Karam Aziz, a shy 16-year-old, knocks on doors in Jabaliya refugee camp, asking for old shopping bags. Locals enquire why he wants them, yet happily hand over any they can find. Within half an hour, Karam usually has about 70 bags — vital raw material for an arts and crafts project using recycled materials. Once he has collected the bags, Karam brings them to his sister-in-law Zainab. She and her team of 20 women transform plastic and nylon garbage into colorful toys, baskets, cushions and ornaments. Zainab Aziz, a 25-year-old mother of two, set up the project after graduating with an Arabic language degree from Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City last year. The project is known as The New Heritage because it gives a modern and environmentally conscious twist to traditional handcrafts. The process of making art from garbage is a long one. First the old bags have to be washed and sterilized, then cut into pieces suitable for crocheting. more

The group of girls, ponytailed and dressed in pink, stretched their arms out to the sides and pivoted onto their toes, trying desperately to hold still. Eagle-eyed, the instructor surveyed Gaza's latest crop of would-be ballerinas. Fifty girls aged five to eight are now enrolled in the ballet school at the Al-Qattan Center for Children in Gaza, making it one of the most popular classes the arts institute runs, under the watchful eye of a Ukrainian teacher. Amid the chaos and destruction that has shattered Gaza so often over the past five years, with repeated wars between Israel and Hamas, the school is a haven of calm and order, one many parents are eager for their children to enjoy. "The ballet project was a dream for many families," said Heyam Al-Hayek, the head of Qattan's cultural activities. "They had been asking for ballet courses but we couldn't find trainers. It was difficult to bring an instructor from abroad." The dream began to take shape ...

R&B superstar Pharrell Williams could face thousands of pro-Palestine protesters at a concert in Cape Town tonight (21 September). Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) South Africa – which campaigns against Israel's presence in Palestine – was given the go-ahead by Western Cape High Court for supporters to demonstrate against the singer's partnership with South African retailer Woolworths (no relation to the former British store of the same name), which it accuses of stocking agricultural produce from the disputed territories. The court decision, which was handed down on 18 September, paves the way for 16,000 Palestine supporters to protest until 4pm local time outside the Grand West Casino. The ruling reversed efforts deemed as unconstitutional by Cape Town authorities to limit the number of demonstrators to just 150. Earlier this year, the Happy singer was appointed style director for the retailer, who says that less than 0.1% of its food products are sourced from I...

From MEMO - The Palestine Festival of Literature, popularly known as PalFest, opened on May 23rd simultaneously in Ramallah and Gaza. A large crowd packed Ramallah's Ottoman Court to hear a range of readings by both local and international writers and artists. Literature has a strong and proud history in the Arab world, and specifically in Palestine literary figures such Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish are still revered today long after their deaths. The tradition of weaving art and politics remains intrinsic in the work of many amongst the new generation of Palestinian writers. In contrast to some other recent cultural festivals in Palestine, PalFest seems again to be remaining true to its roots. Events are held inclusively in cities across historic Palestine and it continues to include many Palestinian and Arab writers alongside international figures. Venues are selected that can be near capacity whilst appreciating that single events will not draw thousands ...

NEW YORK (AFP) -- R&B star Lauryn Hill on Monday canceled a concert in Israel just a few days away, saying she had tried unsuccessfully to perform in the occupied Palestinian territories as well. The former Fugees singer had been scheduled to perform Thursday near Tel Aviv but faced a social media campaign by activists who urged her to boycott Israel over its ongoing military occupation of Palestinian land. Hill said that she had wanted to schedule a second show in Ramallah in the West Bank but that the logistics "proved to be a challenge." "I've wanted very much to bring our live performance to this part of the world, but also to be a presence supporting justice and peace," she wrote on her website. "It is very important to me that my presence or message not be misconstrued, or a source of alienation to either my Israeli or my Palestinian fans," she said. Hill said she would "seek a different strategy to bring my music to ALL of my fans i...

