It will collapse, and the collapse will be harder when it happens later,” says Tareq Sadeq, Palestinian economist and professor at Birzeit University, about the financial bubble building up in the Palestinian Authority government.

“It will mean that people will lose their homes. They will lose their cars. They will lose their land sometimes because of the collapse of the bubble. This will affect the whole economy and will also reflect on the Palestinian Authority. So this may be a collapse of the PA itself,” Sadeq tells IPS.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has announced it is facing a funding crisis; it is now relying on donor aid to cover a budget deficit of 1.1 billion dollars and cash shortfall of 500 million dollars.

“The Palestinian economy has become more and more dependent on wages, on salaries, for the whole economy, not just for the public sector; around 70 percent of all employees are wage employees. As a result, there is no production in the Palestinian economy. People consume and consume and consume and there is nothing to produce,” Sadeq says.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) turned down an appeal from the Israeli government in early July for a 1 billion dollar loan to fund the PA. The West Bank economy is almost entirely upheld by international aid; in 2011, donors promised the PA 1 billion dollars in support, of which 800 million dollars was transferred.

“The whole economy is constrained to financial aid from international donors, which created more vulnerability in the Palestinian economy,” Sadeq says.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has nevertheless pushed economic development and investments in the private sector as a means to secure Palestinian independence. To date, most international economic bodies and foreign governments have praised Fayyad’s approach, pointing to Palestinian gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates as a measure ...

On March 30^th a ground-breaking event will take place. I had not expected it would ever happen when I first heard about it. While teaching at the Summer University of Palestine last July in Beirut, I met a group of Indian Muslims taking the course. They told me they were organising a people’s march to Jerusalem to bring to the world’s attention to Israel’s assault on the city’s history and culture, and its impending loss as a centre for Islam and Christianity. They explained how they and their friends would set out from India, drawing in others to join them as they passed through the various countries on their way overland to Israel’s borders. 

They seemed fired up and determined, and I could not but admire their zeal and dedication to try and rescue this orphan city which has been abandoned by all who should have defended her. But I thought their ambitions would be thwarted by the harsh reality of trying to implement their dreams. It would never succeed, I thought, but I was quite wrong. The movement they and their fellow activists spearheaded, called the Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ), is now in its final stages. A distinguished group of 400 advisers, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nobel Laureate, Mairead Maguire, are promoting the GMJ. The marchers will head for Jerusalem or the nearest point possible on March 30^th. 

This date also commemorates Land Day, a significant anniversary for Palestinians. On that day in 1976 six Palestinian citizens of Israel were killed by Israeli forces. They had participated in a peaceable general strike to protest against Israeli confiscations of privately owned Palestinian land, and paid with their lives for this act of non-violent resistance. Since then this tragic event has been commemorated annually by Palestinians everywhere. Today, it is a fitting reminder of Israel’s other confiscation of ...

Every year on March 30th Palestinians around the world celebrate Land Day, which commemorates a general strike and marches in 1976 against Israeli land appropriation, an event that was a pivotal event in bringing about Palestinian national unity. This year Palestinians throughout the Middle East and in the Diaspora will commemorate Land Day by calling attention to the dangers facing Jerusalem.

The Israeli government has long denied most Palestinians – whether Muslim or Christian – access to Jerusalem, even to visit holy sites. The organizers of the Global March allege that through methods of ethnic cleansing, Israel has been forcing Jerusalem’s remaining Arab inhabitants out, thus endangering the multi-religious, multi-ethnic character of the city that is the intended capital of Palestine.

On March 30th, the Palestinians will attempt to get as close to Jerusalem as they can: whether at the borders of Lebanon and Jordan, at checkpoints in the West Bank, or at the Erez crossing in Gaza. There will also be a demonstration in Jerusalem itself.  The Palestinians will be joined by supporters from five continents.  An eminent Advisory Board includes the Nobel Peace Laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire.  Solidarity vigils and actions are also planned on March 30th at Israeli Embassies and other locations in sixty cities around the world.

