Category: Palestinian politics

By Daoud Kuttab In Arab tradition it is not customary to say bad things about a dead person even if he/she is your biggest enemy. I am not sure that this tradition will work on most Palestinians regarding the Israeli king of the settlement movement, but for some reason the passing of Ariel Sharon after…

  By Daoud Kuttab The Palestinians’ insistence on regarding late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, even after his death, as nothing more than a war criminal responsible for the massacre in Sabra and Shatila and the construction of the settlements is overly simplistic and anachronistic. More than anything else, this approach misses the complexity of the man and the central…

  By Daoud Kuttab If you were to ask a 20-year-old Palestinian today about Ariel Sharon, you might be surprised how little this generation knows about him. The past eight years, in which Sharon became incapacitated, and the few years before that in which he had softened his radical stance, appear to have chipped away at the…

  By Daoud Kuttab Multiple reports two weeks before US Secretary of State John Kerry’s 21st visit to Palestine and Israel focused on a new Israeli concern: unorganized and uncoordinated acts of violence. The conclusion was that Israel’s main problem was impromptu and independent acts by frustrated Palestinians. One of the implications of this Israeli security assessment was that the Palestinian government…

  By Daoud Kuttab When the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to recognize Israel and sign a memorandum of understanding in 1993, the organization was experiencing an all-time low. The PLO had been routed from Beirut, and later from Tripoli. An internal struggle within the Fatah movement had erupted under the name Fatah al-Intifada, and the Berlin Wall had fallen, leaving Palestinians…

By Daoud Kuttab Following appeared in today’s Jordan Times The fast-approaching deadline to the 9-month face-to-face Palestinian-Israeli talks highlights the sense of urgency and fear that the April deadline might arrive without any breakthrough. Palestinians, who were burned in 1993 with a five-year interim agreement that translated into two decades of no progress in the…

  By Daoud Kuttab At face value, the slap in the face senior Fatah leader Jibril Rajoub received from a member of the Palestinian parliament does not constitute material for a news analysis. The strike by parliament member Fateh Abu Rub that occurred Dec. 18 in the Grand Park Hotel’s lobby in Ramallah was resolved relatively quickly, as the two Fatah leaders…

  By Daoud Kuttab The Dec. 16 Facebook message was simple yet powerful: “Imagine if President [Mahmoud] Abbas visited Gaza and took a look at his people there following the winter storm. Imagine how he would be received by Ismail Haniyeh. … People who have been drowning will certainly come out and welcome him,” she concluded. The entry was by Rawya Shawa, a prominent…

  By Daoud Kuttab In the middle of the Alexa blizzard, which turned the Gaza Strip into a giant lake, Gaza lost one of its most respected men. Eyad Sarraj, a Palestinian refugee and psychiatrist, died on Dec. 17 with the same dignity that he lived. While most Gazans have little choice of where to live, Sarraj did. During…