britain and Israel's Western allies come to terms with the results? Would Israel recognize Hamas as the true representative of the Palestinian people? Would the American-trained PA security forces agree to be answerable to the new government?

Obviously, the answer for all these crucial questions is absolutely "No".

The past weekend, we had a conference over two days attended by over 200 people from around the world.  The Conference addressed issues of Israeli colonialism, occupation, and racism.  It was held in the Paradise Hotel in Bethlehem, a scene of previous Israeli attack that severely damaged this beautiful hotel.  In workshops and panels we [...]

An entire mythology has been built around the Palestinian resistance movement (which morphed into a party) Hamas. This construct has actually taken on more legitimacy as a factual interpretation of Hamas than the facts themselves. In most of the Western media, no matter if it is on the right or the left, and in some of the “moderate” media in Arab countries, the very name of the party is coupled with terms such as “fundamentalist”, “radical” or “terrorist”. Clearly, this serves to create a fear trigger that will remove the word from being critically and honestly evaluated. The listener will immediately identify Hamas with a negative connotation and is removed from responsibility for understanding that this is a manipulation of reality. The listener is expected to accept the claims that Hamas is “anti-democratic” and “fanatical”. It is child’s play to then convince the listener that Hamas is Bad, that it is the Enemy of all We represent (in our own eyes, tolerance, democracy, Goodness itself). It is possible to then extend that reading to the belief that action must be taken against them, that they are a “cancer that must be gotten rid of”, as quoted by the institutional peacenik, Noa. How does one eradicate a cancer, once it has been diagnosed? By extirpation or bombardment.

While some calm has returned to the compound of Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Muslim holy site is still under grave threat, writes Khaled Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem
An uneasy calm is descending over East Jerusalem after thousands of Israeli troops lifted a tight siege lasting two weeks on Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, one of Islam's holiest sanctuaries.
The site [...]