Sumud
Another sunny Ramadan morning in Rafah We head out to meet some people in Block J It, too, had been battered during Israel’s Operation Root Canal A few weeks before we internationals arrived We attract…
Category: Palestine
Faces
I wrote last year of the ‘third way,’ and of the daily living being the test of sumud. It is a test I failed, perhaps because I didn’t have the kind of hope necessary for…
“I refuse to give academics more importance than being a human being responding to other human beings in need”
Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University, where I read (with several SLU undergrads) from Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine for the Social Justice and Advocacy Series; Friday afternoon 30 October 2015 When Grades…
A Pope (Opening Up the Imagination)
Given the visit this week of Pope Francis, I want to share a short chapter from my new novel, Dear Layla Welcome to Palestine. This chapter was originally written in 2010 during the pontificate of Benedict…
With My Own Eyes: Israel and the Occupied Territories 1967-1973
An attorney who defended Palestinians in Israeli courts, Felicia Langer was an exemplar of accompaniment and focused, righteous indignation. In With My Own Eyes, she recounts some of her experiences in the first years of the…
Appeal for Gaza
Norman Finkelstein has been calling on people to make a donation to al-Awda Hospital in Gaza in the hopes of raising $100,000. Please consider making a donation of $10 if you can. One of the…
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand/2
Overcoming Speechlessness is a short book on poet and novelist Alice Walker’s travels to Rwanda, Congo, and Palestine where she bears witness and attends to heartbreaking tales of atrocity, devastation, and cruelty. Yet, she is…
Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism
Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West. Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary maven of suspicion when…
An Option for “Unworthy Victims”
On Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Year First published in the National Catholic Reporter, fall 1997 Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and…
Burning Children and the Duty to Resist
In May 1968 Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan wrote a statement on behalf of the Catonsville Nine as to why they were performing an act of civil disobedience in protest of the Vietnam War. It reads,…