Arab/Palestinian – ME

It looks like a civil revolution is taking place in Iran, where the people are rising up against the regime of the Mad Mullahs. The courage, the sheer bravery of the Iranian citizens is awe-inspiring. They face arrest, torture and death and yet are not giving up. It is clear …

  How heartening to see a leader make a bold decision that improves the state of the world! My friends, I spent hours on Wednesday attempting to find the most effective words to convey my thoughts on President Trump’s decision to take out Soleimani. There are, I wanted to say, …

  The Talmud (Sanhedrin 72:1) tells us, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up early in the morning and kill him first.” I seriously doubt that President Donald Trump considered this source when giving the order last Friday morning to kill Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC …

I have written before about the importance of semantics in the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how frustrated many people are about losing various battles over nomenclature, such as references to the disputed territories as “occupied,” and “Judaea and Samaria” as the West Bank.  An arguably more important semantic …

 I think it is time to have pity, as they say in Yiddish, rachmunas, for Palestinians. Maybe  “A Day of Pity.” Think about it.  They are from an honour/shame culture that revolves around vengeance.  What greater embarrassment for them than waking up every day to see that Israel, the Jewish …

I never gave liquorice much thought until I met Victoria. This lady, now in her 80s, had lived in Iran until 1979.  Her late husband’s business was to harvest the roots of the liquorice plants which proliferate naturally near the town of Kermanshah, and to sell the liquorice  for food …

The saga of the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) which have cast their lot with UNRWA for generations may finally be coming to an end. Since 1949, the United Nations has promised Arabs who used to live and work in what became Israel, that they would be entitled to move …

Unsurprisingly, in the aftermath of the assassination of PIJ – known in the West as simply Palestinian Islamic Jihad, terror mastermind Bahaa Abu al Ata and his wife in an Israeli airstrike, PIJ in Gaza has stated that Israel has crossed a red line and is now at war with …

FACT: One reason Israelis have little confidence in the prospect of peace with the Palestinians is that they see how the young generation of students is being indoctrinated in Palestinian Authority schools.  Textbooks erase Israel’s existence, provide misinformation about the Jewish people and Israel, promote violence and martyrdom and demonize …

The leader of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, was given the floor at the United Nations in September 2019. The brutal ruler who denies the Ottoman genocide of the Armenian people which killed over one million people, even while he accuses Israel of genocide for defending itself against Palestinian Arab terrorist resulting …

Resigned acceptance of the inevitable? Why is everyone so much more upset with Trump than with Turkey? My first ‘contact’with the Kurds was when I wrote a piece about Mustafa al-Barzani for Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit in the middle 1970s. Then, as apparently now, the response was deafening disinterest. …

FACT: An international furor erupted when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that if he won the election he would assert Israeli sovereignty over parts of Area C where the Oslo Accords already grants Israel full administrative control.  This hysteria was magnified by the usual assertions that Jewish settlements in that …

“Occupation”-washing, the defense of any of the vile attitudes and actions of Palestinian Arabs by portraying them as victims of Jews living and controlling their holy land, took another turn this week as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives claimed that Arab men kill women in their families …

The first day of school was a wonderful opportunity for the 70 year-old temporary United Nations agency to show pictures of children and ask for money. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) wrote about the 532,000 UNRWA students who went back to school, part of the “5.4 million …

Racism is a form of hatred which believes that all members of a particular group are inferior and/or evil.  In itself, it is ugly but not dangerous, a localized noxious belief system based on bigotry.  Racism becomes toxic when it spreads and obtains power. Such is the state of Palestineism, …

My North African Jewish-Amazigh* grandparents came from Djerba, Tunisia, to Israel in the early 1950s. Around the same time that my father’s parents arrived in Israel from North Africa, my mother’s parents came to Israel from Baghdad, Iraq.  They were also forced out of their country.  They had been part …

Palestinian Nationality is an Entity Defined by its Opposition to Zionism, Not its National Aspirations. What unites Palestinians has been their opposition to Jewish nationalism and the desire to stamp it out, not aspirations for their own state.  Local patriotic feelings are generated only when a non-Islamic entity takes charge …

The economic component of the Trump administration’s intensely awaited plan to achieve an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has been released. Formally titled Peace to Prosperity, the proposal contains a three-pronged program of investment and reforms to transform the Palestinian economy and society through the injection …

The subway wasn’t all that crowded but I was close enough to peer over her shoulder nonetheless. Instagram pictures in rapid succession flashed by on the women’s cellphone.  A pretty girl puckering her lips with floating hearts; a cat wearing a hat; balloons on a beach. Then the images stopped.  …

On May 29, 2019, the United States team tasked with forging peace in the Middle East met with Jordan’s monarch Abdullah II.  Abdullah insisted that the so called “deal of the century” include an independent sovereign state of Palestine with “East Jerusalem” as its capital. On its face, the king’s …