PALESTINE - ISRAEL - JORDAN - SINAI

Off the beaten track tours • Visit sites • Meet locals • Discuss Human Rights & Politics

More than just a Relic of the Past – Yiddish in Israel

By Miri –  Yiddish refers to a primarily Germanic language containing elements of Romance, Slavic, as well as a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, which is written in the Hebrew alphabet. The language is thought of as having originated in the tenth century in the German Rhineland and from there spread through Bavaria towards the […]

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Politicising International Aid to Palestine

By Miri –  The concept of “aid” usually invokes a whole lot of positive, altruistic and humanitarian associations, yet after decades of money flowing from the global North to the South, international aid to so called “underdeveloped” countries has come under increasing criticism. Many claim that rather than serving its alleged beneficiaries, international aid primarily serves […]

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Travability in Palestine and Israel

By Miri – The myth that people with disabilities travel less than the general population is slowly being dismantled as the demand for accessible travel services globally steadily increases. Research shows that the value of the inclusive tourism sector in 2008 was at no less than 11%, and should now be even higher. As such, […]

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Palestinian Music – Beyond the “World Music” Label

By Miri –  The iconic Fairuz Music from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East is commonly subsumed under the label “world music”, a category created by media and record industries to diversify the Euro-American market in order to sell more music. In recent years, the Western music market was in fact at least […]

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The Politics of Archaeology in Israel

By Miri – Much of Palestine’s/Israel’s appeal to tourists stems from it constituting the claimed historical site of many of the stories of the holy scriptures and tourists come in flocks to see the numerous excavation sites, many of which seem to confirm the narrative of the bible. But can the material remains that archaeologists […]

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An Introduction to Messianic Judaism

By Miri –  According to Messianic Jewish believers, a Messianic Jew is “a person who was born Jewish or converted to Judaism, who is a genuine believer in Yeshua [Jesus], and who continues to acknowledge his or her Jewishness.” While most Jews and Christians would agree that the belief in Jesus as the Messiah constitutes […]

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Anti-Semitism in the Middle East

By Miri –  There is a common saying that Arab people by definition cannot be perpetrators of anti-Semitism for they are Semites themselves. If we look at the etymology of the word this is obviously true, as the term “Semitic” actually only refers to a language group, that includes among others also Arabic. If we […]

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Back to Buber – Thoughts on Binationalism

By Miri –   In light of unhalted settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank and Jerusalem, by now housing almost 5% of the overall Israeli population, the two state solution has increasingly been declared as dead. As a consequence voices advocating a binational state as the only viable alternative are getting louder. This does […]

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Scrutinizing Normalization

By Miri –  According to Aziz Abu Sarah “there are as many definitions [of normalization] as there are Palestinians themselves”. Normalization, according to him, developed into a catch-all argument against any cooperative effort with Israel, ranging from the relations between Arab states and Israel, to having any contact whatsoever with Israelis, or even Jews on […]

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“Bienvenue a Israel” – French Immigration to Israel

By Miri –  Strolling down some of the busier streets that run parallel to the sea shore in Tel Aviv’s bourgeois North one easily finds a number of small businesses, hairdressers, cosmeticians and so on displaying signs in their windows saying “Nous parlons Francais”. Similarly, passing coffee shops and restaurants in that same area one […]

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Palestinian Cinema – “A Stateless Cinema of the Most Serious National Consequences”

By Miri –   Like Palestinian artistic and cultural forms of expression in general, Palestinian cinema is “structurally exilic”, meaning its actors are spread across different places, with limited means of communication and collaboration. As such the cinematic approaches of Palestinian film makers, just like their backgrounds, differ considerably, yet writer Nana Asfour asserts that “[w]hat […]

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The Ancient Goddesses of Palestine

By Miri – As a child I was fascinated by Greek mythology; the stories about fighting and raging goddesses appealed to me much more than those about the one and only (male) god commanding a guard of mainly male prophets. At the time, I was not familiar with the predecessors of the monotheistic system, that, […]

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