By Daoud Kuttab

Few Palestinians were surprised when a Swiss lab showed that the remains of late Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat contained a high quantity of polonium. No protests are expected and nothing seems different outside the Palestinian headquarters in Ramallah.

Arafat spent his last days at those headquarters in Palestine before being taken, dressed in pajamas, by a Jordanian army helicopter to Amman in October 2004, then flown to a military hospital outside Paris, only to return in a coffin and be bid farewell for the last time by tens of thousands of grieving Palestinians.

The reason few Palestinians were moved by the widely publicized news about Arafat’s probable cause of death is simple: Most Palestinians had already reached the conclusion that their leader, who had been holed up in his headquarters and surrounded by Israeli tanks, did not die a natural death. Arafat’s family, including his nephew Nasser al-Qudwa, who was the PLO’s representative to the UN, and senior PLO officials, including the usually reserved Nabil Shaath, have repeatedly insisted in public that the founder of modern-day Palestinian nationalism had been assassinated by poisoning of some kind.

What Palestinians and the world want to know is not whether Arafat was killed, but who caused his sudden and mysterious death and how. Experts in the Swiss lab, whose detailed 108-page report was outlined on Al Jazeera, state that death by polonium requires the killer element be taken into the body. In other words, someone had to have placed it in Arafat’s food or injected it into his body. This means that the circle of individuals who are potential targets of any investigation can only be those officials who were with or met with Arafat in his last days in Ramallah. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The Palestinian town of Bethlehem found itself this week in the heart of high-powered Palestinian political discussions and debates. Residents of the city where Christianity began felt the change that included a five-day stay in town by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, a visit of Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski (Nov. 5) and meetings with US Secretary of State John Kerry (Nov. 6).

Security arrangements in Bethlehem were at their  highest level as Palestinian police forces were spread all over the city; certain sections of the city were completely out of reach for residents, and the Church of Nativity — where Christians believe Jesus was born — was a mix of regulating both the visit of ordinary tourists as well as political visitors.

Bethlehem has quickly jumped in terms of importance because of the rise in its tourism income. The city has built new hotels that offer rates much lower than those in nearby Jerusalem, thus attracting many tourists who are eating, shopping and for the first time staying overnight in the Palestinian town. Naturally, the bulk of tourism income is still clearly on the Israeli side, but the growth of the city’s hotel business is evident in the number of tourist buses that are seen crossing in and out of Bethlehem daily. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

News websites in Jordan have been shaken up ever since the Abdullah Ensour government decided to enforce a controversial law that forces websites that deal with Jordanian news and commentary to obtain a licence, like the newspapers.

Unlike the audiovisual law, by equating news websites to newspapers, the legislature has created an unusual and hard-to-manage system that forces the Press and Publications Department to interfere daily in the workings on the Internet, which, the world insists, should be free and unfettered.

In implementing the law, the department has chosen not to include many sites that “deal with news and commentary about Jordan” sighting obscure reasoning. Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo and social media sites and individual blogs have been allowed to continue operations based on the subjective whims of the department.

A further problem is the condition that every news website has to appoint an editor in chief who has been a member of the Jordan Press Association for at least four years. The problem with this is that the JPA has been a closed shop, allowing as its members only journalists working for the written press. Continue Reading »

Following appeared in Jordan Times

By Daoud Kuttab

Inhabitants of a Palestinian village were told in the late 1930s that the British High Commissioner for Palestine wanted to visit them.

As news of the cause for that request was made known, the Palestinian villagers found themselves divided. Some, mostly older people, were happy about the occasion; they felt that it would put their village on the political map and will most certainly result in improved services and, possibly, a few government jobs for people from the village.

Young people were opposed, saying that the commissioner was responsible for the open immigration policy that enabled Jewish Zionists to enter Palestine and, therefore, must be boycotted.

The division between young and old quickly morphed into a much deeper division that went beyond age. Different groups took one side or another for totally unrelated reasons. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

One of the problems of political negotiations without a clear reference point is that the parties, especially the stronger party, can change the rules of the game at will. And the absence of a neutral referee on the field allows such a strong party to get away with regularly moving the goal posts.

