PA officer sentenced to death for collaboration
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Ma'an News Agency
December 9, 2009 - 1:00am

A Palestinian military court in Ramallah sentenced a security officer to death by firing squad on Wednesday after he was found guilty of collaboration with Israel, Palestinian judicial sources said. Identified only by the initials AD, the condemned was sentenced to death in accordance with article 131 of the Palestinian Military Law of Punishment of 1979. The defendant confessed to having been recruited by the Israeli intelligence service in 1992 to spy on Palestinian activists and fellow security officers concerning armament and movement.

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Who will save Gaza's children?
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Victoria Brittain - December 9, 2009 - 1:00am

Among all the complex and long-term solutions being sought in Copenhagen for averting environmental catastrophe across the world, there is one place where the catastrophe has already happened, but could be immediately ameliorated with one simple political act.

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Peace must begin with the plight of Palestine's refugees
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Karen Koning Abuzayd - (Opinion) December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

Sixty years ago today the United Nations general assembly voted into existence a temporary body known as UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA's task was to deal with the humanitarian consequences of the dispossession of some three-quarters of a million Palestine refugees forced by the 1948 Middle East war to abandon their homes and flee their ancestral lands. Just two decades later, the six-day war generated another spasm of violence and forced displacement, culminating in the occupation of Palestinian territory.

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The Pragmatist
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Tablet Magazine
by Michael Weiss - December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, was sharing his vision for the future. “The key requirement for a Palestinian state,” he began, speaking on a cellular telephone from his office in Ramallah. Then the line went dead, a dropped call. “You’ll have to excuse,” he said when he rang back. “We have a lot of competing cellular networks here, and sometimes our signals get crossed.”

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Abbas urges peace in Sleiman talks, offers camps cooperation
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Star
December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stressed Monday Lebanon’s full authority and sovereignty over all Palestinian refugees camps while underscoring that the refugees’ presence was temporary, until a comprehensive peace solution was reached. “There are no legions under the command of the Palestinian authority in refugee camps and we would cooperate with the Lebanese state to the extent the latter allows, since the camps are Lebanese territories upon which the Palestinians live; thus Lebanon has full sovereignty over them,” Abbas said Monday, following his meeting with President Michel Sleiman.

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The Pragmatist
Media Mention of Hussein Ibish In Tablet Magazine - December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, was sharing his vision for the future. “The key requirement for a Palestinian state,” he began, speaking on a cellular telephone from his office in Ramallah. Then the line went dead, a dropped call. “You’ll have to excuse,” he said when he rang back. “We have a lot of competing cellular networks here, and sometimes our signals get crossed.”

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A Portrait of Nonviolent Resistance in One Palestinian Village
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Huffington Post
by Ellen Cantarow - (Opinion) December 8, 2009 - 1:00am

At no time since its 1967 West Bank occupation have Israel’s seizures of Palestinian land and water resources seemed as shocking as the ones attending its construction of “the wall,” begun in 2002. Vast, complex, and shifting in form, the wall appears most dramatically as 25-foot-high concrete slabs punctuated by militarized watch towers, supplemented by electronically monitored electrified fences stretching over vast distances.

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Altogether more than a footnote
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Daily Star
by Olivia Snaije - December 4, 2009 - 1:00am

The first thing that comes to mind when holding graphic novelist and journalist Joe Sacco’s new book, “Footnotes in Gaza,” is the colossal amount of work that went into it. Not only is this pen-and-ink graphic novel almost 400 pages long, the subject too is heavy: The Israeli military’s massacre of Palestinian civilians in Khan Younis and Rafah (Gaza), during the 1956 Suez Crisis. The Malta-born American researched and reported on the subject for seven years, making two extended trips to Gaza – where he was often under fire from weapons paid for with his tax dollars.

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Public building in W. Bank down 60%
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from CBS News
December 2, 2009 - 1:00am

Public building starts in the West Bank have dropped some 60 percent since Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took office, according to Central Bureau of Statistics figures quoted in an Israel Radio report Wednesday. The data showed that between the months of April and September 2009, only 132 housing units were approved, compared to 330 in the same period last year, during former prime minister Ehud Olmert's term in office. Between April and September 2007, the figure was 370.

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Spoilers: The End of the Peace Process
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from World Affairs Journal
by Elliott Abrams, Michael Singh - December 2, 2009 - 1:00am

Typically, explanations for the lack of progress in the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians revolve around disagreements over the “core issues,” insufficient diplomatic activism and pressure on Israel from the United States, and Israeli intransigence. Such views share one premise: that Israeli bargaining power overwhelms that of the Palestinians and must be compensated for by action on the part of the international community.

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