Chronicles of a Refugee, a documentary review Maan News Agency, May 6, 2009 “Do you know what the problem is?” Nadine, a young Palestinian woman asks an off-screen interviewer. She continues, “It’s that the Palestinian has the ability to forgive… If you, as an Israeli, killed his mother and father and his family, he [the …
Cross border medical practices series: Individuals must not be punished for the actions of their governments Common Ground News Service, April 16, 2009 Daily News Egypt, May 7, 2009 In the days and months leading up to Operation Cast Lead, Gaza Strip’s healthcare system was stretched to the point of tearing. Hospitals and clinics in …
“I went home with nothing,” Rosemarie Cote, a former client of Fokara’s, says. During a phone interview from her home in the Philippines, Cote recounts her experience with Fokara. She had been working in Israel without a visa for eight years – sending her money back to the Philippines to support her seven children – when …
On March 10, Haaretz reported that Muhammad Fokara, an Israeli-Arab attorney, would be suing the state of Israel for over 800 million shekels on behalf of the Gazan family, Al Samooni. On March 11, however, Haaretz ran a second article stating that the Al Samooni family had only heard about the lawsuit from the …
Fokara’s law The Jerusalem Post, March 27, 2009 Pinto Baptist, an Indian worker currently living in Tel Aviv, was desperate for help in December of 2008. In India, he’d borrowed $9,000 from friends and family to pay the agency fees it cost to come to Israel to work. But when he arrived here, in July …
From Tripoli to Damascus The Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2009 (published under a pen name to protect the identity of the interviewees) I’d spent five days in Beirut partying too hard and sleeping on a friend’s small couch. I needed a respite from the city lined with bullet-pocked buildings and booming nightclubs. I considered Tripoli—a …
Repeated requests to interview a representative of the Indian embassy in Tel Aviv about the problems facing Indian foreign workers in Israel were declined. Sharad Srivastava, First Secretary (Culture, Consular, and Publicity), offered the brief explanation that the Indian embassy in Israel has little to do with foreign workers. He said “we’re not like …
Stranded Mid-Aviv Outlook India, March 16-23, 2009 print edition Lily Devi paid 8000 dollars to make the journey from India to Egypt so that she could pass into Israel illegally via the southern border. The Indian man she paid had promised that work would await her on the other side. Instead, he abandoned her in …
A sad reflection of reality: interview with author Esther Blau Marcus The Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2009 Esther Blau Marcus, author of the children’s book Tzeva Adom, offers the following story to illustrate her family’s experience of Operation Cast Lead: “During the war,” Marcus recalls, “I had the TV on one day and my …
Mary, Mary, quite contrary: interview with author Mary Gordon The Jerusalem Post, February 27, 2009 Mary Gordon’s work has been hailed as a prism that refracts Irish-American life, offering the reader a complex, multicolored look at this group, but the author herself is difficult to situate on the spectrum of writers. While she has …