Israel’s flagship annual cultural festival has been forced to curtail its 2015 schedule because last summer’s assault on Gaza and the growing impact of Palestinian calls for cultural boycott are making it harder to attract international artists. The Israel Festival’s new director Eyal Sher “does not hide the problems that constrained its production,” the Hebrew-language Israeli publication Mako reports. “This year’s festival was produced with a shortened schedule against the background of Operation Protective Edge,” Sher says, “and had to face, like many cultural and academic bodies in the country, BDS [boycott divestment and sanctions].” Operation Protective Edge is the name Israel gave its 51-day ground and air assault on Gaza last summer that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including 547 children, and left much of the tightly besieged territory devastated. Sher said the festival had to “hold political hasbara dialogues with some of the artists who were invited to this year...

From the Electronic Intifada - The Wu-Tang Clan was once described as “the most innovative force in hip-hop” by The New York Times. But it wasn’t only the gritty and dark soundscape created by the group that was original. Less well-known is that Method Man, one of the combo’s rappers, may have been the first exponent of his genre to express solidarity with the Palestinians. The bass-heavy track “PLO Style” appeared on Tical, Method Man’s 1994 debut solo album. Declaring that “the street life is the only life I know,” its lyrics appear to be more of a commentary on the Meth’s direct experiences of Staten Island’s housing projects than on Middle Eastern politics. But when I interviewed him recently, Meth made clear that the PLO referred to in the title is the Palestine Liberation Organization (watch the interview above). “Fighting for our freedom” “The same way Wu Tang respected how the kung fu dudes was doing their thing and shit, we respected how the PLO got down,” he said. “They’...

From The Electronic Intifada - Eleven-year-old Firas al-Shirafi has experienced three major offensives against Gaza during his short life. Last summer, he was confined to his home in the Tal al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza City as it was too dangerous to venture outside. As Israel bombed and shelled buildings and infrastructure across the Strip, Firas did his best to replace the sounds of destruction with life-affirming tunes. “The only shelter for me was my music,” said Firas, who plays the qanun, a traditional string instrument. Firas has been studying at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music since he was five. “We immediately realized that this boy would have a promising musical future,” Ibrahim al-Najjar, director of the conservatory’s Gaza branch, told The Electronic Intifada. “His father and grandfather were musicians.” The conservatory, which also operates at several locations in the occupied West Bank, took over Gaza’s previous music school (which was affilated with ...

From The Guardian - The street artist, who previously created works on the wall of the West Bank, has made a series of new paintings across ruins in Palestine Banksy Gaza The Bristolian street artist Banksy has returned to Palestine to create another series of works, following his famous 2005 series painted on the West Bank barrier wall. The works, which he trailed on his Instagram account last night, include one piece which somewhat resembles Rodin’s sculpture The Thinker, with the figure’s hand gone from thoughtfully supporting his face to covering it in despair – or perhaps Niobe, the classical figure weeping for the loss of her children. Another features a kitten sprayed on the remains of a wall, posed playing with a coiled ball of rusted metal as if it were wool. A third features children swinging around a watchtower as though it were a fairground ride. The artist made a film to go alongside the works, documenting the devastation wrought by Israeli militia and bombing campai...

An Amman-based Palestinian rap group intends to take action against hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using one of their songs in an election campaign video. Torabyeh “will take all necessary legal action against those responsible” for the “infringement of intellectual property rights and the distortion of the reputation of Torabyeh,” the group announced in a Facebook posting on Saturday. Netanyahu’s video depicts a group of fighters ostensibly from the Islamic State (also known as IS, ISIL or ISIS) riding in a pickup truck as Torabyeh’s song “Ghorbah” blasts in the background. “I want to be buried in the same graveyard as my grandfather. Ever since I was young I’ve dreamed of being a soldier. With time I discovered who I belong to: Mahmoud Abbas, Fatah, Hamas or the Jabha,” one of the rappers sang, referring at the end to the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “Let me be free because they are all mercenaries,” the song continues. In Neta...

