Sep
09
2015
By Daoud Kuttab
The picture posted by Deacon Fadi Abu Sa’ada on his Facebook page Aug. 30 spoke volumes, and the image of medics helping a nun injured by Israeli tear gas raised anger among Palestinians.
Demonstrations after Sunday mass have become the norm in this Bethlehem-area town. The anti-Israel rallies are a protest against Israeli efforts to confiscate property to make room for the wall. The Israeli wall, cutting deep into Palestinian land, is said to have a security aim — to protect Israel — but in fact it is dividing land that belongs to Palestinian Christians. While
Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem, for Palestinians, the land on both sides of the wall belongs to them.
The protest rally in the Beit Jala neighborhood of Beir Ona began peacefully but soon turned into clashes between Palestinian civilians and church leaders on one side and Israeli soldiers on the other.
The protest was led by a revered church leader, Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Sabbah, the former head of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, made an impassioned public plea for an end to Palestinian land confiscation by Israel: “This is our land, and will always remain ours. They claim it’s their land, but they use their soldiers, their tanks, their military occupation to force their will — and it is not their land. It is our land, and one day their forces will withdraw and the land will return back to its indigenous Palestinian owners.†The patriarch concluded by saying that his message to the Christian world, the international community and the Arab world is that “This Holy Land is burning.†Continue Reading »
Sep
01
2015
By Daoud Kuttab
AMMAN — The man sitting outside the plush villa in west Amman looks like an old fighter. Security does not appear to be of much concern in Deir Ghbar, a stable Amman suburb and location of several embassies and diplomatic residences. The chain-smoking guard waves visitors through, into the house of Salim Zanoun, speaker of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the highest parliamentary body of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and then directs them to Zanoun’s office on the second floor. There’s no metal detector, no body search.
 The office is full of black-and-white photographs of Zanoun with founders of the Fatah movement, among them Khalil Wazir (Abu Jihad), Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and especially the late Yasser Arafat. A Palestinian flag is perched behind the large office desk, and a huge photo of Jerusalem’s golden Dome of the Rock covers the wall behind it.
Zanoun, a lawyer by training, had on Aug. 26 expressed his unhappiness with the tactics of his fellow founder of Fatah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is trying to push through an emergency meeting of the PLO’s highest body, the Executive Committee, to reshuffle it to his advantage. Zanoun made his position known to the newly selected secretary-general of the PLO’s Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat, and later to Abbas. Zanoun and Abbas met alone in Amman Aug. 26. Continue Reading »
Sep
01
2015
By Daoud Kuttab
A professional friend who teaches how to produce a highly entertaining TV talk show gives the following advice: begin with those who espouse the most extreme opinions and then conclude with the rational moderate centrist ones.
This advice of the talk show trainer is no longer relevant in the Middle East. The moderate rational centrist point of view has long disappeared from political discussion. All speakers are radical and the moderate political center has long collapsed.
Take for example the Palestinian Israeli conflict. The rational opinion is that the two state solution – Israel and Palestine – on roughly the 1967 borders is the most acceptable way out of the decades old conflict. But other than lip service of world leaders, this solution is nowhere close to reality. Continue Reading »
