Storm Over Columbia
Nadia Abu El-Haj, interviewed by Max Nelson
“The only reason we didn’t descend into violence that day was that the students remained calm. They were the only adults in the room.”
Source: The New York Review of Books
In 1978 I returned to Ramallah from my legal studies in London brimming with ideas about the importance of the rule of law and the possibilities for
In Gaza’s Hospitals
It’s not easy to work under continuous military attack, to wake up and close your eyes to injuries and corpses, to feel helpless to stop it all.
A Bitter Season in the West Bank
The war in Gaza has provided Israeli settlers fresh opportunity and impunity. I see entire villages fleeing in panic.
The Long War on Gaza
Over fifty-six years, Israel has transformed Gaza from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive society to an impoverished one.
Heading Toward a Second Nakba
Nathan Thrall argues that the accident in which Abed Salama’s son died was a predictable, even inevitable, outcome of the Israeli occupation in its quotidian forms.
What Apartheid Means for Israel
A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.
Why Israel Calls Human Rights ‘Terrorism’
In a widely condemned move, the Israeli government has banned the group I founded. This is how it enforces impunity for its illegal policies of occupation.
Editors’ Note
On October 16, we spoke to Raja Shehadeh about his work as a writer and as a lawyer and founder, in 1979, of Al-Haq, which soon became the leading Palestinian human rights monitoring group.
“My Ramallah world, with its proximity to the hills, was being transformed inexorably in a manner that mystified and frightened me,” he said. “The changes taking place through the Israeli army’s takeover of the land using various spurious legal ploys and replacing the names of the various land features, towns, and villages with Hebrew names, as well as the changes in the narrative that accompanied the process, were all preceded by the alterations that were taking place in the local laws.
“My legal project was to chronicle these changes and warn against their consequences. This I pursued with the hope of raising awareness in order to exert pressure to halt Israel’s colonization of our land.”
That four decades-long project of legal accountability was foreclosed last week when, on October 22, the Israeli government declared Al-Haq and five other NGOs “terrorist organizations,” effectively outlawing them. Shehadeh wrote the following response for us.