Anonymous Soldiers as Medical Experts? Only when the NYT covers Israel killing a Palestinian

This article was originally published in the April 2011 issue of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s Extra! magazine.  It was only recently put online. 

U.S. media coverage of the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah reflected how the corporate press routinely covers high-profile civilian deaths caused by Israel. The Israeli government, it seems, can count on U.S. media to print its anonymous claims—no matter how baseless.

Two days after Abu Rahmah, a Palestinian woman from the West Bank village of Bil’in, died from tear-gas inhalation during a December 31 demonstration against the separation wall, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) went into spin mode. Anonymous “senior officers” in the Israeli army pushed a number of theories about her death—Abu Rahmah wasn’t at the demonstration, she had cancer, it may have been an “honor killing” and more—that the Israeli press dutifully reported. Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf (+972 Magazine, 1/4/11), who was actually present at the Bil’in demonstration, described these claims as “half-truths and lies.”

U.S. corporate media also used anonymous Israeli military sources to cast doubt on the 36-year-old Abu Rahmah’s killing. In the New York Times (1/5/11), reporter Isabel Kershner characterized the story as a “debate” with “clashing narratives.” Though she noted that the IDF claims were all anonymous while the Palestinian claims were “backed by medical documents,” Kershner went on to give roughly equal time to both arguments.

Among the IDF’s anonymous claims were that they “had never heard of tear gas killing anyone in the open” and that Abu Rahmah may have had “some pre-existing ailment that, alone or compounded by the tear gas, caused her death.” Why anonymous military officials should be treated as experts on medical questions was never explained.

The Washington Post (1/6/11) similarly stated that anonymous military officials “suggested that an existing medical condition might have contributed to 36-year-old Jawaher Abu Rahmah’s death.” The Los Angeles Times’ only brief mention of the case (1/3/11) explained, “Since tear gas is typically nonlethal, it remained unclear whether soldiers used excessive amounts or whether the woman had health problems that contributed to her reaction.”

But the IDF claims were contradicted by extensive eyewitness reports from other protesters, Israeli journalists from +972 Magazine and the family of Abu Rahmah. In a January 4 statement put together by the Popular Struggle Coordina-tion Committee, Abu Rahmah’s mother said her daughter “was not sick with cancer, nor did she have any other illness, and she was not asthmatic,” while the director of the health center that treated Abu Rahmah stated that she “died from lung failure that was caused by tear gas inhalation, leading to a heart attack.”

Read the whole article here.
 

Palestinian anti-wall activist tortured, threatened with rape and execution by Shin Bet because of BDS activities

The Israeli government’s repression of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is growing ever more harsh.  Domestically, earlier this month, “the Knesset plenum…approved in its first reading a ‘boycott law,’ which would levy harsh punitive fines on Israelis who call for academic or economic boycotts against Israeli institutions,” according to Ha’aretz.

While the anti-boycott bill is aimed at shutting up internal Israeli calls for BDS, much more punitive measures continue to be inflicted on Palestinian activists.

Jesse Rosenfeld, reporting for Alternet, has an exclusive report on the alleged torture of Mohammad Othman, a key organizer in the non-violent resistance campaign against the West Bank separation barrier. After returning from Norway in 2009, where he met with “Norwegian socialist movements and BDS activists, as well as members of the national Parliament, including the Norwegian finance minister,” Othman was arrested at the West Bank-Jordan border.  The interview with Rosenfeld marks the first time Othman has spoken out about his conditions in prison.

Othman tells Rosenfeld that:

He was psychologically and physically tortured by Shin Bet interrogators. He highlighted how interrogators pressed him for details about his activities in the BDS campaign abroad, asked about the the grassroots Stop the Wall movement, and probed his meetings with Norwegian parliamentarians and activists.

In Israeli military court, the military prosecution tried unsuccessfully to prove that he was acting as an agent for Hezbollah. But Othman said that attempts to force him to confess to working with Hezbollah were merely a pretext to jail him and not what actually interested the Shin Bet.

