Palestinian youth in the Dheisheh refugee camp talk about what it means to them to be a refugee, their identities and hopes for the future.

Video source: ibdaa194.org

Do you believe Palestinians and Israelis should stop working towards a two-state solution and focus on co-existence with equal rights and protections in a shared homeland?

A question published by LA Times and asking readers to vote. Majority (at the time of writing this) said, Yes!

ISRAEL: The one-state solution? You vote

A story online today details how Palestinians are losing hope that negotiations will ever produce a fair deal for an independent state beside Israel.

In response, sentiment is growing among Palestinians to stop fighting for territory and begin struggling for equal rights and voting privileges in a land where Arabs will soon be the majority.

We’ll put it to the readers:
Do you believe Palestinians and Israelis should stop working towards a two-state solution and focus on co-existence with equal rights and protections in a shared homeland?

1) Yes
2) No

Go ahead…. vote, Yes!

Haitham Sabbah, Mary Rizzo and Gilad Atzmon are very pleased to announce their new site, Palestine Think Tank. It is a site containing news, analysis, art and more to further the cause of justice for Palestinians. It concentrates on many aspects of the resistance, but also focuses on the issues affecting the entire Middle East. Please visit us at www.palestinethinktank.com, share this news with those who might be interested, and if you have a blog or site, consider linking to us. We also have a forum for those interested in interactive communication.

Together with us are some of the most insightful and talented writers, activists and artists around. Contributors include Khalid Amayreh, Ramzy Baroud, Adib Kawar, Ernesto Paramo, Wael Al Saad, Nadia Hasan, Iqbal Tamimi, Richard Jones, Nahida Izzat, Razan Al Ghazzawi, Khaled Islaih, Steve Amsel, Ben Heine and many more. www.palestinethinktank.com contains both original material and material from other sources that we believe deserves to be considered.

We are people from different backgrounds who live in different countries. We speak different languages and believe in different religions, or even believe in no religion at all.

These differences are not a problem to any of us.

Differences are what makes the world a wonderful place because everyone is unique. It allows us the possibility to learn more about the world and gain insights we would never have access to otherwise.

Celebrating our differences, we understand that there is a belief that unites us and unites all the people involved in creating this website. It is the belief that Zionism is wrong. Zionism is racism. For Zionism to happen, it means the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people of the land of Palestine. We accept nothing about Zionism as being positive, yet we believe there are some people who don’t know exactly what Zionism is, and therefore assume it is something different than an ideology, and therefore, is beyond criticism.

We wish to educate those who don’t know what Zionism is so that they are able to see how damaging it is and how it is a just cause to stop it. We hope www.palestinethinktank.com will be a space for free discussion and wide-ranging analysis.

We believe that the just struggle of the Palestinian people is the greatest liberation struggle of our times, and we aim to render service to their cause through presenting as many aspects of their history, culture and struggle as we can. We intend to give space to many Arab voices as well, since the full realisation of the potential of people in the entire Arab world has been hindered for far too long by the “International Community”. It is far easier to promote an idea of “the Arab” that cleanses Israel and the West from all responsibility for the instability and lack of progress that in some cases is evident than to listen to the complex arguments and reasoning that people from these countries and who understand the history of the Arab World are able to present.

We hope to be able to provide a site full of valid content that is at the service of the Palestinian people especially. Their steadfastness is an inspiration to all mankind, and to those of us in particular who feel close to their cause or are Palestinian, it is a message of love, hope and humanity that we hope we are worthy of.

Content of www.palestinethinktank.com is intellectual property of the authors. All material that does not appear in this site as the original source will always be credited for authors and source.

The material here may be reproduced elsewhere, but we request that you kindly cite our source and post a link to the page on www.palestinethinktank.com from where it was taken. We will also build up our links and community as time develops, so that we can all work towards our goal with the energy and imagination required.

www.palestinethinktank.com contains a forum, which is a space to discuss arguments related to the Middle East. We hope that it will allow all of us to broaden our horizons, engage in constructive debate and present a social network that will be useful to all of us.

www.palestinethinktank.com will be in two languages, in English predominantly, and Arabic.

We accept original articles as well as suggestions for material published elsewhere.

And will be back to my blog by end of this week.

Thanks for dropping by.

My dearest friend, Ben Heine drawn this portrait. I can’t thank him enough for all what he is doing as a pro-Palestine activist. His cartoons and artwork always added to the context of my posts.

