Al-Shabaka Policy Member Aimee Shalan is Chief Executive of Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). She was formerly Director of Fobzu (Friends of Birzeit University), a UK-based charity supporting the right to education for Palestinians, and Co-founder and Director of Pressure Cooker Arts, a not-for-profit arts and advocacy organisation. Before that she was Director of Advocacy at MAP and Head of Education at the Council for Arab British Understanding. She has been a regular contributor to the Guardian and has written for a variety of media outlets. She taught at City University and Queen Mary, University of London, and has a doctorate in the Politics of Palestinian Literature.
From this author
If Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour passes over the perimeter of her home’s driveway in her village of Reineh in the Galilee, an alarm will sound at the British multinational security firm G4S and the Israeli authorities will be alerted. Israeli police arrested Tatour in the early hours of October 11, 2015 for her poem, “Qawem ya sha‘abi qawemhum” (Resist My People, Resist Them), which was posted to her YouTube account earlier that month. On November 2, Israel charged her with incitement to violence and support for a terrorist organization.
All eyes are on the terrible toll of dead and injured and the extensive destruction – as well as the dire humanitarian situation of the population under siege in Gaza. But less attention is being paid to the longer-term damage caused by the current Israeli crackdown throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) that is having far-reaching and detrimental consequences for the development of Palestinian society as a whole.