“They spent over 25 days focused on trying to find out about my boycott contacts and activist contacts in Norway. They were particularly interested in talking about my work with a Jewish American woman in drafting a boycott call,” said Othman, who detailed the brutal methods his interrogators used to try to extract information and confessions from him. “I was told by an interrogator that if I’m released before their investigation is complete, that they would kill me, that they would shoot me in the head,” he recalled.

Kept in a tiny cell that could only fit a small mattress and subjected to extreme hot and cold temperatures, Othman says psychological terror gave way to physical torture. “At one point they tied me in stress positions for five hours. They showed pictures of my sisters and told me they would rape them. They threatened me with rape.”

 

 

Mother of Bilin martyrs: we will not be stopped

This article/interview originally appeared in the Electronic Intifada:

The village of Bilin in the occupied West Bank was quiet on 12 January 2010, but reminders of the violence that hits the village every Friday during the weekly demonstration against Israel’s illegal wall were visible. Posters of Jawaher Abu Rahmah were hung up and taped to signs and walls around the village. It had been nearly two weeks since Jawaher was killed on 1 January 2010 as a result of severe inhalation of tear gas fired by the Israeli military at a demonstration the previous day. In the immediate aftermath of her death, the Israeli military attempted to deflect blame for the killing by spreading misinformation, assisted by the right-wing blogosphere and the Israeli and US media about Jawaher. Israel’s propaganda, though, was quickly refuted by eyewitnesses to the death.

Jawaher was not the only member of the Abu Rahmah family whose life was taken by Israeli military violence. In April 2009, during a similar protest against the wall, an Israeli soldier fired a tear gas canister directly at Bassem Abu Rahmah, Jawaher’s brother, which hit him in the chest and killed him.

The Electronic Intifada contributor Alex Kane met with Soubhiya Abu Rahmah, the mother of Bassem and Jawaher, in Bilin. Hamde Abu Rahmah, Jawaher’s cousin and a photojournalist, translated for the interview.

Alex Kane: It’s been almost two weeks since Jawaher was killed. How are you feeling?

Soubhiya Abu Rahmah: I am not feeling good. I am very sad about my loss. I have been sick, and you know, when you lose somebody in your family, and it’s your daughter, it’s your daughter. Now two people I have lost. It’s really sad.

AK: Where were you when you found out that Jawaher was really ill?

SA: Before that day, I quit my work, because I wanted to take a holiday. In the morning, I made food, and after that I went to go visit my neighbors. It’s like I knew about her dying. After this, we went — me and my daughter [Jawaher] — close to the wall to watch the demonstration, and my daughter said, “I have to go back to the house,” and she left me. When she left me, that’s when it happened. She got tear gassed, and after that Jawaher went to the ambulance to go to Ramallah.

AK: Were you supportive of Jawaher going to the demonstrations?

SA: Yes, I was supportive. I was myself there many times, but because I am really sick, I cannot move. But my daughter, and her brothers, they were going.

AK: What’s your response to the Israeli military’s allegations about Jawaher — that it wasn’t their fault, that she was sick, that she had cancer, all of those allegations?

SA: They are just lying. I saw many papers from the doctors. She has nothing, her health was okay, she did not have any cancer. They always lie.

AK: Given that Jawaher and Bassem were both killed while demonstrating in Bilin, do you still think it is worth it for the protests to continue?

SA: Yes, for sure. When the army keeps doing this stuff, and the Israeli government steals more land, yes for sure I support the protests. Everyone will have to do something against them. We have never stopped, we will not be silent about this.

AK: Do you and your family plan on taking any legal action against the Israeli military over Jawaher’s death?

SA: We are looking, we will see. There’s a lawyer specifically for the wall, and he will see what can happen about Jawaher.

AK: Are there any messages you would like to say to those in the US?

SA: I have to say, for the American government, they have to make Israel stop doing this, to stop killing people, to stop stealing more land from the people here, stop throwing these weapons, these chemicals. Many people get sick from these things and many people die in Palestine, and they have to do many things against Israel to stop them, because they really do not care about anyone. They do what they want. The big reason why Jawaher died was because she took in so much tear gas, and she could not breathe. When she was at the demonstration, she was running from the tear gas, and she tried to go back to the village, and she took in so much of this and she couldn’t breathe and that’s why she died. That’s why they have to stop this.

