He also responds to Israel's admission in the Hind Rajab case and explains why the Palestinian leadership sees internal Israeli investigations as a tactic to stall the ICC.

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Plus: Netanyahu's rejection of the 15-point Gaza plan, and what Abdul El-Sayed's Michigan primary win says about AIPAC's shrinking influence.

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Here’s what we got into.

Say his name: Amin Abdullah

We opened with the mosque shooting in San Diego, and it was hard to talk about. Two teenagers — 17 and 18 — opened fire, then killed themselves. Their manifesto ran 70 pages and was, all over the place: Islamophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, incel themes, even anti-Trump rhetoric.

How do teenagers get radicalized like this? The honest answer points to the unmonitored corners of social media — the manosphere, the silos that feed kids more of exactly what they already believe — colliding with a real mental-health crisis and an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim climate that makes a mosque an easy target.

But the names we want you to remember aren’t the shooters’. Three people were killed that day. Security guard Amin Abdullah spotted the threat, radioed the lockdown, and engaged the gunmen — almost certainly saving many of the nearly 150 students inside the school next door. He died doing his job. Alongside him, two longtime community members, Mansour Kaziha and Nadir Awad, were also killed. Say their names.

As Abdullah Tahriri of San Diego’s Muslim leadership community put it, the attack was “a direct and predictable consequence of a political climate tolerant of anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

AIPAC’s expensive bad night

We are also noticing something unusual: US candidates running for local elections now advertise that they don’t take AIPAC money. “Not AIPAC-backed” has flipped from a liability into a brand.

In Pennsylvania, Chris Rabb — a democratic socialist and vocal AIPAC critic who called Gaza a genocide, refused the money, and ran on Palestinian rights — won handily over an AIPAC-aligned opponent, Dr. Ala Stanford, in a deep-blue Philadelphia district where the primary usually decides the seat. AOC backed him.

The counterexample was Kentucky, where pro-Israel groups poured nearly $16 million into the race — helping Trump-backed former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein unseat Rep. Thomas Massie. At more than $32 million in total spending, it became the most expensive House primary in history.

Add March’s Illinois result — where Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh beat an AIPAC-backed candidate — and a closely watched Michigan Senate race, and the trend is clear. The loudest support for Palestine is no longer coming only from Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar. It’s coming from white American candidates too — and that’s much harder to wave away as “Hamas support.”

When cancel culture comes for the artist

Meanwhile, the author R.F. Kuang (Babel, Yellowface, The Poppy War) has a new novel, Taipei Story, out September 8. Advance readers flagged a fictional Israeli character — an unnamed pianist, two pages, no dialogue, no role in the plot. That was enough for BookTok to call for boycotting her entire catalog for “normalizing a genocidal state.”

The irony writes itself: Kuang is a BDS supporter who pulled out of the Dubai Literary Festival over the movement. We’ve seen this before — Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew an entire Russian-themed novel during the Ukraine war after a similar storm.

Our position: we’re against it. Judge the book, not the author. And humanizing an Israeli character is not the same as endorsing a state — Edward Said himself, the most pro-Palestinian voice you could name, built a whole orchestra on that very idea. You can oppose occupation and genocide and refuse to demonize human beings. Those aren’t in tension.

Iran fatigue and the five-dollar gallon

Two things are shifting the American mood. First, Iran fatigue — people are tired of the story and want to move on.

But here’s the thing voters actually feel: gas. Boston is at $4.79 a gallon — pushing five dollars — versus around $3.20 a year and a half ago. That’s a dollar-plus per gallon, felt instantly at the pump. No war in memory has hit Americans’ wallets this fast. Come the midterms, that pump price is going to do a lot of talking.

It’s the economy, stupid.

See you next week.

— Daoud (Boston) & Natasha (Rockville, MD)Two Arab Journalists, One Levant is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Israeli government called it “blood libel.” The American Jewish Committee called it antisemitic. Protesters showed up at the Times building waving #EndJewHatred signs. Prime Minister Netanyahu announced he had instructed his legal advisor to consider suing the Times for defamation.

