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.

He was the last breakfast companion I was expecting. Separated from me by a rack of toast was Mordechai Vanunu, the man who 18 years ago revealed that Israel had amassed a secret stockpile of nuclear weapons. Breakfast at the St George’s guest house in East Jerusalem is usually a sedate affair, but on this occasion both he and I were skating unintentionally but dangerously close to arrest by Israel’s security services. Vanunu, who found sanctuary in the grounds of the Anglican cathedral of St George’s when he was released from jail two months ago, is under a gagging order imposed by the Israeli government. He is banned from talking to foreigners, especially foreign journalists, as the former Sunday Times reporter Peter Hounam discovered recently when he was arrested by the Shin Bet secret services and deported.

For the first time in nearly two decades, nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu was able to speak directly to the world in an interview with the British media at the weekend. Jonathan Cook reports Both The Sunday Times and the BBC gave a platform to Vanunu in an interview, held in secret, in which he told of his reasons in 1986 for revealing to the world the existence of some 200 Israeli nuclear warheads, of his kidnap by a Mossad agent in Rome and of severe treatment at the hands of Israeli prison authorities. Although the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev had not been allowed to speak of these or any other matters since his capture by Israel, there was little that was explosive in his latest revelations. T

For the past year, members of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee have been meeting on Sundays to draft a constitution that would, once and for all, define the nature of the state and the rights and obligations of citizenship. The task of hammering out a written constitution has confounded Israeli governments and legislators for more than five decades. Strangely, given its historic nature, the committee’s work has attracted almost no media coverage, even though—or, maybe, precisely because—it threatens to reopen wounds that have not fully healed since the Jewish state’s blood-stained birth in 1948.

The panel of three judges found Palestinian West Bank leader Marwan Barghouti guilty in the murders of four Israelis and a Greek Orthodox priest in three attacks dating back to 2001 and 2002. He was also convicted of orchestrating a failed car bombing at a shopping mall in Jerusalem and of belonging to a terrorist organisation.

This year’s US State Department annual report on human rights practices in Israel identifies discrimination against Palestinian citizens in most spheres of their lives. It says: “The government did little to reduce institutional, legal, and societal discrimination against the country’s Arab citizens.” Among many issues, it notes the humiliating treatment of Palestinian citizens, including community leaders, during security checks at airports and checkpoints. Last month, Amir Makhul, director of Ittijah, the umbrella organisation for Israel’s Arab non-profit groups, was detained at length and searched by security staff at Ben Gurion airport.

The small affluent community of Katzir has become a byword for the apartheid policies of the Israeli state. For nine years, an Arab family, the Kadans, who live a short distance away in the Israeli Arab town of Baqa al-Gharbiya, have been fighting through the courts to be allowed to join the Jewish community. Katzir sits high on a hill just inside Israel that overlooks the rolling landscape of the northern West Bank close to the Palestinian city of Jenin. It is one of hundreds of exclusive Jewish communities in Israel which are built on state land and that weed out Arab applicants, unofficially, through strict vetting procedures.

Ariel Sharon emerged on Sunday from the referendum of Likud Party members on his unilateral “disengagement” plan from Gaza stranded in a political cul de sac. Even though he is sitting on one of the biggest electoral majorities in Israeli history, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is now friendless, without allies among the settlers whose support he once cultivated or the mainstream of his own party. Even the White House was sounding cautious about the special relationship. Israeli analysts suggested that Sharon, the army general who had never played by the rules, might yet stage another of his famous comebacks after his defeat by a 20 point margin in the poll, on a turnout of just over half the Likud Party’s membership.

In less than three weeks, Israel’s most notorious prisoner will be released. Mordechai Vanunu, the man who exposed his country’s secret nuclear weapons programme, will walk free after 18 years behind bars – most of them in harsh solitary confinement. For nearly two decades, the Israeli authorities have been dreading the moment when Vanunu would be free to speak to the world in person about Israel’s development of nuclear arms, his abduction by Mossad agents and the details of his incarceration. The timing of his release – as the issue of weapons of mass destruction tops Washington’s Middle East agenda – could not be worse.

A procession of pilgrims, each holding a palm branch, made their way up the eastern slope of the Mount of Olives marking the route of Jesus’s triumphal journey to Jerusalem. Despite its long history, the procession is likely to be the last for the forseeable future.

HAIFA, Israel: It was a historic moment, personified in the diminutive figure of a 35-year-old scientist from Toronto, Canada who took the stage in Haifa at the weekend to tell a mixed audience of Palestinians and Israeli Jews: “I am the poster girl for the right of return.” Ayeda Ayed – both of whose names derive from the Arabic word for return – was in the Israeli port city on a double mission. First, she was there to attend the first-ever conference held in Israel on the right of return for the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war that founded Israel. The Palestinian refugee population, now standing at 5 million, is the largest in modern history, with some 3.5 million Palestinians languishing in camps across the Middle East more than 50 years after the war.

Away from the protests marking the 28th anniversary of Land Day this week, the plight of two villages — one a former Muslim community, now destroyed, inside the state of Israel; the other an inhabited, largely Christian community located in occupied East Jerusalem — illustrates the continuing and unifying struggle of Palestinians to prevent their ever greater dispossession by Israel. Land Day commemorates the killing by the Israeli police of six Palestinian citizens in the Galilean town of Sakhnin in 1976 during protests against a wave of land confiscations by the state from the town’s inhabitants. The land was later transferred to a Jewish local authority, which built a ring of settlements around Sakhnin.

In recent weeks, Israeli bulldozers have finished their work at the Palestinian village of Abu Dis, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and moved to the very heart of the Holy City: the Mount of Olives. There demolition crews have begun scarring the eastern slopes of the mountain and uprooting hundreds of ancient olive trees.