It was late Tuesday night and Saleem Sweidan, who runs Nablus TV, was trying to figure out where to sleep that night. The day before he had tried to get back to Nablus and the normally 45 minutes trip took him five hours. The taxi driver deposited him and the other passengers near Salfit, they had to walk, hitch rides and walk some more before getting home near midnight. ‘I haven’t seen my children in days,” he told a group of colleagues from other West Bank cities who were meeting in Ramallah to hammer out an agreement regarding training and support for local television stations. Others from Hebron and Bethlehem had decided earlier that they will be staying at a local hotel. Continue Reading »

Israelis often misunderstand the political meaning of the word Nakba which Palestinians apply to the events in 1948 that led to the dispossession and disbursement of the Palestinian people.

Watching CNN on Tuesday, I was surprised to hear the interpretation by former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. His explanation was that, since Palestinians remember 1948 as the year of the catastrophe, then that means that they consider the creation of Israel a catastrophe, and therefore, Netanyahu went on to claim, Palestinians have yet to come to terms with the existence of Israel. The Palestinian remembrance is meant as a sign that Palestinians want to destroy Israel, the former Likud leader said.  Continue Reading »

If there was one issue that the Mitchell committee seems to have zoomed clearly on in its report has been the issue of settlement activity. In the clearest call yet from a committee made up of senior western and NATO leaders, the committee called for a clear and unambiguous freeze to settlement activity.

According to Palestinian and Israel press reports, the Mitchell committee went very far in it is statement in exposing the need for an end to settlement activity as a condition to the end of violence. “A cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless the Government of Israel freezes all settlement construction activity. Settlement activities must not be allowed to undermine the restoration of calm and the resumption of negotiations.” Continue Reading »

So finally we have it. A Middle East leader has finally pronounced the two-syllable word. Cease-fire. Sure, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s words were barely out of his mouth before denials and surprises came from Israel. But the fact is that after more than seven months of hell, the word has finally been introduced to the Palestinian-Israeli lexicon.

True, in 1982 the term was also used, and then, as now, the key players were the same, Yasser Arafat and Ariel Sharon. But the occupied Palestinian territories are not Lebanon and everyone who tries to make the comparison is wrong.  Continue Reading »