Daoud Kuttab — my co-host, a Palestinian-American journalist who has been reporting from Amman and Jerusalem for more than thirty years — wants Netanyahu to do it.

“I wish they would sue them. Because in American courts, before the judge even looks at your case, he orders both sides to open up all their books. This will be a Pandora’s box. If the Israeli government is willing to open its box and show us all the investigations they have, we are in great shape — because this will exonerate Nicholas Kristof.”

That’s the part of this story almost no one in the US media is making clear. Netanyahu has not, in fact, sued. He has said his legal advisor will consider it. He did the same thing the last time the Times wrote about hunger in Gaza. There has been no lawsuit. There will not be a lawsuit, predicts Daoud. Discovery is the reason why.

The anger isn’t about what happened. It’s about who said it.

In January 2026 — four months before Kristof’s column — B’Tselem, the well-respected Israeli human rights organization, published a report documenting rape of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli soldiers. Israeli television has aired footage from Israeli detention facilities showing sexual abuse. Five Israeli soldiers were charged. The charges were dropped. Netanyahu publicly praised the decision.

None of that produced a “blood libel” accusation. None of it produced protesters outside any building. None of it produced a single threatened defamation lawsuit. The anger arrived only when the New York Times published the same allegations in English.

The bar that only rises for Palestinians

“The bar is very high when somebody accuses Israel of anything. And it’s very low when Israel accuses Palestinians.”

The reverse — Israeli officials making accusations against Palestinians on far thinner evidence — is treated as background.

“Let the Red Cross in”

The most useful line Kristof gave his critics, Daoud pointed out, was the one they ignored: after the column blew up, Kristof went on X and made a simple ask. Let the International Committee of the Red Cross visit Israeli prisons. The Red Cross is neutral. It used to be allowed. It has been barred since October 7, 2023, on the stated grounds that Hamas was not allowing Red Cross access to Israeli hostages. There are no more hostages. The Red Cross is still barred.

The scoop we almost missed

At the very end of the episode, Daoud dropped news that almost no English-language outlet has covered yet.

The PLO’s main organization, Fatah, just held its Eighth Congress. The person who received the highest number of votes is Marwan Barghouti — in an Israeli prison for the last twenty-five years, consistently the single most popular figure in Palestinian political life.

The number one elected member of the new Revolutionary Council is Dalal Saeb Erekat, daughter of the late chief Palestinian negotiator. Number two is Fadwa Barghouti, Marwan’s wife and lawyer. Mahmoud Abbas is ninety. His son Yasser placed seventh or eighth.

“Cautiously optimistic,” Daoud said. “Put two lines under cautiously.”

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The plane I flew on had three empty seats next to me, and many rows were like that. The terminal was hollow. The Dead Sea was hollow. Madaba was hollow. Petra was hollow. The Iran war has emptied the country.

According to a recent New York Times piece co-written by my friend Rana Sweis. Visitors to Petra between January and February were 112,000, while visitors between March and April were 28,000. Hotel occupancy in Petra: six percent. Six.

I spoke to a factory owner whose shipping costs have doubled. His products are stuck at sea. His vendors in the Gulf have stopped accepting orders because no one knows whether anything can move.

These are people who have nothing to do with Iran. They have nothing to do with the United States, with Israel, with the nuclear program, with the missiles. And their year is over.

My friend and co-host has just got back from a few days in Ramallah, the Old City, and Bethlehem. A trip from Jerusalem to Ramallah took him an hour. The shop owners sat in their doorways and asked him the same question over and over: Do you think the war is going to come back? When will this end?

A man told Daoud that he filled an old water well with gasoline. He’d convinced himself the country would run out, and he wanted to be ready. Dawood told him a single match would blow up his whole house. The man didn’t seem to hear him. That is the texture of life right now. Rational and irrational running through the same conversation.

Meanwhile, Gaza is no longer the story.

Since the day the ceasefire was supposed to hold, 854 Palestinians have been killed. The United Nations counts 2,400 Israeli ceasefire violations in that same window. The Board of Peace — the technocrat council that was supposed to govern Gaza — is stuck in Cairo, unable to enter the territory it is supposed to run. Indonesia, which had volunteered to send peacekeeping troops, has withdrawn its offer.