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- 700 British artists have signed a pledge to boycott Israel as long as it "continues to deny basic Palestinian rights," the latest major success for the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions of Israel movement. "In response to the call from Palestinian artists and cultural workers for a cultural boycott of Israel, we pledge to accept neither professional invitations to Israel, nor funding, from any institutions linked to its government until it complies with international law and universal principles of human rights," the call reads, according to the group Artists for Palestine UK, which organized the pledge. "We support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality." The signatories include artists from many fields, including writers, film directors, comedians, musicians, actors, theater directors, architects, and visual artists. more

From The Electronic Intifada - Naima Shalhoub has an absolutely stunning voice. Listen to her sing “Ferguson-Gaza Blues.” She’s accompanied by Bouchaib Abdelhadi on oud, Jeremy Mitchell on drums and Timothy Wat on Piano. After hearing this powerful song, I wanted to know more about how the Lebanese-American Shalhoub’s art and politics intersect. She was kind enough to provide these thoughtful replies to my questions. Ali Abunimah: What inspired you to make this song? Naima Shalhoub: I’ve learned, seen and felt the systemic connections between the racial oppression of Palestinians in Palestine, as well as the racism against and mass incarceration of Black people in the United States for quite some time. In August, however, when the attacks on Gaza were happening at the same time as the Ferguson protests and the wider call to draw attention to police brutality against Black and brown people, the grief was overwhelming. As an artist, I couldn’t help but write a song attempting to d...

Broken, crumbling and splattered with “blood”, these haunting sculptures have been made by an artist in Gaza to show the pain of conflict.The 50-day war between Israel and Hamas earlier this year left more than 2,200 people dead and razed thousands of homes in the narrow strip to the ground. Most of the casualties were civilians, including hundreds of children, according to the UN, reflected in artist Iyad Sabbah’s depiction of a family. The sculptor, who is Palestinian and lives and works in Gaza, created them using mud and waste materials found in bombsites. In an installation entitled Worn Out, the family of sculptures including a small child and a baby appear to move through debris and rubble and past shelled homes. “Shuja’iyya neighborhood is one of the places that was completely destroyed, and the idea came to my head to do something about the war, to focus on displacement of the Palestinians,” he told the Cairo Post. “The displacement scene is very influential, so the s...

A letter has been published that shows the UK government cooperated with the Israeli Embassy in pressuring the Tricycle Theatre over its public row with the UK Jewish Film Festival in August. As Israel was bombing Gaza, the Tricycle Theatre asked the festival to forego Israeli embassy funding, on the basis that, given the ongoing bloodshed, it was "inappropriate to accept financial support from any government agency involved." Though the Tricycle management offered to provide alternative funding, the Jewish Film Festival insisted on the embassy link, thus withdrawing the festival (see a timeline of events here). According to campaigners, the newly published letter was sent by an official in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport "to a member of the public who had asked for an explanation of Secretary of State Sajid Javid's public denunciation of the Tricycle Theatre." The activists note that the letter "repeatedly refers to anti-Semitism and threa...

From Mondoweiss - This week, the DC Palestinian Film and Arts Festival opens in Washington, DC. One of the featured pieces is a unique production called Condom Lead, directed by identical twin brothers from Gaza, Mohammed and Ahmed Abu Nasser – better known as Arab and Tarzan. Reading the news, memories came flooding back. While I was living in Gaza during the winter and spring of 2011, I shot a series of video vignettes with local residents who embodied, for me, the spirit of creative, non-violent resistance – “faces” of Gaza the world normally never sees. Many of these kindred spirits to whom I was drawn were artists. And two of them were Arab and Tarzan. (Look at their pictures and you’ll immediately think you know why. Watch this interview, however, and you’ll learn the true inspiration behind the names.) Three impressions come to mind when I recall the days I spent with them in Gaza: 1) How much I felt like their little sister even though I was so much older. They constantly ...

