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Who is responsible for the sudden escalation of the situation in the Gaza Strip? All of a sudden rockets are coming out from Gaza after a period of calm and Israel tanks are shelling residential areas, which killed four members of the Helu family in the Shejaiya refugee camp in the Strip. This was followed by the bus bombing that killed an Israeli women and injured tens.
While both Hamas and Israel are blaming each other, I believe that both are responsible this time, and for one reason and one reason only. They are both opposed to the latest initiative coming out of Ramallah. Addressing the Palestine Central Council at the end of last week, President Mahmoud Abbas stunned his audience by offering to go to the Gaza Strip within

Elisabeth Braw wrote this story for metro and The Huffington Post.
“On August 26 there will be a Palestinian state, and it will be open to all,” says Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in exclusive Metro interview.
By Elisabeth Braw, Metro World News, Ramallah
He’s the Prime Minister of the Palestine National Authority. But traveling between his office in Ramallah and his Jerusalem home, Salam Fayyad must nonetheless pass Israeli military checkpoints.
Soon this may change. Later this year

For the longest time, Israeli governments have explained their resistance to Palestinian statehood by pointing to the Palestinians’ and the Arab world’s democracy deficit.
The dishonesty of that explanation has now been exposed to even the most credulous by the reaction of Israel’s government to the democratic revolutions sweeping the region. We are now told by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government that the overthrow of Tunisia’s and Egypt’s rulers and the challenges to other regional autocrats, whose regimes provided Israel with a certain stability by repressing forcefully popular Arab anger over Israel’s occupation policies, no longer allows Israel to accede to risky “concessions” that a peace accord entails.
So that while until now it was the region’s democratic deficit that supposedly prevented Israel from ending its occupation, now it is the region’s surfeit of democracy that stands in its

I always shy away from politics in my writing. I leave such pieces to the more capable minds of journalists and commentators whose opinion I admire. Yet for the sake of a favorite film of mine, Julian Schnabel’s upcoming Miral, I’ll gladly jump head first into a hot topic: the recently announced US veto of the UN Security Council resolution condemning all Israeli settlements.
I really pondered for a couple of weeks whether this would be a smart move of my part, or just a way to open a whole new can of worms, while hurting one of my favorite movies

The horrendous murder of a family from the West Bank settlement of Itamar is a terrible event of itself. But the event also represents a descent into madness and inhumanity in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, at least for me, underscores inevitable and deep pessimism about the peace process.
The conflict is shot through with immorality by this point. Consider how the Israelis and Palestinians have

Killings in Itamar not acceptable
By Daoud Kuttab
The brutal and inhumane killings of the Fogel family in Itamar is unacceptable and indefensible. No matter what anyone might say about the illegality of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, murder is murder and murder of civilians irrespective of the circumstances must be denounced and rejected at all levels.
Palestinians do want an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza. Jewish settlement activities is a major hurdle to Palestinian national aspirations. But all Palestinians fighting for freedom and independence should denounce this barbaric act against an Israeli family of

I recently completed my first State Visit to Israel and Palestine. I did not include Gaza in the trip. Unexpectedly, I left the region with much hope for a fully sovereign Palestinian State and long-lasting peace for the peoples who inhabit that crowded land.
During my 5-day visit I met with the elder Statesman Nobel Laureate President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and Speaker of the Knesset Reuven Rivlin, President Mahmud Abbas and senior advisers and ministers.
I was surprised by the state of peace and economic prosperity prevailing in Israel and the West Bank. Israelis and Palestinians alike are pleased that not one single attack has been launched from the West Bank into Israel in four years.
Visiting Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem, including walking along a “refugee” area, with the infamous concrete security wall towering above me, and shaking hands with a number of youth, I was struck by the relative calm in the

Why is the West Bank quiet?
While the Middle East continues to be in turmoil, one region maintains an amazing degree of tranquility. This is the West Bank, ruled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), under the leadership of president Abbas and PM Fayyad. Are we witnessing another miracle made in the holy land, or are there more mundane reasons? I go with the latter.
The economy of the West Bank is booming, with Chinese-like growth rates and decreasing

Many activists in Palestine believe that they are the inventors of the concept of popular uprisings in the modern Arab history. After all, many say, the Palestinian Intifada has been hailed as a shining example of an entire people rising up in unison against a ruthless aggressor.
Palestinians know very well what it means to break the barrier of fear and what it means to expose the bare chest to the live ammunition of an aggressive security regime. Clandestine youth leadership that works behind the scenes to organize and energize an entire population is something that has the signature of Palestine all over it.
Every country and every situation is different and the fight against the Tunisian dictatorship or the 30-year-old Mubarak regime is different from Palestine’s fight against a foreign military occupier which is also planting colonies and colonizers on Palestinians’ land. But despite their successes, which no doubt influenced the young leaders of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, Palestinians and many other peoples can learn a lot from their fellow Arab revolutionaries.
One of the first lessons Palestinians can learn from the North African uprisings is the need to keep the uprisings united in purpose, not lacking in ideological debate and without a clear individual or party

