According to the UN, the number of Palestinian #refugees, who were expelled from Palestinian villages and cities during the #Nakba to Gaza, is approximately 1.4 million out of a total population of over 2 million, constituting two-thirds of the population in the besieged enclave, which has been suffering a new Israeli Nakba for the past seven months.
Rajha Abu Khalifa is one of many refugees in Gaza, who are older than Israel.
A blistering heat wave has been toasting Asia for several weeks, resulting in hundreds of deaths and canceling schools across the region. A scientist for the World Weather Attribution, a meteorological research group, says only human-caused climate change could be responsible for the increased probability of extreme heat in places like the Philippines. “The heat wave exacerbated already precarious conditions faced by internally displaced people, migrants and those in refugee camps and conflict zones across West Asia,” the organization said in a new study. Read more from CBS News.
Displacement after displacement...the displacement of hundreds of families from eastern Rafah following warnings from the occupation army to evacuate immediately.
"There is no mention of the UK supreme court ruling in November that found there were substantial grounds for believing asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced a real risk of having their claims wrongly assessed or being returned to their country of origin to face persecution."
“It’s a strange place to come for a photo opportunity on the day your flagship UK policy gets signed into law. Maybe Cleverly wanted to go unnoticed – it’s not his initiative, and he probably knows it’s bullshit anyway. Of course the Rwanda plan won’t affect what we do here. If anything it is galvanising,” he said.
"The immigration debate has become so warped, though, that opening safe, legal routes is seen by many as the equivalent of an “open border”, while mass deportation is viewed, in Sunak’s words, as “compassionate”. There is nothing compassionate or constructive about the performative cruelty that now stands for immigration policy"
Kenan Malik on how govt policy, far from being a deterrent, promotes the small boats in the Channel.
If you're Malaysian or in Malaysia you're probably aware of Pichaeats, a social enterprise that provides opportunities for refugee families here to make an income by cooking their foods from home. They've just launched a fundraiser to help six families of their cooks network to leave Gaza, by covering the cost of crossing the border to Egypt (quoted here to be USD8k per adult). Contribute if you can, share if you please: https://www.sedunia.me/campaigns/gaza-misi-menyelamat-6-sekeluarga-life-saving-evacuation-for-6-families/about (text is in English)
A drone view shows the renovated burial ground for refugees and migrants during its inauguration in the village of Kato Tritos, on the island of Lesbos, Greece. REUTERS/Elias Marcou
Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.
David Littleproud has indeed very little to be proud of.
When he says; "The Israeli government is only doing what its people are expecting of them.” does he really think this makes it ok to kill civilians, aid workers and little children?
kids, I'm doing Ride London again this year, raising money for the brilliant Bike Project, who do up bikes and give them, along with training and support, to refugees and asylum seekers. I'm WAY out of shape, having had my slowest start to the year cycling since before COVID. Here's the link to sponsor me, if you'd like to help support them and motivate me :) xxx
There are many many of us Jews that don't feel that our own safety depends on the control or suppression of others. While many of the refugees who came to Palestine as pioneers after the Holocaust had intentions to live peacefully in harmony with the Palestinians*, almost every action of the Israeli government since it was founded has been to treat Palestinians just as badly as we had been treated in Europe.
The ultimate consequence of this has been to harm and dispossess several generations of Palestinians which is extremely effective at ensuring they continue to resent Israel's existence and feel that they must do anything they can by any means necessary to ensure the survival of their people. If Israel can't exist peacefully with Palestinians, what gives Jews the greater "right" to the land than they have? How can we go from being refugees with no safe place to go, to violently forcing the exact same situation upon another people just for the gall of wanting to continue to exist with their families on their own ancestral land?
Even if I was a Zionist I would think that the last 6 months were creating long term curse on the country of Israel by creating a whole new generation of Palestinians with nothing but rage for Israel and nothing to lose. You can look at even the most sanitized accounts of the assault on Gaza see absolute cruelty on the part of the IDF as well as no concern for human life or international law.
(*) For anyone interested in the politics of Israel's founding, I highly recommend I. F. Stone's book Underground to Palestine about the heroic (as he tells it) journey of Jewish refugees trying to reach Palestine in 1946. In 1978 it was republished with 2 new essays from him. One about how Zionism was hijacked by Jews with no regard for Palestinians' rights or well-being, and the other about how it has become completely impossible to have rational conversations that are critical of Israel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_to_Palestine
My #Dad, aged 27, at #RefugeeCamp in #Indonesia - 1979. Photo was taken by humanitarian aid workers to help #VietnamWar#refugees get sponsored to go to Europe, Canada, USA & Australia, under asylum.
My Dad passed away June 9, 2023.
He went through hell & back, several times. He beat almost all odds. Until #covid infection in hospital in 2022. #LongCovid killed him last year.
Which is in fact because I have just finished #AliSmith's 'Spring'. It is a beautiful novel. Part 1 is particularly brilliant. I'm not sure about its flirtation with magical realism in part 2. We need a writer who can find hope without recourse to magic.
On the other hand, it is more mythological realism than magical. We can believe in myth making and story telling. What is real is not the mundane, but the eternal or, better, the eternal in the mundane. Smith is on the side of the angels because she believes in art, in myth in story telling. Spring, with its promise of life, is contrasted with winter which is dark and unenchanted. It is also art and the mundane. Smith is with Chaucer not Elliott. So am I.
What I particularly like is the motif that none of this is about you. It serves to cut the privileged down to size, but the moral extends. The story isn't Florence's or the Machines. It is a shared world and 'world' here is truely all that is, was, will be or even could have been the case.