Gaza-based painter Raed Issa’s home was destroyed during this summer’s intensive Israeli attack on Gaza, which killed over 2,000 people. But, in the slow clear-up and under-resourced reconstruction which has followed, Issa has sought to find a way in which his burnt and crushed paintings can continue to convey a message. His answer has been to display the paintings in the environment in which they were both created and destroyed, hanging them on lines strung through his wrecked home and studio, and holding them up himself amid the chaos. This series of photographs shared by Issa with The Electronic Intifada illustrate his stubborn insistence on finding resonance among the destruction, and on defying that destruction with humor and creativity. Issa recently commented with irony on a Facebook gallery of some of the photos taken of this most site-specific of installations or exhibitions, saying: Here are some of my paintings which have been salvaged from under the rubble of my destroy...

WASHINGTON (AFP) -- Pop idols and professional athletes are going public with strong views about Gaza, putting their relations with fans on the line while stirring up a social media frenzy. More often than not, celebrity sympathies have been leaning in favor of Palestinians as the Israeli assault on Hamas rolls into its fourth week and the death toll keeps rising. Zayn Malik of the British boy band One Direction was the latest boldface name to voice his concern when he posted "#FreePalestine" on his Twitter account Sunday. As of Tuesday, his message had been retweeted 220,000 times, and favorited just as often, among his 13 million followers worldwide. But it also angered Israeli fans -- with some going so far as to make death threats against the 21-year-old heartthrob, a British-born Muslim of Pakistani heritage. "People who don't live in Israel don't have any right to say their opinion out loud," tweeted one young woman, Shaked Erez, who added the ha...

More info at freedom4palestine.org . A press release explains the project: A diverse group of celebrities, artists, and activists that includes American Jews and Palestinians are speaking out for Palestinian human rights in a video released online today. The video is a first of its kind expression of support for Palestinian freedom, equality and justice and features celebrities such as Chuck D, Jonathan Demme, Gloria Steinem, Wallace Shawn, Tony Kushner, Mira Nair, Roger Waters, Brian Eno, and others holding signs with the names and ages of Palestinian civilians recently killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. “The Israeli leaders seem sincere when they say they believe that their actions are appropriate. Apparently, one of ‘us’ is worth many more of ‘them,’” said actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, who provides the voice-over narration for the video. “American leaders know they are lying when they defend the murder of children in their beds. And we, the public, pay for the bombs, pa...

The ongoing slaughter in Gaza has brought a great many artists, musicians and celebrities out in support of Palestine. This is nothing new. In fact, every major Israeli offensive seems to grow the number of artists willing to speak up and stand against the crimes of the apartheid state. But there’s support, and there’s solidarity. Both are of course welcome. But there’s a difference between expressing one’s outrage at a crime against humanity and outwardly answering the call from those who seek to end those same crimes. The track above is a solid attempt to do the latter. What sticks out about “Boycott Israel,” and what allows it to work on a certain level, is the basic internationalism that the lineup itself embodies. The track is primarily from Don Martin, one-third of Norwegian hip-hop group Gatas Parlament, who for twenty-plus years have been something roughly akin to Norway’s version of Public Enemy. Martin’s bandmate Elling Borgersrud once ran for public office as a member o...

I vividly recall the first time I saw Sinéad O’Connor live. She looked shy and fragile as she walked onstage. And then she began her song “Troy,” whispering to us one second; screaming at us the next. It was enchanting and haunting. That was 26 years ago. Ever since then, I’ve admired O’Connor as a woman of talent and courage. So I felt a bit hurt when she rejected me in a distinctly twenty-first century manner last month: by blocking me on Twitter. All I had done was to ask politely that she cancel a gig in Israel. This morning my admiration was fully restored when I read in the Irish magazine Hot Press that O’Connor had decided to withdraw from her Israel show. “Nobody with any sanity, including myself, would have anything but sympathy for the Palestinian plight,” she said. “There’s not a sane person on earth who in any way sanctions what the fuck the Israeli authorities are doing.” O’Connor’s interview suggests that concert promoters are offering enormous fees to musicians wil...