Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

I did not know that it was so good until I started watching. Plot summary . With English subtitles , but you may need a VPN.

There is something in common. Irish children teasing British soldiers. Derry, Northern Ireland 1972 11-year-old Ahed Tamimi  tries to punch an Israeli soldier during a protest in Nabi Saleh, a Palestinian village in Ramallah. 02 November 2012. 

"Visitors to ramallah these days are often struck by its boom-town appearance. There are large-scale construction projects underway, a proliferation of hotels and nightclubs, Mexican restaurants, luxury cars, cappuccino prices on par with London or Brooklyn—jarringly at odds with prevailing notions of Palestinian life under the shadow of Israeli occupation. Arafat’s hilltop compound, reduced to rubble by Israeli shelling and bulldozers in 2002, has been rebuilt at vast expense and now houses his pharaonic tomb. The city’s ‘diplomatic quarter’ of al-Masyoun boasts quasi-embassies from the  OECD  countries, as if it were the capital of a real nation-state, while international dance and theatre companies regularly perform at its state-of-the-art Culture Palace. For some, Ramallah is Palestine’s Green Zone, as isolated from the rest of the Occupied Territories as the notorious  US  headquarters in Baghdad. It represents an enclave cosmopolitanism, a ‘Bantustan sublime’....

John Berger contemplates life and death at the graveside of Mahmoud Darwish

“I unhesitatingly identify myself with the just cause and the pain of those whom the state of Israel (and cousins of mine) are afflicting to a degree that is tragically totalitarian.” —  writer and art critic John Berger A story-teller and a friend of Palestine

John Berger dies aged 90 A Moment in Ramallah (an extract) Reproductions Distort’: A Note on the Culture Industry An obituary on the Financial Times