The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, December 27, 2025

Notably: Raja Shehadeh is the Palestinian native of Ramallah, the son of a lawyer, a lawyer himself, and a writer. He is the author of Palestinian Walks, a wonderful 2007 book about seven walks he took over the years in the Occupied West Bank (what invaders, Florida legislators, Randy Fine and “settler” terrorists prefer to call “Judea and Samaria,” for roughly the same reason Trump prefers to call it the “Gulf of America” and the “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts”). The book chronicles the changes and desecration of the land resulting from the indiscriminate building of massive Israeli colonies from expropriated land. The book won Britain’s Orwell Prize for best political writing in 2008. Shehadeh is also the co-founded of the human rights organization Al-Haq, which got the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize in 1989, and which the Trump administration naturally added to its list of sanctioned organizations a few weeks ago, along with the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) and Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights for, in the words of U.S. Secretary of Soul-selling Mephisto Rubio, “directly engaged in efforts by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute Israeli nationals, without Israel’s consent.” I’m sorry. Since when do justice prosecutors seek the perpetrator’s consent? Anyway, Shehadeh was the New York Times’s David Marchese’s interview on Dec. 20, and it was an excellent one. You can watch it in full below, or read the full transcript here if it’s not paywalled. Some excerpts though. Shehadeh, prompted by the interviewer, rejects the favored Western habit of chucking off the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a “thousand year-old conflict.” Not at all. “The reality is it’s a little over 100 years old,” the interviewer says. “And there’s a long history of what you just described: a different kind of living in that region than is often assumed to be the case.” Shehadeh says: “That’s absolutely true. Palestine has always been a place for three religions, and the three religions lived side by side and enriched life, because it’s enriching to have the differences. And now one religion is trying to dominate and say it’s the only one that is going to be allowed in that land, and that’s perverse.” In a different segment, he says: “the suffering at the time of the Holocaust is always used as We have suffered most, and nobody can suffer as much. Every suffering is a suffering, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. But to use that as a justification for causing more suffering is untenable, wrong, immoral. That is why when this friend was justifying what was happening in Gaza because of trauma, I did not accept it. I thought it was very disappointing. But there’s a lot of it in Israel, and there’s this double consciousness of knowing and not knowing.” And: “I’ve been following the Israeli development of the apartheid regime in the West Bank since 1979, so I’m very familiar with how it came about. I didn’t use the term “apartheid,” because I didn’t want to alienate the readers and do exactly what you’re saying: focus on the term rather than on the facts. But now that it has become very clear that the situation is one of apartheid, I think it’s very important to use the term. And likewise with “genocide.” I didn’t use genocide until I became very clear that the definition of genocide exactly fits the case in Gaza, and then I thought it’s important to use the term because it has legal consequences, which I would like to see take place.” See the full interview below.

Under Israeli law, Fareed and those members of my family who were not residing in the West Bank when Israel occupied it in June 1967 and carried out that first crucial census are considered absentees and their property outside the town has been taken from them. It was vested in the Israeli state for the exclusive use of Israeli Jews. I had read the law making this possible many times but its full import never struck me as it did now. A Palestinian only has the right to the property he resides in. Once he leaves it for whatever reason it ceases to be his, it “reverts back” to those whom the Israeli system considers the original, rightful owners of “Judea and Samaria,” the Jewish peo-ple, wherever they might be. Abandonment, which began as an economic imperative in some instances and a choice in others, had acquired legal and political implications with terrifying consequences.

–From Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2007).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.