• Don’t expect much, if anything, from John Kerry’s visit

    New York Times Room for Debate, March 27, 2013 The previous secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, thought that making efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were, as one Israeli news media outlet put it, “a waste of time.” Clinton delegated the task to George Mitchell — a sure sign that she did not expect …

  • Briefing: Beyond the E-1 Israeli settlement

    United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 18, 2013 Last month, an international fact-finding mission on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council found that settlements constituted a violation of international human rights and humanitarian law and called on Israel to stop all expansions immediately and withdraw from settlements. A …

  • Briefing: Inside the E-1 Israeli settlement

    United Nations’ News Agency IRIN, March 14, 2013 Palestine, now upgraded to a non-member observer state at the UN General Assembly, recently threatened to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel if it moves forward with E-1 (Palestine would first have to sign onto the Rome Statute that created the Court). There was much fanfare over …

  • Women in the Middle East: Jordan- on Gender, Education, and the Limits of the Western Imagination

    Los Angeles Review of Books, January 20, 2013 On the last day of the semester at Al-Quds University in the West Bank, I entered the classroom to find the usual graffiti on the whiteboard, save for an odd symbol. It was a triangle filled with curlicues, topped by two circles with dots in the middle. …