Reporting, commentary and analysis on the Israel-Palestine conflict

The town in Galilee in which Christ grew up has not escaped the commercialisation of Christmas. Shining from shop awnings along Nazareth’s main street are hundreds of inflatable Father Christmases swaying in the cool breeze of an Israeli winter. Competing for attention as dusk fell on Paul VI Street have been the explosions of firecrackers thrown by children celebrating the final days of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, which this year coincided with the build-up to Christmas. Their parents marked it by snaking long strings of green lights – the colour of Islam – along their balconies. But in this city, one third Christian and two thirds Muslim, there has been little sign of the tension or rivalry that scarred relations between the two Arab communities.

Drivers arriving in Tel Aviv are being greeted with a giant message of reassurance. Some 24,000 light bulbs have been draped over one of the Azriela Towers — Israel’s very own version of New York’s now-departed Twin Towers — to form a huge Star of David. The Azriela company is also handing out 25,000 miniature Israeli flags and half a million stickers bearing a slogan demanding steadfastness from the Israeli public: “It’s up to us.” The purpose of all this jingoism, says the firm, is to prevent the country yielding to “an exaggerated prophecy of destruction that will become self-fulfilling.” Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is surely delighted: he believes that Israelis need to demonstrate the same patriotic spirit that has so rapidly infected the American public realm since 11 September.

The banging by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the door for entry to the coalition against terror has grown deafening in the past weeks. After his meeting with President George W. Bush in Washington on Sunday, which coincided with a weekend of the worst violence inflicted on Israel since 1996, he was finally admitted. Sharon wasted no time in launching his own single- handed war on terrorism on his return from the US the next day. But his target was not Hamas, the group responsible for the weekend’s spate of suicide bomb attacks — two plus a car bomb in the heart of West Jerusalem and another on a bus in Haifa — that left 26 Israelis dead and at least 275 injured. Instead his goal was the political and personal destruction of the Palestinian Authority leader, Yasser Arafat.

Nimer Sultany leans forward to reveal the wound to the top of his head. Still visible through his cropped hair, more than two weeks after the Israeli police kicked him and hit him with batons, is a large, bloodied gash. “This,” the young lawyer says, “is how the police deal with us when we demonstrate non-violently.” Seated under the billowing plastic sheeting of his town’s protest tent, Sultany points to the bulldozers 50 metres or so away, close to where he was attacked by the Yassam, an elite unit of the Israeli police. “They were like wild dogs. They just laid into us all; women, children, it didn’t matter.” Hundreds of demonstrators, including students, local farmers, Arab members of the Knesset and activists from Jewish environmental groups, turned out on 30 October to protest at the confiscation of the town’s fields on the outskirts of Tira in central Israel.

The Israeli leadership was steering a collision course with its Palestinian minority this week when it stripped Knesset member Azmi Bishara, one of the country’s most outspoken critics, of his parliamentary immunity in order to put him on trial for treason. The decision against the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) parliamentarian is seen as a major attack on freedom of speech as it allows Bishara to be prosecuted in the criminal courts for his political comments. There are fears among Palestinian leaders in Israel that this new policy will be selectively applied to Arab MKs in order to silence them. Many are concerned that the move is a prelude to outlawing some Arab parties, particularly Bishara’s NDA and the Islamic Movement.

For good reason 67-year-old cemetery keeper Abrahim Iassa tends the graves on a hillside overlooking the village of Biram with an unusual degree of dedication. “At the moment,” he says, “there is only one way I will be allowed to return to my village — in a coffin. I’m an old man but Israel thinks I am a security threat as long as I’m alive.” He is not alone. The 1,000 original inhabitants of Biram, located in the Upper Galilee, have been waging a 53-year battle with successive Israeli governments to be allowed to return to the land from which they were evacuated during the 1948 war.

Nowadays, all roads in the West Bank city of Ramallah lead either to a traffic jam or a dead end. The journey starts promisingly enough. The centre of Ramallah is a huge roundabout called the Minara with a skeletal metal sculpture at its heart, the outline of what appears to be a rocket pointing to the stars. Two years ago it was made more imposing with the addition of four life-size stone lions around the base, each standing at the head of a road and roaring at the horizon. There has been much speculation among Palestinians about these lions, which were hewn from stone in China. It is generally accepted that they represent the city’s four great hamulas, or families.