On March 27, 2008 Students Against Israeli Apartheid at York University (SAIA-York) organized a rally in Vari Hall (the central campus space) in order to: (1) commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, (2) call for an end to the starvation policies and siege imposed on Gaza by the Israeli apartheid regime with Canadian complicity and (3) demand that the university hold a debate on the boycott of Israeli academic institutions that are complicit in the perpetuation of apartheid.
Every once in a while Ibrahim Hawash, 42, calls his wife Noha from his nightshift job to make sure that she has followed the treatment course prescribed by their family doctor for the involuntary urination of their four children, who are in primary school. The doctor says that the four children lost their ability to control urination due to the fear they underwent when Israeli army jets bombed a home near theirs in the Jabalya refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip during the “Warm Winter” military campaign three weeks ago. The four children still remember the terrifying night when they woke frightened up to the sound of a thundering explosion in the area and found that the glass of their home’s windows had fallen onto their bed.
BEKAA VALLEY: A ploughed field and a dirt road form the walls of Atieh Ahmad’s “prison”, belying its setting in the sweeping expanse of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.
“I can’t go as far as the main road because I don’t have an ID,” said the 64-year-old father of two, perched on sofa cushions spread on the grass outside his tent-like shack.
GAZA CITY: You would think the baby boy named Yousef has his life ahead of him. But who knows, with a child born to Palestinian parents from Gaza. What’s more, Yousef was born in an Israeli prison.
He is the only one of Fatima al-Zeq’s nine children who is with her for that reason — she was arrested nine months ago. But these days the baby is not with her. He developed stomach pain, began to vomit, and has been transferred to a hospital inside Hasharon prison in Israel.
On April 7, Prince Philip will be hosting a dinner at Windsor Castle organised by the Jewish National Fund. They will be marking the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state. However this is not a private dinner. Nor is the JNF an ordinary organization.
The JNF was established in 1901 as the land settlement wing of the World Zionist Organisation. It became one of the primary instruments involved in planning for the dispossession and expulsion of the Palestinians. Up until 1948 it purchased land for settlement, often from absentee landlords, and then evicted the peasants from that land. Unlike the normal practice under colonial rule, the Palestinians were not re-employed as wage labourers but excluded from the land altogether. This was the concept of Jewish land. But even by 1947 less than 7% of the land of Palestine had been bought up.
BAGHDAD: While the number of US troops killed in Iraq since the 2003 invasion stands at 4,000, up to three times as many Iraqi soldiers have died – and the number of civilians killed runs into tens and probably hundreds of thousands. The icasualties.org Web site, based only on published reports, shows that around 8,000 members of the Iraqi security forces have died since the March 2003 invasion. Last year, however, the Iraqi government put the figure at 12,000.
There is no agreement when it comes to civilian casualties, particularly as many deaths are never reported in the media.
Representatives of 25 Egyptian and Arab syndicates, led by Mohamed Salmawy and Ibrahim El-Moalem, chairman of the Arab Publishers Union, submitted a memorandum to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 24 February explaining the reasons behind the Arab protest at Israel’s invitation as guest of honour at this year’s Paris Book Fair, which opened in the French capital last week.
“Honouring Israel, and celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of Israel’s independence, a state which constantly violates international peace and the basic human rights of the Palestinian people, can only be seen as an unjustified provocation for Arab and international public opinion,” the memorandum read.
Hundreds of protesters gathered in downtown Montreal on Saturday, March 15th to participate in an international day of action against the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and in Canadian cities in opposition to Canada’s military role in Afghanistan.
The current Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip was highlighted within the Montreal demonstration, as a Palestine focused contingent called for an end to Israeli apartheid. Protesters also directed attention on Canadian complicity towards Israeli military policies towards the Palestinians, which have left over one-hundred Palestinians dead in the past weeks.
