May 2005

http://alawda.newjerseysolidarity.org

New Jersey Solidarity - Activists for the Liberation of Palestine launches Al-Awda - Voices of Resistance and Liberation newspaper!

In 1948, al-Nakba (the Catastrophe in Arabic) befell the people of Palestine. The Zionist project of colonizing Palestine, seeking to create an exclusionary, European colonialist "Jewish state" - at the cost of the lives and independence of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs, Muslim, Christian and Jewish - reached its culmination as British colonial control of Palestine passed into Zionist colonial hands. The United Nations passed Resolution 181, without consultation with the Palestinian people....

Al-Awda newspaper, the new publication of New Jersey Solidarity-Activists for the Liberation of Palestine which will be published monthly, aims to provide an activist printed voice for the Palestinian and Arab community, to address local, national and international issues of concern to the community, and to raise awareness about the Palestinian struggle for national liberation among the public at large....

New Jersey Solidarity - Activists for the Liberation of Palestine is an organization engaging in activism and education to support and build solidarity for the national liberation struggle of the Palestinian people, and against imperialism and oppression everywhere....

On May 1, 2005, workers and activists from around the region converged on New York City’s Union Square for a march and rally in celebration of May Day, International Workers’ Day, and in protest of the U.S. war upon and occupation of Iraq....

Sahar Francis, a Palestinian lawyer who represents Palestinian political prisoners with Addameer, a prisoners’ human rights association, and Akram al-Ayassa, a former political prisoner himself, spoke in New Brunswick, NJ on April 3, in the Rutgers University Women’s Center on the Douglass College campus of Rutgers University.....

New Jersey Solidarity-Activists for the Liberation of Palestine mourns the loss of Ali Kased, a lifelong fighter for the Palestinian cause and an inspiration to generations of activists that continue to follow in his path....

Also:
"Memories of Ali Kased" and
"The Passing of a Son of Palestine"

Where are we now -- we the activist movement for Palestine? There are many differing political attitudes among activists for Palestine. The minimum political program for Palestine activism is upholding the right of return, right to national self-determination, and the right to self defense.....

Addameer association along with the family of Manal and Nour Ghanem have launched a campaign to demand the Israeli government immediately release Manal Naji Mahmoud Ghanem (29) and her son Nour (1.5) who were arrested on the 17th of April, 2003, and are currently being held in Tilmond Central Prison.....

Palestinian children’s theatre troupe, Al Rowwad, from Aida refugee camp outside Bethlehem, will visit New Jersey and New York....

The outbreak in 1990 of war between Iraq and the United States was rooted in the conflict between Iraq's internal forces of social development and imperialist domination of the Persian Gulf....

On April 22, 2005, the British Association of University Teachers (AUT) voted to immediately launch an academic boycott of Haifa and Bar-Ilan Universities....

New York based Al Jisser Group, an organization dedicated to the promotion of Arab arts and culture, has been working tirelessly for nearly a year to raise the funds necessary to host the “Made in Palestine” art exhibition....

"...[W]e are losing the media war," said Colonel Daniel Reisner, head of the international law branch of the IDF Legal Division, in an interview in the Fall 2002 Harvard Israel Review. "...It takes a long time to explain Israeli settlements to the uninitiated..."

Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition held its Third Annual International Convention at the University of California in Los Angeles on the weekend of April 15-17, 2005....

My trip to Montreal to see the Palestinian folk singer and celebrity Abu Arab perform on February 6, 2005 was eye-opening. The concert was a fundraiser for Palestinian refugees facing deportation from Canada....

From April 18-24, 2005, the Rutgers University community was galvanized by the third annual Tent State University protest, an annual campout at Rutgers’ Voorhees Mall that calls for greater funding for higher education and highlights many pressing social issues in its attempt to create, for one week, an “alternative university” on Rutgers....