Palestine, media, Jordan, community radio, online journalism
By Daoud Kuttab Throughout history, liberation struggles have been waged inside prisons as much as outside them. When a national struggle stagnates, it is often the prisoners who remind the rest of the nation of the purpose and goals of their fight. February 2015 has proven to be an especially difficult month for Palestinians held in Israeli…
By Daoud Kuttab The Feb. 24 shooting death of 19-year-old Palestinian Jihad al-Jaafari by Israeli troops may have killed the last remaining working feature of the Oslo Accord — the 21-year-old agreement for security coordination between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA). Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his security forces have been stubbornly resisting calls to end security coordination, which…
By Daoud Kuttab When council woman Maria D. Quinones Sanchez from the city of Philadelphia walked into the Mas Islamic Center January 30th to meet with members of her constituency, she had no idea that she will find herself embroiled with the same kind of political controversy that is shaking up US-Israeli relations. At the…
By Daoud Kuttab Yasmine was born in July 2014 at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center. Six months later, she has yet to get a birth certificate from the Israeli authorities. While her mother Tamara was born and has lived all her life in East Jerusalem, young Yasmine’s sin is that her father hails from the nearby West…
By Daoud Kuttab As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict awaits Israeli elections, a number of important local and international developments are taking place that could have a long-reach effect on it. Israeli elections, set for March 17, have all but frozen all efforts to move the stalled peace process. U.S. officials, as well as their European counterparts,…
By Daoud Kuttab The Arab-Jewish party Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) has been a small but permanent fixture in the Israeli parliament for years. It usually won four or five of the 120 Knesset seats in elections, providing a fig leaf to Israeli democratic claims without being able to influence either internal or external policies….
By Daoud Kuttab When Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker and head of the Jewish Agency, attended a meeting of the socialist-inclined Hadash (the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), he caught many people off guard. But the former Labor Party leader feels that anyone following his work should not be surprised. “I left Zionism a…
By Daoud Kuttab The U.S. response to the efforts by Palestinian president to join international organizations, including the International Criminal Court (ICC), is puzzling. The spokeswoman of the U.S. State Department made an unusual attack in trying to express Washington’s opposition. “The United States does not believe Palestine is a sovereign state and, therefore, does…
By Daoud Kuttab Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was haunted last week by the Arabic saying “cutting livelihood is worse than cutting necks.†Abbas had stopped payment on the salaries of more than 200 security officers suspected of being loyal to renegade Fatah leaderMohammed Dahlan. When the Palestinian government transferred 60% of December salaries on Jan. 20, 220 Gaza-based security…
By Daoud Kuttab The victory of the Greek Syriza Party, which won 149 out of 300 parliamentary seats, has brought major concerns for Israel but was welcomed by the Palestinians. The radical left-wing party scored a decisive victory in the snap elections held Jan. 25Â in Greece. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as well as the left-wing…