Nablus: Palestinian security forces are locked in a standoff with armed Palestinian resistance fighters in Ein Beit El-Ma refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus on Sunday.

The military wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades, announced Sunday that it would react “fiercely” if Palestinian security forces arrest any of its activists ahead of a peace conference in the United States this month.

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Standing on a hill at the edge of Idhna with the displaced farmers Muhammad Talab and Muhammad Ibrahim Natah, the only visible remnants of their destroyed village is a patch of white dust just on the other side of Israel’s wall. Despite being part of the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military destroyed the 267-person farming village of tents and tin houses west of Hebron on October 29 and allegedly ordered villagers to relocate to Idhna.

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“Les valeurs d’Israël sont les valeurs du Canada”(1)

Pour comprendre le conflit qui oppose Israël à ses voisins depuis 60 ans, un retour attentif sur l’histoire de la Palestine et sur l’année 1947 s’impose. Revenir sur la genèse de la solution de partage de la Palestine historique en deux États, puis en un seul, occupant la population autochtone, permet d’appréhender un conflit où, pour faire diversion, il est question de territoires multiples dont les noms changent au gré des batailles, de divers statuts juridiques incompréhensibles, de frontières contestées, de haines fratricides ou de guerres de religions… En réalité, la question palestinienne est d’abord une question coloniale.

(…اكثر)

Saturday, November 10th
Cabot Square, Metro Atwater
11am: Free Community Lunch
1pm: Buses Depart for the Laval Detention Center

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Terrorism is a contested terrain, a political landscape on which the highest levels of international military power engage in a deadly war. In 2007 terrorism remains an ominous threat, a political ghost invoked in the foreign policy rhetoric of Canada’s Conservative government surrounding the ‘War on Terror’.

In 2002 Canada unveiled an official list of ‘terrorist’ organizations, strikingly similar to the US governmental list of an equivalent nature. Today the Lebanese political movement Hezbollah, both the military and political wings, is officially considered a ‘terrorist’ organization by the government of Canada, a policy only endorsed by two additional countries internationally, the US and Israel.

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An evening of Palestinian films to commemorate 60 years of occupation and to celebrate the Palestinian voice.

On November 29 1947, the UN General Assembly voted for Resolution 181 that “recommended” the partition of Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. This solution went against the principle of a people’s self-determination and was particularly unfair since it was rejected by the native Arab population who were not involved in any negotiation regarding its path, one that favoured the Jewish side.

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Lebanon’s feuding political leaders have a long history of digging their country into holes from which it can only emerge by climbing over piles of dead bodies. The current impasse is just the latest example of this tendency, but at least a few cooler heads are determined to avoid the errors of those who went before. It remains to be seen which “side” will prevail – not between the government and the opposition, but between the sane and insane factions in each camp. Not content with this level of uncertainty, however, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has stepped back into the fray in defense of past traditions and future bloodshed.

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BEIRUT: International donors have not sent any money for the Palestinian refugees and Lebanese affected by the conflict at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, more than six weeks after Premier Fouad Siniora asked a donor conference for $55 million, a number of relief officials said. The hundreds of refugee families returning to the battle-scarred camp are facing desperate conditions, although their departure from public schools near the camp has at least begun to release the tensions between the displaced and the Lebanese locals, said Ambassador Khalil Makkawi, head of the Lebanese-Palestinian Dialogue Committee. Over three months of fighting between the Lebanese Army and Fatah al-Islam militants largely destroyed the camp and its environs, while the camp’s 31,000-plus residents fled soon after the hostilities began.

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Last weekend, thirteen bodies, most likely of Palestinian refugees from Iraq, were recovered on the coast of Italy after their boats, carrying at least 127 persons in search of safety, had broken apart. These tragedies highlight the failure of the international community to protect Palestinian refugees.

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A Palestinian Camp in Lebanon is Burned and Destroyed and the World is Silent.

Nahr Al Bared is a Palestinian refugee camp in the north of Lebanon which has been home to about 40,000 Palestinian people, most of whom are the children and grandchildren of those who left Palestine in 1948. Some like Abu Mohammad were born in Palestine. He was ten years old, and next year it will be sixty years since the formation of the State of Israel was achieved through the ethnic cleansing of Abu Mohammad and so many others from their home in Palestine. He told me this as the two of us sat alone in the pitch dark while rats ran around beside our chairs at his house. As I left he went in to sleep alone amongst ashes and rodents, with no neighbours around him, trying to believe that he still has something left to protect.

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