Dilip Simeon's blog

Several shots ring out in quick succession, cutting through a clear, blue spring morning in Jenin, in the West Bank. Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack. The cameraman filming the scene scrambles backwards to take cover behind a low concrete wall. Then a man cries out in Arabic: "Injured! Shireen, Shireen, oh man, Shireen! Ambulance!" When the camera operator pans around the corner, Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh can be seen lying motionless, face down on the ground as another Palestinian reporter, Shatha Hanaysha, crouches down beside her, using a tree trunk for cover. Hanaysha reaches out and tries to rouse her as gunshots continue.  There's no response. Both women are wearing helmets and blue protective vests marked "Press." In the moments that follow, a man in a white T-shirt makes several attempts to move Abu Akleh, but is forced back repeatedly by gunfire. Finally, after a few long minutes, he manages to drag her body from the street....

There was unrest in Jerusalem Friday as thousands attended the burial of veteran Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was  shot dead  two days earlier while reporting on a military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin.  Mourners had marched from Jerusalem's Jaffa Gate to Mount Zion cemetery. They were met with violence at the St. Joseph hospital complex by Israeli police when they tried to carry Abu Akleh's coffin, which Al Jazeera footage showed being rocked and then falling out of the hands of some of the pallbearers, as Israeli police beat them with batons. Shireen Abu Aqleh: press freedom under attack Crowds walked behind as Abu Akleh's rose-covered coffin was carried by pallbearers and lain down to rest next to her parents' grave. Church bells echoed through the cemetery.  The burial was taking place a day after a memorial procession that brought thousands to the West Bank city of Ramallah. Mourners flocked to the city's streets on Friday and huddled...

Should I be banned because I admire Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s masterpieces  Journey to the End of the Night ,  Death on the Installment Plan,  and  Castle to Castle , despite his virulent anti-Semitism…? Should I be banned for liking Joseph Heller’s  Catch-22,  which is rabidly misogynistic? Should I be banned for loving William Butler Yeats, who, like Ezra Pound… was a fascist collaborator? Should I be banned because I revere Hannah Arendt, whose attitudes towards African-Americans were paternalistic, at best, and arguably racist? Should I be banned because I cherish books by C.S. Lewis, Norman Mailer and D.H. Lawrence, who were homophobic? And let’s not even get started with the Bible… God repeatedly demands righteous acts of genocide, transforming the Nile into blood so the Egyptians will suffer from thirst. God sends swarms of locusts to torture the Egyptians, along with hail, fire and thunder to destroy all plants and trees. God orders the firstborn in ...

UN Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk has issued one of his strongest condemnations yet of Israeli apartheid in a  report  to the 49th regular session of the UN Human Rights Council for Agenda Item 7; the session which, claims Israel, singles it out unfairly. Referring to various statements, including those of former Israeli ministers and officials in state institutions who called out the colonial state’s apartheid, Lynk declared, “If these responsible figures have determined that this reality is apartheid, then it is incumbent on the rest of us to test, through the tools of international law and human rights, whether these observations accurately reflect what is happening in the Palestinian territory.” Lynk’s report notes that the Rome Statute’s legal definition of apartheid provides “a forward looking definition with a universal application”, with no reference to South Africa, the country which remains the state primarily associated with the racist system of government and th...

NB: This is a beautifully written account of a terrible human tragedy. Thank you Roy. You did your best for peace and friendship. And you are keeping alive the memory of Aseel, your dead Palestinian friend. You do what is right because it is right. We can only hope that one day the Phoenix of love will overcome the tidal waves of hatred and suspicion. Thank you.  DS At a summer camp for kids from conflict zones, I met my brave, funny friend Aseel. He was Palestinian. I was Israeli. When he was killed by police, my hope for our future died with him     In 11 May 2021, I was sitting with a small group in a cafe in southern Tel Aviv, studying Arabic. Our teacher, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, had been telling us that he and his pregnant Jewish wife kept getting turned down by landlords who would not rent their property to a “mixed” couple. We were almost at the end of the three-hour class when air raid sirens sounded. A few days earlier, missiles had been launc...

Middle East Monitor : Recent weeks rank among the most turbulent in the West Bank, with massive protests taking place in different parts of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. From tension in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah that led to a bloody escalation last May, to the weekly protests being held since June in the village of Beita near Nablus and the most recent confrontations that erupted ten days ago in Burqa, the Palestinians in the West Bank continue to defy Israel’s inhuman and illegal military occupation. Clashes broke out in Burqa after a group of illegal Israeli settlers marched to a Palestinian-owned hill on the outskirts of the village. Local villagers challenged the move before the settlers could occupy the land. Settler mobilisation was countered by appeals from Palestinian activists to the people living in neighbouring areas to rush in defence of the hill and foil the attack. The sight of Palestinian villagers gathering to defend their lan...

