While I sat there I was remembering “A Million Suns in my blood”, a poem by Tawfiq Zeyad. “They stripped me of water and oil / And the salt of bread, the shining sun
the warm sea, the taste of knowledge / And a loved one who - twenty years ago - went off / Whom I wish (if only for an instant) to embrace”. Read more about My way to Ras al-Ain 

“Seasoned and objective analysts have been surprised and alarmed at American officials’ extreme reactions to Belgium’s recently modified universal jurisdiction law. US threats seem excessive and hysterical, especially since the new law successfully filtered out two cases lodged in the Belgian courts against US officials for alleged war crimes committed in Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Could there be any unspoken reasons for the unprecedented and impolitic arm-twisting of the Belgian government by US officials in recent weeks?” Laurie King-Irani examines the political context of recent attempts to gut Belgium’s admirable universal jurisdiction law. Read more about Confronting Impunity for War Crimes: The Choice before Belgium -- and All of Us 

“It was more than 30 years ago that I fell in love with Palestine. It was 1971 and I was in Lebanon doing research for my doctoral dissertation. Ghassan Kanafani, the brilliant Palestinian novelist, advised me that ‘to learn about us, you must go to the camps and immerse yourself in the people.’ The stories these refugees told were so achingly vivid in detail, so raw in the emotion they conveyed, and so right in the simple justice they demanded. It was this, I came to believe, that had kept Palestine alive.” James Zogby writes about hope and dreams of Palestine. Read more about Dreaming of Palestine 

It wasn’t a border dispute so much as a margin dispute. More to the point, it was the highly-flammable material between the margins that fueled last week’s clash over press freedoms and democracy between two of Israel’s most influential newspapers. Compared with the leading Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot (published only in Hebrew and with a weekday circulation of 350,000), the dailies Haaretz (50,000 per weekday) and The Jerusalem Post, (a mere 15,000 per weekday) are not the biggest players on the Israeli media market. But both Haaretz and The Post command an influence beyond their numbers in Israel. Must-reading among visiting diplomats and journalists, the weekly international edition of The Post, and the two papers’ English Web sites draw large numbers of American Jews, thereby informing the Middle East debate within the world’s largest, most powerful Jewish Diaspora community. So when Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken floated the charge that Israeli press freedoms where in jeopardy, word washed up on American shores.” Jacob Laksin writes in Read more about Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post duel over democracy 

“Not only Palestinians are desperately trapped now in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but Jews are, too. Fear and anxiety are unshakeable daily companions. The outward manifestation of this mental landscape is the many infrastructural projects erupting everywhere along the seam between East and West Jerusalem. These public works projects are not about the ‘public’; they will not improve or enhance common spaces, but rather, will only further constrict shared spaces by diverting traffic, housing, commerce, and socializing according to racial distinctions. Walls and barricades are omnipresent, marring Jerusalem’s beauty and cutting into its soul, wounding all who see it, Palestinians and Israelis, Arabs and Jews, locals and foreigners.” EI co-founder Laurie King-Irani reports on a recent visit to Jerusalem. Read more about Escaping what entraps us: reflections from Jerusalem