The burden of sirens in the PA
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 […]
Settlements must go
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 […]
My Ramallah diary
It is 8:50 a.m. on Tuesday, November 14, and the phone is ringing off the hook. My cell phone reads 6 missed calls. I must have overslept. I was up late the night before working on the script for a documentary about how Palestinian children and adults are trying to cope emotionally with the violence […]
The need for international observers
Hearing on the news this week the Palestinian Authority is demanding an international protection force for the Palestinian territories reminded me of a day in 1988 when I wished there was such a force. I was returning home from a day covering the intifada in Gaza. Soldiers on patrol near the Kalandiya refugee camp, located […]
The electronic intifada
It is almost 9 p.m. on Tuesday, October 31, and TV host Hamdi Farraj is interviewing Yacoub Qesieh, one of the Palestinian residents from the town of Beit Jala whose house had been shelled the previous day by Israeli tanks. Qesieh explained that they had had absolutely no warning about the shelling, but had been […]