Mustafa Dirani, once a leader of the Lebanese militia group Amal, had been held in Israeli prisons since he was abducted from his home in the Bekaa Valley by commandoes 10 years ago. In the early months of his detention, interrogators tortured him for news of an Israeli airman, Ron Arad, who was captured in 1986 after his plane was downed over Lebanon.

Israel’s furious diplomatic activity to sabotage a decision taken by the United Nations General Assembly last December to seek the opinion of its highest judicial body, the International Court of Justice, on the legality of Israel building its separation wall across large swaths of occupied Palestinian territory began to pay dividends at the weekend. By the Friday deadline for submitting affidavits, 31 states had joined Israel in rejecting the court’s authority to rule in the matter: 15 member states of the European Union, 10 further members-in-waiting, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, Russia, South Africa and Cameroon. Britain, Germany and France presented their own, separately written affidavits.

Prof Richard Freund believes that further excavations of the bathhouse will throw light on life in Nazareth at the time of Jesus and open up the possibility of discovering a treasure trove of artifacts from the period.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon should have been celebrating this week the first anniversary of his re-election last January. Instead his mind was concentrated on the more pressing matter of his political survival, as the legal noose drew ever tighter around his neck over a series of corruption scandals. At the forefront is the case of a millionaire Israeli businessman, David Appel, who was charged last week with paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Sharon’s family in the form of a bribe. According to the charges, he hoped to use Sharon’s influence to secure a huge real estate deal, in what has become known as the “Greek island affair”.

Guardian Weekly – 19 December 2003 Weekends in Nazareth, the capital of Israel’s one million Palestinian citizens, are often a dismal prospect. For more than a decade a night out has entailed either leaving town or visiting a pub known locally as the Frank Sinatra, housed in a drab building paid for by the singer Read more

Through the dark nights of the intifada, the gigantic illuminated spire of the Basilica of the Annunciation has glowed brightly in the centre of Nazareth like a beacon of inextinguishable hope. This Christmas, however, Nazareth and Bethlehem will be shunned by pilgrims.

Two items of news broke simultaneously this month. The first concerned an apology by a member of the German Parliament, Martin Hohmann, for remarks in which he suggested that Jewish communities in Europe shared a historic “guilt” with the Germans and other nations for the events of the 20th century, a comment which predictably provoked denunciations of Hohmann for being anti-Semitic. The second report was of a survey of various publics in the European Union which showed that a convincing majority, 59 per cent, judged the actions of Israel to be the gravest threat to world peace, knocking more familiar bogeymen like North Korea, Afghanistan and Iran from the top slot.

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.