Author: Jamal Kanj

Eleven days of another asymmetrical Palestine/Israel confrontation. America’s most sophisticated technology left behind a trail of devastation, including the life of more than 60 children, and a generation born under years of Israeli blockade with little hope for a future.

In Gaza, mothers perished under rubbles with their children, are called the lucky ones. They don’t live to grieve the loss of their progeny.

Israel’s open range "chock and awe" aimed to inflect maximum pain, targeted residential towers in the City of Gaza, hovels in refugee camps, COVID testing clinics, cut power and halted water treatment plants. To hide the extent of its atrocities, Israeli jets flattened the tower for the only independent media center connecting the besieged Strip to outside world.

On the Israeli side, and according to official statements, Palestinian resistance fired approximately 4,300 rockets. The Iron Dome, financed by American taxpayers, intercepted 90% of the rockets and Israeli military allowed some to fall in open space.

Continue reading “Gaza Must Prepare for Israel’s Next War”

Palestinian diaspora narratives are broad. Sheikh Jarrah is the story of Palestinian families, in one East Jerusalem neighborhood, under the Israeli occupation. In contrast, my Diaspora journey traces a family of sheep herders and farmers in the Galilee pushed to a Northern Lebanese refugee camp in 1948 and denied a return to their homes. By miraculous fate, I ended up living in the United States and became a registered civil engineer in the state of California. Through my own life experience growing up as a stateless refugee, I can appreciate the unfortunate threat of expulsion facing Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah.

The fight over the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is a microcosm of the Palestine question. While war and fear were the main Israeli instruments to drive out my parents and more than 700,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages in 1948, current Israeli policies use legal euphemisms to change the demographic makeup of Palestinian communities as in the case of Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

Sheikh Jarrah, located a little over one mile north of the Old City, is named after Saladin’s physician. Jarrah means surgeon in Arabic. The community, originally built around the tomb of the 13th-century surgeon, grew to become among the first and most affluent Christian and Muslim Palestinian communities outside the walls of the Old City. Following the 1948 war, Sheikh Jarrah expanded with the arrival of Palestinian refugees expelled from the Talbiya neighborhood in occupied West Jerusalem and other villages.

Continue reading “Sheikh Jarrah Neighborhood, a Microcosm of the Palestine Question”