The online journal of DAWN
@DAWNmenaorg
, magnifying voices from the Middle East and North Africa, including exiles and experts. Pitch: submissions
@dawnmena
.org
“My book ‘The Return’ reacquainted me with my country and my people after 33 years of exile. But it also reacquainted me with myself.”
Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar talks to
@Omid_M
about Libya, friendship and “the potential of our humanity.”
Biden’s renewed talk of a two-state solution is “a ruse, a rhetorical sleight of hand,” Daniel Levy tells
@Omid_M
—“an attempt to go back to a peace process that’s make believe, that allows the existing apartheid to be refrozen.”
“The deafening silence at the heart of Hayut’s speech hinted at what is usually kept under wraps: the Supreme Court is a stronghold of justice for Jews only.”
@HagaiElAd
of
@btselem
on how Israel’s Supreme Court crushes Palestinian rights.
@DAWN_Journal
"I worry about younger academics who will take the message that if they criticize Israel, they jeopardize their career. That is a terrible lesson for Harvard to be teaching."
@KenRoth
speaks to
@Omid_M
in
@DAWN_Journal
"If Biden wanted to, he could grind all this to a halt."
@AnnelleSheline
on the Biden administration's constant resupply of U.S. arms to Israel to continue to wage war in Gaza: "He could end the weapons and cut off the flow of money."
“The Israelis will have to come to terms with what they have done to the Palestinians,”
@FranceskAlbs
tells
@Omid_M
. “I don't think that they realize it yet.”
She spoke to
@DAWN_Journal
about genocide in Gaza and the lack of humanity for Palestinians:
“In a different world, one might think that Washington would now compel Israel to accept this deal to end the war in Gaza—since the U.S. helped negotiate it.”
DAWN fellow
@MouinRabbani
on the real obstacle to a cease-fire in Gaza:
“King Abdullah is terrified of these activists abroad because they can say out loud what millions of Jordanians cannot—they deserve respect for their basic human rights and to be governed by a democracy.”
@Sarahleah1
on Jordan’s transnational repression:
"Palestinian residents make up 40 percent of Jerusalem's population but are not citizens of the state that rules over them. They live in an unfathomably challenging in-between world."
@MairavZ
“After a decade of democracy in which Tunisians enjoyed unprecedented levels of freedom, we had hopes that the era of arbitrary detentions and political trials was behind us.”
@yusraghkh
on the anniversary of the arrest of her father, Rached Ghannouchi:
“In the current Israeli government, there are elements who do not hide their fantasy of continuing what began in 1948: forcibly expelling the Palestinian population,”
@sfardm
writes. Fears of ethnic cleansing in Gaza “should not be waved off.”
"Let's be clear: Israeli settler violence is Israeli state violence."
DAWN's
@MikeOmerMan
on why violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank "are in fact paramilitary groups operating as Israeli government proxies."
@DAWNmenaorg
Watch Mohammed Abu Lebda (
@MohdLbd
), a Democracy in Exile contributor, interviewed on
@democracynow
from Rafah.
And read his two-part poem, "To Be a Gazan," recently published in
@DAWN_Journal
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to attack the city of Rafah in the south of Gaza, we speak with
@MohdLbd
, a poet & translator from Rafah. He describes the crowded, desperate city whose population has exploded from 250,000 to 1.4 million displaced Palestinians.
To reduce all the conflicts in the Middle East to sectarianism “is to perpetuate as monolithic a claim as a ‘clash of civilizations.’”
@profmabon
on the problems of overstating “sectarian rivalries.”
"The Jan. 6 terrorist attack, led by Trump and his Republican allies, with their thugs assaulting Congress, was one of the peaks of how the international order has failed in defending and expanding democracy."
@rulajebreal
“In Nagorno-Karabakh, life for the past two months has recalled memories of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”
@LillianAvedian
on the humanitarian crisis created by Azerbaijan’s ongoing blockade of the disputed territory:
“Authoritarianism didn't stay in the Middle East—it came back to haunt America's democracy itself.”
Our interview with
@rulajebreal
on the legacy of the war on terror.
