UNMIA

Published online by Zionism-Israel, Ami Isserhoff

HIDDEN HISTORY, SECRET PRESENT: THE ORIGINS AND STATUS OF AFRICAN PALESTINIANS

By Susan Beckerleg, translated by Salah Al Zaroo

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was made possible by a Nuffield Foundation, Social Science Award, administered by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

I wish to thank my colleagues working on European Union Avicenne Initiative Projects for their advice and support, in particular Salah Al Zaroo and Gillian Hundt. My husband Abudi Kibwana Sizi assisted during two visits to the Palestine. In the Nagab and Gaza many people helped to put me in touch with colleagues, neighbours and friends of African descent. They include Ibrahim Abu Jaffar, Adnan El Sanne, Fatme Kassim, and Shahada Ebbweini.
Last but not least, I wish to thank all the people of African descent who talked with me in Jeruslaem, Gaza and the Nagab. They are not named so that their privacy can be maintained.

INTRODUCTION

This report summarises the findings of a project has addressed a neglected and sensitive area of research about the history of Palestine. The history of the region has been turbulent and has involved the settlement of peoples from Asia, Africa and Europe. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, Palestinians …

By Nonie Darwish in the Huffington Post

“Gaza conditions at ‘40-year low’” the BBC headlined last week. Rarely a week goes by without a politician or organization deploring the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip. But I do not hear anyone describe its root cause: 60 years of Arab policy aimed at maintaining Palestinians as stateless refugees in order to pressure Israel.

I lived in Gaza as a child in the 1950s when Egypt conducted guerrilla-style operations against Israel from Gaza, then under Egyptian control. My father commanded these operations, carried out by “fedayeen,” (which means, “self sacrifice”). This became the frontline of Arab Jihad against Israel. My father was killed by Israel in a targeted assassination in 1956.

Today the Gaza Strip, now under the control of Hamas, has become the Gaza prison camp for 1.5 million Palestinians and continues to serve as the launching pad for attacks against Israeli citizens.

This is the legacy of the Arab world’s Palestinian refugee policy, started 60 years ago, when the Arab League implemented special laws regarding Palestinians that all Arab countries had to abide by. Arab countries could not absorb Palestinians. Even if a Palestinian married a …

Der Spiegel: By Christoph Schult in Ashkelon

When a Palestinian woman gave birth to twins in an Israeli hospital she experienced what it is like to be the target of rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

One of the Palestinian twins from the Gaza Strip attended by an Israeli nurse.
Getty Images

The humming noise in the sky over Beit Lahia grows slowly louder. It sounds as if the buzzing of a hornet were being amplified by loud speakers in a football stadium. Residents of the Gaza Strip call them “Sannana,” or the humming ones, the small unmanned drones that the Israelis use to scan the border region for rocket commandos — and then to liquidate them with precisely targeted missiles.

Ashraf Shafii has climbed onto the roof his house and is looking across strawberry fields toward the border wall. The smoke-belching towers of the power plant in the Israeli city of Ashkelon jut into the sky along the horizon. His wife is over there in Ashkelon today.

Shafii, a 34-year-old lab technician at the Islamic University of Gaza, glances at his six-year-old daughter. “We were so desperate to have more children,” he says. For years, he waited in vain …

On this Santa Cruz, California TV Show, Becky Johnson and Lee Caplan examine the videos and other evidence of Rachel Corrie’s death, including IDF footage of the incident. The myths created about her death by those who sent her to her death, the International Solidarity Movement, are dispelled.