This is exactly what is happening in the Palestinian-Israeli talks. It began with the Israelis refusing to accept the principle of the 1967 borders and suspend settlement expansion as a reference point, and continued with Israeli negotiators banning US officials from entering the negotiation room.

Palestinians and Israelis have agreed to keep the talks going for nine months. For Israel, talks could go on for nine years as long as the talks masqueraded their continued occupation, but for Palestinians, this meant talking while Israel continued to take away Palestinian lands intended for the future Palestinian state.

The agreement by Israel to release pre-Oslo prisoners in four stages during the nine-month period sealed Israel’s assurance that Palestinian negotiators would not walk out of the talks for any reason whatsoever. Even though the prisoner release was a previous Israeli commitment in the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh Agreement, the Palestinian side also agreed not to pursue any further UN membership attempts during the nine-month negotiations period. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

Throughout the ages, political leaders have used sports as a tool to unify a nation and to provide the people with a sense of nationalistic pride. The case of Palestine is no different.

Despite years of indifference by the Palestinian leadership, few Palestinians will disagree that sports received a huge boost when Jibril Rajoub took over as the head of the Palestinian football [soccer] federation and the Olympic committee. He has introduced and supported women’s sports and exposed Palestine to the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) and Arab sports, as well as supervised the building of new stadiums. His efforts have succeeded in raising the profile of Palestinian athletics.

Rajoub was an honored guest on Oct. 31 at the 50th anniversary of the Beit Sahour Orthodox Club. His speech at the conclusion of the club’s festivities summarized his thinking, ideology and his practicality.

The Palestinian sports leader was elected along with jailed leader Marwan Barghouti and Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan at the sixth congress of Fatah to its highest body, the Central Committee. He mixed politics with sports to stress the importance of national athletics to the Palestinian resistance. He has repeated many times, including to the New York Times, that sports can achieve a lot for the Palestinian cause. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

The possibility of the return of former Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan to Palestine appears to have improved in recent months. Fatah sources told Al-Monitor that Palestinian Authority President and Fatah Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has softened his stance toward the former member of Fatah’s Central Committee.

The sources, however, cautioned against early celebrations by Dahlan and his supporters, noting that Abbas will not automatically allow Dahlan to assume his former post. Fatah suspended Dahlan from the Central Committee in January 2010, severing all ties with him. He will only be allowed to return (and be guaranteed protection) as an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from Gaza. He will still have to respond to official charges of corruption and murder in the West Bank before his status in Fatah is considered, the source told Al-Monitor. No time frame has been agreed upon, but it is related to ensuring that all details are accepted by both sides.

Dahlan responded to media reports about his reconciliation with Abbas with a 13-minute, high-quality video aimed generally at Palestinians and posted on YouTube on Oct. 28. It got more than 23,000 hits within the first two days. Continue Reading »

This appeared in Columbia Journalism Review magazine.

By Alice Su

When Hazm al-Mazouni shows his press pass at the entrance to the sprawling Zaatari refugee camp in the Jordanian desert, the guards don’t let him in. A 42-year-old native of Hama, Syria, Al-Mazouni’s status in Jordan is clear: refugee. But the guards are wary of his Radio al-Balad badge. “This is proof that we did something,” Al-Mazouni says, smiling. “A good thing.”

Al-Mazouni has been a refugee for 11 months and a journalist for seven. He wears brown, horn-rimmed glasses and walks briskly, a laptop bag hanging from his shoulder and two cell phones in hand, one for personal calls, the other for work. Zaatari administrators are well aware of his reporting for Syrians Among Us, a radio news program and online bulletin produced by Syrian refugees.

The program began as pilot project in October 2012 by the Community Media Network(CMN), a Jordanian nonprofit that supports independent media in the Arab world. CMN’s funding comes largely from Western foundations, notably the Open Society Foundations, UNESCO, and the National Endowment for Democracy. A US State Department grant of $77,000 paid for the first phase of Syrians Among Us. Continue Reading »