In Ajami and Mas’ha, Evidence of the Continuing Nakba

Ramallah, West Bank–The Palestinian catastrophe, the Nakba of 1948, never really ended.  What happened since then, as Yehouda Shenhav, an Israeli sociologist and the author of Bounded by the Green Line, puts it, is a “continuation of the [1948] war by other means.”  There are continuous efforts by Israel to displace Palestinians of their land all over the occupied territories and inside Israel.

Two such efforts are evident in recently hearing the stories of Hani Amer, a Palestinian resident of the West Bank village of Mas’ha, and of the Palestinians living in Ajami, a neighborhood in Jaffa.

Amer sits down in his living room, talking with passion and at times smiling, despite his home being surrounded by the illegal separation barrier and Jewish-only settlements.  For seven years, Amer and his family have been struggling against the barrier, which restricts their freedom of movement and ability to farm their surrounding land.  As he explains, “until now, we’re being displaced”–a microcosm of Israeli efforts to confiscate Palestinian land and to push Palestinians out.  “The situation we’re living in is horrible,” Amer says.

But Amer’s story of displacement did not begin in 2003.  Instead, it began in 1948, the year that Israel declared its independence in the midst of an ethnic cleansing campaign that expelled about 750,000 Palestinians.  Amer is a refugee from Kafr Qassem, a Palestinian city east of Tel Aviv.  If he had the chance, he says, he would return.

Hani Amer stands in the doorway of his home, which is completely surrounded by the separation barrier and illegal settlements. Photo: Alex Kane

Amer is responsible for collecting water from his well.  When he wants to go to the well, he has to make sure the Israeli army gate that leads to his land is open.

Amer tells of how he can only access his land at specific times in the day, and of the Israeli occupation’s harassment.  For instance, at times Amer is forced to wait for what can be up to seven hours until the Israeli army lets him access his land.

“We are simple people facing a big entity,” he says.  “The reason why we keep doing this is because we want to sustain our land.”

What Amer is up against is an individual family’s example of what the barrier and settlements are doing to Palestinians across the West Bank.  In the village of al-Walajah, for example, the wall has surrounded “most of the village, with the side of the wall facing the Har Gilo settlement covered by Jerusalem stone and the side facing al-Walajah being exposed concrete,” according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

The same story of displacement—albeit a different chapter—is unfolding in the Palestinian neighborhood of Ajami.  There, the combination of gentrification and discrimination against Palestinians has led to a deteriorating situation, according to Sami Abushhadeh, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University who is writing a thesis on Jaffa as a center of Arab culture during Mandate Palestine.

After the 1948 war, Ajami became a Palestinian ghetto when Israeli forces “surrounded [the Palestinians there] by a barbed wire fence for a number of months,” according to the Israeli organization Zochrot.  But currently, real estate developers looking to make Ajami into a hot-spot for Jewish families are displacing some of the residents and threatening others with eviction.

Isabelle Humphries, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, explains:

Walking around Jaffa, our local Palestinian guide pointed out new exclusive building developments built upon the sites of recently demolished homes and buildings. Eviction orders are issued by Amidar, the housing company owned and operated by the Israeli government. Amidar claims to offer subsidized and rent-controlled housing in Israel, but the fact that its major stockholders are the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund—two institutions openly mandated to support the Jewish population only—shows that it is not simply financial gain that authorities are pursuing. Indeed, since 1948 Palestinian representatives have been excluded from all stages of the urban planning process. Ben-Gurion’s vow that “Jaffa will be a Jewish city” remains the guiding principle.

As the cases of Mas’ha and Ajami show, Ben-Gurion’s vision of an ethnically exclusive state for Jews only remains the vision for the Israeli government today.

Haaretz Knocks Haaretz On Israeli Coverage of Death of Bil’in Woman

Two days ago, the Israeli daily Haaretz added to the Israeli media’s shameful reporting on the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a Bil’in village resident who was killed at last Friday’s anti-wall demonstration due to Israeli Defense Forces-fired tear gas.  Ironically, in a separate article today on Abu Rahmah’s death, the paper slightly knocks Israeli media coverage that repeated the IDF’s claims as fact–something that Haaretz did itself.

