Palestinian youth long for freedom and unity in Gaza
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from BBC News
by Tim Whewell - June 9, 2011 - 12:00am

In the front room of a house in the tightly-packed concrete slum that is Gaza's Jabaliya refugee camp, they are learning to dance. A group of young teenage girls are stepping high in the air, hands on hips, as they practice the debka. Traditionally, it was performed by boys and girls together. But since the Islamist movement Hamas took over Gaza in 2007, mixed dancing has been stopped.

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Between warm and fuzzy, and dangerous in the West Bank
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Olivia Snaije - (Analysis) June 7, 2011 - 12:00am

We left Jenin early on our first day of cycling through Palestine. After an inaugural hill, we crossed a main thoroughfare where the terrain flattened, and whizzed along under a brilliant sun, the road lined with olive trees as well as multicolored fields of thistles, poppies, marigolds and daisies. Our guide, Nidal, drove ahead slowly, as if he were a Tour de France team car. At one point he stopped as a tortoise ambled across the road. Several other times during the week he would stop to pick some of us up when the rolling hills started to seem like mountains.

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Hamas founder remembered in new museum
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Statesman
by Ibrahim Barzak - May 30, 2011 - 12:00am

The Hamas militant group has turned the modest home of its founder into a museum — seven years after the wheelchair-bound Palestinian cleric was killed in an Israeli airstrike as he was wheeled out of a mosque. The Sheik Ahmed Yassin museum, located in an alleyway in the rundown Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City, has become a popular destination since it opened last month. Dozens of schoolchildren and well-wishers visit each day.

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Palestinians plan fresh protests to mark war anniversary
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Harriet Sherwood - May 22, 2011 - 12:00am

Palestinian refugees are planning a fresh round of marches on Israel next month, amid signs that grassroots protests could gain momentum from deep disillusion over the prospects for peace talks and the impact of the Arab Spring. A committee behind demonstrations last weekend, in which 14 people were killed on the Lebanese and Syrian borders, have called for further protests on 5 June to mark the anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

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Ramallah is peacefully flourishing
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Seattle Times
by Kristin R. Jackson - May 21, 2011 - 12:00am

RAMALLAH ISN'T your typical tourist spot. The Palestinian town of 25,000 lies within the Israeli-held West Bank, an epicenter of volatile Mideast politics that has endured centuries of occupiers and uprisings. Yet Ramallah has peacefully flourished in the past few years, growing into the de facto political and cultural capital of the mostly Muslim West Bank.

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Palestinians more skeptical about Mideast talks
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Associated Press
by Karin Laub - May 21, 2011 - 12:00am

Palestinian officials said Saturday that Israel's dismissive response to President Barack Obama's new Mideast peace proposal proves there's not enough common ground for meaningful negotiations. Despite such skepticism, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas seemed in no hurry to announce his next move. He instructed his advisers to avoid public comment, presumably to keep attention focused on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who appears to be set on a collision course with Obama.

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A third intifada? Not necessarily
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from Haaretz
by Amos Harel, Avi Issacharoff - May 20, 2011 - 12:00am

Everyone is heaping praise - with some justification - on the reservists' restrained response to the demonstrators who infiltrated from Syria on Nakba Day, restraint that prevented a mass slaughter. However, it is best not to forget that what a series of previous Arab moves - including army invasions, cross-border infiltrations and terror attacks, airplane hijackings, suicide attacks and rocket barrages - failed to achieve, may be accomplished via mass marches to the borders, the settlements and the Israel Defense Forces roadblocks ahead of September.

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Palestinian Sees Prospects of Deal Receding
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The New York Times
by Isabel Kershner - May 20, 2011 - 12:00am

After President Obama’s high-profile speech on Thursday in which he laid out broad principles for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian deal, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called an emergency meeting at his headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank. He advised his associates not to comment on the speech, according to a senior Palestinian official who attended the meeting, but to wait instead for Mr. Obama’s meeting with the prime minister of Israel in the White House “and see if there are any positive signs.”

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Nakba day: we waited 63 years for this
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Guardian
by Karma Nabulsi - May 19, 2011 - 12:00am

It was the moment for which we had all been holding our breath for decades – for 63 years to be precise. Palestinians everywhere watched the unfolding scene transfixed and awed. The camera followed the movements of a small group of people advancing from the mass of protesters. They were carefully making their way down a hill towards the high fence that closed off the mined field separating Syria from its own occupied territory of the Golan that borders historic Palestine, now Israel.

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'Non-violent resistance does not work with the Israelis'
ATFP World Press Roundup Article from The Jordan Times
by Michael Jansen - (Opinion) May 19, 2011 - 12:00am

Protests commemorating Nakbeh in the Palestinian territories and the countries surrounding Israel demonstrated, once again, that the phony “status quo” is untenable. The “status quo” is false because Israel has long relied on its military superiority to impose stasis on the Arabs while it carries on with its drive to colonise territory slated for the Palestinian state and to ethnically cleanse Palestinians living there.

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