Matt Kennard and Wilson Dizard, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 May 2009.

Photo: ActiveStills. Palestinian youth with slingshot in Bil’in, Palestine.

Ramallah is tired. The feeling you get walking around the streets here is that the Palestinians are weary of the struggle against the incremental destruction of their homeland, happening right now while the world looks the other way. You hear things like, “Our struggle has been long and it has got us nowhere”. And people ask how the world can stand by while the Israelis annex more land. It’s a good question.

In one village the flame of non-violent resistance still burns. Last week, we went to the weekly demonstration against the annexation wall in Bil’in, where it cuts deep into the farmland of this old Palestinian village and the Green Line (the internationally recognised border of Israel-Palestine). Since Israel started building the wall here in 2005 (stealing about 60% of the village’s land) the people of Bil’in have been inventively and non-violently resisting.

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John Halaka show at the Jerusalem Fund, DC.

Photo: John Halaka art work on land and resistance.

John Halaka’s drawings Landscapes of Desire are inspired by the ruins of Palestinian villages and homes that were destroyed by Israel during and after the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The images compel the viewer to reflect on the unrelenting effort by the Jewish State to annihilate a culture that refuses to disappear and an indigenous people that refuse to go away. The ruins of stone homes from destroyed Palestinian villages such as Kafr Bir’im, Lifta and Al-Bassa, poetically represented in Halaka’s drawings, are a declaration that in the face of looming cultural annihilation, the persistence of memory is a crucial act of resistance.

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New York Times, by Robert F. Worth. May 25, 2009

Photo: Bryan Denton. Supporters watch a speech by Hagop Pakradounian, a politician from the main party of the Armenians, Tashnaq, in Beirut, Lebanon.

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Their political apparatus is a model of discipline. Their vast array of social services is a virtual state within a state. Their enemies accuse them of being pawns of Syria and Iran.

They are the Armenian Christians of Lebanon, one of the Middle East’s most singular and least-understood communities. And if they sound a bit like Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group based here, that is no accident.

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Al Jazeera by Ayman Mohyeldin in Gaza.

Photo: Palestinian fisherman on the beach in Gaza Strip.

Every day, as the sun sets on the coast of Gaza, people make their way to the coffee shop-lined beaches and the pot-holed streets that run parallel to its coastline.

On the terrace of the famed Al Deira Hotel, patrons jostle for position, sipping sweet Arabic coffee as the sounds of legendary Arab musicians delicately waft through the air, mingling with the aroma of flavoured tobacco.

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Montreal: Commemorating the Nakba

Photo: Beersheba, Palestine pictured prior to 1948.

Every May, Israelis celebrate the founding of the state of Israel in 1948. For Palestinians, however, this anniversary is known as the Nakba or “catastrophe” in Arabic because it commemorates the illegal expulsion of the Palestinian people from their homeland by Zionist forces in 1948.

In establishing Israel, the Zionist colonizers dispossessed more than 750,000 Palestinians of their dwellings, farmlands, and orchards and forcibly exiled them from their neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities. Despite Palestinian resistance to this colonial project, Israel was founded on May 14 1948 and a quarter of a million Palestinians who had fled their homes in search of safety were suddenly physically and legally alienated from their historical and ancestral lands since Israel refused to let the Palestinian refugees return to their homes. A further half million or so would become refugees during the war that followed the declaration of Israeli statehood.

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cross-Canada speaking tour: June 5-22, 2009.

featuring:
Mohammed Khatib.
Popular Committee Against the Wall, Bil’in, Occupied Palestine

Emily Schaeffer.
Israeli lawyer representing the village of Bil’in

Bil’in, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, has become an internationally celebrated symbol of Palestinian popular resistance to the ongoing construction of the Israeli apartheid wall and settlements on their land. Since 2005, villagers have led weekly protests, with the active participation from both Israeli and international solidarity activists, in opposition to illegal Israeli colonization and annexation of Palestinian land.

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Ma’an News Agency. 23 / 05 / 2009.

Photo: ActiveStills. Armed Israeli soldier.

Jerusalem – Ma’an – Israeli police and armed border officials shut down the Palestinian National Theater in East Jerusalem on Saturday, in an effort to quash the Palestine Festival of Literature and prevent international writer and poets from addressing Palestinians.

The weeklong festival, sponsored in part by the British Council and UNESCO, was scheduled to begin at 6:30 with two panel discussions by authors from Canada, Britain, South Africa and Australia. The second annual festival will travel around Palestine and decided to begin and end events in Jerusalem in honor of Al-Quds Capital of Culture 2009.

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cinematic benefit for cross-Canada Bil’in speaking tour.

THURSDAY MAY 28th 20h00
suggested donation: $5-10
Bar Populaire
6584 blvd St. Laurent
(metro Beaubien)

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Daily Stary, by Matthew Mosley. Thursday, May 14, 2009

Photo: Tanya Traboulsi. Scrambled Eggs perform in Beirut, Lebanon.

BEIRUT: “The choice of artists is very personal,” says Ziad Nawfal of his latest album, “The Ruptured Sessions.” “I really have to like what they do.” It seems that Nawfal isn’t alone in his tastes. A capacity crowd at the album’s April 30 launch party at Hamra’s Walimat Wardeh restaurant craned their necks around bodies and pillars to catch a glimpse of the featured artists at work.

The disk is a compilation of material recorded live on Nawfal’s Monday evening Radio Liban show “Ruptures.” “I started inviting young artists into the studio to talk about themselves and the music they like,” said Nawfal over the phone several days after the album launch. “They’d also play three or four tracks of their own.”

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Radical movements from the Weather Underground to Prisons to Palestine.

SATURDAY MAY 16 2009 19h00
featuring: Laura Whitehorn & Susie Day
1400 de Maisonneuve Ouest
Room LB-125, de Sève Cinema
Concordia University
Montreal, Quebec

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