My friend Khaled Batrawi is a civil engineer working in Ramallah. I went to see Khaled on Tuesday night and found him frustrated with the weak internal response to the current situation. Among other things, Khaled is angry because he feels local officials of the Palestinian Authority are not doing enough to prepare Palestinians for the current onslaught of heavy mortar and missile attacks.  Continue Reading »

My brother in-law Labib runs the Palestinian Bible Society. With its main office in east Jerusalem, the Society works in Bethlehem, Ramallah and Nablus, and has an office and a bookstore in the center of Gaza City.

Due to the current situation, the manager of the bookstore has been back home in the West Bank ever since the closure. Not that he has been any safer, as shells have fallen not far from his home in Beit Sahour.

Travel from the West Bank to Gaza is impossible. The idea of getting the manager to cross into Jordan and fly into Gaza was nixed once Gaza International Airport was closed. Last week, Labib thought he would go to Gaza just to check that the store had not been damaged by recent Israeli shelling. Continue Reading »

Beit Jala is a special town for me. I went to the Hope School at the top of the hill there, and a number of my relatives and in-laws still live in this predominantly Christian town, west of Bethlehem.

Many of the original citizens of Beit Jala have emigrated to Chile and other Latin American countries and the town is relatively quiet. A settlement, Har Gilo, was built on the top of the Beit Jala mountain, near the Everest restaurant and hotel.

A large section of the townspeople’s land was confiscated during the years of occupation, to make room for the Gilo settlement and the two tunnels that connect the Hebron road with Jerusalem, bypassing Bethlehem and the Daheisheh refugee camp.  Continue Reading »

RAMALLAH, West Bank –– When I passed by the bombed out police station in the center of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, I felt sad. What has happened to the peace process, that Israel has to use U.S.-made Apache helicopters to shell one of the few signs of peace with the Palestinians? The Palestinian Authority’s police station was bombed on Oct. 12, after two Israeli soldiers were killed by a mob of Palestinians who wanted to take revenge for the more than 100 Palestinians killed in the past two weeks by Israeli soldiers.  Continue Reading »

The title of this article, “Three million hostages,” may surprise some, but this is actually what has happened to the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza during the past few weeks. These Palestinians have become prisoners in their own country. Movement between cities and towns was completely forbidden, as was the movement across the Jordan River bridge, the Gaza airport, and the land crossing with Egypt. Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport was also forbidden to Palestinians. This procedure was not limited to those wishing to exit but also applied to those who happened to be outside the area when this arbitrary decision was made. Unlike previous times when such radical steps were taken, the Israelis made no attempt to describe this action as a security precaution. This was collective punishment.  Continue Reading »

The year was 1994, long after the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn. The memorandum of understanding between Israel and the PLO had been signed and the details of the areas from which Israel was to withdraw were known.

A Palestinian lawyer decided to use politics rather than law to solve his clients’ problems. His clients were appealing the sealing of their homes by Israel, a collective punishment that is meted out against the families of Palestinians convicted of violent attacks against Israelis.  Continue Reading »

There are plenty of reasons why Palestinians insist on the need for an independent inquiry into the violence of the past two weeks that has resulted in the killing of more than 80 civilian Palestinians, many of them children.  The United States should support this request, which will surely calm the situation on the ground.

Israel wants Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to act like its puppet and order his own people not to protest the illegal occupation of their land. But Arafat is under tremendous public pressure not to allow Israel to get away with this kind of criminal violence against civilians. He will have to produce concrete results before any thought of a return to a peace process can get a footing. An investigation and an effective mechanism to ensure the protection of  the civilian Palestinians is not only necessary but it is the right of people under military occupation according to international law. If Israel is innocent, it should have no reason to worry about the results of such an independent inquiry.  Continue Reading »

The violence in and around Al Aqsa mosque last Thursday and Friday reminded me of the incident 10 years ago (on Oct. 8) when Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians on the compound of Al Haram al Sharif. I remember that incident 10 years ago because it took place one day after the birth of my second daughter Tania. It was also one of the few times that Israeli attempts to manipulate the media were clearly exposed.  Continue Reading »

The date was Dec. 13, 1993, exactly three months after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between Israel and the PLO on the White House lawn. We were dispatched to Gaza to gauge Palestinian reactions to the passing of this date without any change on the ground. Palestinians had high expectations that on this day, Israel would begin withdrawing from Gaza and Jericho as the agreement had stipulated. But nothing was happening on the Israeli side that day. The then prime minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin had made it clear “there are no sacred dates.” With the lapse of this first important date, the carefully worded interim peace agreement with a whole set of interdependent dates had fallen to the wayside.  Continue Reading »

For a long time two people, let us call them Ahmad and Shlomo have had a financial dispute. Shlomo owes Ahmad $100,000 and he has been refusing to pay it back despite Ahmad’s possession of a binding contract to the effect of his rights to this amount. The dispute has caused trouble for both men. Their children are always fighting and the atmosphere between them has become unbearable. Finally a mutual friend, let us call him Jimmy, has suggested a compromise. He went to Ahmad and convinced him that since he will never be able to get all his money back, the best he can do is get $30,000. Although he felt cheated Ahmad reluctantly agreed. But Jimmy was unable to deliver the agreed upon compromised amount. Days turned into weeks and month. An angry Ahmad started bad mouthing Shlomo saying that he has swindled him and has not paid him back his money.  Continue Reading »