SELECTED   NEWS   OF   THE   DAY. . .

ACTIVISTS  BUILD  ‘WADI  AL-AHMAR’  VILLAGE
Palestinian and international activists built, overnight, wooden and steel houses constructing what they referred to as the “Wadi al-Ahmar” village in the KHAN AL-AHMAR VILLAGE in challenge to the Israeli authorities attempting to uproot Bedouin communities off the area.     ___During night hours, dozens of Palestinian and international activists built substitute homes for residents of Khan al-Ahmar using wood and steel.     __Head of the Palestinian Authority (PA) Committee against the Wall and Settlements, Minister Walid Assaf, announced the “birth” of the “Wadi al-Ahmar” village, dozens of meters away from the illegal Israeli settlement of Kfar Adumim that is built on lands of Khan al-Ahmar.     ___Assaf stressed that building the village comes as a challenge to Israeli procedures of attacking Palestinian villages and to confirm that Palestinians are ready to keep on building and holding on to their lands.     More . . .
Related . . .  EU:  KHAN  AL-AHMAR  DEMOLITION  COULD  HAVE  SEVERE  CONSEQUENCES
Related . . .  MALAYSIA  LAUNCHES  CAMPAIGN  TO  SUPPORT  PALESTINIAN  REFUGEES
Related . . .  KHAN  AL-AHMAR:  FRANCE,  GERMANY,  ITALY,  SPAIN,  UK  ISSUE  JOINT  STATEMENT
Related . . .  ITALY  APPROVES  ADDITIONAL  FUNDING  TO  UNRWA

ARMY  ABDUCTS  FOUR  PALESTINIANS,  SUMMONS  THREE  OTHERS,  IN  WEST  BANK
Israeli soldiers abducted, on Tuesday at dawn, four young Palestinian men, and summoned three others for interrogation, during extensive and violent military invasions, in the occupied West Bank.    ___The soldiers abducted a young man, identified as Mohammad al-Hilo, from Hizma town, east of Jerusalem, after stopping him near al-Khan al-Ahmar Bedouin community, facing Israeli demolition and displacement.    ___Furthermore, the soldiers invaded Safa village, west of the central West Bank city of Ramallah, searched several homes and abducted Hasan Karaja, 33, Haitham Siyaj and Saif al-Idrisi.   More . . .

ISRAELI  POLICE  ARREST  SENIOR  PALESTINIAN  OFFICIAL
Israeli police on Tuesday arrested a senior Palestinian official in the 1948 occupied Palestinian territories after searching his house and confiscating some of his belongings.    ___According to his family, Raja Eghbariya, member of the political bureau of Abnaa el-Balad Movement, was arrested from his house in Umm al-Fahm on Tuesday morning.    ___The family said in a press statement that Israeli police seized all computers in the house as well as Eghbariya’s cell phone.    More . . .

COMMENTARY    AND    OPINION. . . .

US  DECISION  TO  SHUT  PLO  OFFICE  ‘DENIES  PALESTINIANS  AS  PEOPLE’
Ola Salem
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) office in Washington, DC, is “denying the Palestinians as people” and further jeopardising the peace process, analysts warn.   ___White House National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the administration’s decision in a speech on Monday, saying the PLO had “not taken steps to advance the start of direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel”.   [. . . .] Palestinian officials have described the decision as a “declaration of war on efforts to bring peace … to the region”.   ___PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said the decision was “yet another affirmation of the Trump administration’s policy to collectively punish the Palestinian people”.   More . . .

THE  VEILED  DANGER  OF  THE  ‘DEAD’  OSLO  ACCORDS
Ramzy Baroud
Yossi Beilin is back. This unrepentant Israeli “peacemaker” is like the mythical phoenix, constantly resurrecting from its own ashes.    ___In a recent article in Al-Monitor, Beilin wrote in support of the idea of a confederation between Israel and Palestine.    ___A confederation “could prevent the need to evacuate settlers and allow those interested to live in Palestine as Israeli citizens, just as a similar number of Palestinian citizens could live in Israel,” he wrote.    ___Bizarrely, Beilin is promoting a version of an idea that was promoted by Israel’s extremist Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman. [. . . .] Oslo is not a specific legal document that can be implemented or rejected. It is a spectrum in which the likes of Beilin, Lieberman and Pipes have more in common than they think, and in which the fate of the Palestinian people is left to inept leaders, incapable of thinking outside the permissible space allocated to them by Israelis and the Americans.   More . . .

NOTICES  FROM  ORGANIZATIONS. . . .

BRIGHT  STARS  OF  BETHLEHEM  JERUSALEM  CONFERENCE—HOUSTON,  TEXAS
As part of the Room for Hope festival, The Jerusalem Conference is a one-day conference on THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11 that brings together scholars, ecumenical theologians, and peace-doers around the topic JERUSALEM: WHAT MAKES FOR PEACE?  Register. . .

POEM FOR THE DAY. . . . 

“GLORIA,”  BY  LENA  KHALAF  TUFFAHA

In the late eighties, in the middle
· · · of middle school we break from studying our ancestors,
pass on the Phoenicians for a while, leave the terraced fields

of Canaan and the hanging gardens of Babylon
· · · for European History. Miss Magda
is our guide and she contextualizes

the continent, intertwines it with our own lives, the shapes
· · · of our maps, the narrowing of our family names. She has
no patience for girls who are charmed by France,

even though a veil of Chanel No 5 unfurls
· · · over our heads as she enters the room, nor for adults
who praise London’s museums. She narrates

a list of our possessions housed there. Miss Magda speaks
· · · many languages: the queen’s English, impeccable
French, some Greek, maybe others? Her Arabic

an elegant Cairene, her eyeliner distinctly Cleopatran. She speaks
· · ·
مش فارقة معها
her mind, she names conquerors, and the servile
regimes they birthed. She liberates the word احتلال

from its quotidian presentation, locates our current colonizers
· · · on a continuum of violence, sends us asking
our grandparents for stories. She enacts her name

as she towers over our desks and asks rhetorical questions
· · ·
كثر خير العرب
who translated Aristotle? Who filled libraries
with books that would later make الرينيساس بتاعهم possible?

In the middle of middle school we are devotees
· · · of American pop songs, they trickle into our lives
months after they top the charts, our childhoods are museums

housing the no-longer hits of the Reagan era. Miss Magda’s
· · · class coincides with our Laura Branigan phase.
Miss Magda barely tolerates our tastes. When she cannot find

a way to escape playground duty and we are perfecting
· · · our hair flips, passing the Walkman around and singing
“Gloria,” she raises a perfect eyebrow and turns toward us

and I think maybe even smiles. In class, ever the historian,
· · · she remarks على فكرة that’s originally an Italian song.
و كانت مش بطالة بس خربوها الأمريكان

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Jordanian and Syrian heritage. Her poems have been published in American and international journals including Blackbird, The Boiler, and Borderlands. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017). She lives in Redmond, Washington.