Imagine the following scenario. A Palestinian gunman boards a bus inside Israel and rides it to the city of Netanya. Close to the end of the line, he walks over to the driver, levels his automatic rifle against the man’s head and pumps him with bullets. He turns and empties the rest of the magazine — one of 14 in his backpack — into the passenger behind the driver and two young women sitting across the gangway. As bystanders in the street outside look on in horror, our gunman then reloads his weapon and sprays the bus with yet more fire, injuring 20 people. He approaches a woman huddled beneath a seat, trying to hide from him, lowers the gun to her head and pulls the trigger. The magazine is empty. As he tries to load a third clip, she grabs the burning barrel of the gun while other passengers rush him.

Israelis have a word for it: “hasbara”. It is often misleadingly translated as “advocacy for Israel”. But what the word signifies more deeply for Israel’s supporters is the duty, when the truth would be damaging, to dissemble or to disseminate misinformation to protect the interests of Israel as a Jewish state — that is, a state with an unassailable Jewish majority. If hasbara is expected of the lowliest members of Israel’s international fan club, it is a duty of the first order for the country’s prime minister. Which is why no one should be surprised that Ehud Olmert’s speech to the US Congress last week was an unpalatable stew of untruths, distortions and double-speak. Washington’s credulous politicians, of course, lapped it up, bobbing up and down as they gave the Israeli prime minister a series of standing ovations.

Since the Citizenship Law’s amendment, observers suspected that security was being used as cover for demographic concerns. Officials were said to be terrified that, as they closed the “borders” to the Palestinians, they would be leaving the back door open via family unification procedures.

In recently approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians, Israel’s Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming. The judges’ decision, in the words of the country’s normally restrained Haaretz daily, was “shameful.” By a wafer-thin majority, the highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel – what is termed “family unification” – did not violate rights enshrined in the country’s Basic Laws.

There were some remarkable admissions in a piece by the distinguished Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the immediate wake of the British teaching union NATFHE’s vote yesterday to offer members moral backing if they boycott Israeli universities. British academics opposed to Israeli colleagues’ complicity in the lengthy and continuing occupation of the Palestinians are now advised to boycott them and their institutions. Today, and quite incidentally, Kimmerling wrote in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper of a decision taken by his own institution, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to offer a special fast-track degree programme to members of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, which has used its fearsome intelligence gathering abilties to maintain the occupation of the Palestinians for nearly four decades.

The guiding principles of Israel’s new coalition government agreed last week to free Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to pursue his big idea: “hitkansut,” a Hebrew word embracing ideas related to “convergence”, “consolidation” and “ingathering.” In practice, it means Israel will begin shaping the final borders of the Jewish state over the next few years. For Israelis, the plan has one main, traumatic outcome: some 60,000 Jewish settlers located in the remoter, smaller settlements will be forced to leave their homes, much as Gaza’s settlers were made to depart last year. Israelis are braced for more tears, threats and pictures of flailing youths manhandled by soldiers.

With his coalition partners onboard, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is plotting his next move: a limited withdrawal from the West Bank which he and his government will declare as the end of the occupation and therefore also any legitimate grounds for Palestinian grievance. From hereon in, Israel will portray itself as the benevolent provider of a Palestinian state — on whatever is left after most of Israel’s West Bank colonies have been saved and the Palestinian land on which they stand annexed to Israel. If the Palestinians reject this deal — an offer, we will doubtless be told, every bit as “generous” as the last one — then according to the new government’s guidelines they will be shunned by Israel and presumably also by the international community.

About 2,000 Palestinian demonstrators gathered on the slopes of the Carmel mountain near Haifa while most Israelis celebrated their 58th Independence Day with open-air barbecues and parties. The Palestinian refugee families were joined by 150 Israeli Jews in an annual procession to commemorate the mirror event of Israel’s independence called the Nakba (Catastrophe), that drew the overwhelming majority of Palestinians from their homes and out of the new Jewish state. This year, the families marched to Umm al-Zinat, a Palestinian farming village whose 1,500 inhabitants were forced out by advancing Israeli soldiers on May 15, 1948, a few hours after Israel issued its declaration of independence.

Across Israel, the sirens have been blaring out this week, closing shops and offices early and bringing Israelis to a minute’s silent halt wherever they find themselves, whether in the house or pulled into a layby at the side of the road. Israel has been commemorating its soldiers who fell in the country’s many wars: a long roll call of names appeared on television screens, and military cemeteries were packed with visiting families. But yesterday, on 3 May, the sombre mood finally lifted as Israel celebrated its 58th Independence Day, marking the declaration of statehood on midnight 14 May 1948 (the anniversary varies every year because it is commemorated according to the Hebrew calendar). Boisterous youngsters piled into the streets, enjoying free public concerts and firework displays, and families headed to the forests for barbecues. Every other car seems to be flying an Israeli flag.