The Palestinian coalition organizing this Global March to Jerusalem is perhaps unprecedented in its breadth. Equally unprecedented is the Israeli campaign against the March, which has included faux Websites and Facebook pages to mislead participants regarding gathering places.  After seventy supporters from India, Malaysia, Pakistan, and other Asian countries visited Iran on their way to Lebanon to join the March, the Israeli press alleged that the March is directed from Iran and that violent ...

New York Times readers found an unpleasant surprise on page A11 on Thursday. A full page advertisement by the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) attacked the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Media Matters as “anti-Israel” and listed the names and numbers of donor foundations whom they want readers to pressure into de-funding these groups. “The Center for American Progress and Media Matters claim to be in the liberal mainstream. But is being anti-Israel a liberal value?” blares the ad. Having worked at CAP for two years, I was surprised to see it characterized as “anti-Israel.”

But to understand the accusation you must first understand the players. ECI is not a group like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that was founded by American Jews to marshal support for Israel across the American. ECI is a conservative group with a conservative agenda. Its founders are William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle; Gary Bauer, a Christian social conservative activist; and Rachel Abrams, a writer married to former Bush administration official Elliot Abrams. They are conservatives first and Zionists second. The ad turned out to be just their opening shot in a barrage of partisan attacks, mostly directed at President Obama, in ...

Within the catalogue of criminality that is Israel’s occupation of the West bank and Gaza, the destruction of Palestinian homes must rank as one of the most cynical and heinous. “Some 90,000 people are currently reported to be at risk of displacement as a result of Israeli policies such as restrictive and discriminatory planning, the revocation of residency rights, the expansion of settlements and the construction of the West Bank Separation Wall.”^[1]

All let us note and explore further, with the tacit engagement of America, who bank-roles the entire operation.

Home, a refuge from the world, safe and secure, somewhere to relax with family and friends, and breath easy, free from fear. This simple image of normality is unknown to many Palestinians living under the brutal illegal occupation by Israel. “The Israeli practice of demolishing homes, basic infrastructure and sources of livelihoods continues to devastate Palestinian families and communities in East Jerusalem and the 60 per cent of the West Bank controlled by Israel, known as Area C. Many of the people affected already live in poverty, and demolitions are a leading cause of their on-going displacement and dispossession in the West Bank.”^[2]

Last year (2011) saw more homes demolished than in the previous six years, and record numbers of people made homeless and displaced, “by November 2011 Israeli authorities had demolished 467 Palestinian homes and other buildings in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem), displacing 869 people.”^[3]  The UN puts the figure even ...

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is one of the most powerful lobby organizations in the country. On March 4-6, AIPAC will be holding its annual policy conference in Washington DC. The speakers include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich and a host of other powerful politicians.

AIPAC has tremendous clout but its influence has been disastrous for U.S. foreign policy and U.S. democracy. Here are ten reasons why AIPAC is so dangerous.

1. AIPAC is lobbying Congress to promote a military confrontation with Iran. AIPAC – like the Israeli government – is demanding that the U.S. attack Iran militarily to prevent Iran from having the technological capacity to produce nuclear weapons, even though U.S. officials say Iran isn’t trying to build a weapon (and even though Israel has hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons). AIPAC has successfully lobbied the U.S. government to adopt crippling economic sanctions on Iran, including trying to cut off Iran’s oil exports, despite the fact that these sanctions raise the price of gas and threaten the U.S. economy.

2. AIPAC promotes Israeli policies that are in direct opposition to international law. These include the establishment of colonies (settlements) in the Occupied West Bank and the confiscation of Palestinian land in its construction of the 26-foot high concrete “separation barrier” running through the West Bank. The support of these illegal practices makes to impossible to achieve a solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

3. AIPAC’s call for unconditional ...

Nisreen Awwad moves closer to the microphone as she signs off to her listeners, the words "Nisaa FM: music, change, success" displayed prominently over her left shoulder.

"The thing I love (most) in my program is when I interview simple women from the villages, because they are successful and (are doing) something different in their society," the 31-year-old radio producer, a native of the Qalandiya refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, tells IPS.

