Palestine Think Tank

WRITTEN BY KHALID AMAYREH  in Jerusalem 
As the month of Ramadan draws to a close, many Palestinians are devoting the last ten days of the holy month to gaining more  spiritual enrichment through I’tikaf or uninterrupted spiritual engagement. 
Many people are going for I’tikaf this year, motivated by a desire to gain Allah’s blessing and also encouraged by [...]

The roots and the horror of this crime date back to June 2, 1994, when the Israeli Special Forces and other IDF soldiers stormed the surgery, maternity and pediatric wards of the Palestinian hospital Augusta Victoria (generally known as “al-Motala”) in Jerusalem while they were looking for the BODY of a Palestinian who they mistakenly [...]

Ramallah / PNN – A new “plan for peace” is coming out of Washington that many consider to be disturbing at best. It includes keeping major Israeli settlement blocs in the West Bank.
The plan keeps the Israelis as occupiers, but with a few twists like in Oslo, such as political prisoners should be released. It [...]

Peres is the President of the country that adamantly refuses to allow millions of Christians and Muslims in occupied Palestine to access their respective religious places in al-Quds.

(…) this writer, who lives not far from Jerusalem, has been utterly unable to enter the city for the past 15 years, even for a brief prayer at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. This is while people from around the world can easily and freely visit the holy city.

So, one is really at loss trying to reconcile this hateful racist policy of religious discrimination against Palestinian Christians and Muslims with Peres’ call for religious tolerance.

*Sheikh Jarrah area, showing areas already occupied and controlled by Jews (red and blue) or threatened with takeover*
If you go half a kilometre north along the Nablus Road from St George’s Cathedral, you will see a tent where Palestinians living in the Sheikh Jarrah district of East Jerusalem are protesting against orders for their houses [...]

Divine Dreams of Blitzkrieg Benedict XVI:
For centuries “Caesaropapism” was a well know theory in ancient Europe where monarchs ruled by the idea of divine right, which stated that the king ruled both Crown and Church. The idea was pretty simple; combining the power of secular government with, or even making it superior to, the spiritual [...]

In 1929 Ben-Gurion said: “Jerusalem is not the same thing to the Arabs as it is to the Jews”. While he meant to say that Palestinians were not part of Jerusalem and are not attached to it as the Jews are, I would say, he almost got it right: Jerusalem is not the same thing [...]

Commemorating 60+ Years of the Systematic Murder of Palestinian Land. The first part of a three part series for Land Day
As I stood on the roof and watched Jerusalem stretch in front of me, with the sun reflecting on the golden Dome, I felt angry and felt how unfair the world is. I was born [...]

by "An American in Jordan"

In its increasingly rabid efforts to consolidate control of traditionally Arab-East Jerusalem, Israel this week moved to suppress Palestinian cultural activities associated with the city being declared the capital of Arab culture for 2009.
On 19 March heavily armed paramilitary police violently dispersed a meeting at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem, confiscating posters, leaflets, placards [...]