Coffins on Our Shoulders plots the troubled contours of Jewish-Arab relations in the Holy Land over the past century through two interweaving narratives. The first, intimate one comprises the stories of its two authors’ experiences of being Israeli – one a Jew, the other a Palestinian Arab – and the separate paths that led their ancestors, willingly and unwillingly, to their citizenship in the new state. A second, related narrative provides a series of contextualising analyses of ethnic politics in Israel.

The policy of “hitnatkut”, or unilateral disengagement, developed by Ariel Sharon needed a swift facelift following the withdrawal of settlers from Gaza last year. And Israel’s prime minister-designate, Ehud Olmert, has found it in the related concept of “hitkansut”, variously translated as “convergence”, “consolidation” and “ingathering”. After all, Olmert could hardly campaign convincingly for a West Bank disengagement when it was clear Jewish settlers and soldiers would continue occupying a significant proportion of Palestinian land at the withdrawal’s end. So convergence is usefully, and misleadingly, supplanting disengagement.

The low margin of victory aside, Kadima’s success in the Israeli election on Tuesday is far from the political and ideological upheaval most analysts were predicting. The most notable event was the humiliation of Likud, Ariel Sharon’s old party and the one he hoped to sabotage by setting up Kadima shortly before he himself was felled by a stroke. Likud’s fortunes foundered after most of its supporters, following in Sharon’s footsteps, deserted either to Kadima or to the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu. Given the record low turnout, and the challenges posed by the Palestinians’ recent backing of a Hamas government, the scale of the Likud failure was all the more shocking. Apparently even some of the settlers abandoned it. On learning of his defeat, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu told supporters that the party would “not bend to the winds of fashion.”

If you want to understand what is concerning ordinary Israelis as they prepare to cast their ballots next week, the most revealing poll is also the one that has received least attention. A few weeks after Ariel Sharon broke up his Likud party to form a new “centrist” faction, Kadima, his advisers conducted a poll to find out how potential voters would respond if its list of candidates included an Arab. The results were unequivocal: Kadima would lose votes equivalent to between five and seven seats in the 120-member Knesset from Israeli Jews worried that they might be helping to elect an Arab.

In the looking-glass world of Middle East politics, it is easy to forget that Ahmad Saadat, the imprisoned Palestinian leader Israel summarily arrested in Jericho late on Tuesday, is wanted for masterminding the killing of the Jewish state’s most notorious racist politician-general. Rehavam Zeevi, head of the Central Command in the late 1960s and early 1970s, personally developed and managed Israel’s brutal regime in the newly occupied West Bank. After retiring from the battlefield, he waged a relentless war against “the Arabs” on the political front. His Moledet party, founded in the 1980s, advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Greater Israel — in other words, from Israel and the occupied territories.

The news swept across Nazareth last Friday like wildfire. There had been a terror attack on the Basilica of the Annunciation. Just visible, as final darkness fell, were faces etched by a mixture of anger and anxiety. Christians and Muslims, who share Nazareth, were equally shocked at the violation of one of the Holy Land’s most sacred spaces.

Until recently liberal Europeans were keen to distance themselves, at least officially, from the ideological excesses of the current American administration. They argued that the neo-conservative enthusiasm for the “war on terror” — and its underpinning ideology of “a clash of civilisations” — did not fit with Europe’s painful recent experiences of world wars and the dismantling of its colonial outposts around the globe. But there is every sign that the public dissociation is coming to a very rapid end. The language and assumptions of the “clash scaremongers” is permeating European thought, including the reasoning of its liberal classes, just as surely as it once did about the Cold War.

Nazareth was sucked into the eye of a storm last weekend, threatening, briefly, to unleash a conflagration. Three visitors to the Basilica of the Annunciation let off a series of explosions that. As rumors spread of a Jewish terror attack, Nazarenes hurried to the church.

Analysis will be dedicated over the coming days to the significance of Wednesday’s Palestinian legislative elections and what they herald for the Middle East conflict. But that spectacle and Hamas’ starring role in it have overshadowed a far more important drama playing out in the wings. Barely anyone has remarked on the unfolding events at the Herzliya Conference, Israel’s most important annual policy-making jamboree. This week politicians, businessmen, generals, academics and journalists converged on the exclusive seaside resort of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, to share their thoughts on the country’s central concern, as expressed in the conference’s title: “The balance of national strength and security in Israel.” Based on past form, the discussions and speeches are revealing more about the direction of Israeli policy over the next year than all the Knesset debates, Cabinet meetings and press conferences put together.

Natan Zada had recently moved to the West Bank settlement of Tapuah, where, it was later reported, he had fallen in with the far-right Kach movement. Formally outlawed by the Israeli government, Kach expounds a virulently racist ideology demanding the removal of all non-Jews from the Land of Israel. Once his bus had arrived in Shafa ‘Amr, Zada set his M-16 on automatic and put his beliefs into practice. He killed the driver and three passengers, and wounded another 12, before being overpowered and then beaten to death by angry townspeople