The talks, which are set to begin in earnest in mid-August, are taking place not because either Israel or the Palestinians believe a deal is in reach. The two sides are talking to avoid being blamed for embarrassing the US. The White House’s motivation, meanwhile, was suggested by an official this week: they desperately want to avoid the “train wreck” of the Palestinians returning to the UN in September.

Leaders of Israel’s Palestinian minority have accused the Israeli authorities of intensifying efforts to push Christian and Muslim communities into conflict, as part of a long-running divide-and-rule strategy towards the country’s Palestinian citizens. The allegations have been prompted by a series of initiatives to pressure Christian school-leavers into the army, breaking the community’s blanket rejection of the Israeli army draft for the past 65 years.

Alex Gibney’s documentary about Wikileaks and Assange could have been a fascinating study of the moral quandaries faced by whistleblowers in the age of the surveillance super-state. How is it possible to remain transparent, open, honest — even sane — when your every move is being watched? Instead Gibney indulges in easy character assassination.

“I want my films to put fear into Israelis. My job is to disturb their dreams, to wake them from the fantasy that there is no occupation.” An interview with Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, whose new movie, Omar, recently won a top prize at Cannes.

Over the past decade, Israel has surged up the arms trade’s international rankings. Despite having a population smaller than New York City, Israel has emerged as one of the world’s largest exporters of armaments. It is the merging of theory, hardware and repeated “testing” in the field that has armies, police forces and the homeland security industries of the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America lining up to buy Israeli know-how

Israel has been intensifying a campaign to evict Palestinian farming communities from their ancestral lands to replace them with Jewish newcomers. Israeli human rights lawyers, tired of the international community’s formulaic criticisms, say it is time to be more forthright. They call these “ethnic cleansing” zones – intended to drive off Palestinians irrespective of the provisions of international law and whether or not the Palestinians in question hold Israeli citizenship.

Cafes have always been integral components of Arab culture, making room for cultural and political syntheses. With the gradual increase in the complexities of contemporary issues facing the Arab societies, cafes have developed into safe havens for different local communities to think openly, be different and exist in a free environment in the face of repressive and inhospitable surroundings. They have become active ingredients in the change the Arab world is witnessing.

The tiny village of Al-Aqaba in the West Bank is a model of access for the disabled. Its mayor, Hajj Sami Sadeq, has been using a wheelchair since the age of 14, when a bullet from an Israeli soldier lodged in his spine. His case typifies the especially ambiguous aura around disability among Palestinians. The view of disability shifted dramatically during the two intifadas, when tens of thousands of men, women and children were left with permanent injuries from Israeli military operations.

While Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies on the far right were castigating an amusement park called Superland for separating Jewish and Arab children, they were busy backing a bill that will give Israeli Jews who serve in the army a whole raft of extra rights in land and housing, employment, salaries, and much more. Superland’s offence pales to insignificance when compared to that, or to the decades of state-planned and officially sanctoned discrimination against the country’s Palestinian minority.

In recent weeks, Israel has moved from relative inaction to a deepening involvement in Syrian affairs: it launched two air strikes last month, and at the same time fomented claims that Damascus had used chemical weapons. Meanwhile, statements from Israeli officials have tacked wildly between threats to oust Assad one moment and denials that Israel has any interest in his departure the next. Is Israel sending out contradictory signals to sow confusion, or is it simply confused itself?

A dream long nurtured by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians made refugees during the establishment of the state of Israel has become a concrete reality at a small makeshift camp atop a windswept hill. A dozen young men have set up the camp at a site in the Upper Galilee from which their grandparents were expelled more than six decades ago. Today, all that remains of the village of Iqrit, close to Israel’s border with Lebanon, is a Catholic church on the hill’s brow. But in 1948, the village was home to 600 Christian Palestinians.

With Europe’s most talented young footballers preparing for the kick-off of the under-21 championships, Israelis are celebrating the biggest footballing coup in their history. But criticism from global statesmen such as Desmond Tutu has bolstered the recent launch of a campaign by Palestinian groups and European and American solidarity activists for a sporting boycott of Israel, modelled on the international campaign that targeted apartheid South Africa.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s real agenda was always transparent: not Palestinian statehood, but what he termed “economic peace”. Last week the US indicated it was switching horses. John Kerry revealed an economic programme for getting peace talks on track. Some 300 Israeli and Palestinian business people were on board, he said, and would invest heavily in the Palestinian economy in a venture that was “bigger, bolder and more ambitious than anything since the Oslo accords”.

“You know why Israel’s leaders can’t make peace?” a Palestinian friend asked recently. “Because if the conflict ever ended, Israeli Jews would start tearing out each other’s throats.” But any Palestinian who hoped the protest movements emerging in Israel might signal the beginning of Israeli society’s disintegration should think again. There are plenty of reasons to doubt that most Israeli Jews are ready to break free of the militaristic and nationalist thinking that has dominated Zionism for decades.”

Faced with years of diplomatic impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, John Kerry, the US secretary of state, seized his chance to resurrect the peace process earlier this month. He extracted from the Arab League an agreement to dust off a decade-old regional plan, the Arab Peace Initiative, declaring the move “a very big step forward”.

Israel’s increasing integration into European competitions, despite its refusal to revive peace talks with the Palestinians, respect human rights and halt illegal settlement, is, according to critics, contrary to sporting values and should be met with international opposition of the kind faced by apartheid South Africa.

In 2007 Tony Blair assumed the position of Quartet Representative. Against the background of mounting criticism at home over his role in the 2003 Iraq War, this profile examines the record of Blair’s activities in the Middle East over the past five years. The picture that emerges is one of rapid self-enrichment through murky consultancies and opaque business deals with Middle East dictators, and an official role whose main results appear to be an unhappy Palestinian Authority and the perpetuation of the status quo.

For Palestinian leaders, waiting anxiously in the hope that US Secretary of State John Kerry unveils a peace plan when he visits this week, the need to secure East Jerusalem’s future has come sharply into relief. The reason is simple: there can be no viable Palestinian state without Jerusalem as its capital. This was the background to a March 26 pledge by the Arab League to establish a $1 billion fund to protect East Jerusalem’s Arab and Islamic characters.

Those who hoped that Barack Obama would be arriving in Israel to bang Israeli and Palestinian heads together, after four years of impasse in the peace process, will be sorely disappointed. At the weekend, Arab-American leaders revealed that Obama had made it clear he would not present a peace plan, because Israel has indicated it is not interested in an agreement with the Palestinians.