Daniel Burston: An Open Letter to Steve Kowit on his poem “Intifada”
Right now, civil conversation on these subjects is difficult to impossible to sustain because both the Zionist and the Palestinian narratives have been carefully curated to highlight the harms that each side inflicted on the other, and to minimize or ignore the harms that they inflicted on their adversaries.
Steve Kowit: Intifada
bekippad Sabras dance thru the Tel Aviv streets chanting
gleefully: No school tomorrow in Gaza; all of their children are dead.
Tracey L. Rogers: Palestinian Lives Matter | We Must Reject Crimes Against Humanity
Just as Black Lives Matter, so do Palestinian Lives Matter. We cannot campaign for racial healing and justice on stolen land in our own country while simultaneously backing a campaign to occupy and displace people abroad.
Amira Hass: Israel Is Wiping Out Entire Palestinian Families on Purpose
The numerous incidents of killing entire families in Israeli bombings in Gaza—Parents and children, babies, grandparents, siblings—attest that these were not mistakes. The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.
Patrick Gathara: Colonial Powers Have Long Demanded the ‘Right to Self-Defense’ Against the People They Have Colonized
Colonial occupiers have long claimed a “right” to defend themselves from the resistance of native communities, including by committing mass murder.
James L. Gelvin: As the Palestinian minority takes to the streets, Israel is having its own Black Lives Matter moment
As in the United States, a brutalized minority group, facing systemic racism and discriminatory acts has taken to the streets. And, as in the United States, the only way out starts with serious soul searching on the part of the majority.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: Lullaby
We want things smaller than we know.
A vessel strong enough
to lift you into tomorrow,
Emily De Ferrari: Saturday January 16, 2010, revisited
This is not security, this is not madness, this is a concerted effort to rid the land of Palestinians.
Abby Zimet: Connecting the Shots
U.S. Quakers have launched an Israeli arms exports database to help Palestinian victims of “battle proven” weapons and other activists track Israel’s deadly contributions to human rights abuses around the world.
Angele Ellis: In Lebanon, 2000 June
It was the summer the Israelis withdrew, leaving
behind
a landmined no-man’s-land of phosphorus orange groves,
blighted with white like the kingdom of the Snow Queen.
Daniel Burston: Anti-Semitism on the Left
Many Left wing activists disparage the majority of American Jews, saying that we enjoy all the perks of White privilege, and therefore seek to “uphold”, rather than to oppose or dismantle White Supremacy; the very thing far-Right activists insist that we are secretly intent on destroying.
Philip Terman: Darwish and Amichai Share Poems in Heaven
the breath of their words
shaping the winds
across the deserts
of their homeland,
which is the same homeland
John Lawson: O King
The president recently promoted himself as “like the King of Israel… the second coming of God.” Poet John Lawson gives the president his due.
Naomi Shihab Nye: To Netanyahu
My Palestinian father named his donkey after you…
Now I think he insulted the donkey.
