A recent attack on a Knesset member underscores the country’s hostility towards calls for transparency in Israel’s weapons of mass destruction programme. At midday on Friday, 24 October, Issam Makhoul, an Arab member of the Israeli parliament, and his wife Suad got into their two cars outside their home in the centre of Haifa. Issam Makhoul reversed his Knesset-supplied Ford out of the driveway as his wife started the engine of the family Honda to collect their twin children from school. Seconds later an explosion flooded Suad Makhoul’s car with flames. She leapt from the vehicle moments before the fire could engulf her.

Sally Azzam, a student from Nazareth in northern Israel, tells me fondly of being able to smoke a nargilleh, a water pipe, in cafés and restaurants in Jordan, anonymous among the local women who do the same. Smoking, says Azzam, represents a small feminist victory for Jordanian women – one of the battles she fears is being lost back home.

The roadside signpost bearing the information “Facility 1391” was removed months ago. Now there is nothing to identify the concrete fortress guarded by two watchtowers that sits atop a small wooded hill. But this summer the Israeli government, under pressure from the courts, admitted that Facility 1391 serves as a “secret prison,” what one local newspaper termed “Israel’s Guantanamo”.

Israeli academic Jeff Halper has coined the term “matrix of control” to explain how Israel uses non-military tools — planning laws, architecture and geography — as well as military hardware to herd Palestinians into the spaces it allocates them: the “Bantustan” homelands familiar from apartheid South Africa.

Facility 1391, close to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border between Israel and the West Bank, is not marked on maps, it has been erased from aerial photographs and recently its numbered signpost was removed. Censors have excised all mention of its location from the Israeli media, with the government saying that secrecy is essential to “prevent harm to the country’s security”.

Elias Shama’s small souvenir shop in Nazareth, the town of Jesus’s childhood, barely catches the eye. But a team of forensic archaeologists and biblical scholars have been poring over a network of tunnels Shama unearthed under his shop in a discovery that may rewrite the history books.

Beit Fauzi Azar, my Nazareth home for the past two years, is one of the “hidden palaces” of Palestine, according to the Israeli conservation expert Sharif Sharif. These mansions, built in the late 19th century, are one of the few windows left on Palestinian society from before the advent of modern Israel.

By every journalistic yardstick, the Israeli media’s recent report of a “children’s summer camp of terror” was a silly season story. Channel 10 news “revealed” that 300 Israeli Arab children were being trained to become terrorists at a summer camp in the village of Kabul in western Galilee.

Al-Ahram Weekly – 25 September 2003 I am loath to put pen to paper again to continue a debate with Ran HaCohen that doubtless appears more than a little self- indulgent to many outsiders. Maybe we do sound like two birds singing from the same tree limb, as one of Al-Ahram Weekly’s more compulsive Zionist Read more

Wissam Yazbak, at rest in a Nazareth cemetery, cannot tell the story of what happened to him nearly three years ago, on the night of 8 October 2000. That evening a mob of several hundred Israeli Jews from the neighbouring town of Nazareth Ilit marched on the eastern quarter of Nazareth, many armed with guns and chanting “Death to the Arabs”. As the mob attacked the first Arab homes, Nazareth’s mosques called on local residents to defend their town. In the pressure cooker atmosphere of the first days of the Intifada, when communal war between Israel’s Jews and Arabs was in the air, the residents made their way uphill from the centre of town to the road that separates the Jewish and Arab Nazareths.

After a wait of three years, including 12 long months of silence as the final report was being drafted, the Or commission of inquiry into the shooting dead of 13 Arab citizens in the Galilee by the Israeli police at the start of the intifada issued its verdict this week. Theodor Or’s 781-page report, published on Monday, severely criticized several senior police officers, including the former national police chief, Yehuda Wilk, and his commander in the Galilee, Alik Ron, as well as reprimanding the former prime minister Ehud Barak and his public security minister, Shlomo Ben Ami. All were implicated to varying degrees in the decision to allow police officers to use rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition as a first line of defence in controlling demonstrations in the country’s north.