The trucks are getting in. That part of the official story is true. What the story leaves out is who is moving them and what they are charging. The trucks belong to Egyptian and Israeli commercial operators who levy what they call “coordination fees”. A truck of oil costs $200,000 to move in. A truck of clothing, $50,000. A truck of soft drinks, $80,000. The merchants pass the cost to the people. A carton of eggs in Gaza now sells for around $20.

Food is in Gaza. No one can afford it. The Israelis have not destroyed Hamas; they have also not replaced it. The vacuum is filled by militias and armed gangs, all of them charging Gazans for the privilege of eating.

I rode in a lot of taxis on this trip. When is this guy Trump going to leave us alone? A number of taxi drivers asked me.

The friends I visited used to send their kids to American universities. They have started sending them to the UK, to Spain, to Dublin — and increasingly to Hungary. They cite the war, but they also cite the deportations, what happened at Columbia University, and the visa revocations. The risk of paying tuition and watching their kid get kicked out before graduation. The American university was, for thirty years, the brass-ring credential of the Arab professional class. That status is gone, possibly for a generation.

Civil society leaders I spoke with put it more bluntly. One told me: Stop teaching us about democracy. Start practicing it, and we will watch.

Daoud and I talked on the show this week about whether the United States can win this war, and the answer is built into the question. The bar for an Iranian victory is survival. The bar for an American victory is regime change, the dismantling of a nuclear program, the abandonment of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the surrender of a government that is not in the business of surrendering.

Many in Jordan and beyond are anxious, irrational, exhausted, and alert.

The bombs are not falling. Everyone is watching the sky.

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It’s the story of what’s happening to Christians in the Holy Land right now.

At the time of recording this episode, Daoud was in Jerusalem, and I was in Amman, Jordan.

You can watch the full replay above. Here’s what we covered.

The nun, the kick, and the video

On April 28, a French nun — an archaeologist working with an Israeli university — was walking through Jerusalem’s Old City when a man ran up behind her and kicked her. He yelled at her to get out of the country.

The first image the world saw was a single photograph released by the church: a half-image of the nun, a bruise on her right side. That was it.

It took international pressure — from the French government, from the churches — before Israeli police released the surveillance footage. Daoud pointed out something most viewers won’t realize: there are roughly 800 cameras across Jerusalem’s Old City. The video existed the whole time. They just hadn’t planned on showing it.

When the footage finally came out, it showed something even more disturbing than the attack itself: a man in a white shirt walking by, watching, doing nothing. The attacker walked away, came back, and kicked her again. The bystander kept walking.

A pattern, not an incident

This isn’t one bad day in Jerusalem. There have been 155 documented attacks against Christians in Jerusalem and Israel in 2025 alone — a 40% increase over the previous year.

In the past few months alone:

• The Latin Patriarch was barred from holding Palm Sunday services at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

• Worshippers were beaten by Israeli police on Sabt al-Nour, the Eve of Easter.

• An IDF soldier in South Lebanon smashed a Christian cross. The video went viral, and Israel arrested the soldier — and the cameraman who filmed him.

• A Palestinian Christian held in administrative detention for two years — never charged, never tried — has been denied a Bible. He’s asked for a priest to take confession. Denied that too.

• A campaign by American churches has sent over a thousand postcards of solidarity to Palestinian women prisoners. Not one has been delivered.

Daoud and I kept circling back to one thing: there is no accountability. Itamar Ben-Gvir — a man so extreme that Netanyahu’s own Likud party once refused to put him on their list — runs the police. The attacks have escalated because nothing happens when they occur.

Netanyahu condemned the soldier in Lebanon. Those were IDF troops under his command, on territory Israel was illegally occupying. He has not condemned the attack on the nun.

Why it’s happening — and what it means for Christians in the region

The attackers, by and large, aren’t random, pointed out Daoud. Many are products of religious schools where a particular strain of extremism is being cultivated — one that holds Christians collectively responsible for the Holocaust, that treats the cross as something to spit on, that views Christian presence in the Holy Land as an offense.

