Palestine On The Air

Few doubt the pro-Israel bias of the Western media. It takes the form of overtly supporting Israel's government policies, or of maintaining neutrality or silence on issues of Israeli violence, occupation, and settlement expansion. Scholar and activist Karma R. Chávez collects eleven interviews that allow dissenting voices a forum to provide rarely heard perspectives on the Palestinian struggle for justice, land, and self-determination.This volume in the Common Threads series is a supplement to the Journal of Civil and Human Rights. The conversations within took place on a radio program Chávez hosted from 2013-16. There, journalists, activists, academic figures, authors, and Palestinian citizens of Israel shared a wide range of thoughts and experiences. Participants covered topics that include: everyday life for Palestinians in the West Bank and in Israel; the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement that arose in response to Israel's ongoing actions; the Steven Salaita controversy at the University of Illinois; the pro-Palestine social movement on college campuses; Israel's pinkwashing of human rights abuses; the aftermath of the 2014 attack on Gaza; and Chávez's 2015 visit to the West Bank.

An unforgettable photographic journal of the "shadows" of the Arab world--at turns invisible, unknown, and threatening to some--this work gathers images of the Palestinians during the first few months of 1988 when the intifada was beginning to gain momentum. We have come to visually associate the terms "intifada" and "Palestinian" solely with images of young men wrapped in kafiyyehs hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers. The photos gathered here are different. They grant us the rare opportunity to see facets of the Palestinians not portrayed in the popular media: the beauty of the land, the life of the sheepherders, the joy of the children, the quiet defiance of the elders, the dignity they all salvage. From 1981 to 1987 George Azar chronicled the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the destruction of the U.S. Marine compound, the civil insurrection in West Beirut, the Iran-Iraq War and the interfactional war among the Palestinians in North Lebanon. He saw gun battles and deaths so numerous that his memory of them has become a blur. Leaving the horror of Beirut, Damour, and Tripoli behind, he resisted the thought of going back. But in early January 1988, news reports showed the people of the refugee camps, the villages, and the towns in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip taking to the streets. He returned to the occupied territories later that month and began taking these pictures. This book bears witness to Palestinian lives and by doing so gives the Other a human face. The texts that accompany the photographs are taken from eyewitness testimonies, open letters, news clippings, interviews, and Arabic poetry. An introductory essay by Ann M. Lesch describes the genesis of the intifada movement and its interactions with the Israeli government. Despite death, deportation, and the destruction of their homes, the Palestinians remain steadfast, convinced that one day the horror of military occupation will end and they will be able to live once again. This work is a testament to that conviction.

As the first cultural history of Palestinian aviation, Palestine in the Air reveals civil aviation's role in the 'question of Palestine' over the past century. International civil aviation has been a powerful tool for the systemic disenfranchisement of Palestinian statehood, connectivity and mobility. Yet, at the same time, Palestinians have creatively appropriated aviation technologies in diverse modes of resistance. They have exploited flight's symbolic values of escape and liberation in their struggle against occupation. Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, diplomacy and history, Palestine in the Air examines civil aviation's political, social and cultural impact upon the Palestinian quest for sovereignty. The book makes use of an unprecedented range of aviation-related sources spanning histories, images, interviews with Palestinians, research, print and television archives, art, film, literature, poetry and even stand-up comedy. Aviation is presented here as an unconventional weapon of resistance that has gained media exposure and has had the ability to disrupt dominant narratives about Palestine. This includes, most radically, aeroplane hijackings, but also subaltern resistance movements that make use of balloons and kites, or filmmakers and researchers that use commercial drones to reclaim knowledge and agency of their environment.

Adham Rayyes, a Canadian of Palestinian descent, successfully negotiates the path of a young Arab immigrant, but is compelled to seek answers to the ultimate issue that haunts Palestinians everywhere; that of returning to, and finding a home, in the land of his ancestors. Is God conspiring to create surprising circumstances that reunite him with childhood friends, including a Jewish roommate, in a circuitous, but seemingly inevitable confrontation with the truth? The prophets, old and new, Moses, Mohammed, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mandela and Obama, help to guide him in this odyssey of purification.

Palestine is a region that is located in Western Asia, situated between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. Palestine has been an important center of human civilization for thousands of years, with civilizations like the Canaanites, Israelites, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottoman Empire having all had a presence in this area. In modern times, the region has been the subject of intense conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, with both sides claiming it as their rightful homeland. The history of Palestine is complex and multifaceted, with conflicting narratives and interpretations of events. The ongoing struggle for control of the territory remains a major issue in the Middle East and the world at large.

"Israel, Palestine, the Holy Land, a country that evokes deep emotions in millions of people throughout the world, is vividly brought to life in this magnificent collection of aerial photographs. From the golden domes of Jerusalem to the deep desert craters of the Negev, and from Kibbutz fields to camel trains, Itamar Grindberg has captured a stunning array of images from a land of endless contrasts. Israel's rich past is never far removed from its energetic present in this exhilarating mosaic of a hundred lands wrapped into one."--Back cover

Post-Millennial Palestine: Literature, Memory, Resistance confronts how Palestinians have recently felt obliged to re-think memory and resistance in response to dynamic political and regional changes in the twenty-first century; prolonged spatial and temporal dispossession; and the continued deterioration of the peace process. Insofar as the articulation of memory in (post)colonial contexts can be viewed as an integral component of a continuing anti-colonial struggle for self-determination, in tracing the dynamics of conveying the memory of ongoing, chronic trauma, this collection negotiates the urgency for Palestinians to reclaim and retain their heritage in a continually unstable and fretful present. The collection offers a distinctive contribution to the field of existing scholarship on Palestine, charting new ways of thinking about the critical paradigms of memory and resistance as they are produced and represented in literary works published within the post-millennial period. Reflecting on the potential for the Palestinian narrative to recreate reality in ways that both document it and resist its brutality, the critical essays in this collection show how Palestinian writers in the twenty-first century critically and creatively consider the possible future(s) of their nation.

With new talks in the Middle East Peace Process about to begin, the shadows of previous negotiations fall heavily across all involved. In this powerful and absorbing testimony, one of leading figures of the Oslo talks, former Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie ('Abu Ala') takes us behind closed doors and inside the negotiating rooms of Wye River, Stockholm and Camp David, where the terms of peace and a Palestinian state were sketched out, argued over, and eventually lost. Larger than life figures emerge from the minutes of these dramatic meetings - released here for the first time. Qurei recounts both the Israelis' intractability and the dynamic inside the Palestinian camp with candour and insight. This indispensable first-hand account provides a completely new perspective on the history, issues and personalities that will determine the future of the Middle East.