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Palestinian and Israeli Negotiators Merely Shadow Boxing
By Daoud Kuttab The Palestinian Israeli meetings that took place in Amman Tuesday and are to be repeated next week took many by surprise. After all, the Palestinian leadership has been resisting for months responding to tremendous pressures to go back to negotiations without conditions. Furthermore it has become conventional wisdom that as the…
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WAR ON GAZA– three years later
by Daoud Kuttab Three years ago the Israeli army initiated a major military offensive against the people of the Gaza strip with the aim of stopping the shelling from Gaza and the release of one of their soldiers that was held in the strip. Over 1,400 Palestinians, many of them women and children, were…
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Will Jerusalem Cause a Third Intifada?
Daoud Kuttab This may be a journalistic hunch, but I have a feeling that we are about to witness an explosion in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, this time again over Jerusalem. In 2000, a Palestinian-Israeli human rights film festival took place in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ramallah and Nazareth. The concluding event, during which the name…
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We Are Palestinians
  By Daoud Kuttab JERUSALEM — When they were young, one of my children’s favorite games was reciting the family lineage. In our culture a person’s full name is a combination of his paternal parentage. My son, born in Jerusalem in 1988, would say his name is Bishara Daoud George Musa Qustandi Musa Kuttab. Our…
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Worse than the ‘invented’ comment
By Daoud Kuttab Prime minister of Israel at the time Yitzhak Rabin, wrote to Palestine Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat: “In response to your letter of September 9, 1993, I wish to confirm to you that, in light of the PLO commitments included in your letter, the government of Israel has decided to recognise the…
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The Arab Spring Has Yet to Focus on Media Freedoms
By Daoud Kuttab Did the independent media help produce the Arab Spring or did the revolutions succeed in liberating local media in the Arab world? This and many other questions were debated and discussed by Arab and international freedom of expression advocates and media practitioners and experts in Amman this week. The Arab Spring…
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Palestinians Will Have to Wait Another Year
By Daoud Kuttab Leaders have a habit of creating expectations for their people; these are higher in the case of groups that suffer from injustice. Not wanting to set precise time limits, leaders sometimes say elections will take place in the winter of the coming year, in the first half of the following year,…
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Why the Palestinians might reject U.S. aid
  By Daoud Kuttab  RAMALLAH, WEST BANK Few in Washington may realize that the issue of U.S. funding for Palestine is the talk of the town in Ramallah and other Palestinian cities. And the talk is not pleasant.  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been telling aides that he plans to reject some $150 million in…
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The genesis of a revolutionary media
By Daoud Kuttab Suleiman al Kabaili sits in an office that has clearly been rearranged to convert it into a makeshift studio. The wall behind the desk has a naked nail that used to hold a framed photo of the Libyan dictator. Suleiman, a radio studio director, dates the genesis of the current crop of…
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Packing Heat at the Gate
 By Daoud Kuttab The first thing you notice upon entering Mitiga Airport in Tripoli is a series of signs with the word “No†in capital letters next to illustrations of automatic weapons. The second thing is just how liberally most Libyans interpret these rules. In the days following the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the…