On January 3, 2010, Anshel Pfeffer wrote:

The Israel Defense Forces said on Monday that the medical report on the death of a Palestinian woman said to have been killed at a West Bank protest contains significant inconsistencies regarding the circumstances of her death…

Military sources said, however, that there was no evidence that Abu Rahmah even participated in Friday’s demonstration against the security barrier in Bil’in – nor that she died from inhaling tear gas.

The army’s claims have quickly been discredited by eyewitnesses who were at the demonstration against the separation barrier.  Haaretz catches on today with a stellar piece of reporting by Avi Issacharoff:

The Palestinian woman who died last weekend from smoke inhalation was indeed hurt by tear gas in Bil’in, according to new evidence provided to Haaretz. The evidence has also made it clear that the woman, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, had been standing near youths throwing stones at Israeli soldiers on Friday.

This new information runs contrary to claims made in the media, which are allegedly based on military sources.

Haaretz should stop repeating the IDF’s claims as fact in articles until they do their own investigation.  What a difference two days makes.

NY Times Isabel Kershner Wasn’t At Bil’in Demo–But Still Wrongly Reports On It

The New York Times has a report up by Isabel Kershner on yesterday’s demonstration in the West Bank village of Bil’in against the illegal separation barrier, where the Israel Defense Forces’ use of tear-gas canisters led to the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, a demonstrator.

The Times report is disingenuous at best–and that probably results from the fact that Kershner or any other Times reporter wasn’t at the demonstration, according to Lisa Goldman, a Canadian-Israeli blogger who was there.

Kershner writes:

The Palestinians say the protests are meant to be nonviolent, but they inevitably end in clashes, with young Palestinians hurling stones and the Israeli security forces firing tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets.

It may be the case that at past demonstrations in Bil’in, stones have been hurled while Israel uses brutal military force against the protesters.  But to write about “violence” in Bil’in in the context of the anti-wall protest yesterday, especially when a Times reporter wasn’t there, is just plain sloppy reporting–and all the more so considering that eyewitness reports indicate that there were no stones hurled yesterday.

Joseph Dana, an Israeli blogger who chronicles the nonviolent resistance movement in the occupied territories, was on the ground yesterday live-tweeting the Bil’in demo.  Dana tweeted that the IDF’s claims of people throwing stones were “lies.”  Goldman affirmed Dana’s tweet with one of her own.

It shouldn’t have been too hard for Kershner to speak with Goldman, Dana or any of the other people at the demonstration to find out if stones were, in fact, hurled.  Instead, the world will read a distorted picture of what happened yesterday when Abu Rahmah was killed by the IDF.

Jackson Diehl’s Settlement Delusion

Weeks after an awful October 18 column in the Washington Post which argued that it was President Barack Obama’s fault that the “peace process” is faltering because “insisting on an Israeli freeze” created a “near-insuperable obstacle to the peace process,” neoconservative Jackson Diehl is at it again.  This time, he penned a column that similarly claimed that it was “Obama who first turned the settlement issue from a minor to a major one.”

The settlement issue is a minor one?

Is it minor that the matrix of Israeli settlements controls 42 percent of the land in the occupied West Bank, land that is supposedly meant for a future Palestinian state?

Is it minor that Israel steals land from Palestinians to build settlements and confiscates more land to build a separation barrier that, de facto, annexes some 60 settlements?

Is it minor that in occupied Hebron, hundreds of extremist Jewish settlers have been inserted into the heart of a city with a population of about 150,000 Palestinians and wreak terror and havoc on the Palestinian residents there, with the full support of the Israeli army?

Is it minor that raw sewage from settlements flood Palestinian areas and destroy crops and contaminate drinking water?

Is it minor that the International Court of Justice, in a 2004 advisory opinion on the separation barrier, declared that “settlements have been established in breach of international law”?

Only in a world where delusions about Israel/Palestine are routinely published in the one of the nation’s top newspapers are the settlements a “minor” issue.