President Barack Obama’s failure to ever get around to pivoting to the economy last year was one of the major reasons why Democrats didn’t do well in the mid-term elections. But if he loses next year, and I expect him to win, it probably won’t be because of the domestic economy. It will be because of what he’s spent so much of time on that is not the domestic economy, namely geopolitics.
Not that the domestic economy is going great guns, which it’s clearly not, but that it will be good enough for Obama to muddle through on against unimpressive Republican opposition tied to the policies which nearly got us into Great Depression II in the first place. Late last week, meeting with high tech industry leaders over dinner in Silicon Valley, Obama showed that he might be able to add some forward-leaning vision, and counter the Republican spin that he’s anti-business, to the policies that have us moving away from the abyss he inherited from the Bush/Cheney Administration.
President Barack Obama, reacting very cautiously to the crisis in Libya, is dispatching Secretary of State to Geneva for an international conference on Monday.
But even as he was meeting with a dozen tech titans at the home of one of the biggest greentech venture capitalists in the world, Obama’s already complicated geopolitical situation became more complicated, illustrating the dichotomy he faces.
Bahrain’s royal family ignored the entreaties from his secretary of state and secretary of defense and again cracked down violently against peaceful protesters in the capital city Manama, not far from where the

Yes, that was the implicit imbalance behind the failed vote in the UN on February 18, 2011, that would have described as “illegal” Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, while reiterating demands that all settlement activity should cease immediately.
Although it was a UN Security Council ballot, and the vote was 14 to 1, the resolution itself had been sponsored beforehand by 130 member countries. Can all these countries be wrong? The British certainly don’t consider themselves to be, as Foreign Secretary William Hague stated during the debate: “Today the UK voted with others, including France and Germany, to reinforce… our longstanding view that settlements, including in East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and constitute a threat to a two-state solution.”
The United States, which earlier had called for an end of Israeli settlement activity, then renounced the effort after being snubbed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has now turned the clock back to repudiate its own previous stand as it vetoed the February 18 resolution.
How does the U.S. explain this blatant inconsistency? By a blithe sidestep coming from its UN representative, Susan Rice:

President Obama was on the right side of history when he supported the young nonviolent protestors in Egypt. The Obama administration was on the wrong side of history when Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN raised her hand vetoing a UN Security Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements. The resolution supported by 14 countries including US allies repeated the exact same language that the Obam administration has said to the Israelis, to the Palestinians and to the public. Calling Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories illegal is reflecting the reality of international

As pro-democracy demonstrations sweep across the Middle East, ousting dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, many in the West have expressed surprise that such a strong, sophisticated vision of a democratic future is being articulated by ordinary citizens and grassroots movements in the Arab world.
I have not been surprised. Sophisticated organizing for democratic reform and justice has a rich legacy in the region. In fact, watching anti-Mubarak demonstrators taking to the streets en masse to demand true democracy, freedom from repression, and the right to be stakeholders in their own political and civil systems caused me to reflect on my friend Sami Al Jundi, a Palestinian from the Old City of Jerusalem who has spent the last two decades working for peace and a nonviolent end to Israeli occupation. He is, in many ways, a product of that legacy.
Sami’s political awakening came in 1980, when he was inducted into a highly organized, democratic community and, at the age of 18, began a program of serious study, reading hundreds of books including:
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract Makarenko’s Pedagogical Poem The writings of Ho Chi Minh, Basil Liddell Hart, and Angela Davis Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain The Incoherence of the Philosophers by Imam Ghazali The Call of the Wild by Jack London Arab Nationalism Between the Reality of Separation and the Aspiration for Unity by Munir Shafiq The complete works of

With all of the unrest sweeping the Middle East, one place long-associated with bullets and bloodshed has so far been remarkably calm: the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
I recently traveled there for the first time in a decade and so much had changed. Cities once racked with violence like Ramallah, Hebron and Jericho are now bustling.

I happened upon this neighborhood by chance. In late 2006, an e-mail arrived from my then- landlord notifying me that the building was being sold. Still fairly new to San Francisco, I had a few weeks to find a new home. I roamed the neighborhoods looking for the right

Virtually overnight, the Arab Middle East has been unrecognizably transformed. The implications of that transformation for America’s vital interests in that region and for Israel-Palestine peacemaking will be far-reaching. They will also be largely interconnected.
Most observers seem to agree that Israeli fears of an emergent political influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and of a consequent resurgence of Hamas in the West Bank ends what little prospect for an Israeli-Palestinian accord might have survived the latest deadlock in the US-brokered peace

