While the aggressive language of many among Gaza’s 7000 Jewish settlers is making Israeli officials nervous, the government is far more fearful of the response of the wider settler population of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They number at least 400,000, a significant proportion of them hardline religious Jews who have little time for realpolitik or compromise. They believe they are doing God’s work in settling land that was promised the Jews in the Bible. “Enough with the embraces and love,” Oz Kadmon from Kafr Darom said. “[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is a belligerent man and he must be addressed in the language he understands.”

The latest legal maneuvers by the Israeli government to confiscate Palestinian land in East Jerusalem have rightly caused outrage, even among senior Israeli officials. Last summer, it emerged that the government secretly resurrected a 55-year-old piece of legislation drafted in the immediate aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Using the 1950 Absentee Property Law, Israeli officials have the right to seize the holdings of any Palestinian landowner they define as “absent.” The renewed application of the law came to light only after an Israeli lawyer pressed the army for a promised entry permit into Israel for his client, Johnny Atik, a Bethlehem farmer who needed to reach his fields.

For centuries Christians around the world have accepted the Nativity story at face value – that Jesus was born in a stable in the little town of Bethlehem. But a growing number of Bible scholars and archaeologists are rocking the foundations of Christian faith by suggesting they have identified a different Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus.

In the Holy Land’s “other” Bethlehem, there are no pilgrims looking for a room – not even at Yosef Yeger’s inn. “Christmas isn’t much of an event in Israel,” says the hotel owner.

A Holocaust banking scandal is belatedly playing out in Israel, even if no one – not even the reparation funds or the Israeli government – is drawing attention to it. In Jerusalem, auditors working for an investigative committee of the Israeli Knesset have unearthed thousands of dormant accounts belonging to Holocaust victims from which Israel’s own banks have long been profiting.

Investigations by the Israeli parliament have dug up disturbing evidence that Israel has been profiting for decades from vast sums invested in local banks by European Jews who died in the Nazi death camps. Even now the banks are delaying returning the money to their heirs. But unlike a similar scandal that hit European banks in the mid-90s, almost no pressure is being brought to bear on the Israeli banks by the Israeli government or by Jewish reparation organisations.

My critics fall into two camps. The first accuses me of excusing or justifying violent Palestinian attacks on Israelis. This is a gross misrepresentation. I simply explained why Arun Gandhi’s message of nonviolence is likely to fall on stony ground in the occupied territories.

“I am coming to speak about peace and non- violence,” Arun Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson, told the Jerusalem Post newspaper shortly before he arrived in the Middle East to preach a message of mutual respect, love and understanding to two conflict-weary publics, Israeli and Palestinian. At his first rally in East Jerusalem last week, Gandhi led thousands of Palestinians, including Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, and a handful of Israeli peace campaigners on a march against the wall being built across the West Bank. Under the banner “No to violence, yes to peace”, the protest was designed to promote the path of Palestinian peaceful resistance to Israel’s military occupation.

The arrival in the Middle East of Arun Gandhi, preaching his grandfather Mahatma Gandhi’s message of love, brotherhood and nonviolence to conflict-weary Israelis and Palestinians, has raised tentative hopes that the bloody conflict may be entering a more reflective phase.

Severe cracks surfaced inside the Israeli government this week as its senior law officers publicly fell out with the defence establishment and the Foreign Ministry over the country’s future strategy in the face of the July verdict of the International Court of Justice that the separation wall being built in the West Bank is illegal. According to a report issued last week by a Justice Ministry team appointed by the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, Israel is facing international sanctions and its leaders potential prosecution for war crimes unless it begins presenting a fairer face to the world.