Queen Noor Brings Palestinian Struggle to MSNBC; Scarborough Repeats Israeli Talking Points

It’s not often that the story of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation gets told in a fair way to American consumers of media, but today on MSNBC‘s “Morning Joe” that’s exactly what happened.  Queen Noor of Jordan was a guest on the show, promoting the powerful documentary “Budrus,” which tells the story of how the West Bank village of Budrus successfully beat back Israeli attempts to confiscate Palestinian land as part of the Israeli effort to build a “separation barrier,” which was ruled to be illegal by the International Court of Justice in a 2004 advisory opinion.

Noor gets these often-squelched messages out on MSNBC:  that Israel confiscates Palestinian land; that Israelis, Palestinians and internationals can work together in a common pursuit of justice; that Israel has imprisoned the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza; and that Israel is cracking down on the growing nonviolent resistance movement against the wall.  After discussing the growing crackdown on Palestinian dissent, Noor asks, “are [Israelis] trying to reach a peaceful settlement?  Because these are their partners.”  These messages are not something you often hear voiced on corporate television.

Unfotunately, after Noor asks that question, host Joe Scarborough launches into tired cliches about Hamas, asking how Israel is expected to make peace when “next door” is a movement that “doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist” and whose “stated goal is to drive them into the sea.”

Scarborough has some problems with the facts about Hamas.  As I wrote in the July 2010 issue of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

The truth about Hamas is much more nuanced than what corporate media repeat. While it is true that the 1988 founding charter of Hamas includes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and calls for the establishment of an Islamic state in all of historic Palestine, Hamas’ leadership has largely abandoned that rhetoric. In the run-up to the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, Hamas dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto (Guardian, 1/12/06).

In recent years, leaders of the Islamist movement have stated that Hamas is ready to make peace with Israel as long as a settlement is based on full sovereignty in the 1967 borders, East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and the right of return for Palestinian refugees—positions that have their basis in international law and United Nations resolutions. Israeli daily Ha’aretz (11/9/08) reported that “the Hamas leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, said…his government was willing to accept a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders.” And Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas’ political wing, recently said (Charlie Rose Show, 5/28/10) that “Hamas accepts a Palestinian state on the borders of 1967 with its capital Jerusalem and with the right of return.”

Still, regardless of Scarborough’s inaccurate questions, it’s important that Noor was on MSNBC getting out those vitally important messages.

And go see Budrus.  It’s really excellent.

(H/T Matt Duss for pointing this MSNBC segment out.)

Caught Between a Wall and a Shipwreck

The following article originally appeared in the latest issue of the Indypendent:

Midnight on the Mavi Marmara: The Attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and How It Changed the Course of the Israel/Palestine Conflict
Edited by Moustafa Bayoumi
OR Books, 2010

A Wall in Palestine
By René Backmann, Translated by A. Kaiser
Picador, 2010

The Israel/Palestine conflict has become so all-consuming that even objects are central to the struggle. Two recent books illustrate this fact.

René Backmann’s A Wall in Palestine looks at the planned 490-mile-long, 25-foot-high wall, complete with fencing, trenches, thermal imaging and sniper towers, that Israel is building in parts of the West Bank. The second work, Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, is a collection of essays examining the deadly Israeli attack on an international seaborne convoy. The “Freedom Flotilla” was attempting to break the crippling blockade of Gaza, which began in 2007 when Hamas took power after winning democratic elections and defeating a U.S.-backed effort to install Fatah, the party that lost the elections, into power.

Both works reveal how inanimate objects — the wall and the flotilla of six ships — have become so imbued with conflicting meanings and ideas that they can be seen as actors that create new actions in their wake, such as the plans by international activists to launch new ships to Gaza or the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that takes aim at Israeli colonization, particularly what many have labeled the “apartheid wall.”

While French journalist Backmann’s work is a useful contribution to understanding the separation barrier, the author all too easily adopts the language of the Israeli occupation and spends little time on crucial context and history relating to the Israel/ Palestine conflict. Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, on the other hand, gives readers a much more comprehensive look into the current situation as well as vital history and context, like explaining why the ongoing “peace process” is bankrupt.

The International Court of Justice, in an advisory opinion, ruled the separation barrier to be illegal under international law in 2004. The vast majority of it snakes through occupied Palestinian territory, slicing up Palestinian villages and cutting off access to urban areas.

