Nadia Hijab

The Goldstone Report has rightly focused international attention on the crimes committed during Israel’s offensive against Gaza in December-January this year. Even if the United States quashes it at the United Nations Security Council – where it is likely to go now that the Human Rights Council has adopted it – the report will make…

The whirlwind of summiteering on climate change, non-proliferation, the economy, and Iran swept the Arab-Israeli conflict off the news – but not before Barack Obama had spoken of a “just, lasting and comprehensive peace in the Middle East.” That startling turn of phrase – used just before his trilateral w ith Mahmoud Abbas and Benjamin…

Two Israeli missile class warships sailed through Egypt’s Suez Canal into the Red Sea this week, some days after one of their nuclear submarines. The news barely blipped the media surface of the United States. It should have raised a few questions: Will Israel really attack Iran? What does the law have to say to…

“It was a trying time for dreamers,” Wadad Makdisi Cortas wrote of the year 1935. She was 26 and “yearned to speak my language, to read Arabic books, and to foster Arab independence and solidarity.” But she had just become the headmistress of a girls’ school in Lebanon that was a particular thorn in the…

Barack Obama feels able to counsel others – most recently Armenians and Turks – to work through their pasts “in a way that is honest, open and constructive.” Otherwise, he cautions, unresolved history “can be a heavy weight.” And yet Obama decided to leave his own country’s past unresolved by boycotting this week’s international conference…

I usually define myself as, first, a human being and a global citizen, committed to human rights for all. Second, a Palestinian Arab with American attributes. And third, a woman, conscious of that additional layer of discrimination with which women struggle, whatever their race, creed, or economic status. The president-elect’s unfolding appointments to the cabinet…

Condoleezza Rice’s failure in the Middle East is coming to its tragic conclusion. Masking its desire to keep the Palestinians disunited, the Bush administration has used Rice as more ruse than effort. President-elect Obama can learn several lessons from Rice’s fruitlessness. History is here. Rice is trying to shape it by insisting that her Annapolis…