Palestine

In 1964, Denis Goldberg and other ANC comrades were on trial for their lives at what became known as the Rivonia trial. Against expectations the judge did not impose death but gave them several concurrent life sentences instead. The young man shouted out jubilantly to his mother, “It’s life! Life is wonderful!”

Denis was born of Jewish immigrant parents, both communists. After involvement in local racially unsegregated civil rights movements in the 1950s, he joined the communist party.

In Gaza, we understand what being under a blockade is like. More than two million people have lived under siege for over ten years, it is one of the most crowded places in the world and has experienced three wars that have destroyed infrastructure including hospitals and health centres.

With much fanfare and mutual backslapping, Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu launched the US government’s “peace plan” at a glitzy press conference on 28 January. In addition to the world’s media, three Gulf states sent their ambassadors: the UAE, Bahrain and Oman (although the Omani ambassador confided to the Times of Israel that he didn’t even know what was in the document).

With much fanfare and mutual backslapping, Donald Trump and Binyamin Netanyahu launched the US government’s “peace plan” at a glitzy press conference on 28 January. In addition to the world’s media, three Gulf states sent their ambassadors: the UAE, Bahrain and Oman (although the Omani ambassador confided to the Times of Israel that he didn’t even know what was in the document).

Nur Masalha’s Palestinian history is a powerful antidote to Zionist narratives, and to accepted Western narratives, which place Palestine as a territory that began its life in 1918 under British rule.

Masalha details Palestine’s 4,000 year history, from Late Bronze Age Egypt through the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic empires to the modern era.

The streets of Tel Aviv were adorned with rainbow flags alongside Israeli ones on 8 June as thousands of Israelis took to the streets for their 20th annual pride march.

To those unaware of the ethnic cleansing and genocide carried out by Israel on a daily basis for the past 70 years, the self-proclaimed “gay capital of the Middle East” would have appeared to represent a very tolerant and open society.

Can you explain why the protests had the focus around the border?

Firstly stop calling it a border, there is no border. This is all part of the land of Palestine. If you want you can call it an Israeli-imposed barrier because that’s what it is. The protest called itself a great march of return.

The idea was that 70 years of displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people must come to an end and they be able to go home, and since about 80 percent of Gaza’s people are descendants of 1948 refugees the idea of return is very relevant to them.

Bernard Regan has produced a timely and well researched analysis of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. The declaration stated unequivocally the British government’s support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. The qualification that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” was a view observed less in its implementation than in its negation.

Dear Nick,
“Some people say it’s just rock and roll. Oh, but it gets you right down to your soul.” This lyric from your song “Push the Sky Away” could function as a shorthand expression of the relationship I have had with your work for much of my adult life.

As a theatre critic and arts journalist, I spend much of my professional life trying to find art works that transcend the banalities of everyday life and touch something profound in the human experience. Rarely am I as affected by the work I review as I am by your music.

Trump’s announcement that the US embassy will move to Jerusalem ignited protests across the world in solidarity with the Palestinians. On the steps of the Journalists’ Union building in Cairo demonstrators burned the American flag and brandished posters condemning Trump and his partner in crime, Egypt’s dictator Abdelfattah al-Sisi, while thousands took to the streets in Jordan, Lebanon, Algeria, Morocco, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.