Beautiful Souls Summary

She realised that people of any age will do anything to assist what they are fighting for. Furthermore, Stack lived through a portion of the second Palestinian intifada. During this struggle countless suicide bombers came by day and Israeli tanks acquired Palestinian land in the West Bank by night. Stack describes this period of time as complete chaos, where, “violence fed violence. Blood washed blood”. Stack knew a Palestinian woman who was a victim of the brutality during the first intifada. She was tortured during the days of this time period for being part of an underground Palestinian political movement. Stack’s Palestinian friend was “tortured for days, beaten, abused, threatened with rape” by a barbaric Israeli interrogator. Although she faced strong hostility from the interrogator, she also faced kindness in the form of an anonymous Israeli man who “sat with her hour after dark hour” and attempted to help her get through the pain. This shows that an individual can interact with both negative and positive things throughout a conflict. Stack later faced a conflict when she wrote a feature about how the body parts of suicide bombers had caused a policy debate in Israel. This feature caused Stack to receive hundreds of hate mails regarding as to how she “humanized [suicide bombers]” by writing about them as actual people with families.

I rolled out of bed to the familiar sound of air raid sirens. Half asleep, I slipped on my shoes and followed my dad. Our shelter was a building originally fortified as a synagogue. Since the walls were extra thick, it had been converted as a shelter. The war had started with the kidnapping and murder or three Jewish boys. In response, the Jews kidnapped a Palestinian boy and murdered him as well. From there, it escalated quickly. The Palestinian’s were soon firing rockets into Jerusalem. We were staying right outside Jerusalem and often had to wake up between two and three almost every morning.

When one discusses the Arab-Israeli conflict, the individual notices that there are different narratives based on the time period and location of where the situation is being addressed. Generally, the narrative points out the plight that civilians are subject and have been subject to in the past, and uses it to justify their future actions against the opposing side. However, for Palestinians and Israelis, the narrative differs because they have been in such close proximity with each other, and they are the main protagonists of the conflict. “On the Attitude Toward Children in Wartime” by Dahlia Ravikovitch is a poem that focuses on the topic of children in wartime, specifically Palestinian children who were still living in the land. In the

Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-In-Law: Ramallah Diaries tells the story of every Palestinian's struggle under Israeli occupation. The sense of humor in Amiry’s memoir is what makes it a unique book. She writes about the altercations with Israeli soldiers, the fear and panic that come from being under constant violence, surveillance and curfews, living in a land where it is easier to obtain a legal ID card for your dog than it is for you to obtain one for yourself, and life in general. Amiry uses comicality to lighten what are often very heavy scenes, but still manages to convey their seriousness (143). The combination of frankness, humor, and pain all contribute to attracting attention to matters important to the Palestinians and the difficult

Life or Land? A Critical Review of Gershom Gorenberg’s A Bitter Prize: Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Collins and Lapierre create both a monumental historical work and an exciting page-turner in their book O Jerusalem. The book begins in 1947 at the announcement of the United Nation’s decision to partition the British mandate of Palestine into both a Jewish state and an Arab Palestinian state. The book ends with a ceasefire the following year. Using hundreds of personal interviews, unpublished diaries, papers, and photographs, the authors chronologically tell this tale through the eyes of the people that lived through this tumultuous time. The authors break this massive book into four parts. These four sections are roughly divided by the announcement of the partition, the rising conflict, the actual conflict, and its conclusion.

The War of 1967 concluded with Israeli control of Jordanian territories that included Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In “Young Palestinian Voices from East Jerusalem,” Road AbuZayyad claims how the Israeli government’s influence and control in East Jerusalem affected the lives of the Palestinians living in the region. In “The Birth of Core Issues: The West Bank and East Jerusalem Under Israeli Administration,” Moshe Elad recounts how issues, predominantly concerning the Arab and Jewish conflict, arose with the implementation of an Israeli Administration after the War of 1967. The articles share how the Israeli control of East Jerusalem cultivated the conflict, however, each article has a focus on different aspects of the Israeli government that created the Arab and Jewish conflict. While Elad discusses how the Israeli Administration increased Arab-Israeli conflict, Abuzayyad focuses on how Israelization, the capture of territory and enforcement of Jewish law, created these conflicts. Additionally, in this paper, I will summarize each of the articles and evaluate them based on their organization, quality of evidence, and perspective. While AbuZayyad effectively establishes his thesis through the use of relevant personal accounts, experiences, and descriptions, Elad evaluates the administration through a historical perspective but fails to adequately prove his thesis due to his lack of relevant evidence and convoluted structure.