@Omid_M
“The laws of war weren’t designed only for situations in which our blood is cool, in which there is no justified anger or understandable desire for revenge,” DAWN fellow
@sfardm
writes in
@haaretzcom
“It is only in a world where Palestinian lives are so dehumanized that Palestinian suffering becomes normalized,” DAWN fellow
@dianabuttu
writes in
@DAWN_Journal
. “We Palestinians must prove our humanity.”
“Together with the genocide case currently before the ICJ, the era of absolute impunity enjoyed by the Israeli state and its leaders appears to be coming to a gradual end.”
@MouinRabbani
on Israel and the ICC in our expert Roundtable:
"The credibility and strength of the U.N. human rights systems hinges upon their ability to hold all countries, including powerful ones, to account. What is at stake is not just the rights of Uyghurs, but of everyone around the world." -
@wang_maya
of
@hrw
“My forebears fled to Gaza and our fate was sealed.”
@AlnaouqA
on his family's history in Gaza and the tragedy of their fate. “Because the occupation decreed that a decent life is not for us, and if we demand it, then life is not for us.”
@orbooks
“Some coercion on Israel needs to be exercised, because Israel clearly doesn't feel bound by international law, by UN resolutions, and what we are facing today are the extreme consequences of decades of tolerated and protracted impunity.”
-
@FranceskAlbs
“The gravity of the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang deserves global action, or else abusers like the Chinese government will be further emboldened,”
@wang_maya
of
@hrw
on how to hold China accountable for its repression of Uyghurs.
@DAWN_Journal
“From the very beginning, we had absolutely no idea where we’d go,” a young Palestinian woman writes in this diary from Gaza. “There was no safe place here, and that remains the case.”
“The initial ruling by the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide against Israel made history,"
@MouinRabbani
writes.
Israel and its Western sponsors can no longer shield themselves from accountability.
“Major cases involving Israel's war in Gaza are testing the scope of the ICJ and the ICC's different international legal responsibilities, in the face of war crimes, crimes against humanity and possible genocide,” writes
@Heidi__Matthews
This week in Democracy in Exile:
•
@McFaul
on Russia, the Middle East and American interests - interviewed by
@Omid_M
.
•
@samuelmoyn
on the risks of humanizing warfare.
•
@kevinjonheller
on the myth of humanitarian intervention.
Our most-read article of the year was by DAWN fellow
@sfardm
, who warned that the "profound shock and outrage in Israeli society over Hamas's massacre" could be "exploited for ethnic cleansing in Gaza."
The Israeli army admitted on Monday that it is ‘highly probable’ Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by an Israeli soldier—but would not open a criminal investigation.
As
@dianabuttu
wrote, Israel's response to her killing has been a textbook example of hasbara:
The invasion of Iraq 20 years ago cannot be extricated from the deeper, darker history that helped set the stage for it: the devastating economic sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s, writes
@NohaAboueldahab
in
@DAWN_Journal
"The gravity of the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang deserves global action, or else abusers like the Chinese government will be further emboldened." -
@wang_maya
"To put it bluntly, the United States is an active and complicit partner in Gaza's killing fields," writes
@MouinRabbani
. Unconditional U.S. support for Israel's bombing campaign has "exposed the self-serving core of the 'rules-based international order.'"
“Israel could not have been established as a Jewish state without the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population. This is not ancient history.”
Michael Merryman-Lotze of
@afsc_org
on the roots of Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza:
“The magnitude of the catastrophe in Sudan requires all international powers to work together to end this war,”
@HamidMurtada
writes from Khartoum, where life has become impossible for millions of Sudanese civilians. |
@DAWN_Journal
"It is only in a world where Palestinian lives are so dehumanized that Palestinian suffering becomes normalized."
One of our most-read articles of the year, by DAWN fellow
@dianabuttu
.
@DAWNmenaorg
“They lied in Iraq and destroyed the country. Nobody paid the price. There is no accountability whatsoever... Why should there be any now? Look at Trump—he waged a war on the U.S. Constitution, there's no accountability even for him.”
@rulajebreal
“Syrians are dying not only because of a natural disaster but also because of the unnatural indifference of an ill-named ‘international community.’”
