by Daoud Kuttab
Amman, Jordan– Ever since our family returned from the US, I have
been repeatedly asked to compare life in America to life in the
Middle East. For the 2007-’08 academic year I served as a Ferris
Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and a lecturer at the
Near East department.

With our older children working or at college, my wife, Salam, and
our nine year old, Dina, returned to Amman with mixed feelings. I was
happy to be back working as I commuted between my community radio
station in Amman and working as the executive producer in Ramallah of
a new season of shara’a simsim, the Palestinian version of Sesame
street.
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Following appeared in the Jordan Times

Collision course

Daoud Kuttab

Without realising it, an American philanthropic organisation, planning to set up a $16.5 million children’s hospital in Palestine, is on a collision course with radical Jewish settlers at a time that American officials are constantly repeating calls for a contiguous and independent Palestinian state. One wonders how someone like Barack Obama, who is presently visiting the region, would respond to actions by Jewish settlers preventing the creation of a hospital.

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Thursday, July 10th, 2008,
THE JORDAN TIMES

Comprehensive approach to media needed

Daoud Kuttab

During my free time while teaching journalism at Princeton University, I agreed to a request from the International Centre for Journalists to create and supervise an online course teaching interested Arab journalists how to set up their own news website. The course was an interesting experience in gauging the status of the internal workings of the Arab press as nearly 40 journalists (in two rounds) participated in the six-week online course. Continue Reading »

There is no avoiding land for peace
Daoud Kuttab

After Israel’s crushing defeat and occupation of Arab lands in 1967, the United Nations introduced the concept of land for peace into the conflict by unanimously enacting Security Council Resolution 242.

Much has been said about whether the resolution demands Israel to withdraw from all “the territories”, in accordance to the French version, or just “territories”, a formulation that without the “the” has caused Israel and its supporters to claim that the country has a right to retain some occupied land. But in both cases, the concept as specified in the preamble was the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security.”
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Obama’s promises fail at the AIPAC conference
By Daoud Kuttab
It was so sad. To see a grown tower of a man come to his knees. Just like everyone before him, the presumptive democratic followed the suit of all US political leaders before him and bowed down at the footsteps of the pro Israel lobby. What happened to the anti lobby nominee.
On the day his nomination had been sealed, at a time when his chances of being elected had been all but ensured Barack Obama failed the test. What happened to the nominee who was going to change the way Washington was run. What happened to the promise of “I will tell you what you have to hear not what you love to hear.”
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published in the Huffington post

The Kippa, the Keffiya, Green and Orange
by Daoud Kuttab

Upon arriving for my freshman orientation at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania back in 1971, I was asked to wear a cardboard beanie. Having just come from Jerusalem I was rather upset at having to wear that head covering. The beanie that I was given looked very much like the kippa that Jewish settlers wear in the occupied Palestinian territories. I later discovered that there was no connection between the two head coverings. Since then I have seen that small rounded item put on the head on different individuals include the Catholic Pope and the Anglican Bishop.
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What was more dangerous than the ‘appeasement’ reference

By Daoud Kuttab

While the Barak Obama , Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, the media and others were correct in pouncing on President Bush for his ‘appeasement’ remark during his speech at the Israeli Knesset, an even more dangerous trend was totally ignored.

In his gushing praise for Israel as a Jewish state, the president not only injected domestic politics but he crossed the church state line that is the bedrock of American politics.

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By Daoud Kuttab

As the state of Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinians remember the naqba, or “catastrophe” – their story of dispossession, occupation, and statelessness. But, for both sides, as well as external powers, the events of 1948 and what has followed – the occupation since June 1967 of the remaining lands of historic Palestine – represents a tragic failure.

Israel is most at fault for this failure, owing to its continued military occupation and illegal settlements. Despite paying lip service to peace, the Israeli refusal to leave the Occupied Territories continues to be in direct contravention to what the preamble to United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 termed the “inadmissible taking of land by force.”
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Following appeared in the Washington Post

Priority: Statehood
The Palestinian right of return is not what’s holding up a peace agreement.

By Daoud Kuttab
Monday, May 12, 2008; A19

In the spring of 1948, my father, George Kuttab, and his brother Qostandi fled Musrara, a Jerusalem neighborhood just outside the walled city, after their sister Hoda’s husband was killed in front of her and their children. When Dad used to tell us about the Naqba, the catastrophe that befell Palestinians in 1948, he never talked politics or hatred. He would laugh as he told us how his brother secured their home near Damascus Gate. To assure his mother and brother that the house (in what is now Israeli west Jerusalem) would be safe, my uncle joked that he had double-locked the door, turning the heavy metal key twice. He took that key with him to Zarqa, Jordan, expecting to be able to use it again one day.

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My interview on NPR’s morning edition can be heard on http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=4&islist=true&id=3&d=05-14-2008