I was interviewed today by Bryan Farrell of Waging Nonviolence on the meaning and significance of the events in Egypt.
Bryan Farrell: What first came into your mind when you saw the announcement that Mubarak had stepped down?
Cynthia Boaz: I was not surprised (but very pleased!). It was very clear from the first day that the movement in Egypt had been planned carefully and had been effective in conveying the need for both sustained pressure on the regime and strict nonviolent discipline. Despite media portrayals to the contrary, the uprising in Egypt was not spontaneous and by and large, the movement was better at strategy, discipline, adaptation, and reading the opponent than the regime. The most telling moment was how, after the first big round of repression, the resistance got even more galvanized and determined.
BF: What does this movement mean for the future of nonviolent action around the world?
CB: Well, it’s obviously very inspiring and I think many folks in places such as Iran, Burma, Belarus, Tibet and elsewhere are feeling emboldened by the successes of the people of

Lawrence Davidson says, “Keep your eye on the language: When South Africa assigned rights according to race they called it apartheid. When Israel assigns rights according to religion they call it the only democracy in the Middle East.”
Lawrence Davidson is a professor at West Chester University in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His academic work is centered on the history of American foreign relations with the Middle East.
Throughout his career, Davidson has informed public discourse with his critique of American foreign policy in the Middle East and has embarked on this endeavor in a way that promotes citizen awareness. Davidson analysis has centered on the reality of American conduct in the Middle East and has performed this analysis in conjunction with an awareness of the propaganda that has permeated this debate for the past 65

While it is not clear when and how the popular revolt in Egypt will end, it is clear that the winners and losers, following the present uprising, throughout the Arab world can be identified. It might be a clich to state that tyrants are the biggest losers and peoples are the winners, but it does reflect what is the case in much of the Arab world.
Rulers who were able to govern with little resistance for years are suddenly discovering that the seats they have been clinging to are becoming unbearably hot.
Even without being provoked by their own people, some Arab rulers are already announcing that they don’t intend to run for office again. Heads of state who have been harboring ideas of bequeathing their power to their children are declaring such ideas void even though their children are still running the army or such important senior posts.
Ruling parties are also quickly feeling that the ground under their feet is shifting. As people power increases in scope and courage, these parties that have ruled for years without a serious challenge are also facing the music, unable to stand up to the scrutiny of their peoples.
The newly found bravery of Arab youths has spread from one country to

If the debate in Washington over the Iraq War had made for strange political bedfellows, during the current discourse over the Egypt crisis, the bedfellows are looking really weird.
In the run to the U.S. “liberation” of Mesopotamia the romance between the neocons (American Enterprise Institute / Weekly Standard) and the liberal imperialists (The Brookings Institute / New Republic) — consummating their relationship while doing nation building on the banks of the Euphrates — was all the rage. You may recall that the bed aka the Freedom Agenda that our odd couple was sharing crashed to the floor of Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and the rest of the Middle

What is interesting about the tsunami of change sweeping through the Middle East this past month is that the “dumb, undeserving-of-democracy” Arab masses have turned out to be magnificently saavy, efficient , focused and determined in flipping over longstanding dictatorships.
And it turns out they are polite too. Arab populations from North Africa, the Levant and the Persian Gulf have now, quite organically it seems, devised a wait-your-turn system for overthrowing the Middle East’s iron-fisted leaders.
Opposition groups and ordinary citizens have come to the streets in Yemen, Jordan, Palestine, Bahrain and Algeria recently to air their grievances and demand change. But they are not going full throttle quite yet.

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Barely had the pundits and populace come to grips with the Tunisian revolution that the existence of Palestine Papers was declared. Al Jazeera, the Qatari based television channel, has released a number of documents pertaining to the Israeli Palestinian peace process into the public domain, together with UK publication The Guardian.
The papers make for somber reading, for all that they don’t add much to what followers of the peace process have known for some time: the horse has not just expired under brutal flagellation, but was for all intents and purposes sent to the glue factory a decade back.
It is abundantly clear that the oft-used Israeli canard of ‘no partner for peace’ is a complete and utter fabrication. Not only has Israel had a partner for peace, said partner has been rolling over making poodle eyes. The myth of America as honest peace broker has also been shattered

Across the Middle East dramatic events have been unfolding in rapid-fire succession, confounding U.S. policy makers.
First, Tunisia erupted in mass protest leading to the abdication of that country’s President and the dissolution of its ruling party. While developments there were fermenting and still unresolved, attention was diverted to al Jazeera’s much hyped release of leaked notes recording conversations between Palestinian negotiators and their American and Israeli

At this writing, it’s just before 6 a.m. in Cairo on Friday morning. Within hours, thousands of Egyptian protesters from all walks of life will be in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities, chanting, “Down with Mubarak.”
What will be the response of the U.S.-backed Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak to these protesters? Will U.S.-supplied Egyptian security forces shoot unarmed demonstrators? Will there be massive loss of life?
If there is massive loss of life, will be we be able to say truthfully that the U.S. government had done everything in its power to stop it?
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Clinton urged the Egyptian government not to crack down on peaceful protests and not to disrupt social networking sites.
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