Robin Yassin-Kassab (
@qunfuz2
) on the agony of Syria’s earthquake:
"Socotra is the jewel in Yemen's crown. The UAE's exertion of influence over Socotra suggests it is cherry-picking its involvement in Yemen to serve its own agenda,”
@Dr_E_Kendall
tells
@GiorgioCafiero
No. 8 on our list of most-read articles of 2022:
@GiorgioCafiero
on the UAE's expansionist agenda in Yemen and de facto takeover of Socotra. "The Emiratis have been pursuing their own geostrategic interests across Yemen's southern coastal areas."
"MBS continues to fund and support a counterrevolution to democratic movements across the region, as Arab democracy anywhere is a threat to his absolutist rule,"
@SevKech
&
@aalodah
write.
"The U.S. has long aligned itself with Israeli positions which are antithetical to international law, to the achievement of peace, to Palestinian rights, indeed, to the humanity of Palestinians being acknowledged."
-Daniel Levy, president of
@USMEP
"When another Eid passed with my father still in prison, I remembered the other ten times that he spent Eid in jail in the 1980s, in different prisons under different Tunisian dictators."
@yusraghkh
on her father Rached Ghannouchi, arrested a year ago:
“‘It can't get any worse,’ Syrians used to say. And then it got worse, again and again, until the phrase became a sad joke,” Robin Yassin-Kassab (
@qunfuz2
) writes in
@DAWN_Journal
. “Entire towns have been erased, entire families wiped out.”
“The so-called Iran threat could be dealt with by establishing a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. Everyone is in favor of that, including Iran. The U.S. blocks it, because they would have to open up Israeli nuclear weapons to inspection.”
“Israel lives in its own reality, in its own interpretation of international law,” says
@FranceskAlbs
. “But in the real world, Israel has maintained an occupation for now almost 57 years…a vehicle for colonizing the land or simply displacing the people.”
“University presidents are suspending and expelling students, while cordoning their campuses before this movement of Palestinian solidarity spreads any further.”
Elliott Colla (
@AbuMrouj
) on the Gaza protests and how university leaders have failed:
No. 10 on our list of most-read articles of 2022, by
@Ferjani9arwi
: “Western democracies cannot say they have no part in what Tunisia has become if they keep indulging Saied and ignoring his abuses.”
"In Nagorno-Karabakh, life for the past two months has recalled memories of the collapse of the Soviet Union."
@LillianAvedian
reports on the impacts of Azerbaijan's blockade of the disputed territory—with photos from
@marutvanian
in Stepanakert.
"With Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Western governments have shown how far they can go in sanctioning and freezing the assets of President Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs. They should do the same with MBS."
@SevKech
&
@aalodah
in
@DAWN_Journal
:
“I wrote this book as an investigation and warning to remind people Israel’s occupation isn’t just brutalizing Palestinians but also finding its way into countless other countries.”
@antloewenstein
in
@DAWN_Journal
on his new book The Palestine Laboratory:
“With the rapidly escalating war in Ukraine, Algeria's anti-imperialist heritage is counterbalanced by its historically strong links to Russia.”
@AndrewFarrand
on Algeria’s reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:
“The idea that the Assad regime will respond to normalization with concessions of its own flies in the face of everything we know about how the Assads have ruled Syria for more than 50 years,”
@SHeydemann
writes in
@DAWN_journal
“Western democracies cannot say they have no part in what Tunisia has become if they keep indulging Saied and ignoring his abuses,”
@Ferjani9arwi
writes in
@DAWN_Journal
"Palestine was a country with a rich culture and history. It was home to close to 1 million people. Israel was created—literally—on the ruins of villages and by breaking into and taking over Palestinian homes."
@dianabuttu
on the Nakba's enduring legacy:
"Netanyahu likes now to say that Palestinians must be deradicalized," Daniel Levy tells
@Omid_M
. "Flick on your television in Israel and watch a few minutes, and you begin to ask yourself which society needs deradicalizing."
“Implicit in the ICJ’s ruling was the critical weakness at the core of Israel's case: its inability to provide any persuasive answer to South Africa's abundant evidence of indiscriminate death and destruction in Gaza.”
