Raja Shehadeh

Este archivo solo abarca los artículos del autor incorporados a este sitio a partir del 1 de diciembre de 2006. Para fechas anteriores realice una búsqueda entrecomillando su nombre.

Palestinians walking in Gaza City’s al-Rimal district following Israeli airstrikes there, October 10, 2023

MundoOriente Próximo

We were waiting for the plumbers who had promised to come early on Saturday morning to our house in Ramallah when the news broke of Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel. When they arrived they were a team of two. The younger couldn’t stop watching the video clips Hamas was posting. I could see him smile every time a new one arrived of Palestinian gunmen tearing down the walls and gates that have hemmed in Gaza for the last sixteen years. There’s an inevitable euphoria as the imprisoned anywhere break their chains and escape their incarceration.

The eldest was more somber and able to concentrate on his work.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinian protesters run from teargas fired by Israeli security forces near Nablus in the occupied West Bank, April 2021. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

It was early April 1988, at the height of the first intifada, and the hills were awash with spring flowers. I took the professor and activist Noam Chomsky to visit the Palestinian village of Beita near Nablus. He wanted to speak to the villagers about a recent incident in which a group of Israeli settlers from Elon Moreh, 10km (6 miles) from Beita, had got into a confrontation with some villagers while out hiking. Two of the Palestinian villagers and one of the Israeli settlers were shot and killed. The army initially blamed the Palestinians for the settler’s death. It emerged later that she – like the two dead villagers – had been killed by a bullet fired by one of the men guarding the settlers.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinians and Israeli soldiers during protests against an agreement between Israel and the UAE in the West Bank city of Hebron, September 2020. Photograph: Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA

MundoOriente Próximo,

More than a quarter of a century after Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn, Israel has managed to turn its occupation of Palestinian territory from a burden into an asset. What was for so long a liability – the flagrant violation of international law – has now become a valued commodity. Understanding this development is key to explaining why the Israelis are making peace with two distant Gulf states but not their closest neighbours, the Palestinians – without whom there can be no real peace.

Israel has learned in recent years how to manage the occupation in perpetuity with minimal cost.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinian demonstrators protesting against Jewish settlements, in the West Bank on September 13, 2019. Credit Issam Rimawi/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

Last week, ahead of the parliamentary elections in Israel this Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that if re-elected, he would annex up to one-third of the occupied West Bank.

His announcement prompted widespread international condemnation. But for most Palestinians such declarations mean nothing. We’ve heard many statements of support over the years, and nothing ever changes. Cynicism is widespread; by now, many of us would prefer straight talk. As Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote recently, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s plan: “Let him turn the reality in this territory into a political reality, without hiding it any longer. The time has come for truth.”…  Seguir leyendo »

A Palestinian protester slinging shots at Israeli forces after a demonstration against Jewish settlements in the West Bank in February. Credit Jaafar Ashtiyeh / Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo

Israel is holding an election on Tuesday, and Palestinian communities in the occupied territories are not following it with much interest. This is not because whoever is elected will not have a strong impact on our lives. It’s because none of the leading candidates has a program for peace. The main contenders are committed to maintaining the illegal Jewish settlements that have been established in the West Bank. They do not seek to end the occupation.

Israel has not formally annexed the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, but it lords over these lands like a sovereign power. Or worse. It has seized tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority, which is supposed to administer the West Bank; it keeps Gaza under siege.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinian protesters fleeing tear gas smoke in Ramallah on Friday. Credit Abbas Momani/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

MundoOriente Próximo,

My nephew Aziz, a bright young man who returned to Ramallah this summer after studying in London, called me on Thursday morning, the day after the decision by the United States to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“I don’t know what can be done,” he said, with obvious pain in his voice. I didn’t have much to propose. I had just heard an announcement from the nearby mosque calling on people to go to the center of town at noon. There we could gather to denounce the American decision. I suggested to my nephew that we go together and see what was happening.…  Seguir leyendo »

Palestinians waiting to pass through an Israeli checkpoint near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Credit Mohamad Torokman / Reuters

MundoOriente Próximo

Every conflict has its heroes. In Palestine they’re the taxi drivers.

After living for half a century under occupation, I can no longer endure the anxiety of what might appear on the road, whether it is angry drivers bottlenecked at the hundreds of barriers scattered through the West Bank or the pathetic boys who throw themselves at your car pretending to clean the windshield, asking for money. The plight of these boys invariably makes me hate myself, forcing me to confront the extent to which my society has failed. Then, of course, there is the indignity of having to wait on the whim of an Israeli teenage soldier to motion me to pass.…  Seguir leyendo »

A view of the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adumim (foreground) and Mishor Adumim (behind), as seen from Palestinian lands in the West Bank on Feb. 7. (Jim Hollander / European Pressphoto Agency)

MundoOriente Próximo,

If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it”, Daniel Reisner concluded in 2009, after a decade serving as head of the Israel Defense Force’s international law department. “An action that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries”.

As proof, Reiner cited the “targeted killings” Israel conducted continually until the practice was, in his words, “in the center of the bounds of legitimacy”. The Israeli government’s latest attempt at legitimization takes the form of a new law passed by Parliament on Monday. The bill retroactively legalizes government expropriation of privately owned Palestinian land on which settlements or outposts were built “in good faith or at the state’s instruction”.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

Moments of hope are rare in this miserable, interminable Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so archaic in its colonial character, so postmodern in the methods Israel uses to oppress the Palestinians living under its rule.

There was one such moment around the time Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords in 1993. Soon after, the Israeli filmmaker Esther Dar contacted my mother proposing to make a documentary film about her and some friends, two Palestinian Arabs and two Israeli Jews who had spent four years together at an Anglican boarding school in Jerusalem, starting in 1939, during the British Mandate in Palestine.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo, ,

Tout dépend d'où on part. Il y a dix ans, la loi n'interdisait pas aux citoyens israéliens de pénétrer dans les villes palestiniennes de la Cisjordanie, et la bande de Gaza n'était pas assiégée comme elle l'est aujourd'hui. Il est bien plus facile d'imposer votre définition du peuple que vous avez ghettoïsé si vous n'autorisez pas vos citoyens à juger par eux-mêmes. Soixante-dix ans auparavant, sous le mandat britannique, il existait un certain nombre de villes et villages palestiniens dont la population était mixte, à la fois juive et arabe. En remontant encore plus loin dans le temps, on s'aperçoit que sous l'Empire ottoman, il n'y avait aucune frontière dans toute la méditerranée orientale : ni entre les Etats-nations arabes (Syrie, Jordanie, Liban), ni avec l'état juif d'Israël.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoOriente Próximo,

I can remember the appearance of the hills around Ramallah in 1979, before any Jewish settlement came to be established there. In the spring of that year I walked north from Ramallah, where I live, to the nearby village of A'yn Qenya and up the pine-forested hill. A gazelle leapt ahead of me. When I reached the top I could see hills spread below me like crumpled blue velvet, with the hamlets of Janiya and Deir Ammar huddled between its folds. On top of the highest hill in the distance stood the village of Ras Karkar with its centuries-old citadel that dominated the area during Ottoman times.…  Seguir leyendo »