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 »