The spitting, Daoud explained, has become daily. Walk through the Old City wearing a cross or a habit, and it happens.

This is what’s behind the slow disappearance of Christians from the Middle East. Palestinian Christians used to make up around 20% of the Palestinian population. Today, the figure is closer to 1–2%. In Jerusalem itself, the numbers are even smaller.

People are leaving for the same reasons anyone leaves a war zone — but Christians often have somewhere to go. Connections through churches abroad. Family in the diaspora. We talked about something Daoud has been hearing more and more from friends with kids studying overseas: parents now telling their children, don’t come back.

What we want this show to do

Toward the end of the episode, we got into the bigger question: where does serious Middle East journalism go from here?

Legacy outlets are increasingly captured. Foreign press has been kept out of Gaza, which — ironically — handed the narrative to Palestinian video bloggers with millions of followers and a phone. Gen Z isn’t watching ABC World News. They’re watching raw footage on TikTok and Instagram. You can spin a press release. You cannot spin a livestream.

We talked about Tucker Carlson’s striking pivot after his interview with Mother Agapia Stephanopoulos. About Candace Owens. About Mehdi Hasan on Substack. About a media realignment that was unimaginable three years ago.

Join us live every Monday

Two Arab Journalists, One Levant goes live every Monday at 7 PM Amman time / 12 PM Eastern.

Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Replays go out to subscribers.

Got a topic you want us to cover? Reply to this email or drop it in the comments. We’re listening.

Until next Monday —

Natasha and Daoud

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A ceasefire leads one paper and gets buried in another. A protest is “unrest” here and “an uprising” there. A death toll is a statistic in one frame and a name with a family in the next. Headlines emphasize different actors. Sources get different weights.

If you’ve spent any time reading English-language coverage of the Middle East, you already know something is off. Context goes missing. History gets compressed into a paragraph. The people living the story rarely get to tell it. And the conversation about the region in English barely overlaps with the conversation about the region in Arabic.

We’re starting this Substack to do something about that.

Who we are

We’re Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist born in Bethlehem in 1955, and Natasha Tynes, a Jordanian-American journalist and author, born in Amman and based in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

Daoud has been a working journalist since 1980. His career spans Palestinian print media (Al-Fajr, Al-Quds, Asennara), audio-visual production, and op-ed columns in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Daily Telegraph. He’s a former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton and the founder of AmmanNet, the Arab world’s first internet radio station. He’s received the CPJ Freedom of Expression Award, the IPI World Press Freedom Hero designation, the PEN Club USA Writing Freedom Award, and the Leipzig Courage in Freedom Award. His latest book is The State of Palestine Now.

Natasha is a Journalist, novelist, ghostwriter, and book coach with bylines in the Washington Post, Esquire, Elle, Aljazeera, where she writes on MENA digital transformation. She runs Read and Write with Natasha on Substack and has spent her career bridging Arabic and English-language media, including media training across the MENA region. She runs the podcasr Read and Write with Natasha. She is the author of two fiction books and one children book.

Between us: more than 70 years of journalism, three cities, and one shared frustration — the conversation about the Middle East in English rarely sounds like the conversation about it in Arabic. We’ve spent our careers crossing that gap, translating not just language but framing, context, and stakes.

The Levant is a mosaic, not a monolith

Here’s what gets flattened in most English-language coverage of the region, and a lot of Arabic coverage too: the Levant isn’t one voice. It isn’t one community, one religion, one politics, or one experience. It’s a mosaic, and we plan to report on it as one.

The Arab Christian communities of Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria — among the oldest in the world — are living through pressures most Western coverage misses entirely. We’ll talk about the harassment, the inheritance laws affecting Christian families, the demographic squeeze, and the political voice these communities are still trying to claim. Daoud has been reporting on this for decades from inside the community.

We’ll bring forward other voices in the Levantine mosaic too: the Circassians and Chechens of Jordan, the Armenians, the Bedouin tribes, the Druze, the Assyrians — communities whose stories rarely travel even within the region, let alone into English. And Jordan’s young population, one of the youngest in the world, sitting on top of an economy that doesn’t have nearly enough room for them. They’re not a footnote to the region’s story. They’re shaping it.

