By Daoud Kuttab

Shimon Peres will be remembered mostly for the same reason the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin is: both were architects of the Oslo Peace Accords and were awarded, along with Yasser Arafat, the Nobel Peace Prize for this agreement.
Both Rabin and Peres were hardened Israeli Zionists committed to the need for a “Jewish state”, and had little problem with the way their decisions affected the Palestinians.

Peres fathered the nuclear programme and was a supporter of the settlement enterprise, but at the same time supported the peace process and accepted the Oslo parameters. Their only difference was in style rather than in substance.
Shimon Peres focused a lot on the appearances of peace rather than its reality. His attacks on Lebanon, after he became prime minister in 1995, following Rabin’s assassination, was on his biggest mistakes.

After Israel’s 1985 withdrawal from Lebanon, Israeli military wanted to deter attacks on Israel. Israeli artillery hit a UN outpost in south Lebanon’s Kafr Kana, killing nearly 100 people who had tried to shelter themselves from the Israeli onslaught at the internationally flagged UN location. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The atmosphere at the Palestinian ministry was as cold as ice. News had come of the condolence statement issued by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the death of former Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

The press was asking for comments, but no one at the ministry wanted to talk to the press. A senior Palestinian official who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, said, “If we say what we want, we will be going against what the president said. At the same time, no one wants his or her name associated with a whitewashing of Peres’ bloody history.”

Most of the staff working for the Palestinian government today entered political life around the time Peres and Abbas sat at a table on the White House lawn, on Sept. 13, 1993, to sign the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That declaration, since called the Oslo Accord, established the very offices in Ramallah and elsewhere in which some of these longtime staffers work today. Oslo — which was preceded on Sept. 9 by an exchange of letters in which Israel and the PLO recognized each other — ushered in the Palestinian Authority as well as controversial Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The world’s leading soccer association is under pressure by the world’s leading human rights organization to live up to its own rules and ethical guidelines.

A well-researched study, which included aerial photos, by Human Rights Watch (HRW) called on Sept. 25 for six clubs of the Israeli Football Association (IFA) to stop playing its home games in soccer fields built on Palestinian lands. Pointing to an Oct. 11 FIFA meeting, HRW described the Israeli actions to be against international humanitarian law.

HRW called settlements “illegal” and said that they are built on “stolen” and “seized” Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank.

Under the headline “Israel/Palestine: FIFA Sponsoring Games on Seized Land,” the HRW report states that “Israeli settlement football clubs contribute to human rights violations.”

Palestinian Football Association (PFA) chief Jibril Rajoub wasted little time to jump on the report, saying that FIFA has a responsibility to follow up on the case. Meeting on Sept. 27 with FIFA President Gianni Infantino in India, Rajoub was quoted by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA as saying that FIFA must take steps against IFA, which is clearly violating FIFA laws prohibiting the presence of two associations in the same recognized country. Continue Reading »