By Daoud Kuttab

A statement issued by UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova has angered Palestinian officials and activists.

Bokova made the statement Oct. 14, the same day Israel decided to suspend its relations with UNESCO due to the organization’s resolution on Israeli violations in Jerusalem that Israel feels ignored Jewish connections to Al-Haram al-Sharif compound. Bokova tried to re-emphasize the importance of the three main Abrahamic religions and called for tolerance and for dialogue. After explaining that UNESCO declared Jerusalem a World Heritage Site because of its universality and its importance to the three religions, she concluded by appealing for “dialogue, not confrontation.”

But what angered Palestinians was the feeling that the UNESCO director-general tried to oppose the will of the majority of the member states. Of special concern was Bokova saying, “The Al-Aqsa Mosque/Al-Haram al-Sharif, the sacred shrine of Muslims, is also the Har HaBayit — or Temple Mount — whose Western Wall is the holiest place in Judaism.”

A Haaretz article from May 2015 stated there was no connection between Al-Haram al-Sharif and the Jewish temples. While they did not question the existence of the First Temple, Israeli journalists Ruth Schuster and Ran Shapira wrote in the same Israeli daily in October that year, “Archaeologists cannot conclusively point to stones they know comprised the Second Temple, let alone the first one.” Continue Reading »

         

By Daoud Kuttab

The recent resolution that was approved by the world’s cultural body about the old city of Jerusalem, Al Haram Al Sharif and the Ibrahimi Mosque had nothing to do with Jews or Jewish history.

A close reading of the resolutions passed by UNESCO shows that they are about Israel and its practices in occupied Palestinian territories.

Yet, one would not notice this fact if one were following the Israeli media as well as much of the world media that falls within its orbit.

The spin and overreach of the Israeli hasbara (propaganda) machine would have its readers believe that this was the most anti-Jewish resolution ever.

The UNESCO resolution condemned Israel for its actions against Palestinians and Palestinian holy places, and reminded the world that repeated attempts by UNESCO experts to examine the situation on the ground and to meet with Israeli and Palestinian officials were blocked by the Israeli occupiers.

While there was no explicit anti Jewish reference in the resolution, the word occupation appears 15 times in the text because that was the focus of the resolution. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

A senior adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas visited a local vegetable store in Ramallah on Oct. 2. The store owner and the adviser talked about Abbas’ having attended the funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres on Sept. 30. When the owner of the vegetable store conveyed his criticism, the adviser related to him part of the discussion that had taken place at the Muqata, the presidential headquarters in Ramallah, prior to the funeral.

In a conversation with Al-Monitor, the vegetable store owner talked about the conversation with the adviser to Abbas on condition of anonymity. He said that the adviser had told him, “We told him [Abbas], ‘How does a leader benefit if he wins over the entire world but loses the love of his people.’” But the Palestinian leader was adamant about going to attend the funeral irrespective of the advice of the adviser or his aides.

“I am 82 and I am not running for office anymore. What I am doing is in the best interest of my people,” the adviser related as to what Abbas had said to those who opposed his action, according to the vegetable store owner. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The United States is not the only place that will be witnessing a leadership change. Elections for top institutions and the overall leadership will be taking place within the two leading Palestinian political movements.

Fateh is expected to hold its seventh congress this winter and Hamas is expected to choose its political bureau sometime before the end of this year.

Neither Mahmoud Abbas nor Khaled Mishaal are going to be running for the top leadership position.

If it is held as planned on November 29, the seventh congress will be held two years late. But this is a huge improvement over the sixth congress that took place in Bethlehem in August 2009, 20 years after the fifth.

The Fateh central committee met in September and took this decision. The actual date will be set in a meeting that is to take place late this October.

The plan is that the Palestine National Council, over which Fateh has decisive control, will meet afterwards to elect a new executive committee of the PLO and a new chairman. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The American Noble Energy Company signed a 15-year agreement with the National Electric Power Company to ensure its supply with natural gas at the cost of $10 billion.

The gas will be coming from the newly discovered huge gas wells in the eastern Mediterranean and will most likely be piped into Jordan through the occupied West Bank, without the permission of the Palestinians.

The Jordan Bromine Company, which operates south of the Dead Sea, had signed a similar deal.

Ever since a memorandum of understanding was signed to buy the Israeli gas from the American company, many Jordanians have protested the deal.

Parliament opposed it, as well as large numbers of Jordanians, but since this is a deal with a private company, even though the government owns controlling shares in it, it does not need parliamentary approval.

At least this is what government officials say.

This leaves the Parliament with very few options to stop the deal. It would have to vote down the government, in a vote of confidence, to be able to stop this deal. Continue Reading »

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 »

By Daoud Kuttab

The overtly exaggerated power of electoral democracy has once again been put into question in the Middle East. Municipal elections slated for the West Bank and Gaza on October 8th will not take place due officially to a decision of the Palestinian High Court.

But the high court decision -whether you believe it was taken independently or not- reflects a clear problem in the situation that Palestinians were facing in the fall of 2016.

In most Arab countries the problem with electoral democracy is that it is often the only portion of democracy that is implemented and usually for a short period. The separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary and a robust free media are often missing in most cases where elections are taking place which are usually not even free or fair.

In the Palestinian example the last time municipal elections took place was in 2012 and was limited to the West Bank. The Islamic movement didn’t allow elections to take place in the Gaza strip which has been under their control since 2007 and at the same time they instructed their supporters in the West Bank to boycott the elections. Continue Reading »

This is a personal story of the discrimination we faced trying to get a residency ID issued for our daughter

By Daoud Kuttab

My wife and I were born in east Jerusalem before Israel’s 1967 occupation of the city. Our youngest daughter, Dina, was also born in Jerusalem.
We have kept a home in Jerusalem, a city which continues to be the center of our lives, despite the fact that I have had to travel a lot for work.

This week we spent an entire day at the only Interior Ministry office that is allowed to provide legal residency documents to Palestinians. The entire 350,000-strong population of east Jerusalem can only use a single Interior Ministry office, located in Wadi Joz, while they are for all practical purpose denied use of three other ministry offices (including offices in Gilo and Har Homa, that are located within settlements in areas occupied in 1967.

For Palestinians in Jerusalem the mandatory visit to the ministry is as hated as a visit to the dentist. You have to wait in line for hours just to enter the building and once inside you spend a few more hours until you get your turn and then you face a very unpleasant official who is looking for ways to trap you rather than help you. Every Palestinian wishing to get a travel document or an ID must visit this unwelcoming office. Getting our daughter’s permanent- status blue ID card was no different.
This visit is a huge operation for Palestinians in Jerusalem. You need to prepare all kinds of documents to prove that Jerusalem is the center of your life, even though in the end you are at the mercy of an Israeli official who ultimately makes the final judgment call. Continue Reading »