-
@MichaelLynk5
“Weapons are weapons. This new false dichotomy of ‘defensive’ versus ‘offensive’ weapons is nothing more than a political ploy to justify selling more arms to abusive governments.”
@raedjarrar
on Biden’s backtrack on arms sales to Saudi Arabia:
“Asking for the blockade to be lifted is the least that Saudi and the UAE can do,”
@shireen818
tells
@AhmadAlgohbary
. “Lifting the blockade should be unconditional and immediate, and Yemenis’ lives should not be held as bargaining chips.”
In a purge of Tunisia's judiciary, President Kais Saied sacked 57 judges on Wednesday, accusing them of corruption and "protecting terrorists."
"The judiciary is now essentially Saied's personal fiefdom," as
@Ferjani9arwi
warned in
@DAWN_Journal
“There is no solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine that is not based on respecting everyone's human rights; on ending the occupation; ending apartheid… and upholding the provisions of international law, by all.”
@sfardm
“It is long past time for the administration to take a stance to reject what Israel has been doing, and to hold them accountable for the ways in which they're violating the Geneva Conventions and violating American laws,”
@AnnelleSheline
tells
@Omid_M
“Such deprivation, including of food and medical services, can constitute the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a protected group, in whole or in part—a genocidal act.”
@Heidi__Matthews
“From every side in Palestine, you are under attack. What the occupation and the PA share is they don’t want accountability. They are using more and more extreme measures to suppress dissent.”
@adshap
interviews Palestinian NGO director
@UbaiAboudi
“There might soon be two groundbreaking cases in South Africa that can be used as legal precedent in other situations of apartheid today. It is about time the crime of apartheid leaves the realm of legal theory and gets tested in the courts.” -
@_MiaSwart
Read—and listen to—“The Journalist in Jenin,” a new poem in
@DAWN_Journal
by
@MosabAbuToha
about Shireen Abu Akleh.
Abu Toha’s debut collection of poetry was just shortlisted for the 2022
@palestineawards
.
“The devastation of the 1990s sanctions ensured that any post-Saddam government would be decided not by Iraqis, but by a U.S.-led foreign intervention.”
@NohaAboueldahab
in
@DAWN_Journal
on why Iraqis deserve justice in the form of reparations:
.
@wang_maya
on how to hold the Chinese government accountable for its abuses against Uyghurs—and why "the gravity of the crimes against humanity in Xinjiang deserves global action."
"There's only a handful of doctors and nurses left at Shifa with the most critically wounded. All the other hospitals in Gaza have collapsed. Tonight, there are sounds of running gun battles. There's tank fire."
-
@GhassanAbuSitt1
“The sound of tank shells is exploding everywhere around the hospital," Dr.
@GhassanAbuSitt1
told
@DAWNmenaorg
in a voice message from Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City today.
“When authoritarian regimes are confronted with public protest and social unrest, they often respond by violently attacking women.”
@DaliaFFahmy
on the gendered nature of authoritarian violence across the region:
“In Yemen, war’s costs have too often landed on civilians who bear no responsibility for the war nor for the wrongs committed during it.”
@K_Beckerle
on the case for reparations:
In 2020, activist Ghada Naguib became the first Egyptian citizen to be stripped of her nationality over her criticisms of Sisi's government. She talks to
@MohammedKamalAh
in
@DAWN_Journal
about her “fate in forced exile after I became stateless.”
"Iranians themselves, including many braving bullets to protest in the streets for weeks, will continue to bear the cost of sanctions far more than their own government,"
@SajjadSafaei0
writes.
An Egyptian court has ordered the release of detained researcher Patrick Zaki.
@channeldraw
advocated for Zaki's release through his drawings, including huge installations in Bologna. He describes his art as "speaking for those who can no longer speak."
“When a young Saudi transgender woman named Eden Knight took her own life in March, it came after what can best be described as a siege of mental abuse by her own family.”
@NoraNoralla
in
@DAWN_Journal
on an all-too familiar story for transgender Saudis:
"It was more of this slow realization that I just no longer wanted to have to walk in the door. That felt complicit."
@AnnelleSheline
on deciding to resign from the State Department over Biden's Gaza policy:
"You will die on the 30th," wrote the first officer.
