Palestine, media, Jordan, community radio, online journalism
My friend Khaled Batrawi is a civil engineer working in Ramallah. I went to see Khaled on Tuesday night and found him frustrated with the weak internal response to the current situation. Among other things, Khaled is angry because he feels local officials of the Palestinian Authority are not doing enough to prepare Palestinians for…
My brother in-law Labib runs the Palestinian Bible Society. With its main office in east Jerusalem, the Society works in Bethlehem, Ramallah and Nablus, and has an office and a bookstore in the center of Gaza City. Due to the current situation, the manager of the bookstore has been back home in the West Bank…
Beit Jala is a special town for me. I went to the Hope School at the top of the hill there, and a number of my relatives and in-laws still live in this predominantly Christian town, west of Bethlehem. Many of the original citizens of Beit Jala have emigrated to Chile and other Latin American…
RAMALLAH, West Bank –– When I passed by the bombed out police station in the center of the Palestinian town of Ramallah, I felt sad. What has happened to the peace process, that Israel has to use U.S.-made Apache helicopters to shell one of the few signs of peace with the Palestinians? The Palestinian Authority’s…
The title of this article, “Three million hostages,” may surprise some, but this is actually what has happened to the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza during the past few weeks. These Palestinians have become prisoners in their own country. Movement between cities and towns was completely forbidden, as was the movement across…
The year was 1994, long after the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn. The memorandum of understanding between Israel and the PLO had been signed and the details of the areas from which Israel was to withdraw were known. A Palestinian lawyer decided to use politics rather than law to solve his clients’ problems….
There are plenty of reasons why Palestinians insist on the need for an independent inquiry into the violence of the past two weeks that has resulted in the killing of more than 80 civilian Palestinians, many of them children. The United States should support this request, which will surely calm the situation on the ground….
The violence in and around Al Aqsa mosque last Thursday and Friday reminded me of the incident 10 years ago (on Oct. 8) when Israeli soldiers killed 17 Palestinians on the compound of Al Haram al Sharif. I remember that incident 10 years ago because it took place one day after the birth of my…
The date was Dec. 13, 1993, exactly three months after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between Israel and the PLO on the White House lawn. We were dispatched to Gaza to gauge Palestinian reactions to the passing of this date without any change on the ground. Palestinians had high expectations that on this…
For a long time two people, let us call them Ahmad and Shlomo have had a financial dispute. Shlomo owes Ahmad $100,000 and he has been refusing to pay it back despite Ahmad’s possession of a binding contract to the effect of his rights to this amount. The dispute has caused trouble for both men….