Ben is a Belgian political cartoonist, caricaturist and painter born in June 12, 1983, in Abidjan, Ivory coast. He studied Art and Journalism and currently produces art relating to day to day international political issues. He can be contacted at : heinebenjamin@hotmail.com

More information on Ben can be found on his website : http://www.benheine.com and his blog http://www.benjaminheine.blogspot.com and http://www.benheine.deviantart.com

The government of Dubai recently allowed a major bankroller of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank to open at least two Jewelry stores in the Gulf emirate.

According to reliable sources in the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a key member-state, Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev is preparing to open two large jewelry stores in Dubai, a world’s hub of Jewelry trading.

The first store will be opened soon at the Burj Dubai Mall (Dubai Mall Tower) while a second store is slated to be opened later this year in the new Atlantis Hotel on the Jumeirah Palm Island.
Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008, in the lobby of al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.
The Dubai authorities were initially reluctant to grant the Israeli billionaire a license to do business in the oil-rich emirate. However, Leviev reportedly successfully lobbied “North American and European connections” to convince Dubai officials to reconsider their objections.

Leviev’s companies, including Africa-Israel and Leader Management & Development as well as several other subsidiaries, have been quite active in displacing Palestinian villagers from their homes and land in several parts of the West Bank.

The two firms have built hundreds of settler units in at least five Jewish settlements constructed on land illegally seized from its Arab proprietors.

In recent years, a company called Leader belonging to Leviev built the settlement of Zufim on private Arab land seized from the village of Jayyous. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of the Leviev-owned company Africa-Israel has built hundreds of settler units on land stolen from the village of Bilin. Numerous additional settler units were built in the two large settlements of Ma’ali Adomim, a few kilometers east of Jerusalem, and Har Homa, near the predominantly Christian Arab town of Beit Sahur.

Israel hopes that these settlements will cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, thus making the Palestinian dream of making the city the future capital of a prospective Palestinian state utterly unrealistic and outright impossible.

In addition to his intensive involvement in Jewish settlement expansion, including colonies defined by the inherently unjust Israeli justice system as “manifestly illegal,” Leviev has donated undisclosed but reportedly large sums of money to the Land Redemption Fund, a land-grabbing organization affiliated with Gush Emunim, the ideological group behind Jewish settlement activities in the West Bank.
Read the rest of this entry »

In shocking testimonies that reveal abductions, beatings and torture, Israeli soldiers confess the horror they have visited on Hebron.

By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Saturday, 19 April 2008

The dark-haired 22-year-old in black T-shirt, blue jeans and red Crocs is understandably hesitant as he sits at a picnic table in the incongruous setting of a beauty spot somewhere in Israel. We know his name and if we used it he would face a criminal investigation and a probable prison sentence.

The birds are singing as he describes in detail some of what he did and saw others do as an enlisted soldier in Hebron. And they are certainly criminal: the incidents in which Palestinian vehicles are stopped for no good reason, the windows smashed and the occupants beaten up for talking back - for saying, for example, they are on the way to hospital; the theft of tobacco from a Palestinian shopkeeper who is then beaten “to a pulp” when he complains; the throwing of stun grenades through the windows of mosques as people prayed. And worse.

The young man left the army only at the end of last year, and his decision to speak is part of a concerted effort to expose the moral price paid by young Israeli conscripts in what is probably the most problematic posting there is in the occupied territories. Not least because Hebron is the only Palestinian city whose centre is directly controlled by the military, 24/7, to protect the notably hardline Jewish settlers there. He says firmly that he now regrets what repeatedly took place during his tour of duty.

But his frequent, if nervous, grins and giggles occasionally show just a hint of the bravado he might have displayed if boasting of his exploits to his mates in a bar. Repeatedly he turns to the older former soldier who has persuaded him to speak to us, and says as if seeking reassurance: “You know how it is in Hebron.”

The older ex-soldier is Yehuda Shaul, who does indeed “know how it is in Hebron”, having served in the city in a combat unit at the peak of the intifada, and is a founder of Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence, which will publish tomorrow the disturbing testimonies of 39 Israelis - including this young man - who served in the army in Hebron between 2005 and 2007. They cover a range of experiences, from anger and powerlessness in the face of often violent abuse of Arabs by hardline Jewish settlers, through petty harassment by soldiers, to soldiers beating up Palestinian residents without provocation, looting homes and shops, and opening fire on unarmed demonstrators.

The maltreatment of civilians under occupation is common to many armies in the world - including Britain’s, from Northern Ireland to Iraq.

But, paradoxically, few if any countries apart from Israel have an NGO like Breaking the Silence, which seeks - through the experiences of the soldiers themselves - as its website puts it “to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created” in the occupied territories.

