US Press
Washington reads Turkey's rise, a court's rebuke and Mansour's obituary
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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What the American press put in front of its readers this weekend, and what a Palestinian reader should take from it.
The New York Times led its Middle East file on a rivalry rather than a war. Its correspondents reported that Israel's strike on a Syrian base, carried out to pre-empt a feared deployment of Turkish forces, belongs to a widening contest between the two states for influence across the region.
The paper also marked six months of the Iran war with two pieces of arithmetic: how the fighting has moved oil, gas and equities, and how far the world's crude stockpiles have been drawn down while the Strait of Hormuz remains contested.
The Hill carried the Senate letter on E1, in which thirty Democrats asked Israel to withdraw tenders for 1,234 settlement housing units and asked their own administration to weigh sanctions on those expanding settlements.
The Washington Post published its obituary of Sliman Mansour on Saturday, five days after the painter's death at 79. The paper called him a towering figure of Palestinian art and traced how his work turned political after his imprisonment.
The obituary's appearance in an American paper of record, on a Saturday given otherwise to Venezuelan oil and a flood in Nepal, is its own small measure of where Palestinian culture now sits in the American conversation.
The courts supplied the week's clearest Palestinian story in the United States. A federal judge in San Jose struck down the visa revocations aimed at students who criticised Israel, in a case brought by Stanford's student newspaper — a week after a federal appeals court in Richmond threw out the $42m Abu Ghraib verdict on the ground that foreign plaintiffs may no longer sue in American courts.
The asymmetry is worth holding still. American courts are open by statute to suits against Palestinian institutions, and are closing to foreign plaintiffs suing American ones.
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