Host of the daily morning show on Nisaa (Women in Arabic) FM, Awwad explains that positively influencing the roles women play in Palestinian society, and changing the way Palestinian women view themselves, is what she strives for. 

"I got involved here because I believe in the message of the radio station, and I wanted to make (a difference for) women in our society. Nisaa FM, I think, it’s something different," Awwad said. "I like how my work in Nisaa FM makes me involved more in women’s issues." 

Launched in June 2010, Nisaa FM is an almost entirely female-run Palestinian radio station based in Ramallah, West Bank and the only radio station in the Middle East devoted solely to women’s issues. Its director Maysoun Odeh Gangat says that the station aims to inform, inspire and empower local women. 

"Through the positive role that the women are playing in the society that we portray, we believe that we can empower women economically and then socially and politically. It could be any woman from the rural areas or the refugee camp, or a woman parliamentarian or minister," Gangat told IPS. 

In addition to suffering from a myriad of human rights abuses stemming from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and siege of Gaza, Palestinian women face challenges from within their own society. 

According to a 2009 report released by the Palestinian Women’s Information and Media Centre ...

Violence, abuse, non-accountability, hate — such is communal living today within the occupied West Bank, where some 518,974 colonisers sit within “200” illegal settlements. According to Noam Chomsky:  “The settlements cover over 42% of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), not counting the Jordon valley, which they are taking over.” Estimates of colonisation vary from the 42% reported by Chomsky and BT Salem to that of Human Rights Watch who, at 60%, set the figure even higher.

Around half a million ‘settlers’, more accurately, colonisers, now squat upon Palestinian soil, huddled within walled encampments upon stolen land, branded blue and white. Noisily perching upon hilltops, rooms with a view, or flourishing in verdant valleys, these settlements creep shamefully throughout the West Bank and the sacred city Jerusalem, East, West North South; The City of Peace.

Former President Jimmy Carter stated: “The occupation & confiscation of Palestinian land that doesn’t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonisation of that land, and the connecting up of those isolated but multiple settlements, (there are some 200), with each other by high-ways on which Palestinians can’t travel and where quite often cannot even cross. The persecution of the Palestinians under the occupation [by the Israelis] is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation.”

Inside the West Bank, Outside the Law

The building of one single settlement is illegal. This is a fact, a fact well known, a ...

Official Washington has been rife with condemnation at the decision by the governments of Russia and China to veto an otherwise unanimous UN Security Council resolution condemning the ongoing repression in Syria and calling for a halt to violence on all sides; unfettered access for Arab League monitors; and "a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system, in which citizens are equal regardless of their affiliations or ethnicities or beliefs."

Human rights activists were outraged, as they should be. What is striking, however, is the response from US officials and pundits so roundly condemning the use of the veto by these two permanent members of the Security Council to protect the Syrian regime from accountability for its savage repression against its own citizens.

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Part I - Two Fronts

An elderly Palestinian woman spent last week on hunger strike to protest violent attacks by Israeli settlers. Hana Abu Heikel went on the hunger strike on behalf of her family after settlers burned the family car during the previous weekend. Since Israeli settlers moved into the houses surrounding the Abu Heikel family home in Hebron in 1984, the Abu Heikels have seen eight cars burned. Six vehicles were also smashed by settlers.

Settlers also pelted the Abu Heikel’s home with stones last weekend. Two young Palestinian men were attacked and beaten by Jewish settlers in Hebron during the same period. The young men were jumped on Shuhada Street which was once the bustling center of Palestinian commerce in Hebron. Because of the street runs through an illegal Israeli settlement, it has been closed. Its shuttered storefronts are covered with spray-painted Jewish Stars of David.

When Israeli soldiers intervened, they arrested the Palestinian men and did not take any action against the settlers.

The second weekend of January also saw settlers cut down over 100 olive trees in two small villages near the West Bank city of Salfit.

Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved measures to curb settler violence last month, January’s incidents reflect Israeli authorities’ continued refusal to protect Palestinian civilians and their property.

Recent settler attacks also point to growing violence in the West Bank.