The point isn’t to be exhaustive. The point is to refuse the flattening, to treat the Levant as the actual mosaic it is, and to bring you stories you won’t find in normal coverage because normal coverage isn’t looking.

What this show is

Two Arab Journalists, One Levant is a live show on Substack and a podcast. Every week, we go on air from our respective cities — Jerusalem, Amman, and DC — and compare notes on what we’re each reading and seeing.

That’s the honest pitch. We’re not running a research operation. We’re two working journalists who already follow the media in two languages every day, because we have to. The show is what happens when we get on the same call once a week and talk about what we saw.

Daoud reads the Arabic press, social media, WhatsApp groups, and what’s talked about in newsrooms and at dinner tables from Jerusalem and Amman. Natasha reads the English-language coverage from DC and watches what’s landing in policy circles. We come on air, we tell each other what’s leading on our side, what’s missing, what got buried, and what the story looks like from where we’re sitting. The chat asks questions. We answer.

It’s the kind of conversation working journalists have with each other off the record all the time. We just thought it should happen on the record, in English, where readers can listen in.

Episode format

Each week, we agree on one theme in advance, a story, an issue, a question worth a full hour. We come prepared, but not over-prepared. The conversation goes where it goes.

The Byline. We open with the theme through what we each saw this week — the story, the column, the social media moment, the conversation that brought us to it. What we noticed, what we think it means, and why it mattered.

What’s leading where? A quick comparison: how the theme is being covered in Amman and Jerusalem this week versus what’s landing in DC and the major English-language outlets. Sometimes it’s the same story told differently. Sometimes it’s a different story entirely.

The Conversation. The theme, unpacked together — often with a guest. Reporters, editors, analysts, policymakers, and the voices that don’t usually get a microphone in English-language coverage: Christian clergy, Circassian and Druze community leaders, youth organizers, women writers, regional commentators whose work hasn’t crossed the language line.

We won’t always agree. Daoud is a Palestinian who has spent his career inside the occupation, including periods of detention for his work. Natasha is a Jordanian-American who has spent hers translating the region for audiences that often don’t want to hear what it’s saying. We come at this from different generations, different vantages, different experiences.

That’s the point. Two journalists, one Levant — not one verdict.

Who this is for

• Readers who want the Middle East explained without being talked down to

• Journalists, policy people, and diaspora communities tired of reductive coverage

• Anyone who suspects the story they’re getting isn’t the whole story

• Readers curious about the communities and voices that don’t make it into headline coverage

• People who want to hear two Arab journalists across two generations and two cities figure things out in real time

What to expect

The live show. Every Monday at 12:00 PM EST / 7:00 PM Amman time, on Substack. Open to all subscribers. Bring your questions — the chat is our third co-host.

The podcast. Each episode dropped as audio shortly after the livestream.

The newsletter. A short companion post each week with the stories we mentioned, links to follow up, and the headlines we didn’t get to.

Free subscribers get: every live show, the weekly newsletter, and full podcast episodes.

Paid subscribers get: bonus segments / extended interviews / monthly subscriber Q&A, access to the full archive, and the knowledge that you’re directly supporting independent Arab journalism in English.

A note on what we are — and aren’t

We’re two Arab journalists, and we’re not pretending otherwise. We don’t think objectivity means having no position. We think it means showing your work, naming your assumptions, and reporting on your own biases more rigorously than on anyone else’s. That’s what we’ll do here.

You’ll hear us disagree. Daoud has spent forty-five years inside the story, often at considerable personal cost. Natasha has spent twenty-five years translating it for Western audiences. Those are different jobs, and they produce different instincts.

What it means: we’re covering this region as people of it, not over it. The whole region — including the parts that don’t make the headlines.

If any of this sounds like the show you’ve been waiting for, subscribe now. It’s free, and it’s the best way to make sure you don’t miss the first episode.

We’ll see you on air.

— Daoud Kuttab & Natasha Tynes

Two Arab Journalists, One Levant. The Middle East today, from Jerusalem, Amman, and DC.

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