Al-Ahram Weekly – 26 August 2004 Four years ago Raed Abu Elkian, 27, finished serving in the Israeli army as a Bedouin tracker. Today the entrance to his village in Israel’s southern semi-desert region, the Negev, is marked by a giant concrete block stamped in black ink with the words “Danger. Entry Forbidden: Firing Range” Read more

A little-known team is making football history as the qualifying rounds of the UEFA Cup begin this month. It is the first Arab team to compete in a European championship and the first Arab squad to represent Israel in an international tournament. The team, called Bnei Sakhnin, are carrying aloft the hopes of the Jewish state. But as Sakhnin romped home to a 3-0 victory in their first match, against the Albanian side Partizani Tirana, in a sultry Tel Aviv stadium last week, few Israelis were cheering them on. A mere 2,000 fans turned out at the national stadium in Ramat Gan.

The match itself will be little honoured outside the sporting annals, but last Thursday an obscure team called Bnei Sakhnin made football history by appearing in an international qualifier against an Albanian side in the Uefa Cup. They were the first Arab team ever to compete in the European competition.

In a last-minute attempt to head off a mass hunger strike among Palestinian political prisoners, Israel partially reversed this week its policy of blocking most family visits to inmates. Prison authorities declared that an extra 600 prisoners would be allowed to see close relatives. Yaakov Ganot, head of the Israel Prison Service (IPS), instructed the 20 Israeli jails holding Palestinian security prisoners to compile lists of those who had been denied visits for more than a year. Ganot took his decision after Palestinian prisoners submitted 57 demands for improvements in detention conditions, with the restoration of visiting rights top of the list. A hunger strike is due to begin next week.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon opened a round of hurried negotiations this week with the two main Israeli opposition parties, Labour and the ultra-Orthodox Shas, in the hope of finding a third leg to prop up his collapsing government. Labour officials said they believed the talks could be completed before the Knesset leaves for its summer recess in two weeks. If an agreement cannot be reached, elections will loom large. The negotiations to create a unity government gained an unexpected urgency last week following the dismissal from the cabinet and his party of Yosef Paritzky over revelations that he had plotted to frame a senior rival figure in his centrist secular Shinui Party before the last elections, in January 2003.

In principle there is protection of religious rights, such as the freedom of religious practice and worship. But in reality Israel has devised a partial theocracy in which large areas of the citizens’ private dealings with the state fall exclusively under the control of religious authorities. So there is no option of a civil marriage within Israel, nor are inter-faith marriages possible. The religious authorities — Jewish, Christian and Muslim — have sole authority over issuing birth, marriage and death certificates. The Interior Ministry refuses to classify citizens on their ID cards in any terms other than ones that reveal their ethnic and religious identities. Even the adoption law of 1981 provides that a child can only be adopted by people of the same religion. The outcome, if not the purpose, of all these measures has been to reinforce the ghettoisation of the weaker, non-Jewish religions.

The first visit in several years of the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), should have sent a collective shiver down the spine of the Israeli defence establishment. Instead, it passed by with little publicity or tension. Mohamed El-Baradei’s two-day visit included a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and concluded without any real pressure being exerted on Israel over its policy of “nuclear ambiguity”. According to Israeli officials, El-Baradei did not test whether he would be barred from the Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev. He did not even ask for access to the site, which is believed to be used in the manufacture of nuclear armaments.

An Israeli Knesset committee is currently formulating a constitution for Israel — the first such attempt in its 56 years. The task was abandoned early in the state’s history, after the country’s founding fathers feared that giving a precise definition to the state’s character would tear apart the fragile consensus between secular and religious Jews and that a Bill of Rights would enshrine in law rights it wanted to deny the Palestinians. Instead, the founding document of the state, the Declaration of Independence, made a promise: that Israel would “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of religion, race or sex”.

Dozens of corner stores across Israel are at the centre of a divisive legal battle which is tearing apart the traditional consensus about the character of the Jewish state and who should be considered a Jew. Gennady Ozadovsky’s Super Ta’anug store – in the city of Karmiel in northern Israel – is one of them. It has shelves stuffed with everything from hummus, pretzels and pitta bread, to low-fat yoghurt and beer. For the world it looks like any other corner supermarket in Israel. Ozadovsky, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, has offended the sensibilities of his religious neighbours by stocking non-kosher products in his shop, including pork meat, sausages and shellfish.