The Israeli public was given an unflattering glimpse of military life in Hebron this year when a young lieutenant in the Kfir Brigade called Yaakov Gigi was given a 15-month jail sentence for taking five soldiers with him to hijack a Palestinian taxi, conduct what the Israeli media called a “rampage” in which one of the soldiers shot and wounded a Palestinian civilian who just happened to be in the wrong place, and then tried to lie his way out of it.

Read the rest of this entry »

At 3pm on Wednesday, 16th April, the mutilated body of 15 year old Hammad Nidar Khadatbh was found in lands of the illegal Israeli settlement of Al-Hamra by his father, who was out searching for his missing son.

Hammad had left the house at 9am on Tuesday, 15th April to work on the family’s land, located near the stolen agricultural lands of the settlement. As the second eldest son, he was picking cucumbers for the family rather than going to school, to help with the income of his struggling family. At evening he failed to return home, and so his father and other family members immediately went searching for him. They found nothing. They set out again the next day, Wednesday, and found his body in a place they had searched the day before - clearly dumped overnight.

Hammad’s body was naked, bloated, and tortured. His neck was broken, and his face had been smashed in with rocks. One finger had been cut off and there were multiple holes in his torso, seemingly made by a sharp, round implement - something like a pen, his family explained. An Israeli police officer who arrived on the scene to investigate the incident confirmed that Hammad had been murdered, but made no comment as to by whom. Hammad’s body was immediately taken to the coroner in Jerusalem, but the report on the exact cause of his death will not be available for another week.

After speaking to many people in the area, it was established that Hammad had tried to return home via the Al-Hamra (Arabic for “red area”) checkpoint, but was refused passage through as being only 15 years old, he had no identification (IDs are only issued to Palestinians aged 16 years and over). It appears that Hammad was then forced to walk around the long way home, and was taken at this point on Tuesday night.
Read the rest of this entry »

New York human rights activists, and representatives of the West Bank Palestinian villages of Bil’in and Jayyous called on the government and the people of the United Arab Emirates to boycott the jewelry stores of Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev over his companies’ construction of Israeli settlements. According to a flurry of recent media reports, Leviev is opening jewelry stores in Dubai during 2008.

“We call on the government and people of the United Arab Emirates to join the growing international campaign to boycott Lev Leviev’s companies due to their construction of Israeli colonial settlements, and their human rights violations in Angola,” declared Daniel Lang-Levitsky of Jews Against the Occupation-NYC. “A major Israeli violator of Palestinian rights and international law should not be opening jewelry stores in Dubai,” added Adalah-NY spokesperson Issa Ayoub. Adalah-NY has organized eight boycott protests outside Leviev’s new Madison Avenue jewelry store over the last five months.

In the last few days, media have reported that Lev Leviev Diamonds will open two stores in Dubai this year. In the fourth quarter of 2008, construction will begin on a store to be located in the Burj Dubai Mall. The second will open in September in the new Atlantis Hotel on Jumeirah Palm Island. Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008 in the lobby of Al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.

Leviev’s company Leader is building the settlement of Zufim on the land of the West Bank village of Jayyous. The company Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of Leviev’s Africa-Israel, has also built Israeli settlements on the land of the village of Bil’in, and has built homes in Maale Adumim and Har Homa on Jabal Abu Ghneim, encircling and cutting off East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Israel is building its wall to the east of all these settlements, with the aim of annexing them to Israel. Leviev also donates to the Land Redemption Fund, an Israeli settler organization which has used deceit and strong-arm tactics to secure Israeli-occupied Palestinian land for settlements in villages like Bil’in and Jayyous.
Read the rest of this entry »

It was a happy moment when I heard the news that UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) launched in coordination with Google Earth, a new layer that focus on refugee camps around the world. This should be a great tool to follow the crisis of Palestinian refugees under occupation and expose it to the world through one of the most used Web 2.0 applications (Google Earth claims to have more than 350 million downloads and counting).

In their press release, UNHCR said:

Google Earth’s new mapping programme takes you on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.

The first use of this geospatial tool focuses on refugees and displaced people located in remote areas of Chad, Iraq, Colombia and Sudan’s volatile Darfur region. Sit in front of your computer and, with a few clicks, see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee.

Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.

To start your journey, click here.

However, my happiness did not last for long when I discovered that NONE of the Palestinian refugee camps within the Occupied Palestinian Territories are published there (see map below). So, even if you “Sit in front of your computer“, with a few clicks you can “see, hear and develop an emotional understanding of what it is like to be a refugee“, but not the Palestinian refugees’ experience. They don’t exist!

(Click image to enlarge)

Note: Blue icons are original bookmarks by UNHCR of Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, but nothing in West Bank and Gaza.