According a year-end report compiled by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), settler violence against Palestinians and their property went up 40 percent in 2011 compared to 2010. When compared to 2009, it rose 165 percent.

While settler violence is on the rise, it is not new. According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Israeli settlers killed 50 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza between September 2000 and June 2011. ...

"During hard times, we have survived off olive oil," says Ahmed Sourani from the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. "During the last war many people who couldn’t leave their homes had only bread and olive oil to sustain them for long periods."

Even during the first Intifadah (Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation), olives and olive oil were vital to survival. "They enabled many thousands of very poor Palestinian families to survive," recalls Sourani. "When the Israeli army imposes curfews on us, it is our main food source. Most students take za’atar (wild thyme) and olive oil sandwiches to school for their lunch."

This source of sustenance has been targeted by Israel over years. In November 2008, Oxfam reported that since 2000, 112,000 olive trees had been destroyed in the Gaza Strip.

"According to Israeli authorities, the ‘buffer zone’, an Israeli-imposed no-go zone prohibiting Palestinians from their land, is 300 meters from the Gaza-Israel Green Line border," says Sourani. "But in reality it extends well beyond 600 meters, encompassing 30 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land."

The UN cites areas of up to two kilometers into Gaza from the border rendered inaccessible due to Israel’s policy of shooting, shelling and intrusions into Gaza’s borderlands.

According to the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC), more than 42 percent of the 175,000 dunams (one dunam is roughly 1,000 square meters) of cultivable land in the Strip has been destroyed during Israeli invasions and operations. The World Health Organization reports that the last Israeli war on Gaza alone destroyed up to 60 percent of the agricultural industry.

Despite the systematic campaign of destroying olive trees and rendering farmland inaccessible, Sourani says that "some areas of Gaza still have olive trees that are hundreds of ...

The exchange of prisoners between enemies is often a prelude to political reconciliation. Unfortunately, the recent exchange between Israel and Hamas, in which the Islamist organization gained the lion’s share of more than 1,000 prisoners in exchange for the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, does not augur well for the chances of an Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Contrary to appearances, the deal is not a reflection of both sides’ interest in beginning a political rapprochement that might lead to the end of the Gaza siege and other confidence-building measures. This exchange reveals quite the opposite – that both parties are committed to their core values of resistance and confrontation.

For Israel, recovering Shalit was its way to uphold an ethos of unity in times of war, and to fulfill the army’s promise to its conscripts (and their families) that no soldier, dead or alive, would ever be left behind. The message was that Israel must remain mobilized and alert in a hostile environment, and that its survival depends on the cohesion of ...

It is a warm spring day as citizens go about their business. Colourful bougainvilleas climb the building housing the Yaffa Community Centre (YCC). Inside the centre’s kindergarten children play while older students attend a class at the media centre. A group of foreigners is touring the attractively decorated building and getting a brief introduction to its history. YCC, named after the city of Jaffa in Israel, was established in 1996 by a group of Palestinian intellectuals. It was established to teach the next generation of Palestinians about their culture, history and the Palestinian political struggle. It was also established to provide young Palestinians with a cultural outlet, a place for social activities, and equipping them with educational and vocational skills. In addition to the media centre and kindergarten the centre has a restaurant, a guesthouse, offers psycho-social counseling, drama, language and communication courses, and summer camps. The centre, situated in Balata refugee camp, and its activities might look like those of any youth centre anywhere in the world, but this centre has a bloody and bitter history. Balata refugee camp sits nestled among the mountains in the city of Nablus in the northern Palestinian West Bank. It has a population of approximately 26,000 cramped into one square kilometre, one of the most densely populated places on earth. The camp was established to house Palestinian refugees who either fled or were driven out of their former homes in Israel by Israeli military forces during Israel’s establishment in 1948. During the second Palestinian uprising, or Intifadah which erupted in 2000, Balata was considered a "hotbed of militancy" by the Israeli authorities with many leaders of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a militia affiliated to the Fatah political party in the West Bank, operating from the camp. Nightly raids by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), shootings, killings and arrests were the ...