For the residents of the Charahi Qambar refugee camp, it's been a long five years since they fled the U.S.-led destruction of their villages and put up tents in this destitute Kabul neighborhood. The majority is of Pashtun descent, from Afghanistan's southern Helmand Province, a warlord-torn region notorious for opium...

On the eve of the State of the Union address, the labyrinthine tunnels connecting congressional offices to the Capitol building were eerily quiet. But turning a corner, an unlikely surge of Caribbean energy came in the form of a delegation of Haitians making their way from the Rayburn Building (where...

Nyéléni, Mali --The National Confederation of Peasant Organization's (CNOP) agroecological training center stands at the crossroads of the West African countryside. Surrounded with rich Malian farmland and dotted with white thatched-roof huts, the Niger River snakes into the horizon on one side, and a dusty road connects the property to...

Hebron (Khalil in Arabic) is home to more than 165,000 Palestinians -- making it the largest city in West Bank Palestine. The city is famous for qidreh, a fragrant dish cooked in clay pots, leather shoes and avant-garde glass blown vases. It is notorious for settler violence in the conflict...

Away from the televised and broken streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti hosts some scenic worlds. Down south, there are remnants of cloud forests that fade into blue skies, and in the north cacti twist out of rust desert soil. The eye takes in lime green rice fields in the central valleys...

The elderly woman sat cross-legged atop a worn tribal carpet on the dirt, her eyes downcast and swollen from tears. Above us, a plastic tarp hanging precariously on sticks flapped loudly in the wind as she began to speak. "You need to know what happened here today," she said in...

RAFAH, Gaza -- I'm sitting around a table at the Rural Women's Development Society (RWDS) near the Gaza Strip's southernmost border with a group of women discussing grassroots agricultural initiatives and drinking sugary sage tea. For a second, the sound of a war plane suffocates our words. One of the...

GAZA CITY -- The turnstile locks behind me and I'm standing in a small metal room. I flashback to the first time I crossed Erez checkpoint last year and remember the claustrophobic feeling of walking into a trap, three small metal doors blending into the steel. This time, I know...

Sheer numbers never convey the magnitude of a disaster because they leave out the human stories. News reports offer constant access to images and analysis, but the suffering can just seem too distant at times. And then there are those other times when it hits personally, all in one dreaded...

Year before last, I was sitting in the living room of my childhood home sharing a cup of morning coffee with my mother and musing over the holidays. We laughed over kitschy Christmas gifts from well-meaning relatives before deciding to turn on the news for five minutes on the brink...

Down south in the Negev desert, the sounds of jets fill wide-open spaces. Increasing militarization is constant --at least 80% of the land there is used for military training purposes, including weaponry development. The Negev also contains the largest petrochemical processing center in the Middle East and Israel's nuclear facilities....

Fifty years ago, my maternal grandfather uprooted his family and headed west in search of a better life. My grandmother hated the idea of living in the scorching desert, but understood that Arizona was a place where they could build a future for their children that was unparalleled elsewhere. They...

Last August, I stood in Haiti's Artibonite valley with several peasant organizers and looked out at the mountains leading up to the Central Plateau. The older leaders in the group explained in depth how green the mountains once were, while the younger organizers and I listened in amazement. The tropical...

Tomorrow marks the first of many anniversaries in this new phase of Haiti's history. It has been a month. The earthquake -- known simply as "the incident" to Haitians -- changed everything, instantly dividing their experience into a before and after. Many large NGOs, international institutions and donor countries are...

I have been to the Gaza Strip twice and southern Israel once since the 2008-09 war, where I had the opportunity to listen to accounts from both people about what had happened to them during that time. Israelis showed me thickly walled rooms that act as bomb shelters and explained...

WASHINGTON, D.C. - J Street's first national conference just finished after a three-day whirlwind of events. For an organization that started a little over 18 months ago, bringing more than 1,500 people and nearly 150 members of Congress together to "change the face of pro-Israel advocacy in the United States...

GONAIVES, Haiti - Most of us would agree that there is a serious problem vis-a-vis access to food in the developing world. According to the UN food agency, there are now more than one billion undernourished people worldwide. The need to do something about the broken food system is especially...

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Here in Haiti, a country all too often characterized by internal instability, the biggest scandals of all have external origins. Just ask the Haitians. In the last century alone, they have been forced to deal with what award-winning Haitian economist Camille Chalmers described to me as "three...

Like so many others, I have been glued to the Internet all week watching Iran's chaos unfold from the outside. This moment is certainly one in which there will be a "before" and "after" -- not only for the Persian people -- but also for the international community. Following are...

RAFAH, Gaza - Although the idea of "necessity as the mother of invention" dates back to Plato's Republic, it has become a motto of sorts in the Gaza Strip today as people organize to rebuild and work around complicated obstacles. Not only are some of the ideas coming out of...