A new report alleges that Israeli security officials are being given a free hand by airports around the world to use racial profiling against Arab passengers, in violation of international law and the host countries’ domestic legislation. Israeli media have for several years reported on suspicions that non-Jews, including Israel’s more than one million Arab citizens, are being routinely subjected to lengthy interrogations, bag checks and invasive body searches at Israeli airports and land crossings. The report, Suspected Citizens, collects for the first time personal testimony from Arab citizens to support claims of discriminatory and humiliating treatment by Israeli staff at Israeli airports.

Without Palestinian Christians confusing the picture, it would be much easier for Israel to persuade the West that it is facing a monolithic enemy, fanatical Islam, and that the Palestinian national struggle is really both a cover for jihad and a distraction from the clash of civilisations against which Israel is the ultimate bulwark.

The era of the Middle East strongman, propped up by and enforcing Western policy, appears well and truly over. His power is being replaced with rule by civil war, apparently now the American Administration’s favoured model across the region.

The problem facing the Palestinian leadership apparently reduces to a matter of a few words. Like a naughty child who has only to say “sorry” to be released from his room, the Hamas government need only say “We recognise Israel” and supposedly aid and international goodwill will wash over the West Bank and Gaza.

Region – 14 – 20 December 2006 Issue No. 824 The official political leadership of Israel’s more than one million Palestinian citizens issued a manifesto in Nazareth last week demanding a raft of changes to end the systematic discrimination exercised against non-Jews by the state since its creation nearly six decades ago.   Included in Read more

If one thing offers a terrifying glimpse of where the experiment in human despair that is Gaza under Israeli siege is leading, it is the news that a Palestinian woman in her sixties — a grandmother — chose last week to strap on a suicide belt and explode herself next to a group of Israeli soldiers invading her refugee camp. Despite the “Man bites dog” news value of the story, most of the Israeli media played down the incident. Not surprisingly: it is difficult to portray Fatma al-Najar as a crazed fanatic bent only the destruction of Israel.

Commentators and columnists seem agreed: Pierre Gemayel’s assassination must have been the handiwork of Syria. Case, apparently, closed. I do not claim to know who killed Gemayel. But it seems as if the possibility that Israel was behind it cannot be entertained in polite society. So let me offer a few impolite thoughts.

A new breed of Israeli academics classify Israel as an ‘ethnocracy’ rather than a liberal democracy, arguing that the institutionalised discrimination against Israeli Arabs, the ‘Judaising’ of public space, the enduring interference of the Jewish Diaspora and Zionist organisations like the JNF in Israel’s affairs, as well as the lack of defined borders and the influence of the extra-territorial settlers who live in the occupied territories, disqualify Israel from being a democracy.

David Grossman, one of Israel’s foremost writers and figurehead for its main peace movement, makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism’s legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.

The decision of Ehud Olmert to invite Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party into the governing coalition caused a brief and revealing furore. Like many of his fellow politicians, Lieberman harbours a strong desire to see the Palestinians of the occupied territories expelled, ideally to neighbouring Arab states or Europe.

The Middle East, and possibly the world, stands on the brink of a terrible conflagration as Israel and the United States prepare to deal with Iran’s alleged ambition to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, it becomes clearer by the day, wants to use its air force to deliver a knock-out blow against Tehran. It is not known whether it will use conventional weapons or a nuclear warhead in such a strike. At this potentially cataclysmic moment in global politics, it is good to see that one of the world’s leading broadcasters, the BBC, decided this week that it should air a documentary entitled “Will Israel bomb Iran?”. It is the question on everyone’s lips and doubtless, with the imprimatur of the BBC, the programme will sell around the world.

The message delivered to Condoleezza Rice this week by Israeli officials is that the humanitarian and economic disaster befalling Gaza has a single, reversible cause: the capture by Palestinian fighters of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, in late June from a perimeter artillery position that had been shelling Gaza. When Shalit is returned, negotiations can start, or so Rice was told by Israel’s defence minister, Amir Peretz. If Peretz and others are to be believed, the gunmen could have done themselves and the 1.4 million people of Gaza a favour and simply executed Shalit weeks ago.

A mistake too often made by those examining Israel’s behaviour in the occupied territories is to assume that Israel is acting in good faith. Even its most trenchant critics can fall into this trap. Such reluctance to attribute bad faith was demonstrated this week by Israel’s foremost human rights group, B’Tselem.

Kadima and the government are in trouble as the Israeli public steps even further towards the right in politics, writes Jonathan Cook in Nazareth Israelis saw in the Jewish New Year on the weekend with a flurry of opinion polls showing that they feel more insecure now than they have at any time over the past 10 years and that they no longer trust the leaders they elected just six months ago. Both results reflect the bitter public mood that has followed Israel’s military humiliation at the hands of Hizbullah over the summer. A survey in The Jerusalem Post revealed that 56 per cent believed Israel was less safe than a decade ago, when the country was recovering from the assassination by a Jewish extremist of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and facing a spate of Palestinian bus bombings in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

In an article article criticising Human Rights Watch for singling out Hizbullah rather than Israel for harsher condemnation of its military actions during the Lebanon war, I made sure to quote the organisation fairly and accurately before seeking to refute its arguments. Unfortunately, in her recent response HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson did not return the favour.

The trajectory of a long-running campaign that gave birth this month to the preposterous all-party British parliamentary report into anti-Semitism in the UK can be traced back to intensive lobbying by the Israeli government that began more than four years ago. At that time, he drafted the Israeli media into the fray. Local newspapers began endlessly highlighting concerns about the rise of a “new anti-Semitism”, a theme that was rapidly and enthusiastically taken up by the muscular Zionist lobby in the US.

Because of the business that human rights defenders are in, they must be held to a standard higher than we demand of others. Unfortunately, one of the best – Human Rights Watch – has failed that test during the war in Lebanon this summer.

During Israel’s attack on Lebanon this summer, Robert Fisk did sterling work debunking the main myths that littered the battlefield. But possibly in an attempt at even-handedness, he also muddied the picture over Hizbollah’s actions and thereby contributed towards the very mythical narratives he sought to undermine.

In a state established on a founding myth – that the native Palestinian population left of their own accord rather than that they were ethnically cleansed – and in one that seeks its legitimacy through a host of other lies, such as that the occupation of the West Bank is benign and that Gaza’s has ended, deception becomes a political way of life.