By Daoud Kuttab

This is a story about one fleet of vans, two companies and three governments. The van is a 9 seat hundai which travels a three kilometer route joining the passport terminal on both sides of the King Hussein Bridge. The companies are a Jordanian one and an Israeli. The Jordanian company: the Golden Arrow is a company officially registered in the name of Abu Khaled Hanania but it is known by many that there is a certain amount of investment in this company by one of Jordan’s security branches. The Israeli company is called Laufer Aviation it recently won a concession from the Israeli Airport Authority replacing Qumran VIP. The three relevant governments are the Israelis (which includes here both the civilian and military) the Palestinian Authority and the Jordanian
government.
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Opinion
NY Times Room for Debate

June 23, 2009, 3:22 PM

Weakening Hawkish Elements

Daoud Kuttab is a Palestinian journalist and a former professor of journalism at Princeton University.

No matter how the standoff in Iran ends up, two things have become clear. The power of digital technology can override analog government efforts of suppression, and the shakeup in Iran has weakened a host of hawkish elements in the region.
The Iranian people, a majority of whom are young, have discovered, developed and perfected every possible available means of communications. All the attempts by a brutal regime, like the one currently in power in Iran, have proved incapable of totally and completely gag ging their own population from being heard.
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Jun. 21, 2009
Daoud Kuttab , THE JERUSALEM POST
The suffering of Palestinians crossing the King Hussein Bridge, the only exit and entry point between the West Bank and Jordan, continues without any serious attempt at relief. While there is no doubt that the real remedy is the end of the occupation, genuine efforts should be exerted now to ease passage for individuals and families.
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By Daoud Kuttab

In private talks held in Oslo and other places, Palestinians were promised an independent state, but were told by the Israelis that they couldn’t actually use these words in the agreement. They were told that the five-year transitional period, which began in 1994, was meant to convince the Israeli public to accept this eventuality.

The person promising a sovereign state, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated by his own people and Palestinians had to start all over again with a right-wing leader who had no interest in talking to them. Continue Reading »

Ever since his announcement that he was going to make a major address, the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was billed as a copy of the Obama speech in Cairo. In fact Netanyahu has been touting himself for some time as the Israeli Obama. His election campaigners tried to copy all of the American president’s style using the exact same website look and attempt to use the Internet to garner support. The speech was even given to a university audience and some Israeli media outlets were joking that Bibi was asking his wife if she remembered any Quranic verses that he can use in his speech. Continue Reading »

“It is undeniable that the Palestinian people- Muslim and Christians- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation, Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza and neighboring lands of a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations- large and small that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation of the Palestinian people is intolerable.”

The above words were spoken by the President of the United States Barack Obama in Cairo to millions of people around the world. Never before had a US president even admitted the existence of Palestinian Christians let alone speak of the suffering of Palestinian Christians.
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Daoud Kuttab

AMMAN – The main conclusion emerging from the Obama-Abbas meeting last week is that the United States continues to be dead serious about its demand that Israel immediately freeze all settlement activities. Considering all the hot button topics, some might argue that issues of withdrawal, Jerusalem, and the Palestinian right of return, ought to be much more important. So why has the demand to freeze settlement activity become the defining issue?
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An Arab proverb says that a madman throws a stone in a drinking well and 100 wise men are needed to get the stone out. This proverb applies to the gigantic effort that US President Barack Obama will have to exert as he attempts to clean up the mess his predecessor created in the Arab and Muslim worlds. As in the proverb, the problem of regaining trust requires 100 times the effort made to lose it. Trust obviously cannot be built just with words, even though words, and the right words, have a lot of meaning.
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