( Middle East Monitor ) – Israeli media have been  pointing out  that the Biden administration in Washington is not too bothered about the occupation state’s illegal settlement expansion. There is little reason to doubt the veracity of the claim. So far, US President Joe Biden has managed to maintain a fine balance between his agenda in favour of the two-state compromise, and his predecessor’s legacy which promotes Israel’s annexation of more Palestinian land. As long as Biden adheres to the international consensus about the two-state compromise, all he has to do is issue periodic condemnations and look the other way, turning the proverbial blind eye to Israeli settlement expansion. After all, that is what the UN has been doing ever since it recognised Israel’s colonial existence… https://www.juancole.com/2021/12/expansion-settlements-palestinian.html Why do Americans turn a Blind eye to Israel’s Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians? / Children are on the frontline of Israel’s w...

We were all so excited. Ramadan was coming to an end, and preparations for the Eid al-Fitr holiday were underway. As the eldest daughter in my family, my parents sent me shopping with my sisters for new clothes for Eid, while my father went out to bring ingredients for  sumaqiyya  and  feseekh . Meanwhile, Israel was undergoing its ethnic cleansing campaign aimed at 28 Palestinian families – 500 Palestinians –  in Sheikh Jarrah , Jerusalem, intending to replace them with Israeli settlers. It didn’t stop there. Following protests in Jerusalem, Israeli occupation forces  stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque  and brutalised worshippers. Here in Gaza,  resistance forces retaliated . Israel collectively punished the two million Palestinians in Gaza with  heavy bombardments  and indiscriminate airstrikes. Instead of celebrating Eid,  we spent 11 days terrified  by warplanes and drones hovering overhead at low altitudes, devastating Gaza... https:...

Looking back on the latest round of fighting in Gaza, one can’t escape the grim sense of déjà vu .  How many such rounds have there been? I can’t remember. Worse, eerie and compulsive repetition suits the way many, perhaps most, Israelis - including, it seems, the higher echelons of the army and intelligence services - tend to think about Gaza and Hamas. On the surface, the primitive logic goes like this: Hamas is a murderous, barbaric organization that wants only to kill as many Israelis as possible and is continuously building up its military capabilities to that end. In practice, the only useful way of dealing with Hamas is therefore to pound it to pieces once every few years (or months), thus reestablishing what the Israeli army and government fondly call “deterrence” (it’s their favorite word). The trouble with this approach is that it never works. To revert to the army lingo, which Israelis hear every night on TV during episodes of fighting: deterrence is inherent...

Until Camp David in 1978, Egypt had been Palestine’s main ally and the strongest military power in the region after Israel. The peace treaty returned Sinai to Egypt in exchange for recognition of Israel. With that normalisation, Egypt closed the door to any sort of Arab military assistance to the Palestinians for ever. We inherited that era’s bitter disappointment. Palestine had been such an integral part of Arab identity for so long that it came to be known as “the case” or “the file” – an urgent unresolved issue at the heart of our world. After the Camp David agreement, “the case” went from being a rousing call for solidarity to something more melancholy and scattered. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Iranian revolution motivated Arab and Gulf governments to ingratiate themselves with the US, and that wouldn’t work if  Israel  remained their public enemy number one. So even the lip service paid to the Palestinian cause in the period immediately after Camp David f...

Back in 2000, the right-wing Israeli politician Ariel Sharon  marched  into the Al-Aqsa Mosque with a detachment of bodyguards. The provocation sparked the second Intifada, which lasted until 2005. Sharon was the leader of the opposition Likud party at the time. The fighting that erupted after his visit also stoked the flames of populism and nationalism in the country, and less than a year later, in March 2001, the Labor Party government of Ehud Barak collapsed and Sharon became prime minister.  The events of this May in Israel-Palestine are a frightening repetition of what happened in 2000. The results of the March 2021 elections in Israel, the fourth elections in a two-year period, were inconclusive. Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud)  failed  to gather a majority in his allocated time to form a government. Shortly after the president gave the opportunity to opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party, Netanyahu  sent  Israeli police to storm the al-...

NB : The word 'mistake' is so ugly in the midst of corpses of children and piles of rubble. Led by the US, the western powers have an unofficial and flexible algebra for the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed, hospitals and schools in Gaza destroyed, before they call for a cease-fire. This is not a mistake you shameless people. This is a crime against humanity; this is prolonged and planned ethnic cleansing and you are complicit in it. Read the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide and ask yourselves what is going on in Palestine. Thank God there are persons of conscience in the US, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  and Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky who are exposing you for what you are: spineless opportunists. DS ‘Bearing the brunt’: the suffering of children in the Gaza-Israel conflict – photo essay Gaza Tests Biden Foreign Policy Team’s Promise To Learn From past Mistakes Two years before Joe Biden won the presidency, 30 national security experts who worked with him und...