Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, issued a statement last week claiming victory in its campaign to convince the school to become the first U.S. institution of higher learning to divest from the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Six companies were targeted by the group for "supporting or profiting from Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories." 

Much is made of 'first time' experiences in life, but nothing in my good and bad education, or professional experience, prepared me for my first time at the Cannes Film Festival. The emotional charge was furthermore doubled, tripled, even quadrupled because the first screening I planned to attend in the theater reserved for the Official Selection Un Certain regard section, was a dearly beloved's first feature film - Annemarie Jacir's Salt of this Sea. 

The Israeli military is facing fresh accusations from a Palestinian human rights group that it is responsible for civilian deaths in the Gaza Strip. Israel has also been accused of targeting Palestinian children in Gaza, as numerous children have been among the civilian casualties in Israeli strikes on the Strip. Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin speaks with a Palestinian human rights expert from Gaza in this special report. 

The closure of Gaza's border crossings has created a multi-million-dollar economy - underneath the Palestinian territory's frontier with Egypt. Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin reports from the Gaza-Egypt border on the intricate network of tunnels that was once used for smuggling weapons and people and is now a vital route into Gaza for medicine, food, and fuel supplies. 

The opening moments of Salt of This Sea, Annemarie Jacir's first feature, hit like an unexpected jab - black and white newsreel footage from 1948: Israeli tanks knocking over walls, pulling down houses, panicked refugees wading into the sea to crowd onto boats. From the violence of 1948, the film jumps to the present day, to a Palestinian-American woman standing in a passport-control booth at Ben-Gurion airport, negotiating her entry, only to be whisked away for an interrogation and a full-body search. 

For Palestinian filmmakers like myself, cinema has become a way of re-creating Palestine and making sense of our uprooted lives and disrupted narratives. I believe that all Palestinians have an "imaginary" Palestine in their heads that they construct like a film and watch over and over. It is what safeguards their identity and gives them the strength and hope to withstand injustice and despair. 

The second annual Al-Kasaba International Film Festival wraps up this weekend, having presented to Palestinian audiences two full weeks of Palestinian and international films at the historic Al-Kasaba Theatre and Cinematheque in Ramallah. After the success of last year's festival, the first major international film festival in the occupied Palestinian territories, this year's event showcased over 30 features, documentaries, and short films from Palestine, the Arab world, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. 

In February 2003, the FBI raided the home of University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian. Arrested in front of his wife and children, Al-Arian was charged with 17 counts related to terrorism. In an unusual move, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft called a press conference to announce Al-Arian's arrest, stating Al-Arian was the leader of the North American branch of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.