The big question posed by HRW’s report
May 10,2021 - Last updated at May 10,2021
While reading Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) monumental report “A Threshold Crossed”, I felt a range of emotions. It also left me with one big question.
I was deeply impressed by the report’s rigorous scholarship. At the same time, it brought to the surface feelings of anger and profound sadness. It’s an extraordinarily complete study detailing not only the many ways Israel has violated a broad range of Palestinian human rights, but the ideology of racial superiority and entitlement that Israel has used to justify its repression.
The Palestinian Museum launches phase two of its Digital Archive project to include more than 360,000 items 21/April/2021 04:19 PM
The Palestinian Museum launches phase two of its Digital Archive project to include more than 360,000 items
Photo from the Palestine Museum.
BIRZEIT, Wednesday, April 21, 2021 (WAFA) – The Palestinian Museum announced the launch of phase two of its Digital Archive project (PMDA), which will continue for three years as of March 2021 and when complete, the archive will include more than 360,000 freely-available items, according to a press release.
During phase two, the project will widen its reach, gathering Palestinian archives from families and institutions, and from diaspora Palestinians in Jordan and Lebanon. The aim is to digitize and publish 180,000 archival items that shed light on different aspects of Palestinian social history from the 1800s to the present day.
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Apr. 19, 2021 11:51 AM
For 73 years, relations between Israel’s Jewish and Arab communities have adhered to a certain status quo, which has had some ups and plenty of downs, but all in all remained static. Each side knew its place. The recent cycle of elections – four in two years – seems to have disrupted this alignment.
For the first time, large parts of the Jewish population can distinguish between the different elements of the so-called Arab parties, and are even willing to accept some of them as partners in running the state. Can this maneuver, which began as a political necessity for the camp that wants to ouster Benjamin Netanyahu and continued as a life raft for the prime minister himself, become a tectonic shift that will change the face of the state?
by Tamir Sorek
(Stanford University Press, £20.99)
THIS is an unusual biography of Tawfiq Zayyad, not least because it is about a Palestinian communist and is written by a US-based, Jewish-Israeli social scientist.
The renowned Palestinian poet and activist was a leading member of the Israeli Communist Party for over four decades and was elected mayor of Nazareth before becoming a member of the Israeli Knesset, serving for 18 years. He died in 1994 at the age of 85.
The book s author Tamir Sorek openly questions his right as an Israeli Jew and non-communist to write such a biography. But his admiration and respect for Zayyad, even though he never met him, is unquestionable and he was given full access to Zayyad’s family and comrades and exhaustively mined many archival sources.
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Feb. 2, 2021
“The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad,” by Tamir Sorek, Stanford University Press, 2020; 264 pps., $26
Tawfiq Zayyad (1929-1994) was a leader, a prominent Palestinian national poet, a communist, a native son and mayor of Nazareth and a member of Knesset for almost 20 years. The first-ever biography of Zayyad, by Tamir Sorek – an Israeli sociologist who teaches in the history department of Penn State University in the United States – tells a fascinating life story, from the series of arrests and detentions of Zayyad as a youth, through his long term as mayor and as a member of Israel’s Parliament who led the Arab public in Israel to engage in political partnership with the Zionist left.