Palestine Think Tank

WRITTEN BY KHALID AMAYREH
There seems to be a perfect conformity between Gabi Ashkenazi and his last name. The Israeli chief of staff is considered one of the main Israeli  war criminals responsible for the virtual genocide against the Gaza Strip during the past winter. On his murderous hands, he carries tons of innocent blood, including [...]

The Israeli Public Prosecution in the Magistrate's Court of Tel Aviv – Jaffa imposed a serious indictment against the Israeli MK (member of the Knesset), Mohammad Barakeh, a Hadash representative. The court accused Barakeh of assaulting police and soldiers on four different occasions over a period of two years since 2005. The indictment was signed [...]

“You are a terrorist, you are not welcome in the land of Palestine”. A Palestinian from the Hamdan family shouted these words in the face of Tony Blair, Quartet Representative for “Peace” in the Middle East, when he arrived at the Iron Cage at the entrance of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. A bodyguard of [...]

Even up until the mass killing, the Samouni family still clung naively to the notion that their working relationship with the IDF would protect them. Haaretz reports that “on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael [Samouni], located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence – despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.”

And then the IDF shelled that home, killing 21 of the Samouni family. Their usefulness had expired.

The Samouni’s had not thrown stones at Israeli tanks and had not waved angry fists at Israeli soldiers. Instead, they had worked dutifully for the Jewish population and had learned its language. But they were not spared. They were not spared because they had not themselves been Jewish. They were not spared because “peaceful co-existence” is merely a phrase bandied about by politicians seeking camouflage.

It is written in the Torah if any one cares to read and know: “Destroy all the land, beat down their pillars and break their statues and waste all of their high places, cleansing the land and dwelling in it for I have given it to you for your possession” Numbers 33:52,53. “ And they [...]

In Palestine, under the Israeli occupation and the boundless criminal practices of the IDF, every unimaginable and never heard of horror is possible, while outside, most people never know or even  imagines these things to be possible. In Palestine it is not enough to steal the land, to build colonies for Jewish squatters, an apartheid [...]

Austria/ Palestine/ Occupied Territories:
At around 11AM, Fuad Mahmoud Nayef Turkman, aged 17, was killed before the eyes of his brother, relatives and colleagues inside the schoolyard of the “Izz al-Din al-Qassam” school in Yabad, after an Israeli military jeep broke into the school shooting tear gas and then proceeded to deliberately run over one of [...]

Without preconditions, the Israeli central command Gadi Shamni is demanded to return the stolen 30 dollar which one of the coward thieves under his command stole from the wallet of Ru'a Osama Al-Ayasa, the daughter of my colleague Osama Al-Ayasa.
On August 15 2008, Gadi Shamni sent a heavily armed military contingent consisting of an [...]

Those who seek information about Palestine often tend to be attracted to particular writers and journalists for the special insights and gifts that seem to be uniquely their own. “The Middle East Crisis” is an issue having a profound, complex and multi-faceted dimension of interpretation, that for however long there has been a crisis (and worse), and despite the great abundance of written material available, more than we can ever realistically confront, the reader is driven to seek the voices that can analyse any aspect of the situation clearly. There really are far fewer with this talent than one would expect. The characteristic of this type of writer is that there is a distinctive voice or style, and more than that, there is a strong sense that the coherent and authentic ethics of this person are part of the message. It is not just reporting facts and intelligent analysis, but creating within us a consciousness of the moral situation that underlies the events. Khalid Amayreh is one such “source”. He is a very prolific author, and he is often able to correctly analyse the event of the day and place it into its overall context. This makes his work almost a diary of Palestinian events. However, as useful as it would be if he limited himself to reporting, Khalid Amayreh is far more important as a writer. He is concerned with the human condition and knows that the reader should not be left only with a cold reportage, because that would be telling only half of the story, and the less important half at that. His voice is the one speaking to the human heart, to the reader who sees the oppression that Palestinians are living under, and is mystified at they are no nearer to the end of their suffering. Khalid does not talk about “indiscriminate masses”, his work is almost a passion play, where there are names, identities, human stories behind all of the events narrated. In this interview, he touches on many issues in his intimitable way.

WRITTEN BY Ramzy Baroud 
'We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of impunity,' Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, was quoted by IPS in response to the findings of a 574-page report by a four-member United Nations Fact finding mission. The mission, led by internationally-renowned [...]