Showing posts with label forced exile. Show all posts

Monday, September 14, 2026

Report by Israeli human rights group [B’Tselem] says systematic and broad assault being waged on conditions required for Palestinians’ existence

A Palestinian shepherd from the hamlet of Anizan, where residents have been repeatedly driven out of their homes by settlers. Photograph: Quique Kierszenbaum/The Guardian

Israel accused of trying to ‘eliminate’ living conditions for Palestinians in West Bank

Quique Kierszenbaum in Sair, and Peter Beaumont

Mon 14 Sep 2026

Israel is working towards the systematic “elimination” of the conditions that sustain Palestinian collective life in the occupied West Bank, according to a major report published by the human rights group B’Tselem.

The Israeli organisation’s hard-hitting report, shared with the Guardian in advance of publication, says Israel is “dramatically intensifying its attacks on every aspect of Palestinian life in the West Bank”, including “the ability to get to work, take children to school or university, receive medical treatment or municipal services, meet family and friends, cultivate land or go on vacation … routine activities that make up human life”.

According to B’Tselem, the assault on Palestinians is “governed by a coherent organising logic” and comprises five “interwoven domains of action”: violence and intimidation, movement restrictions, economic strangulation, social and political destruction, and ethnic cleansing and territorial takeover.

The publication of the Elimination Project, B’Tselem’s most comprehensive piece of work on the West Bank since its launch in 1989, comes less than a week after the British foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, accused settler terrorists, supported by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, of committing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, in the UK’s starkest condemnation of Israel since the foundation of the state.

By looking more broadly at the conditions required for Palestinians’ collective existence, however, the B’Tselem report goes further still. It says various arms of the Israeli state – led by Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister with broad powers over civilian matters in the West Bank – are seeking to “create a reality in which millions of Palestinians live in constant fear of Israeli military and civilian violence”.

“Palestinian communities are being pushed out in an accelerating process of ethnic cleansing, while an ever-expanding Israeli presence is being established in their place in the form of settlements, outposts, farms and Jewish-only civilian infrastructure,” the report says. “Elimination in this context means sustained harm to the conditions that enable Palestinians to exist as a people with land, institutions, language, culture, social ties, leadership, shared memory and history, and a social and political horizon.

“It is an ongoing political project that seeks to re-organise space and the conditions of life so that Jewish presence becomes contiguous, institutionalised and permanent, while Palestinian existence becomes fragmented, vulnerable and dependent.”

One of the most obvious aspects of this fragmentation is the closure of roads and villages to Palestinian passage...READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2026/sep/14/israel-palestinian-living-conditions-eliminated-west-bank-human-rights-report

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies here, there- and everywhere]

Monday, September 7, 2026

"Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Gaza was not that the world allowed it to happen. It was discovering that Gaza was only the beginning...."

Doctor, sometimes a writer. Revealing hidden stories, a voice for the unheard. Witness to humanity's darkest depths. Palestine https://hope-heal.org/

https://x.com/ezzingaza/status/2096672691130703996

Dr. Ezzideen

@ezzingaza

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about Gaza was not that the world allowed it to happen. It was discovering that Gaza was only the beginning.

All the speeches, protests, resolutions, international laws, red lines, condemnations, and promises of “never again” have apparently taught this monster nothing.

This morning, Israeli strikes completely destroyed Ghandour Hospital in southern Lebanon.

Another hospital !! Another building once meant for healing reduced to rubble.

We watched hospitals in Gaza bombed, besieged, evacuated, burned and destroyed. We were told Gaza was exceptional. We were told the world was watching. International institutions issued statements. Governments expressed “concern.”

People marched through capitals demanding that there must be a line even war is not allowed to cross.

And now we are watching those lines disappear somewhere else.

Again.

We are living through a dark age in which military power and money seem capable of crushing almost everything humanity spent generations pretending was sacred: international law, hospitals, homes, places of worship, trees, memory, and human life itself.

And perhaps that is what terrifies me most.

