It took only two days from last week’s handshakes at the Aqaba summit between US President George W Bush and the Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers, Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas, setting the seal on the latest peace initiative for the Middle East, for the folds of the so-called “roadmap” to start falling apart. The plan, building on President Bush’s speech of last summer, is designed to create a “viable” Palestinian state living alongside a “secure” Israel by 2005. But the moment the summit closed, Israel and the three most active armed Palestinian groups succeeded in erecting a series of roadblocks that make the route ahead look impassable.

More than 1,000 Israeli police officers and soldiers struggled all day last week to remove an “illegal” outpost — home to 10 settlers — on a hilltop south of the Palestinian city of Nablus. Hundreds of other settlers, mainly Jewish religious extremists, came to defend Mitzpe Yitzhar after a court order preventing the dismantling of the site was finally lifted on Thursday. It was the first inhabited settlement to be taken down. It looked — and was meant to look — like a turning point in Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s relationship with the decades-old settlement project in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel’s veteran politician, 79- year-old Shimon Peres, donned the mantle of Labour Party leader once again last week. Famously, Peres has led Labour five times into elections and never won, although for extraordinary reasons he has been prime minister twice. Peres won against two minor figures last Thursday with 49 per cent of the central committee vote, a lukewarm endorsement for a man widely seen as a holding measure while the party struggles to rehabilitate itself. Fewer than half of the 2,400 committee members turned out to vote. The internal election was forced after Labour Chairman Amram Mitzna resigned in early May, following a humiliating general election defeat on 28 January at the hands of incumbent Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Israel’s image as a democratic state took a further heavy battering last week as two separate reports were issued, the first by Amnesty International into Israeli military policies in the occupied territories, and the second by a United Nations watchdog monitoring Israel’s commitment to human rights. Both reports follow on the heels of a survey last month by the Israeli Democracy Institute, an academic think-tank in Jerusalem, that ranked Israel close to bottom of 32 countries in terms of the value its politicians and citizens put on democratic participation. The results showed a particularly weak identification by the Jewish majority with the values of pluralism, with 53 per cent believing Arabs should be denied equal rights and slightly more, 57 per cent, wanting Arabs transferred out of the country. Only 77 per cent of respondents thought democracy was the best system of governance.

Anti-Semitism, like some plague-inducing virus, is “evolving” — or so warns Holocaust scholar Daniel J. Goldhagen. His article is one of the latest contributions to a growing body of reports by American and Israeli journalists and research centers purporting to show that a powerful new strain of racism is sweeping the globe. None of the authors is as disinterested as he claims: each hopes to silence criticism of both Israel and the muscular Zionist lobby groups within Washington that support Israel.

A humorous email circulating on the Internet explains the “law of diminishing territorial returns” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Israel making a series of ever-less generous offers on Palestinian statehood.

It was an operation organised with the kind of ruthless precision needed to capture Osama Bin Laden. In the early hours of Tuesday 13 May, hundreds of armed Israeli police and security officials massed at different locations in northern Israel and snatched senior members of the country’s largest Arab organisation. The biggest catch was netted in the Jewish town of Hadera. Sheikh Raed Salah, the nearest thing Israel’s Muslim citizens have to a spiritual leader, was arrested as he lay in a hospital room at the bedside of his terminally ill father, who died only hours later. The security forces had not forgotten to bring an escort of television crews and photographers who dutifully captured the scene as Salah was led away, in the white T-shirt he was sleeping in, for interrogation.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s mission since the collapse of the negotiations he led his country into at Camp David and Taba has been to reveal one, and one lesson only, to the world. “I am the person who exposed Yasser Arafat’s true face,” he has repeatedly said. The “revelation” that the Palestinians were never serious about making peace with the Jewish state created a new mood of militancy in Israel and, paradoxically, led to Barak’s rejection at the ballot box.

While world attention was focused on a US-led invasion of Iraq, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon prepared a smaller-scale reordering of the region. He has devised a plan to rid the huge semi-desert area of the Negev, in Israel’s south, of its Bedouin farmers, forcing them into a handful of ‘townships’.

Al-Jazeera was showing Iraqi prisoners, their heads covered with hoods and their hands tied tightly with white plastic cuffs, on the television behind Sultan and Shareef Haroun. But the two brothers, sitting in their home again after three days exiled from their families, hardly needed reminding of what occupation looks like up close. The pair were among some 2,000 men aged between 15 and 40 rounded up by the Israeli army a week ago in the refugee camp of Tulkarm, in the northern West Bank, for questioning. Afterwards the soldiers blindfolded the men, tied the same plastic cuffs used in Iraq around their wrists and herded them on to buses in which they were driven a few kilometres to neighbouring villages.

