By Daoud Kuttab

A man was once labeled a terrorist and held in a South African prison. He and his people appealed to the world for an end to the apartheid regime ruling his country, but the world’s governments failed to respond. They appealed to the world’s citizenry and to private companies, asking them to divest from South Africa, and to people of concence, asking that they boycott the racist regime.

The life of this extraordinary man, Nelson Mandela, was honored during a weeklong celebration leading up to his funeral. Among those praising him were Israeli leaders, including President Shimon Peres, who were intimate supporters of Mandela’s jailers and his people’s oppressors. South Africans became free when people took action against the racist regime and put enough pressure on it to force it to change course.

I was thinking about this as I read the paternalistic Al-Monitor column by Shlomi Eldar from Dec. 16, in which he criticizes Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Executive Committee member Hanan Ashrawi for sending a letter to NBC protesting a television series to be filmed in occupied East Jerusalem, focusing primarily on Jewish sites at the so-called City of David excavations. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

A $400 million agreement to create a desalination plant in Aqaba and to pump brine water to the Dead Sea is a far cry from what is being hyped by Israel as an “historic agreement.

The memorandum of understanding signed at the World Bank on Dec. 9 by Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian officials calls for the creation of a desalination plant in Aqaba that would supply clean water to Aqaba and Eilat and pump sea water into the shrinking Dead Sea. In return, Israel would give Jordan 50 million cubic meters of water from the Sea of Galilee free of charge and sell to the Palestinians 20 million to 30 million cubic meters of water. Jordan would supply Eilat with 30 million cubic meters of water and make the same amount available to its own southern population.

Israeli Minister of Energy and Water Silvan Shalom, hailing the agreement as “historic,” said it reflected what he called unprecedented regional cooperation. His Palestinian counterpart, Shaddad Attili, said that the Palestinian government supports the Jordanian project, which would for the first time free up a decent quantity of water for supply to Palestine outside the framework of the Oslo Accords. This largely Jordanian endeavor is a far cry from the multibillion dollar Red Sea-Dead Sea channel that has been part of the discussions steered by the World Bank. Continue Reading »