By Ramzy Baroud On 16 September, I visited South Africa, a country where many Palestinians have always felt welcomed, if not overwhelmed by the degree of genuine and meaningful solidarity. While having the honour to address many audiences in six major cities, I have also learned a great deal. An important and sobering lesson is that while apartheid laws can be dismissed in a day, economic apartheid and massive inequality can linger on for many years. Thanks to my interactions with many South African intellectuals, activists and ordinary folk, I learned not to romanticise the South African struggle, a crucial lesson for those of…

By Diana Block Reaffirming Internationalism in the Twenty-first Century In March 2019 I traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa to attend a conference – Teaching Palestine: Pedagogical Praxis and the Indivisibility of Justice. The conference was co-sponsored by the AMED (Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies) program of San Francisco State University (SFSU), AMEC (Afro-Middle East Centre) in Johannesburg, the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, and An-Najah University, in occupied Palestine.  Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, Director of the AMED program, had initiated the Teaching Palestine project in 2016, ahead of the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s imperialist Balfour Declaration, as an emancipatory pedagogical and advocacy project that would be…

By Ramzy Baroud Five years after spearheading what is inaptly referred to as a ‘government of national reconciliation’, Palestinian Prime Minister, Rami Hamdallah, has finally resigned. “We put our government at the disposal of President Mahmoud Abbas and we welcome the recommendations of the Fatah Central Committee to form a new government,” Hamdallah tweeted, shortly after Abbas had ordered him to dismantle the government. Since the Palestinian Authority was founded in 1994, 17 governments have been formed, and every single one of them was dominated by the Fatah party, the largest faction within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Fatah’s monopoly over Palestinian…

By Marwa Fatafta (This article was first published by Al-Shabaka - The Palestinian Policy Network) Palestinians recently ranked corruption as the second largest problem they face after the economic crisis – higher than the Israeli occupation, which ranked third. Indeed, Palestinians generally view Palestinian Authority (PA) officials as a self-serving, elitist group disconnected from the Palestinian national struggle and the daily sufferings of the people. Such perceptions are fostered by the failure of the Oslo Accords, the death of the Palestinian statehood project, and the continued fragmentation of political leadership in the context of Israel’s ongoing oppressive occupation and its violations of Palestinians’ fundamental rights.1 Despite this…