MER Article An Open Letter to Abu Jerry For two decades, human rights lawyers struggled to publicize that thousands of Palestinians were being tortured under Israeli interrogation. Officials denied these allegations and accused the lawyers of being "terrorist sympathizers." It was a minor vindication when, in 1987, an official commission confirmed that the General Security Services Lea Tsemel • 5 min read
MER Article The Cost of Peace We know the images well: ethnic cleansing in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, intra-communal violence in Northern Ireland, and competing claims to land rights spurring the forcible transfer of populations in Palestine and Israel. Claims to self-determination and minority rights, often found at the heart Kathleen Cavanaugh • 10 min read
MER Article Economic Deterioration in the Gaza Strip On February 25, 1996, following several Hamas suicide bombings in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel imposed a heightened closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. [1] This most recent heightening of the closure has severely damaged the already precarious economy of the Gaza Strip and caused immense Sara Roy • 14 min read
MER Article Closures, Cantons and the Palestinian Covenant On April 24, 1996 -- Israel’s forty-eighth Independence Day -- PLO leader Yasser Arafat made good on his 1993 pledge to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to amend “those articles of the Palestine Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist.” In a historic decision, 504 out Graham Usher • 12 min read
MER Article Yitzhak Rabin and Israel's Death Squads Now that the abrasive and pugnacious Yitzhak Shamir has been replaced by the gravel-toned, pragmatic Yitzhak Rabin as Israel’s prime minister, should we anticipate a change for the better in Israel’s human rights record? Rabin cleverly campaigned for his June victory at the polls by ambiguously criticizing Likud’ Anita Vitullo Khoury • 7 min read
MER Article Letter from the Curfew Zone “What can we do?” asked Marwan, a service worker at the temporary quarters of the Birzeit University the morning President Bush announced a cessation of hostilities in the Gulf. “Whatever happens, it’s always on the head of the Palestinians.” He turned back to his own Herculean task -- attempting Penny Johnson • 5 min read
MER Article Human Rights Briefing What has been the performance of human rights organizations during the first two years of the intifada? A fresh look at eight organizations surveyed prior to the uprising (MER 150) shows that overall coverage has increased, as one might expect based on the intensity and duration of the uprising, but Nabeel Abraham • 3 min read
Prison Text, Resistance Culture The Israeli prison apparatus is a critical and contested site in the manifold struggle to control communication and information in the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation. During the two decades of occupation before the intifada, prisons in Israel and the Occupied Territories housed an aver Barbara Harlow • 6 min read
Eyeless in Judea One of the major problems confronting the Israeli security forces during the Palestinian uprising was the disintegration, by June 1988, of Israel’s system of penetration and control over the clandestine national movement. First, the apparatus of the military government received a considerable blow w Salim Tamari • 17 min read
Women, the Hijab and the Intifada Many accounts have suggested that the intifada has enabled Palestinian women to make great strides toward their social as well as political liberation. While some positive developments have occurred, it is also true that the intifada has been the context for a vicious campaign in Gaza to impose the Rema Hammami • 15 min read
"The PLO Is Still Waging a Struggle for Recognition Rather Than for a Solution" ‘Ali Jarbawi, an associate professor of political science at Birzeit University, is the author of The Intifada and Political Leadership in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, in Arabic). MERIP contributing editor Penny Johnson interviewed him in Ramallah in late February 1990. You Penny Johnson • 5 min read
The Intifada in Israel Our visitors -- activists coming to express solidarity with the Palestinians, human rights workers documenting the latest atrocities, itinerant journalists doing the definitive intifada story -- sometimes see things clearer than we do. Here, in the eye of the storm, it is easy to be misled. The sign Stanley Cohen • 15 min read