She makes an incongruous figure, waiting in front of the central mosque in the northern Israeli town of Tamra. Susan Nathan is the only Jew among 25,000 Muslims in Tamra, one of the country’s dozens of Arab communities whose council is run by Islamic fundamentalists.

She is an incongruous figure waiting infront of the large central mosque in the northern Israeli town of Tamra for my arrival. There is no danger I will miss her. She has short blond hair, in contrast to most of the women who cover their heads with scarves, and is wearing a loose-fitting, floral kaftan that would be less out of place on the streets of Wimbledon in south London, her former home, than here in the Middle East. But the difference runs much deeper. Susan Nathan is the only Jew in Tamra, living among 25,000 Muslims in a town run by Islamic politicians. More than this, she is one of only two Israeli Jews known to have crossed the ethnic divide in Israel to live in one of the country’s dozens of Arab communities.

In these pages recently (Al-Ahram Weekly, 7 – 13 August) the left-wing Israeli academic and journalist Ran HaCohen argued that most Israelis had almost no idea what their government and army were doing in their name in the occupied Palestinian territories. “The Israeli public is kept in the dark about what is happening just a 20-minute drive from Tel-Aviv, or just across (and even within) the municipal borders of Jerusalem,” he wrote in an article headlined “Eyes Wide Shut”. HaCohen’s usually admirable qualities as an analyst of the situation inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza appear to have deserted him on this occasion. Let us examine how plausible the assumptions he is making about the “Israeli public” really are.

JERUSALEM: Israel faced a stinging rebuke last week from a United Nations watchdog body for passing a law two weeks ago, days before the Knesset’s summer recess, that bans Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens from living together in Israel. The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination called on Israel to revoke the law immediately, adding that it “raises serious issues” about whether Israel is violating an international human rights treaty it ratified in 1979. The panel, comprising 18 human rights experts from around the world, is due to issue a periodical report assessing Israel’s compliance with the treaty in December but was so concerned by the new law that under emergency procedures it rushed out an early statement criticizing the legislation.

As Sharon manoeuvers in the shadow of the roadmap, the shortcomings of the mainstream Israeli peace camp have never been more evident. This Saturday a convoy of Jewish and Arab Israeli peace activists will venture into the olive groves of Anin, a Palestinian village in the northern West Bank close to the pre-1967 border with Israel. They will be there to help Anin’s farmers prepare for the autumn harvest, hoping to use their Israeli citizenship to defy military restrictions and reach more than 2,500 acres of fields that have been off-limits to the villagers since Israel recently erected its apartheid wall. The trip is not without risk: only two weeks ago, international demonstrators who joined the villagers to protest against the wall were shot by Israeli police and soldiers.

Early one morning two years ago, as the fields below the small hilltop town of Deir Hanna in the central Galilee soaked up the dawn light, Diana Hussein’s life changed for ever. Woken by violent knocking at the front door, the 43- year-old school nutritionist found several dozen armed Israeli police surrounding her house. They were looking for her 16-year-old son Rabiah, asleep inside. For an hour and a half, five men searched his bedroom, looking through photos, opening up his collection of radios, confiscating his Umm Kulthoum tapes and trawling through files on his computer. All they found of note was a screensaver that read “Rabiah Saleh Hussein from Deir Hanna in occupied Galilee”, a reference to the capture of the Galilee in the 1948 war that founded Israel.

Morad as-Sana and his wife Abir returned home from their honeymoon in Istanbul last Saturday to the news that the Israeli parliament had passed a law two days earlier that will make their planned life together impossible. As the young couple crossed back over the land border from Jordan to Israel, they parted ways: Abir to her family in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and Morad to his apartment in the southern Israeli city of Beersheva. Neither knows when they will be able to see one another again. The enforced separation is the result of legislation rushed through the parliament last week on the orders of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, before the Knesset’s summer recess this week. Sharon made the new law — an amendment to the Citizenship Law barring Palestinians from joining a spouse to live in Israel — a vote of confidence in his government.

A new report by an Israeli human rights group warned: “Most of the abuses occur not as a result of operational necessity on the part of the army, but from vindictiveness on the part of soldiers, who receive implicit approval to denigrate the dignity, life and liberty of innocent Palestinians.”