Middle East Near You

A friend of mine has a very peculiar gift: he can relate any incident in his life, be it his marriage, his children’s birthdays, his graduation date, the time...

What were the management at the Church of His Presence in Alabama thinking when they gave Yair Netanyahu a platform to speak earlier this month? Did they see him...

Hamas did a rare thing this week; it issued a press release contradicting one of its top officials, Fathi Hammad, who called for the killing of Jews everywhere in...

Palestinians these days are fond of circulating on social media a scene from an old Israeli comedy which shows a group of Hamas fighters who could sneak through a...

It was a revealing and quite intersecting interview that Jared Kushner had with Jonathan Swan on Axios on HBO aired a week ago. Sawn asked Kushner a few direct...

One thing caught my attention during the latest Israeli escalation in the Gaza Strip, which left dozens of Palestinians dead. It was a video message, in Arabic, by Israeli...

Turkish media reported recently on the visit to India by Ibrahim Kalin, the special adviser to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The visit came in the middle of an election...

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro caused a big uproar in Israel after he addressed a group of evangelical pastors in Rio de Janeiro, saying that he believes the crimes of...

In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes a vain emperor hires two tailors who claim to make the most beautiful clothes and convince him that they...

Just few days separated the American official recognition of the Israeli authority over the Syrian Golan Heights and the rocket that destroyed a house in Tel Aviv. In the...

On 4 March, the newly formed Israeli Blue and White party’s leaders, Gabi Ashkenazi, Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz and Moshe Ya’alon, declared that Israel will not pull out from...

Maulana Jalaluddin Rumi once said, “Friendship of the wise is good; a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.” I don’t know if this applies to the current...

This week, the Palestinians won a moral victory. The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a report that sheds light on the killing of peaceful Palestinian demonstrators in the...

The Israeli General Election in April will be interesting, not only because there is a good chance that the world will see the political end of Benjamin Netanyahu and...

Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs has released a report called Terrorists in Suits: The Ties Between NGOs promoting BDS and Terrorist Organisations. The report has a sense of melodrama,...

Prologue For decades, Israeli leaders and media have insisted that Palestinians left their homes in the Nakba of 1948, leaving everything behind to become refugees of their own free...

General Benjamin (Benny) Gantz, the 20th Chief of General Staff of the Israeli army, was charged in March 2010 with illegally expanding his house onto public property. Upon his...

What was Sondos thinking as she huddled with her three children in their tent and set it on fire? Did the tears of her children not move her? Didn’t...

Two days ago, I attended to a seminar on the legal background and implications of the dissolution of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) by President Mahmoud Abbas. Two of...

On 22 December Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), dissolved the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC). He did so despite the fact that the law does not...

On 16 December 2018, an Israeli court in the occupied city of Jerusalem sentenced Suzan Abu Ghannaam – the mother of 20-year-old Palestinian martyr Muhammad Abu Ghannaam – to...

About a month ago my wife asked me, “Have you seen that two-story house they demolished in the West Bank. Such a pity, it was such a beautiful house,...

The Trump administration has made Mahmoud Abbas do what no other ally has done before – renounce America’s role and turn his back. Mahmoud Abbas declared that the Americans...

What does it take to make someone wield a screwdriver and attack a fully armed, well-trained, well-protected soldier, knowing that if he got injured no ambulance would take him...

Is Israel a nuclear power? In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli former nuclear technician, revealed to the British media details of Israel’s nuclear power programme and was eventually jailed...

The result of the latest round of fighting in the besieged Gaza Strip, when the Israeli army tried to carry out a covert military operation even while the Egyptians...

One of the anomalies of political Zionism is that, while it was founded as a response to murderous pogroms against European and Russian Jews as a means to rescue...

Until Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-religious, right-wing party came into power, we Palestinians used to have a lot of difficulties convincing the rest of the world...

Recently, in another shocking incident, Israel’s Culture Minister Miri Regev was outraged by a Palestinian children’s novel written by Walid Dagga, a Palestinian prisoner who spent more than thirty...

If US President Donald Trump can be visualised as King Cyrus, then Benjamin Netanyahu is the prophet out to save the modern Israelites in a hostile environment. His message...

Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks at the 2018 conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), are key to an understanding of how Israel is run. The Israeli leader is...

There are many in the Arab world who fell about laughing when the US ambassador to the UN started to lecture them about how rich Arab countries did not...