Report from a War Zone From the outside, they give a friendly impression, the villages around the small Egyptian city of Mallawi, four hours by train south of Cairo. The Nile waters flow serenely to the north. Only the chatter of the colorfully dressed women doing their laundry together on the riverbank breaks the silence Karim El-Gawhary • 7 min read
Education, Control and Resistance in the Golan Heights Discussions of the Israeli-occupied territories generally treat the Golan Heights in terms of strategic significance and water resources, seldom in terms of the 16,500 Syrians living under Israeli rule today. [1] While in some ways their experiences are comparable to those of Palestinians in the occ Bashar Tarabieh • 14 min read
Homecoming I was afraid. Why should I be? But once I stood in front of the young women in the white and blue-striped shirt I was reduced to shivering with a tongue as dry as the Negev. She asked me insistently, “Why are you here?” I had earlier thought of two or three convincing answers, but suddenly I could n Numan Kanafani • 7 min read
Stacking the Deck For many Palestinians, the political success or failure of the Palestinian Authority (PA) hinges on its ability to bring rapid economic improvement to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where peoples’ livelihoods have been seriously eroded by the Israeli occupation, the intifada and the repercussions of Emma Murphy • 9 min read
An Interview with Usama Halabi Usama Halabi, a lawyer, works with the East Jerusalem Quaker Legal Aid Program and is the author of The Druze in Israel: From Sect to Nation (Jerusalem: Golan Academic Association, 1989) [Arabic]. Barbara Harlow interviewed him in Jerusalem in December 1994. In November, the Israeli military court Barbara Harlow • 4 min read
Transfers and Powers The Declaration of Principles (DOP), signed between Israel and the PLO on September 13, 1993, provided the “agreed framework for the interim period.” [1] This was to be based on the establishment, through elections, of a Palestinian interim self-governing authority for a transitional period not exce Raja Shehadeh • 10 min read
Gaza's Workers and the Palestinian Authority The story of the January 1995 strike in a private health clinic in Gaza City was published in only one paper, al-Watan, a new weekly affiliated with Hamas. Neither al-Quds nor al-Nahar, dailies in tune with the Palestinian Authority (PA), reported on the first workers’ strike under Palestinian self- Amira Hass • 11 min read
Palestinian Trade Unions and the Struggle for Independence Not so long ago, to visit the Erez checkpoint on Gaza’s “border” crossing with Israel was to witness a modem slave market. Tens of thousands of Palestinian workers would wake up at 3 am and gather at Erez for the privilege of working in their occupier’s economy, predominantly in construction and agr Graham Usher • 13 min read
An Interview with Mahmoud Darwish Mahmoud Darwish, a well-known Palestinian poet, resigned from the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993. His most recent book in English is Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (California, 1995). The following excerpts are from an interview with Mona Naim in Mona Naim • 3 min read
Settlement Expansion Despite Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s August 1992 assurance of a “settlement freeze” in the Occupied Territories, and despite the Declaration of Principles of September 1993, settler population expansion and Israeli land confiscation has continued. Peter Ogram • 2 min read
From Zionism to Capitalism The Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” seems to be in trouble. The due date for the redeployment of Israeli forces in the West Bank to allow for election of the Palestinian governing authority has long come and gone. Expanded construction in “Greater Jerusalem,” land grabbing by settlers throughout the West Bank, bombings Yoav Peled • 12 min read
Fading Flags The basic challenge facing the Palestinian Authority (PA) today can be reduced to the twin tasks of legitimacy and control. Any observer of the events that led to the bloody confrontations between the Palestinian police force and Hamas and Islamic Jihad followers in mid-November 1994 realizes that the legitimacy of Salim Tamari • 8 min read