"If I see you on the street, I will shoot you in the head," said the second.
@matnashed
reports on young activists terrorized by Sudan's security forces and now languishing in prison on sham charges:
“The lack of due process reflects a compromised justice system in Sudan that the coup authorities are weaponizing against critics.”
@matnashed
reports for
@DAWN_Journal
on 12 young Sudanese activists languishing in prison on trumped-up charges:
"This approach, which rehabilitates Assad diplomatically, is little short of delusional."
@SHeydemann
on the costs of normalizing Assad's regime, including "the erasure of its responsibility for the destruction of Syria and all that has accompanied it."
“Alaa Abdel Fattah’s vision of a very different Egypt, along with that of millions of young Egyptians, has itself been imprisoned by Sisi’s regime.”
@jricole
in
@DAWN_Journal
on America’s shameful backing for Egypt’s police state:
“Sisi's regime requires a state of perpetual crisis in order to remain in power—if the crisis is resolved, then the ideological appeal of the regime fades away.”
An excerpt from
@MagedMandour
’s incisive new book, Egypt Under El-Sisi, in
@DAWN_Journal
"They don't see the Palestinians as human beings. They don't. They see a mass—faceless, dreamless,"
@FranceskAlbs
tells
@Omid_M
of the lack of humanity afforded to Palestinians. "The lives of hundreds of thousands of people have been destroyed."
Despite supposed legal reforms to the death penalty, Saudi judges are still “sentencing minors to death by brazenly overlooking their birthdates and the dates of their so-called crimes,”
@SevKech
writes in
@DAWN_Journal
“Without a political process working toward the prospect of self-determination for Palestinians, and with dispossession and repression undiminished, conflict and violence will only intensify, especially in East Jerusalem.”
@MairavZ
in
@DAWN_journal
“To adopt my father’s optimism, his imprisonment and that of so many other political prisoners from across the Tunisian political spectrum are proof of their refusal to bow down to tyranny.”
@yusraghkh
on Rached Ghannouchi, arrested one year ago:
“International law’s strength lies in the red lines it draws on (mis)conduct during wars and occupations,” writes DAWN fellow
@MichaelLynk5
, the former UN special rapporteur in Palestine, on the need to investigate war crimes in Gaza and Israel.
Can international law lead to accountability in Gaza?
DAWN fellows take stock of the ICC prosecutor’s warrant requests for Israeli and Hamas officials in our new expert Roundtable—with
@dianabuttu
@sfardm
@BazziNYU
@Yara_M_Asi
@MouinRabbani
and many more:
“Potential war crimes and crimes against humanity shouldn't be ignored just because they don't carry the same expressive weight as genocide,” Shannon Fyfe (
@sefyfe
) writes, on the question of intent in Gaza and international criminal law.
“The states negotiating the Genocide Convention's definition deliberately modeled it on the Holocaust—understood as history's largest hate crime—to distinguish it from warfare and even population expulsions.”
@dirkmoses
on international law and genocide:
“Since the revolution in 2019, the international community has continued to put its trust in both Burhan and Hemedti—despite neither general proving worthy of it,”
@HamidMurtada
writes from Khartoum. Leverage is needed to end Sudan’s war.
"Europe, it seems, is fine with Saied's autocracy in Tunisia if, indeed, he becomes the EU's border guard,"
@MarcMartorell3
writes in
@DAWN_Journal
. "So much for the EU supporting 'Tunisia's journey of democracy.'"
“When we fight for a free Palestine, we’re fighting for a Palestine free in all ways, not just free from the occupation. A Palestine that does not discriminate based on religion or based on gender or sexual orientation,” artist
@Bashar__Murad
tells
@adshap
“Students are not going to unlearn what they know to be true about apartheid and ethnic cleansing because a politician, or their own college president, smears them.”
Georgetown professor Elliott Colla (
@AbuMrouj
) on the campus protests over Gaza:
“The Biden administration has dramatically misread the Israeli political dynamic,” Daniel Levy tells
@Omid_M
. “It has been unwilling to deploy its very real leverage… without the constant channeling of American weaponry, this could not continue.”