On July 16th, 2014 NBC journalist Ayman Mohyeldin was playing soccer with a group of local boys on a Gaza beach outside his hotel. Moments after he left, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) pelted the beach with missiles, killing four of the young boys. This story is not exceptional for its horrific violence but rather for the coverage it received in the mainstream media. As journalist Rula Jebreal noted during an interview on MSNBC after the incident, “Because of the money behind it… We are disgustingly biased when it comes to [the Palestinian Israeli conflict]...” The incident’s mere existence in the mainstream media, then, ultimately hinges on a question of grievability: are Palestinian children’s lives now grievable? According to the

Contemporary outsiders consider Israel and Palestine 's bleak circumstance with fatigue, apathy and lack commitment to support further resolutions [3]. This paralysis taps into my reactions as a young adult researching the holocaust which were not diplomatically measured. I was full of horror, disbelief and determined never to stand by silent; silent, facilitating such a thing to occur again. Well, it has not been that simple and enormous transgressions have happened again and again!

Little did Israel know that the Six Day War would turn into a fifty year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank? During this occupation the Israeli Government placed settlement and settlers in the disputed territory for the purpose of keeping a buffer between Israel and the Palestinians as well as using the settlements and settlers as a means to keeping Gaza and the West Bank. During 2005 the Israeli government began removing settlers and turning the land back over to the Palestinian’s with the thought that holding on to it had become too big of a problem and it had become to taxing to the Israeli government (Monitor, 2015).

Fueled by the prospect of becoming heroes and lacking the maturity to understand the dangers they are seeing, young Palestinians are easily provoked to enter into harms way. The children on the front lines of this uprising are not accidental. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has intentionally provoked children to drop their toys and pick up stones against the occupying forces of Israel. A number of Palestinian teenagers, some as young as 13 and 14 have gone on suicide missions because the societal conditioning has deceived children into believing that combat and a heroic Death for Allah are expected of them. The subject matter of the PA national curriculum and state-owned media coach the children into armed conflict. The objective; to irrevocably plant seeds of hatred into entire generations. The children are almost conditioned to take up collective behavior that conforms to violent ideological social movements. For many in the Palestinian society the one goal in life is death. The PA leadership consistently accuses Israel of violating human rights for the killing of innocent children while they are fully responsible for placing the children in the heat of the battle. This is a cynical attempt to undermine human rights tensions.

Since the last shots were fired on June 11, 1967, countless writers, journalists, scholars, and politicians, have attempted to decode the complex circumstances that brought about the six-day war, which radically changed the Arab-Israeli relationship forever. A myriad of explanations of the different aspects of the war have been offered in an attempt to uncover the events that resulted in Israel’s greatest military victory they would ever achieve, and the greatest humiliation the Arabs would ever suffer, in their more than one hundred years of intractable conflict. In recent years, professional historians have also joined the investigation. Since forty nine years have passed, archives relevant to the period have been uncovered and many of the

This essay analyses the killing of Hadeel al-Hashlamouna, as well as the aftermath, also putting it into a wider context, with “The Iron Wall” by Vladimir Jabotinsky. The killing of al-Hashlamouna is interpreted as a way to convince the Palestinians that they cannot fight against Israel. However, it will be argued that Jabotinsky did not consider what would happen if the Palestinians gave up hope of fighting against the existence of Israel, but Israelis did not recognise that. As we will see, that has happened. Thus it has created the situation in which Israel is keeping up the iron wall with brutal violence while the Palestinians, then, are fighting against the iron wall itself rather than the existence of Israel. Therefore the brutal killing

Israeli occupation controls all aspects of my life as a Palestinian. I live in a country that is occupied by the most battle trained armed forces in the world. I have no power over my own daily life. I always live in a state of fear. The fear of losing people I love or even losing myself. This major problem has been faced by Palestinians for more than 67 years. As a young Palestinian female who has the opportunity to study aboard, It’s a must that I try to convey the truth and let people know that while all the unjust and outrageous things that happen to us, we still stand in front of the occupation with rocks in one hand and education in the other.

Yesterday, May 15th was the day in which Palestinians all over the world were reminded of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba Day which took its name from the 700,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. As these Palestinians were pushed forcibly out of their homes as Zionist leaders proclaimed the State of israel with the help of the British. To every story there are two sides, in this essay I shall present my previous knowledge as an Arab and the information I have gained from my history textbook on the Arab israeli Conflict.