Category: Current Op-Ed

Analysis on Palestinian history, Middle East politics, and the ongoing struggle for justice.

Category: Current Op-Ed

Sheikh Jarrah is a microcosm of the Palestine question

May 21, 2021 at 11:27 am Palestinians stage a demonstration held for the 73rd anniversary of Nakba, on 15 May 2021 in Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. [Mostafa Alkharouf – Anadolu Agency] by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Palestinian diaspora narratives are broad. Sheikh Jarrah is the story of Palestinian families,

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Israel’s apartheid character…

February 28, 2016 at 12:57 pm by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom created a maelstrom in Israel by merely demanding a “credible investigation into deaths of Palestinians in order to clarify and bring about possible accountability.” Israel declared the Swedish official persona non grata for daring to

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The most dangerous Palestinian…

February 14, 2016 at 12:52 pm by Jamal Kanj jamalkk In the last week’s column, I wrote on the banned love story from the Israeli high school reading list. The Israeli education ministry claimed that young Jewish students might not comprehend “the significance of miscegenation” for “maintaining the national-ethnic identity

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Forbidden love tales in Israel…

February 7, 2016 at 12:32 pm by Jamal Kanj jamalkk How can a two-year-old novel become a best seller? Censorship is the short answer. The most important question is, however, why would the “Jewish democracy” censor a love fiction between a Jew and non-Jew? The banned book Borderlife was based

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Rights of Palestinian Israeli citizens…

January 31, 2016 at 12:59 pm by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Palestinian civic organisations inside Israel have declared January 30 the Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Israeli citizens. Israel was established in 1948 on the ruins of more than 500 native towns and villages and the forceful displacement of approximately 780,000

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Israeli self-inflicted hate…

October 25, 2015 at 1:37 pm by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Haftom Zarhum, a 29-year-old Eritrean, was lynched by Jewish Israelis simply because he looked different. After being shot in the legs, a mob circled him like hyenas over a bleeding prey throwing a bench over his head and chanting the

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Israel’s haunted temple…

October 13, 2015 at 9:45 am by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Tension in Jerusalem has escalated to dangerous levels in response to deliberate Israeli provocation at Haram Al Sharif or the Noble Sanctuary. This fragile situation was further worsened by new Israeli government decrees to blow up Palestinian homes and grant

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The birth of the European refugee crisis

September 6, 2015 at 11:29 am by Jamal Kanj jamalkk Many years ago I read Men in the Sun, a novel by late Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. He, along with his young niece Lamis, were blown up by Israel in 1972. In the book, Kanafani told the tale of three

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A day of reckoning, 39 years later…

March 30, 2015 at 8:44 am by Jamal Kanj jamalkk If you are like me, I am sure you are tired of reading about the results of the last Israeli election. Or on Benjamin Netanyahu’s Hebrew pledge running up to the election and his flip-flopped English version after winning the

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External Publications

Jamal Kanj

Jamal Kanj (jamalkanj.com) is the author of Children of Catastrophe: Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international publications.