Not only that these things are being destroyed, but that the world is being trained to watch their destruction and continue with its day.

A hospital becomes rubble. A neighborhood disappears. A family becomes photographs. Another condemnation is written.

And elsewhere, people wake up, drink their coffee, go to work, come home, and sleep.

I once believed that knowing what happened would be enough to make humanity afraid of repeating it.

Now I understand the more terrible possibility:

Human beings can know.

They can remember.

They can build museums to the dead, teach their names in schools, write “never again” above their graves; and still allow another human being to become rubble.

It happened.

Therefore it could happen again.

Perhaps the mistake was believing that “again” would look exactly like the first time.

If hell is a place where power can destroy human beings, homes, hospitals, memory, and life itself, while those who built laws to prevent it discover that their laws cannot make it stop, then perhaps hell does not require another world.

Perhaps it requires only this one,

and enough people willing to continue their day.

#SurvivalTestimony

Wednesday, July 29, 2026

For 2,000 years, Christians have called the Holy Land home. CNN’s Clarissa Ward travels from Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank to examine how Israeli ultranationalist extremism is reshaping that reality.

The quiet erosion of Christian life in the Holy Land

0:00 Losing Ground: Christians in the Holy Land

3:32 Anti-Christian Incidents in Jerusalem are rising

8:01 Christian Palestininans are leaving faster than most

13:24 A confrontation with the Israeli army

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

United Nations photo- Palestine Refugees, Middle East, 1951: "The Palestinian conflict forced into exile nearly a million Arabs. Great efforts were made by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA] to provide work and pay for the refugees. But available funds were [are] only sufficient to provide employment for a small minority, without producing lasting economic effects. Refugees make materials and clothes for their own use."

United Nations Photo Palestine Refugees, 1951

Palestine Refugees, Middle East, 1951

The Palestinian conflict forced into exile nearly a million Arabs. Great efforts were made by the UN Relief and Works Agency to provide work and pay for the refugees. But available funds were only sufficient to provide employment for a small minority, without producing lasting economic effects.
Refugees make materials and clothes for their own use.
UN Photo
1951
Middle East
Photo # UN7707935
https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/53376742762/in/album-72177720313177543/

This photo is in 1 album

History of Question of Palestine 184 items
[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

Palestine Refugees 1949

A wagonload of refugee children in the U.N. demilitarized zone at Lake Tiberias on the Israeli-Syrian frontier. [Exact date unknown]

Photo # UN7505381

https://www.flickr.com/photos/un_photo/53376742872/in/album-72177720313177543/

Saturday, June 6, 2026

"Homes can be demolished. Walls can be reduced to rubble. Entire families can be scattered across the world. But roots run deep... And sometimes, from beneath the wreckage, life emerges to remind us that memory, belonging, and hope refuse to die." Mike Hanini Odetalla

Mike Hanini Odetalla

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All That Remains...Reflections on a rather sad day

5/31/26

After the death of my father-in-law (ay), his humble two-room home in the Kadoura Refugee Camp was torn down.

His family, like so many Palestinians, had been violently expelled from their homes and lands by Zionist forces in 1948 and forced into a life of exile and displacement.

Seven years later, in 2022, I took my grandson—his great-grandson—back to show him where his grandmother had grown up and to visit a place that I myself had always loved.

The house was gone.

The tiny garden that my father-in-law had tended with such tender loving care was buried beneath rubble. Yet among the destruction, something remarkable remained.

A magnificent grapevine once covered his patio, providing shade in the summer and producing the most exquisite grapes. As I stood there looking at the ruins, I noticed a small cluster of grapes protruding defiantly from the debris.

I took this photograph.

To some, it is merely a bunch of grapes growing from a collapsed structure.

To me, it is a symbol of Palestine itself.

Homes can be demolished. Walls can be reduced to rubble. Entire families can be scattered across the world. But roots run deep.

And sometimes, from beneath the wreckage, life emerges to remind us that memory, belonging, and hope refuse to die.

