By Daoud Kuttab

The bustling town of al-Ram, with a population of over 25,000, is strategically located between Jerusalem and Ramallah. For a long time, the town’s geography was its blessing. Today, it has become its curse.

Al-Ram’s main entrance was once the Jerusalem-Ramallah road just past the suburbs of Shufat, Beit Hanina and Dahiyat al-Barid. But then the wall was built, dividing half of Dahiyat al-Barid and placing the entire town of al-Ram on the other side of the wall away from its normal access from either side of the Jerusalem-Ramallah road. All shops, including the recently opened branch of the Arab Bank, that were once on the main road suddenly found themselves facing a 10-meter-high wall with no access to either Jerusalem or Ramallah. To get to the two main cities, one must now exit the rear of the town, which is the most poorly maintained, least properly zoned part.

The population of al-Ram, made up almost entirely of east Jerusalemites with Israeli blue ID cards and yellow licensed Israeli car plates, suddenly found themselves surrounded and isolated. Residents must now take the long way to get to school, work or any other location that used to take minutes to reach. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

France has always been a country that cares first and foremost about itself, which is normal, but sometimes it is so calculating that it comes across as not caring and spineless.
France is a huge economic exporter to the Arab world. Its wheat and military exports to Saudi Arabia and the Arab world are literally in the billions of euros.
At the same time, France is a founding member of the European Union, a permanent member of the UN Security Council and a strong member of any Western alliance of which the US is the leader. This means that Paris has to balance its interests with the Arab world with its role in the Western alliance.
A month ago, France was eager to attack Syria for its use of chemical weapons, only to see America suddenly back off as a result of an agreement with Russia.
In the Middle East conflict, the French have been slightly leaning in favor of the Arab position while maintaining its good relations with both Israel and the US. For years, Arab leaders and ideologues have romanticized France’s role as the savior of Palestinians and the Arab world, only to be regularly disappointed when nothing happened.
France’s political calculation and attempts to be seen as neutral sometimes come close to being absurd. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

For years, France has been a source of fascination for Palestinians and Arabs for its courage to take positions that run contrary to those of many in Europe and the United States. Palestinians still vividly remember the 1996 visit by former French President Jacques Chirac, when Israeli soldiers insisted on accompanying him to one of Islam’s holiest mosques — Al-Aqsa — as a way of declaring Israeli sovereignty over it. At the time, Chirac uncharacteristically screamed in English at Israeli security: “This is a provocation. Do you want me to get on my plane and go back to France?”

Much has changed since then, including the election of Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Francois Hollande, who have not shown similar courage in their support for Palestinian rights. Israeli officials have repeatedly praised Israel’s relations with France, despite France’s vote at the UN in favor of Palestinian statehood in 2012. Even the physical manhandling of a French diplomat in September failed to shake up this unusual bond that has formed between France and Israel.

This Israeli love fest was put on display this week during the state visit by Hollande, who was given the special privilege of addressing the Israeli Knesset. The red-carpet treatment given to the French president was due in large part to his staunch refusal to sign on to the US-led compromise on the Iranian nuclear agreement. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

Once again, the fate of Gaza is gaining importance as the failure of Palestinian reconciliation, coupled with the deep rift between Hamas and the new Egyptian rulers, is being felt by every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip. The high-profile military parade by Islamists in Gaza on Nov. 14 shows that Hamas continues to be strong, despite not having been able to pay salaries to its employees for the past three months. The parade was held on the first anniversary of the war on Gaza, which had ended in a cease-fire worked out by then-Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. Israeli fighter jets struck inside Gaza on Nov. 14 claiming that their attack was aimed at two locations from where rockets against Israel were launched. Islamic Jihad is said to be responsible for the attacked site, but no injuries or fatalities were reported.

The parade and clashes reflect both acts of strength and confidence and acts of desperation because of the dire economic situation facing Hamas. The Gaza government of Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has not shown any serious signs of weakening. Al-Monitorsources in Gaza insist that the Islamist movement is still strong, despite its recent regional losses in Syria and Egypt. Continue Reading »

B y Daoud Kuttab

Ever since the Palestinian-Israeli peace talks began this summer, Palestinian negotiators have found themselves without one of their strongest negotiating weapons: the ability to walk out of the talks.

