Month: October 2000

Beit Jala is a special town for me. I went to the Hope School at the top of the hill there, and a number of my relatives and in-laws still live in this predominantly Christian town, west of Bethlehem. Many of the original citizens of Beit Jala have emigrated to Chile and other Latin American…

RAMALLAH, West Bank –– When I passed by the bombed out police station in the center of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, I felt sad. What has happened to the peace process, that Israel has to use U.S.-made Apache helicopters to shell one of the few signs of peace with the Palestinians? The Palestinian Authority’s…

The title of this article, “Three million hostages,” may surprise some, but this is actually what has happened to the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza during the past few weeks. These Palestinians have become prisoners in their own country. Movement between cities and towns was completely forbidden, as was the movement across…

The year was 1994, long after the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn. The memorandum of understanding between Israel and the PLO had been signed and the details of the areas from which Israel was to withdraw were known. A Palestinian lawyer decided to use politics rather than law to solve his clients’ problems….

There are plenty of reasons why Palestinians insist on the need for an independent inquiry into the violence of the past two weeks that has resulted in the killing of more than 80 civilian Palestinians, many of them children.  The United States should support this request, which will surely calm the situation on the ground….