Until last weekend, Israel’s one million Palestinian citizens had stayed well out of the debate about the country’s imminent disengagement from Gaza. “It’s not our story,” they would say when pressed. “This is an entirely Jewish conversation.” While for months Jewish car drivers have been flying blue and orange ribbons – showing respectively support for and opposition to the disengagement – car aerials in Israel’s Arab towns and villages remained bare. That is no longer the case. At the weekend, Arab drivers in the Galilee could be seen flying black ribbons to commemorate the deaths of four Arabs shot dead on a bus last Thursday afternoon by a Jewish extremist with his Israeli Army-issued rifle. Now Israel’s Palestinian citizens are part of the conversation, whether they like it or not.

The letter one reporter in Israel wishes he could send news editors who ask him to cover the disengagement:

Dear Editor,

Many thanks for your email asking me to cover the Gaza disengagement for your publication. I was surprised to hear that you needed someone “already on the ground in Israel”, as you put it, and will not be among the publications sending a correspondent to cover the disengagement from Gaza. I know that some 3,000 foreign journalists are expected to descend on Israel in the coming days.

Maybe I should learn to be less sensitive but when director Eran Riklis arrived in Nazareth last month for the screening of his much-garlanded film “The Syrian Bride”, he got off on the wrong footing the moment he walked through the door. A handful of Nazerenes had been invited to a film studies workshop, keen to see an Israeli movie that has won universal praise, as well as more than a dozen awards, for its uplifting and supposedly non-partisan message: that we must never let go of our humanity or our dignity, even in the face of the brutalitising effects of the Middle East conflict.

The Israeli soldier who shot and killed Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old British peace activist, in the Gaza Strip was convicted by an Israeli court of manslaughter this week. Despite more than 1,700 Palestinian civilians having been killed by the Israeli army in this intifada, few soldiers are ever brought to account. Here, journalist Jonathan Cook details an earlier incident in which the Israeli army killed a British UN worker that was covered up.

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I read Uri Avnery’s recent offering, “Death of a Myth”, about the deathbed confession of Naomi Shemer regarding “Jerusalem of Gold”, her song that became a second Israeli national anthem after the Six-Day War of 1967. The Israeli public was apparently duped: Shemer had plagiarised the song from a Basque lullaby. As Avnery implicitly admits, no one was more fooled than he. At the time, he was a member of the Knesset and unsuccessfully tried to pass a law to have the song replace the national anthem, “Hativkah” or “The Hope”.

For a decade Misgav regional council has been seeking to prevent Ali Zbeidat, his Dutch wife Terese and their two daughters from living on land that has belonged to his family for decades. Using discriminatory land laws, the council has claimed jurisdiction over their land, even though it is located inside the Arab town of Sakhnin.

Crowing over his success in breaking up the old Arab order, President George W. Bush has been strongly hinting that the first shoots of democracy pushing up through the sands of the Middle East will soon blossom into peace. Truly representative Arab leaders, we are assured, will put away the qassam and katuysha rockets and embrace their former enemies. The model – at least in the thinking of the White House – is the peace process supposedly under way between the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships, sealed in a handshake last month at the Sinai beach resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon are now doing business because both speak the same language of democracy – or so the Bush argument runs.

You won’t hear of the plight of my friend Ali Zbeidat and his family or the imminent physical and financial ruin of their lives by Israel, even though Ali’s plight is far from unique. There are tens of thousands of other Palestinians in the same desperate situation as Ali, living in homes Israel defines as illegal.

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