The idea of separating the Palestinian population from the Israeli population has deep roots within Zionist ideology and has been proposed by Israeli officials for decades.

But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the second Palestinian Intifada that began in 2000, and Ariel Sharon’s rise to power, that the idea of constructing a physical barrier was seriously considered. Ironically, the rightwing Likud Party, of which Sharon was a long-time member, was originally wary of the concept. The idea of a barrier built on Israel’s borders as established in the aftermath of the 1947-49 war — as some Israeli politicians on the left suggested — might create the boundaries for a future Palestinian state and leave Israel’s colonization project of the West Bank in jeopardy, something that right-wing Zionists had no interest in.

In 2002, after a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings inside Israel, the Israeli government under Sharon decided to begin building the barrier.

Although security for Israeli civilians was the stated justification for the wall, its route made clear that it was primarily an annexation project. As the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem explains, “a major aim in setting the route was de facto annexation of land: when the Barrier is completed, some nine percent of the West Bank, containing 60 settlements, will be situated on the western — the ‘Israeli’ — side.” Other benefits of the route of the barrier from the Israeli perspective include, as Backmann notes, the taking of fertile land and precluding the possibility of a Palestinian state.

When describing the Sharon government’s siege of the Occupied Territories in 2001, Backmann refers to civilian casualties as “collateral damage.” On a number of occasions, he refers to the West Bank uncritically and without quotes as Judea-Samaria, which is the biblical term used by Israeli settlers. Backmann fails to discuss the events of 1947-49 that led to the creation of Israel, including the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians by 1949. An exploration of the colonial nature of Zionism would help explain why Israel sees no problem with building a separation barrier that tramples on the human rights of Palestinians.

Also missing is an in-depth discussion of the rise of popular resistance movements across the West Bank, which developed in response to the building of the barrier.

Resistance to the Israeli occupation isn’t just confined to Palestinian villages, though, as the events of the May 31 Freedom Flotilla, explored magnificently in Midnight on the Mavi Marmara, show. The flotilla was an international effort that included 600 passengers from a multitude of nations, and attempted to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip by sea.

The book is a comprehensive antidote to Israel’s attempt to spin the events as a group of savage Islamist terrorists “lynching” defenseless Israeli soldiers. The reports from eyewitnesses who were aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara are clear: As the flotilla was in international waters, Israeli commandos rappelled onto the Marmara, opened fire and killed nine people. A recently released U.N. report authored by three human rights experts found the Israeli raid to be illegal, “disproportionate” and brutal. Beyond the lucid eyewitness accounts, the book includes exceptional analyses of what the attack means and where the international solidarity movement goes from here. Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, editors of the blog Mondoweiss (for which I am a contributor), aptly call the attack on the flotilla a moment that has caused “many to consider what Zionism has built in the Middle East.”

Yousef Munayyer, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Palestine Center, reminds readers that Israel massacring civilians is not a new phenomenon, nor is the world’s apparent unwillingness to hold Israel accountable for war crimes.

While it is a one-stop shop for all things “Freedom Flotilla,” Midnight on the Mavi Marmara has a dearth of original content, with most contributions being reprints. It’s an understandable shortcoming given the lightning- quick turnaround. But it reads more as an immediate reaction to the flotilla killings than a reflection on how and why the flotilla marks a “turning point” in the Israel/Palestine conflict. There are a couple of duds as well. For instance, Stephen Walt, the co-author of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, writes an uncharacteristically boring “how to” guide on “defend[ing] the indefensible.”

By and large, though, if one wants to understand the attack on the flotilla and the utter necessity of building an international solidarity movement that will finally bring Israeli apartheid down, this is the book to read. It couldn’t have come out at a better time; while the world’s media incessantly focus on recently re-launched “peace talks,” the real work of bringing about liberation for the Palestinian people can be found in efforts like the Freedom Flotilla.

Adam Shapiro, a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement, succinctly closes out the book with his piece on the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement and the effort to break the blockade of Gaza through ever-escalating direct action: “The days of the oppression of Palestinians — whether in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in refugee camps, or in the diaspora — are numbered. It is now in all our power to expedite that day of liberation.”