This misfortune seems to be a result of one of two things:

1. Either the issue of the Palestinian refugees under Israeli occupation got solved and nobody told me (in this case I only blame myself for missing last night’s news), or;

2. The UNHCR does not recognize the Palestinian refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territories all together as “refugee camps who needs emotional understanding“, so they are not one of the “major displacement crises,” thus do not require “the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims“! We understand that UNHCR mandate is to take care of refugees all around the world, but not those inside Occupied Palestinian Territories, UNRWA does that. However, one of UNHCR’s mandates is to offer refugees to return to their home country, an act that is rejected by Israel. Hence, this does not justify the UNHCR to wash its hands of Palestinian refugees under occupation and not mention them altogether. They are still refugees no matter if they have been able to make the best of a horrible situation, and they all should be represented.

It is disturbing to see such a horrible mistake (intentional or unintentional, we need to know) spread by a UN agency which claims to be taking care of refugees all around the world. The UNRWA lists the name of all the refugees camps in West Bank (19 camp) and Gaza (8 camps) and their population (West Bank 486,479, Gaza 478,272, total 964,751). Not only that, but they also have location maps for these refugees camps on their website:

(Click image to enlarge)

The question is, how can UNHCR ignored a total of 27 Palestinian refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, populated with almost one million inhabitants?

Understanding that in general, refugee camps almost by definition have limited visibility, and the Palestinian refugee camps in Palestine are located in a war zone, such camps go unseen by most of the world except when the occasional crimes conducted by Israel are fortunately picked up by some reporters who might write a small segment for the evening news about that “incident“.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) claims and hopes to give more visibility to the work that it does in refugee camps around the world by bringing the reality of refugee life into the laptops and living rooms of web surfers, but not the Palestinian refugee camps under occupation!!! This is not acceptable.

Action Alert:

1. Use UNHCR contact form here http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/contact and ask them to correct this mistake immediately. Sample letter can be as follows:

Dear UNHCR,

We are pleased to know that UNHCR launched it’s ‘Google Earth Refugee World’ layer to take Google Earth users on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.
Reference: http://www.unhcr.org/events/47f48dc92.html

However, we are disappointed to see that Palestinian refugee camps in Occupied Palestinian Territories were not shown anywhere.
Reference: http://tinyurl.com/4jnpoy

We are sure that this is an oversight on UNHCR part, but 27 Palestinian refugee camps that exist in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are not shown on your new Google Earth Refugee World layer. Over one million people live in these camps. Do you not believe that they are living under most non humanitarian conditions and should be mentioned on UNHCR’s ‘Google Earth Refugee World’ like all other refugees?

Please correct your listings to include these camps. They DO EXIST and they MUST be known about.

Alternatively, you may write to Mr. Antonio Guterres (the UN high commissioner for refugees) and ask him to correct this mistake immediately (Headquarters contact form here: http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/contact?hq=y). Sample letter can be as follows:

Dear Mr. Guterres,

We are pleased to know that UNHCR launched it’s ‘Google Earth Refugee World’ layer to take Google Earth users on a virtual reality tour with the UN refugee agency of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.
Reference: http://www.unhcr.org/events/47f48dc92.html

However, we are disappointed to see that Palestinian refugee camps in Occupied Palestinian Territories were not shown anywhere.
Reference: http://tinyurl.com/4jnpoy

We are sure that this is an oversight on UNHCR part, but 27 Palestinian refugee camps that exist in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are not shown on your new Google Earth Refugee World layer. Over one million people live in these camps. Do you not believe that they are living under most non humanitarian conditions and should be mentioned on UNHCR’s ‘Google Earth Refugee World’ like all other refugees?

Please correct your listings to include these camps. They DO EXIST and they MUST be known about.

2. Sign this petition asking UNHCR to correct this mistake and add all Palestinian refugees camps within the Occupied Palestinian Territories to their “Google Earth Refugee’s World Layer“.
Petition: http://tinyurl.com/4re8du

3. Republish, share and e-mail this post. Click following “ShareThis” link below.

Update (Apr 11, 2008): Good news! I just got a positive reply to my email to Mr. Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

from: Antonio Guterres
to: haitham.sabbah@gmail.com,
date: Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 6:27 PM
subject Re: Palestine Refugee Camps on Google Earth

Dear Mr. Sabbah,

Thank you for your email. You are absolutely right. However, as we have only just launched “Google Earth Refugee World” layer, we only have three sites for the moment: Iraq, Colombia and Darfur. Other sites will follow.

With best regards,
António Guterres

I replied to Mr. Guterres and urged him to put adding Palestinian Refugee Camps on top of their priorities.