Category: Palestinian politics

By Daoud Kuttab The Palestinian leadership seems to be on the verge of change. It is very likely that this will be the last year that Palestine will be led by the PLO’s Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas’ Khaled Meshaal. Abbas announced over a year ago that he does not plan to run for the presidency of…

By Daoud Kuttab Anyone following the Palestinian struggle for liberation understands that the only path to success today is through a concerted, holistic, non-violent approach. Palestinian leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, have been repeatedly and consistently opposing any violent solution and supporting acts of popular non-violent resistance. Recently, they even succeeded in…

By Daoud Kuttab After years of travel restrictions, Israel last month opened up its borders to many (not all, of course) Palestinians from the West Bank. In Nablus alone, 17,000 permits were issued out of 25,000 applications. Certain age groups were allowed in without a permit. The occasion was the holy month of Ramadan, but…

By Daoud Kuttab The past two and a half decades witnessed the slow death of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The PLO, established in June 1964 by the Arab League and then taken over internally by the various resistance movements, led by Fateh, is credited with the unification of the Palestinians in the diaspora. It is also…

  By Daoud Kuttab The belief in Palestine is that the office of the president is responsible for major national and international policies and initiatives, while the office of the prime minister is responsible for executing these policies. For the most part, this has been the norm in Palestine’s temporary capital, Ramallah. The West Bank-Gaza…

By Daoud Kuttab Something deep and painful was broken in Ramallah this week: along with the bones broken by violent Palestinian plainclothes and official security officials dealing with a protest, Palestinian trust was permanently wounded. The protests were called for by non-partisan youth protesting the intended, unprecedented, visit by the Israeli vice premier, Shaul Mofaz, to…

following ran in the Jordan Times By Daoud Kuttab   The Palestinian conflict is going through one of its strangest stages these days. So much is going against Palestine, yet so much is going for it. Israel was never as arrogant in its treatment of Palestinians and its expansionist policy, and the U.S. government as well…

By Daoud Kuttab Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stunned Israelis Tuesday morning with a political shocker. He convinced his largest opposition leader, Shaul Mofaz, to join the coalition, thus cancelling early elections scheduled for September. Speaking to the media, Netanyahu said that the coalition agreement (called by some in the Israeli media a stink bomb) is good…

By Daoud Kuttab The question seemed simple. A European official wanted to know if the peace was just around the corner, or far away. On the surface of it, one can tick off a number of positive signals. Palestinian and Israeli negotiators recently exchanged letters outlying their various political positions as to the best way…

By Daoud Kuttab For years the Arab world has been searching for the perfect Arab democratic model. Progressive young Arabs want a Western-style democratic model, but older democrats argue that we have to discover our own model, not copy and paste models from this or that country. Islam, of course, confused this search. Islamists appeared…