In front of the locked gates of the Kfar Saul psychiatric hospital in the sprawling suburbs of West Jerusalem, Eitan Bronstein was trying to unfurl the banner of Zochrot, a small Jewish group committed to educating Israelis about the 1948 war that founded their state.

Israel’s leading “liberal” newspaper, Haaretz, has received numerous accolades from its foreign readers (who are able to access its English edition on the Internet) for its coverage of the Intifada. Prize-winning journalists Amira Hass and Gideon Levy have won an enthusiastic audience abroad since their reports started being regularly translated into English three years ago, contributing to the newspaper’s image as Israel’s conscience. For many outside Isarel, Haaretz is their main window on the Jewish state. Hass and Levy, however, contribute only a tiny fraction of Haaretz’s daily output, and it is getting hard to ignore a disturbing trend: the paper’s senior editors are increasingly shading the events of the Intifada in a very different light than that provided by Hass and Levy, the paper’s two moral beacons.

Khairieh Abu-Shusheh braved the checkpoints of East Jerusalem last week to make a pilgrimage to the village of Deir Yassin. Here 55 years ago, in one of the darkest episodes of the Jewish state’s creation, nearly 100 men, women and children were butchered by the Irgun and Stern militias. Several captives were taken and paraded in Jerusalem before being killed. The massacre on 9 April 1948, several weeks before the state of Israel had been declared, as well as news of other slaughters, triggered an exodus that ended in 80 per cent of the Arab population being forced from the new Jewish state.

As a tide of Palestinian protest — from Nazareth to Bethlehem and Gaza — was unleashed at the weekend against the war, a suicide bomber slipped into the coastal town of Netanya and detonated himself at the entrance to a café, hurting 58 diners and passers-by. According to Islamic Jihad, which claimed responsibility, the injuries inflicted by the explosives strapped to 19-year- old Rami Ranam were “a gift” to the Iraqi people. The bombing occurred on Land Day, an annual event observed across much of the Middle East to commemorate the fatal shootings of six Palestinian citizens of Israel by the security services in 1976, during demonstrations against government attempts to confiscate huge swaths of Arab- owned land in the Galilee.

Palestinians, reduced by a year of Israeli military invasion to a society of “handout seekers”, are rapidly finding that even the handouts are drying up. That is the verdict of aid agencies, including the World Bank and the United Nations refugee agency UNRWA, both of which recently published reports on the humanitarian catastrophe unfurling in the West Bank and Gaza. Sixty-year-old Mohamed Misleh hardly needed telling that. He had been nervously waiting all morning for UN supplies of rice, flour, sugar and oil in the dark corridors of the Charity Society’s offices in the West Bank town of Azzoun, along with three hundred other refugee families.

There is every sign that Washington is playing for time on the “road map” to a Palestinian state by 2005. Few now remember that the draft plan, presented in October, required both Israel and the Palestinians to implement the first phase of confidence-building measures leading to an end to the violence within two months — that is, by December 2002. Such obligations were soon brushed aside in favour of endless adjustments, negotiations and delays. First President Bush agreed to postpone the road map’s publication until after Israel’s elections, then the deadline was the formation of an Israeli government. Now it is dependent on the new Palestinian prime minister, Abu Mazen, announcing his cabinet, or maybe it will have to wait until “after” the war in Iraq, whatever that might mean.

Less than a fortnight ago Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took his cabinet ministers on a well- publicised tour of the northern sections of the 360km separation fence, ostensibly being built around the West Bank to protect Israelis from Palestinian attack. Addressing them afterwards, Sharon adopted his standard posture: the electrified fence, he said, was purely a “security measure” and would not become a “political” border — code among the right and settlers for the government’s refusal to demarcate the borders of a future Palestinian state. That has been the constant refrain since Sharon was cornered into accepting the separation wall by his former Labour coalition partners last June. However, in contrast to his previous utterances, this time Sharon may not have meant what he said. The ministerial tour appears to have heralded a dramatic new phase in Sharon’s thinking.

With the clock ticking down the last minutes before a US-led war against Iraq, Israeli officials have put on hold promises made in court last month to deliver gas masks to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living in so-called “Area C” — huge swaths of the West Bank and parts of Gaza that were never handed over to Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords. They join the rest of the Palestinian population in being denied protection by Israel from possible chemical and biological attack if President Saddam Hussein decides to go out dramatically, all super-guns blazing.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent out deliberately confusing messages this week as he prepared for the return of US peace envoy General Anthony Zinni, a sign of America’s renewed, though possibly temporary, interest in the conflict. The familiar “hawk” Sharon drove the army deeper into Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank at the weekend, putting into action his earlier declared pledge to inflict heavy casualties. Dozens of Palestinians were killed in the bloodiest week of the Intifada as tanks and troops entered West Bank refugee camps and the air force again pounded the Gaza Strip.