The current peace talks began without the Israelis agreeing on two basic conditions: the suspension of settlement building in Palestinian areas and a clear reference point for the talks. While these conditions were not directly accepted by Israel, the United States guaranteed that the 1967 borders would be the basic reference point of the border discussions. On the settlements, the Palestinians were assured by the United States that Israel would not build any outside the settlement blocks that Israelis hope would be annexed to Israel.

On both these issues, Israel appears to have reneged and the Palestinian side was put in a corner. If the Palestinians walk out of the talks for this violation of the understanding communicated by the United States, the Israelis would stop the process of staggered prisoner releases. Israel has committed to releasing 104 Palestinians imprisoned since before the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords in accordance with the 1999 Sharm el-Sheikh agreement. Continue Reading »

Following appeared in today’s Jordan Times

By Daoud Kuttab

The never-ending search for an appropriate democratic model in Jordan continues without any result.

Popular protests sped up the debate while the current retraction of protests appears to have delayed this process.

Nothing appears to have stunted participatory democracy more than the current status of Jordanian municipalities.

The topic of decentralisation has been talked about for some time, but has been almost forgotten.

A conference on participatory democracy organised by the French Cultural Centre in cooperation with Al Rai Studies Centre opened in Amman on Wednesday.

The audience consisted of mayors of major Jordanian cities; strangely, governmental officials were absent despite the fact that they were invited, as the badges were showing.

Had officials from the interior or municipal affairs ministries come, they would have received an earful of harsh complaints about the unhealthy status of Jordan’s municipalities.

One after the other, mayors complained that they are unable to carry out their jobs independently and serve the population that elected them because of the ever-present “big brother”, in the form of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. Continue Reading »

By Daoud Kuttab

Allies don’t usually criticize each other in public. But this is exactly what happened between Israel and the United States.

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly attacked each other regarding the two issues that the United States has said are its top foreign policy priorities in the region: Iran and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Kerry spoke about US and world frustration with Israel during a rare joint interview with Israeli and Palestinian reporters. Kerry attacked Israel’s lack of seriousness in the negotiations, warning Israelis about complacency during this temporary quiet on the Palestinian front. He defended Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a nonviolent leader and told Israelis that if they don’t deal with him, they will end up with a violent leader and a possible third intifada. But Kerry’s harshest criticism was over settlements, which, echoing President Barack Obama, he called “illegitimate.” Kerry questioned the wisdom of building settlements on lands that will become a Palestinian state and rejected the idea of new settlements in exchange for Palestinian prisoners, saying that the prisoner release is to keep Palestinians from going to the United Nations.

The verbal attack was labeled a “scolding” by international media and appears to have stunned Israelis. Instead of reacting to it, however, Netanyahu responded angrily to rumors of a possible deal with Iran. Netanyahu repeatedly called what he perceived as being offered to Iran as the worst deal for the world and best one for Iran. Continue Reading »

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 »

By Daoud Kuttab

News websites in Jordan have been shaken up ever since the Abdullah Ensour government decided to enforce a controversial law that forces websites that deal with Jordanian news and commentary to obtain a licence, like the newspapers.

Unlike the audiovisual law, by equating news websites to newspapers, the legislature has created an unusual and hard-to-manage system that forces the Press and Publications Department to interfere daily in the workings on the Internet, which, the world insists, should be free and unfettered.

In implementing the law, the department has chosen not to include many sites that “deal with news and commentary about Jordan” sighting obscure reasoning. Internet giants such as Google, Yahoo and social media sites and individual blogs have been allowed to continue operations based on the subjective whims of the department.

A further problem is the condition that every news website has to appoint an editor in chief who has been a member of the Jordan Press Association for at least four years. The problem with this is that the JPA has been a closed shop, allowing as its members only journalists working for the written press. Continue Reading »