Ramzy Baroud is an American-Palestinian journalist and writer. He is the author of several books on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Ramzy Baroud is an American-Palestinian journalist and writer. He is the author of several books on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
His father came from the village of Bayt Daras, just south of Jaffa. In 1948, when his father was 9 years old, the Baroud family was driven out and finished up as refugees in the Gaza Strip [1] His father became an autodidact with a particular passion for Russian literature. [2]
Baroud was born and raised in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, where from the age of 6, he attended an UNWRA Elementary School for Boys. [3] [4] The school was separated from Bureiji refugee camp by an Israeli military encampment, whose soldiers frequently handcuffed and detained students for displaying pictures of the Palestinian flag. [3] [lower-alpha 1] One of his UNWRA schoolmates, Raed Muanis, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers when they sighted him running with one such small flag. [3] As a high-school student he joined other youths in throwing stones as IDF soldiers shot their way when the First Intifada broke out. In was experience that enabled him to become fully aware of his identity. [lower-alpha 2]
He grew up resenting that his Palestinian identity was denied. His Israeli-issued travel document described him as having an "undefined" nationality. [3]
He has recounted much of his family's history, within the wider historical context of the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem since 1948, in his memoir, My Father was a Freedom Fighter which has been highly praised by Richard Falk [lower-alpha 3] and by Gilad Atzmon who called it a "heartbreaking" "masterpiece" which narrates "a tragic journey of a rural self-sufficient population that is driven into total dispossession, humiliation and absolute poverty." [2]
In 1999, dissatisfied with the failure of mainstream outlets, including Palestinian news sources, to cover the day by day realities of Palestinian lives, in September he began a personal blog The Palestinian Chronicle, which became a newspaper of which he remains chief editor. [5] [6] He has served as managing editor of Middle East Eye, editor-in-chief of the Brunei Times and as a deputy managing editor of Aljazeera online and once headed Al Jazeera's English's Research and Studies department. He has also taught mass communication at the Malaysia Campus of Australia's Curtin University of Technology. [7] In 2015 he received a PhD in Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter with a doctorate on a "People's History of Palestine", under the direction of Ilan Pappé. [3]
Baroud subscribes to the One-state solution and actively supports the One Democratic State Campaign. [5]
Baroud is the author of five books. some prefaced with, or containing afterwords by Kathleen Christison and Bill Christison, Jennifer Loewenstein, Khalida Jarrar and Richard Falk.
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Palestinian refugees are citizens of Mandatory Palestine, and their descendants, who fled or were expelled from their country over the course of the 1948 Palestine war and during the 1967 Six-Day War. Most Palestinian refugees live in or near 68 Palestinian refugee camps across Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In 2019 more than 5.6 million Palestinian refugees were registered with the United Nations.
Camps are set up by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to accommodate Palestinian refugees registered with UNRWA, who fled or were expelled during the 1948 Palestinian expulsion and flight after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War or in the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, and their patrilineal descendants. There are 68 Palestinian refugee camps, 58 official and 10 unofficial, ten of which were established after the Six-Day War while the others were established in 1948 to 1950s.
Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born British jazz saxophonist, novelist, political activist, and writer.
Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian, political scientist, and former politician. He is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Pappé was also a board member of the Israeli political party Hadash, and was a candidate on the party list in the 1996 and 1999 Israeli legislative elections.
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Bayt Daras was a Palestinian Arab town located 32 kilometers (20 mi) northeast of Gaza and approximately 50 meters (160 ft) above sea level, which was depopulated in 1948.
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Nuseirat is a Palestinian refugee camp located in the middle of the Gaza Strip, five kilometers north-east of Deir al-Balah. The refugee camp is in the Deir al-Balah Governorate, Gaza Strip. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the refugee camp had a population of 31,747 and the surrounding Nuseirat municipality had a population of 54,851 in 2017. The camp was established after the 1948 Palestinian expulsion during the 1948 Palestine war.
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Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War against the Palestinians is a 2010 collection of interviews and essays from Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé that examine Israel's Operation Cast Lead and attempts to place it into the context of Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The book was edited by Frank Barat, who had conducted his first e-mail interview on the subject with Chomsky in 2005, as a result of his joint dialogue with Chomsky and Pappé, previously published in French as Le Champ du possible, which forms the heart of the work.
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Samah Sabawi is a Palestinian playwright, scholar, commentator and poet. Her plays include Cries from the Land (2003), Three Wishes (2008), Tales of a City by the Sea (2014) and Them (2019). Sabawi has received two Drama Victoria Awards, a Green Room Award, and a place in the VCE Drama curriculum for the latter two plays. Since 2014, Tales of a City by the Sea has been staged over 100 times in theaters and schools around the world. THEM will be remounted in July 2021, with a premiere at the Arts Centre Melbourne before it tours through Shepparton, Bendigo, and Sydney.
Omar Barghouti is a founding committee member of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and a co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He received the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017.
Ali Hasan Abunimah is a Palestinian-American journalist who has been described as "the leading American proponent of a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict". A resident of Chicago who contributes regularly to publications such as the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, he has served as the vice-president on the board of directors of the Arab American Action Network, is a fellow at the Palestine Center, and is a co-founder of The Electronic Intifada website. He has appeared on many television discussion programs on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and other networks, and in a number of documentaries about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, including Collecting Stories from Exile: Chicago Palestinians Remember 1948 (1999).
The Rafah massacre occurred on November 12, 1956, during Israel's occupation of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Protectorate following the Suez Crisis. The town of Rafah, lying on the Egypt–Gaza border, had been one of two invasion points during the initial incursion by the Israel Defense Forces into the Strip on November 1.
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In the Israel–Hamas war, as part of the bombing and invasion of Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has conducted numerous airstrikes in densely populated Palestinian refugee camps in both the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