All that remains... and yet, somehow, it is enough to tell the whole story.

That image of grapes emerging from rubble carries a quiet symbolism that is difficult to ignore:

the house was destroyed, but the vine still remembered where it belonged.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10166091777606977&set=a.10150390714236977

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Historical reckoning: The push for the US to acknowledge the Nakba... On the 78th anniversary of the mass expulsion of Palestinians, experts say US ‘political amnesia’ continues.

Palestinian villagers who fled from their homes during fighting between Israeli and Arab troops, on November 4, 1948 [Jim Pringle/AP Photo]

By Joseph Stepansky

Washington, DC – It is a question that reaches a fever pitch this time of year for Palestinian survivors and rights advocates: Can the United States government create just policy in the Middle East without a full accounting — or recognition — of Palestinian history?

Thursday marks the annual day of remembrance for the Nakba, a period that began in 1948 with the mass expulsion of Palestinians and the creation of the state of Israel.

Since then, Palestinians have endured decades of displacement and ethnic cleansing.

But the US government does not recognise the Nakba, which translates to the “catastrophe” in Arabic, even as it continues to assert gargantuan influence over the region and maintains ironclad support for the Israeli government.

Under the second administration of President Donald Trump, the US has taken a further active role in Palestinian affairs, establishing the controversial “Board of Peace” to oversee the reconstruction of Gaza, even as it continues to take a permissive approach towards Israel’s genocide.

When faced with the question of whether the US can responsibly address Palestinian issues without acknowledging the Nakba, Khaled Elgindy, a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute, believes the answer is simple: No.

“If you only acknowledge the humanity and suffering of one side, that forces you also to ignore historical realities that are still with us today,” he told Al Jazeera.

Elgindy said “political amnesia” has long defined the US government’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

For decades, the US has supported Israel with billions in foreign assistance and military aid, despite the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and a system of segregation that rights groups say constitutes apartheid.

Since October 7, 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed at least 75,000 Palestinians. Elgindy told Al Jazeera that the US has played a key role in underwriting the conflict.

“For better or worse, mostly for worse, the United States is inextricably tied to the Palestinian issue,” Elgindy said.

A fundamental – if long delayed – corrective step would be recognition of the Nakba, he said. “It is a historical reality that Palestinians have a collective trauma that is part of their identity and part of their political psychology.”

‘The ongoing Nakba’

On Thursday, US Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced a resolution to officially recognise “the ongoing Nakba and Palestinian refugees’ rights”.

It was the fifth consecutive time she has put forward the bill, with the latest version carrying 12 co-sponsors, up from six when it was first introduced in 2022.

In a video conference this week, she explained that it was necessary to draw attention to the Nakba, given that the human rights abuses against Palestinians continue.

“Too many of my colleagues in Congress like to act like … the state violence against the Palestinian people began with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Tlaib said.

“We know that Palestinian history has been one of the ongoing Nakba and the ethnic cleansing campaign since the creation [of Israel] in 1948.”

All told, about 750,000 Palestinians were violently expelled during the Nakba, displaced to refugee camps across the West Bank, Gaza and neighbouring Arab countries.

About 400 cities and villages were depopulated, with massacres committed in Balad al-Sheikh, Saasaa, Deir Yassin, Saliha and Lydda, among others.

Like in past years, Tlaib’s latest legislative effort is largely symbolic, with little chance of progressing in Congress, which remains predominantly pro-Israel.

Still, the latest resolution comes amid signs of shifting public awareness, with polls showing increasing sympathy for Palestinians and a rise in negative views towards Israel’s government. Polls have shown tanking support for Israel, particularly among Democrats, amid the genocide in Gaza.

Attitudes in Congress have also shown significant, if more incremental, signs of change. Though support for Israel was once considered sacrosanct... READ MORE https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/15/historical-reckoning-the-push-for-the-us-to-acknowledge-the-nakba

[AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes or watch videos) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

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