On his last evening
Abu Ali walked home
between the rows of pine
that line his driveway,
settled in the shelter
of his grape arbor, rolled
a cigarette, was served tea
by his wife,
who was preparing
for the expected arrival
of unexpected guests.
He spotted a cluster
above his head
and tugged at it.
Was it pomegranates we used to eat?
I cant quite remember
it was before all the bombs
fell everywhere even on that church
in the backyard of grandma’s house,
when grandma did not believe in Jesus
and pushed her little sister
off of the window sill,
then her mother got pregnant again.
The Obama administration appears to have given a green light to an Israeli attack on an unarmed flotilla carrying peace and human rights activists — including a vessel with 50 Americans on board — bound for the besieged Gaza Strip. At a press conference on June 24, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton criticized the flotilla organized by the Free Gaza Campaign by saying it would “provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.”
Capital is a fickle lover. Recently, a growing number of corporate leaders are getting second thoughts about the “Chinese Model” that has been so central in the globalization of production and markets over the last three decades.
The author will shortly be setting sail on the Freedom Flotilla II — Stay Human and hopes to arrive in Gaza bearing letters from the American people.
By half-heartedly retracting his report, Richard Goldstone not only won no friends in Israel, but sabotaged his human-rights reputation.
Whether or not Hamas is strapped for cash by restrictions on its comings and goings from Gaza, it’s squeezing its own people.
“Gaza Youth Breaks Out” set an example by pointing a finger at oppression across the political spectrum.
Published less than two months after Israeli commandos boarded an international aid flotilla bound for Gaza and killed nine activists, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara is, in the words of editor Moustafa Bayoumi, “the first book about the attack,” but “will likely not be the last.” This collection of some four dozen essays from eyewitnesses and “activists, novelists, academics, analysts, journalists, and poets,” serves many purposes. Some essays are expressions of simple outrage. Others probe more deeply into Israel’s broader political strategy in the region and its human costs for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Author and Harvard scholar Sarah Roy’s essay offers a detailed and rigorous accounting of Gaza’s humanitarian and economic woes, while well-known academic and blogger Juan Cole’s excellent contribution emphasizes the deeper problem of Palestinian statelessness, the political fact of which the Gaza blockade and even the Israeli occupation itself are merely symptomatic.
The Israel-Palestine conflict has been at the heart of regional affairs since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. This is the context wherein the “de facto” Iran-Turkey-Syria axis should be understood, although substantive normalization of relations in the last decade between Turkey and its neighbors Iran and Syria served as a pre-requisite for the supposed alliance.