“People don’t know anything about us. That’s why we’re doing comedy,” New York Arab-American Comedy Festival co-founder Dean Obeidallah explained at the Festival’s opening night at the Gotham Comedy Club on 14 November 2006. Following sold-out shows in previous years, the 4th Annual Festival extended to six nights, featuring two stand-up comedy nights, a short film night, and three sketch comedy theatre nights (to which a fourth show was added and sold out as well). The week kicked off with a press conference held by the New York Foreign Press Center of the — no joke — U.S. State Department. Read more about Jihad, hummous and airport security: It's the Arab Comedy Festival, of course! 

A little over a year ago, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn, Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, the PA’s Muhammad Dahlan and the EU reached an agreement to allow Palestinians free movement in and out of the Gaza Strip. The Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) signed on November 15, 2005 promised Palestinians freedom of movement of people and goods. A detailed fact sheet published by the Palestinian Monitoring Group shows that since last year, none of the agreement’s provisions have been fully implemented by Israel. In July, seven Palestinians waiting to be let into Gaza from Egypt died as a result of heat and the absence of shelter. Read more about Let our people move 

Commentators and columnists are agreed. Pierre Gemayel’s assassination must have been the handiwork of Syria because his Christian Phalangists have been long-time allies of Israel and because, as industry minister, he was one of the leading figures in the Lebanese government’s anti-Syria faction. President Bush thinks so too. Case, apparently, settled. Unlike my colleagues, I do not claim to know who killed Gemayel. Maybe Syria was behind the shooting. Maybe, in Lebanon’s notoriously intrigue-ridden and fractious political system, someone with a grudge against Gemayel — even from within his own party — pulled the trigger. Or maybe, Israel once again flexed the muscles of its long arm in Lebanon. Read more about Syria is a convenient fallguy for Gemayel's death 

Suzanne Klotz is the creator of Thy Kingdom Come — Pocket Guide to the Holy Land, a vividly coloured book of captioned drawings that portray Israeli-occupied Palestine as she saw it between 1990 and 1995. To describe this work is in a sense to add a fourth lens to the view of the Israeli occupation and the associated war crimes being committed to perpetuate it, because the book is the artist’s vision of images seen through the naive eyes of an imaginary American tourist woman and her little daughter who arrive in the Holy Land excited to explore it. Read more about Artist Suzanne Klotz's Indispensable Guide to the Holy Land 

The phrase “Ugly America” which epitomized American arrogance, corruption and tragic blunders in South East Asia in the early sixties is no longer in vogue in that region. But “Ugly Israeli” is alive and well in the Middle East, wherever there is an agreement of any kind between Israel and an Arab partner. There are two essential rules to follow for anyone attempting in good faith to “normalize” relations with Israel: Avoid ambiguity in any transaction and make sure that working procedures as well as processes of arbitration and enforcement are firmly in place. Read more about The Ugly Israeli 

This week, ASN Bank, a Dutch bank based in The Hague, announced that it would end its relationship with Veolia Transport, and all companies that benefit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Since it first announced its intentions to become involved in an Israeli project to build a light rail/tramline system, to be constructed in occupied East Jerusalem, Veolia Transport, a French multi-national corporation, faced a lot of criticism from all over the world. The tramline aims to connect the illegally-constructed settlements in East Jerusalem with towns and cities in Israel. The case of ASN Bank shows that a call for boycott and divestment can be successful. Read more about Principled Dutch ASN Bank ends relations with Veolia 

David Grossman’s widely publicised speech at the annual memorial rally for Yitzhak Rabin earlier this month has prompted some fine deconstruction of his “words of peace” from critics. Grossman, one of Israel’s foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country’s apologists — in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike — desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism’s legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path. Read more about Hollow visions of Palestine's future 

A November 7, 2006 New York Times news article about a Human Rights Watch report on domestic violence against Palestinian women brings welcome attention to human rights issues. Unfortunately, the same article, viewed in the context of The New York Times’ reporting on Israel/Palestine over the last six years, provides a powerful example of typical US mainstream media bias against Palestinians. Research shows clearly that The New York Times pays little attention to human rights in Israel/Palestine, downplays the larger context in which violence against Palestinian women occurs and generally silences Palestinian women’s voices. By omitting crucial details and emphasizing certain others, The New York Times, one of the US’ most respected and powerful media outlets, has turned a valuable piece of human rights reporting into a tool that can be used to reinforce a Western agenda that has cynically exploited “saving Muslim women” as an excuse for dominating and abusing the rights of people from other cultures. Read more about The New York Times Marginalizes Palestinian Women and Palestinian Rights 

The rate of unemployment in the occupied Palestinian territories has reached through the roof - 31.1% in the first quarter of 2006. Palestinian academics are concerned, even as they quibble over methodologies and exact figures. The Palestinian Economic Policy Research Institute (MAS) held its annual conference on the 13th of November at Birzeit University to discuss this problem. Unfortunately, very little by way of original ideas came out of this conference. What is sorely needed is consensus over a bold governmental policy that deals squarely with the current major cause of unemployment - Israel’s closing of its labor market, which at one time absorbed as many as 200,000 Palestinian workers. Read more about Happy Independence Day