By Daoud Kuttab

AMMAN — The man sitting outside the plush villa in west Amman looks like an old fighter. Security does not appear to be of much concern in Deir Ghbar, a stable Amman suburb and location of several embassies and diplomatic residences. The chain-smoking guard waves visitors through, into the house of Salim Zanoun, speaker of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the highest parliamentary body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and then directs them to Zanoun’s office on the second floor. There’s no metal detector, no body search.

Zanoun, a lawyer by training, had on Aug. 26 expressed his unhappiness with the tactics of his fellow founder of Fatah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is trying to push through an emergency meeting of the PLO’s highest body, the Executive Committee, to reshuffle it to his advantage. Zanoun made his position known to the newly selected secretary-general of the PLO’s Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat, and later to Abbas. Zanoun and Abbas met alone in Amman Aug. 26. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

A professional friend who teaches how to produce a highly entertaining TV talk show gives the following advice: begin with those who espouse the most extreme opinions and then conclude with the rational moderate centrist ones.

This advice of the talk show trainer is no longer relevant in the Middle East. The moderate rational centrist point of view has long disappeared from political discussion. All speakers are radical and the moderate political center has long collapsed.

Take for example the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The rational opinion is that the two state solution – Israel and Palestine – on roughly the 1967 borders is the most acceptable way out of the decades old conflict. But other than lip service of world leaders, this solution is nowhere close to reality. Continue Reading »