Arab/Palestinian – ME

The Arab Spring began in December 2010 with a cry for help from a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire.  The self-immolation quickly spread as widespread protests in other Muslim Arab countries when people sought to overturn backwards authoritarian regimes which were not accountable to its citizens.  The …

FACT: “I never expected this poison dagger to come from an Arab country,” Saeb Erekat complained after the UAE-Israel agreement was signed. “You are rewarding aggression. … You have destroyed, with this move, any possibility of peace between Palestinians and Israelis” (“Palestinians Say UAE Deal Hinders Quest for Mideast Peace,” …

Forty years after the peace treaty with Egypt, and 26 years after the peace treaty with Jordan, Israel signed another peace treaty with an Arab country: the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Unlike the former two treaties, this treaty seems poised to create a warm relationship with a country that is …

Despite all the potential payoffs Israel &-UAE normalization may entail, the agreement is really a prop in the choreography for a much bigger drama.  The major issue is not [attaining] an agreement, but ensuring the actual implementation of the agreement in practice. The number of agreements which the Arabs have …

Obama tried to punish Israel and encourage Iran, leaving America’s Sunni allies with only Israel to turn to. In one of the great recent examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences, substantial credit must be given to Barack Obama for helping to set the stage for the recent announcement of …

The other day, the question was put to me that if the Palestinian “right of return” was taken out of the current Palestinian – Israeli conflict, could one list other major obstacles to a peaceful solution to the conflict In writing the article below, I relied on the intellectual property …

An ISIS large-scale attack in the northern Sinai Peninsula demonstrates well the improvement in its operational capabilities and the weakness of the Egyptian security forces. ….   ISIS’s attack in Bir al-Abd and its activity following it is the most outstanding activity as part of the wave of attacks referred …

After Israel defeated the attacking Jordanian army in June 1967, it allowed the Jordanian Islamic Waqf to have administrative control of the Jewish Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem while Israel controlled the security of the area. In 1980, Israel officially applied sovereignty and reunited the city of …

Palestinian Arabs often share a series of maps which show that “their land and country” are in a perpetual state of shrinking when the opposite is the truth. Local Palestinian Arabs never had self-rule until 1995. The Ottomans ruled the region from 1517 to 1917 and then the British until …

In May 2016 I spoke at a panel event on the possibility of a two state solution.  My talk focused on the key issue of the entire conflict – the reason the ‘Palestinian refugee’ situation can never end.  At the time I called for the ridiculous definition of a Palestinian …

Though the definite origins of the word Palestine have been debated for years and are still not known for sure, the name is believed to be derived from the Egyptian and Hebrew word peleshet. Roughly translated to mean rolling or migratory, the term was used to describe the inhabitants of …

On the 5th April, 2020, Yahya Sinwar, terror leader of Hamas in Gaza promised that if one “Palestinian” died in Gaza he would ensure that 6 million Jews would be rendered by his forces unable to breathe. Low-base Arab-media-ready histrionics aside, this article asks if there is or was ever …

FACT: Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir is reputed to have said, “Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” Since her time, the truthfulness of those words has been demonstrated repeatedly. and it was again last month when the Palestinian Authority said it would …

Perhaps Israel should just take their Nobel Prizes and go home to cry because we didn’t invent falafel? We just mechanised production first; were the first to market it to Europe and America and adapted it for local conditions as street food. The Palestinians certainly didn’t invent it either. You …

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was created in December 1948 as a temporary agency to handle shelter, medical assistance and education for the roughly 700,000 Arabs who left what became Israel. Over seventy years later it continues to artificially extend its mandate. UNRWA’s term …

On March 30, 2020, the Toronto Star wrote an article “Fearing Gaza coronavirus spread, Hamas preps for mass quarantines” which painted Hamas as a reasonable and responsible government caring for its citizens. The article opened with a woman returning to Gaza from Egypt who was surprised that Hamas had set …

In 2004,  shortly before the death of PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the Pope’s ambassador in Jerusalem, also known as the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, invited me to his  home on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem to present a document that he had received from Arafat. The document, in Arabic, …

FACT: As in the specious claim that Israel is refusing to help Palestinians in the West Bank contain the coronavirus, similar lies are being disseminated about Israel’s treatment of those in Gaza.  The Guardian reported, for example, “An Israeli blockade, in place since 2007 although eased in recent years, has …

Press Release Islamic Waqf Takes Advantage of Temple Mount Closure to Conduct Digs Photos uploaded yesterday to the official Facebook page of the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf showed them conducting unauthorized digs on the Temple Mount. “Despite the closure of the Al-Aqsa Mosque/Haram esh-Sharif due to coronavirus, the staff, workers and …

The United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced the appointment of Philippe Lazzarini of Switzerland to be the new head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Upon hearing that the head was going to be from Switzerland and not England which …