By Daoud Kuttab

After 90 minutes of powerful anti-Israeli speeches by 18 members of Parliament, Deputy Speaker Mustapha Amawi called the session over because of lack of quorum.

The speakers were incensed by the fact that Jordan and the American Noble Energy Company signed a letter of intent to import gas from the Israeli Leviathan field in the eastern Mediterranean.

Speaker after speaker explained that Jordan today is no longer in need of this deal, after having built a liquid gas seaport in Aqaba and working on building the Basra-Aqaba pipeline to import Iraq oil and gas.

Furthermore, parliamentarians insisted that today’s oil prices, hovering at around $30 a barrel, are different from what they were a few years ago. Oil was over $100 a barrel and the Egyptian gas pipe was blown up every other week, causing Jordan to have to use much more expensive alternatives to generate electricity. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

AMMAN — Jamal Zahalka has been a member of the Israeli Knesset in good standing for 13 years. He was first elected to the 16th Israeli legislature in 2003 and has been regularly re-elected since.

In a phone interview with Al-Monitor, Zahalka explained that the Feb. 4 decision of the Ethics Committee against him and his colleagues “was purely political” and had nothing to do with ethics. The Ethics Committee deals with issues related to behavior and actions of Knesset members.

Zahalka, Zoabi and Ghattas are accused of showing sympathy with terrorists. Zahalka, however, said that the efforts of the parliamentarians to help families in East Jerusalem are “totally the kind of act a parliamentarian is supposed to do.”

The problems began when Palestinian families from East Jerusalem were unable to retrieve the bodies of their children more than four months after having been killed by Israeli security — often involving a violent interaction with Israelis. “The families tried, through their lawyers, to speak to the police, but were told that this is a political problem,” Zahalka said.

Zahalka, 61, and two other Knesset members went to an East Jerusalem cultural center Feb. 4 to meet with the families, and subsequently discussed these complaints with the Israeli police. Rather than engaging with them to negotiate the solution for this humanitarian problem, the meeting itself quickly became the focus of a vicious campaign led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against the Arab Knesset members. “Netanyahu used our clearly parliamentary action to incite against us, saying we were paying condolences to terrorists even though our meeting was at a cultural center four months after the incident happened. Who pays condolences after four months?” Zahalka asked sarcastically. Continue Reading »