Palestine, media, Jordan, community radio, online journalism
By Daoud Kuttab For the fourth year in a row, Bethlehem hosted a spring marathon. Nearly 4,400 participants, including foreigners and local Palestinians, ran, walked or pushed baby strollers in the Palestine Marathon on April 1 in a festive atmosphere. Â To finish the full marathon, the runners had to complete two laps of a 21-kilometer…
By Daoud Kuttab In a March 18 statement, the Land Defense Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) reintroduced to political discussion terminology no longer often heard. In the statement, the PLO accused right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu of reviving theAllon Plan, so named after the late Labor Party Minister Yigal Allon.  The Allon Plan, developed shortly after Israel began its occupation of Palestinian lands in 1967, proposed that…
             By Daoud Kuttab After every horrific act of violent extremism we are inundated with right-wing incitement against followers of a major religion and, often from the West, with calls to use the Israeli approach in combating terrorism. Very little effort is made by pundits to…
By Daoud Kuttab The airlifting of a dozen-and-a-half Yemeni Jews to Israel last Monday received wide coverage. The action to evacuate 19 Yemenis to Israel is said to have included four stops and was done in cooperation with the US State Department. What happens to these Yemeni Jews, as well as what happened to the…
By Daoud Kuttab Karam Qubrosi can’t believe that Israel is allowing so many Gazans to travel on the occasion of Easter. “This is a dream come true, especially for many of us in the age group of 18-35,†he told Al-Monitor. Speaking to Al-Monitor after reaching the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, Qubrosi, 28,…
By Daoud Kuttab Hundreds of Palestinian dairy and meat farmers find themselves caught in a political struggle between Israel and the Palestinian authorities. Â The problem of Palestinian farmers began on March 10 when Israeli troops barred trucks belonging to the five leading Palestinian dairy and meat companies from entering into Jerusalem. Trucks from Hamoda dairy…
By Daoud Kuttab One of the nastiest acts that has emerged since the beginning of the current wave of Palestinian resistance to Israel is the cruel punishment of withholding bodies of dead Palestinians. Israel is holding the corpses of some 13 Palestinians, some summarily killed by Israeli soldiers, for as long as five months. Taher…
By Daoud Kuttab Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on March 13, 1941, in the Galilee village of al-Birweh. Darwish’s birthplace has now been replaced by Jewish settlements. Moshav Ahihud and Kibbutz Yasur now sit where the Palestinian village once stood in northern Israel, east of the port city of Acre. Today, 75 years after…
By Daoud Kuttab A substantial survey carried out in Israel, East Jerusalem and among Jewish settlers in the West Bank has shown that Arabs — Muslim, Christian and Druze — are much more religious than Israeli Jews.  Two-thirds of Israeli Arabs surveyed by the Pew Research Center said religion is very important in their lives,…
By Daoud Kuttab Attempts by the Palestinian Authority to arrest Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) member Najat Abu Bakr for statements she made alleging corruption by a government minister have ignited a discussion about defamation being a crime and calls for its decriminalization.  Majed Arruri, a media rights expert from Ramallah, told Al-Monitor, “Defamation in both its written [libel] or…