Confronted by a new generation of Arab-Israeli leaders challenging the Jewish state’s claim to be democratic, Israeli authorities have stepped up their battle to control the country’s indigenous Arab minority according to leading Israeli analyst Asad Ghanem. The two most charismatic figures among the Palestinian minority, Islamic leader Sheikh Raed Salah and secular nationalist Azmi Bishara, have been victims of concerted campaigns aimed at delegitimizing them as politicians, and charging them with criminal offenses. Both have fallen foul of the political establishment due to their skills in articulating opinions that challenge the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

The Israeli Supreme Court heard three major cases this week involving army policies in the Occupied Territories, which, according to human rights groups, either grossly violate the individual rights of Palestinians or inflict unfair collective punishment on the civilian population. In separate hearings, Israeli and Palestinian lawyers asked the judges to ban extra-judicial assassinations of Palestinian leaders, to end the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields and to lift the curfew that has been in place in Hebron for the past six months. In the Hebron case, the judges rejected outright the grounds for the petition, which argued that the continuous curfew prevents the city’s 120,000 inhabitants from safely getting food and medicines. Instead the court accepted the army’s claim that the measure was necessary to allow soldiers to carry out operations against “terrorist cells.”

The inhabitants of Nazareth, Israel’s only Arab city, often talk of the “invisible occupation”: although they rarely see police — let alone soldiers — on their streets, they are held in a vise-like grip of Israeli control just as much as their ethnic kin in neighbouring Palestinian cities like Jenin and Nablus are. In September 2000, for example, when Israel’s one million Palestinian citizens, including Nazarenes, demonstrated against Ariel Sharon’s visit to the mosque compound in Jersualem — known to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount — 13 of their number were shot dead by police in four days. Not a single protester had been armed.

Israeli Prime minister Ariel Sharon has been quietly flexing his muscles against Israel’s two Islamist movements in recent weeks, leading one of the organization’s political leaders to call the crackdown a “declaration of war on Islam.” Last week Sharon sent hundreds of heavily armed policemen into the center of Nazareth, Israel’s only Arab city, to demolish the foundations of a mosque being built there, in a dramatic strike against the southern Islamic Movement. The party’s leader on the city council, Salman Abu Ahmed, was among half a dozen Muslims arrested at the site.

History was made last month in Jerusalem’s municipal elections when the city elected its first ultra-Orthodox mayor, Uri Lupolianski, backed by a majority bloc of religious representatives on the city council. It was an outcome that reflected two of the key demographic factors that have been shaping life in the city since the war of 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank, including the eastern half of Jerusalem, and began “unifying” the city as its capital. The first was the decision taken by the Israeli leadership in the aftermath of the war to tighten its hold on Jerusalem, and the surrounding area, by transforming the city from a historic and religious symbol for the Jewish people into the concrete heart of the modern Jewish state, pumping the settlement project deep into the occupied West Bank.

Hundreds of heavily armed special forces sealed off the centre of Nazareth, Israel’s only Arab city, yesterday, as the foundations of a large mosque being built next to one of the Middle East’s holiest churches was demolished. The invasion began shortly before 5am, as Nazareth was still sleeping. The first warning was the drone of a police helicopter overhead followed at about 5.30am by a voice — quickly cut short — calling over the mosque loudspeakers on Nazarenes to defend their city. In the heart of the Nazareth, riot police and government officials sealed off the main road, arresting several religious leaders who tried to defend the site, including the deputy mayor, Salman Abu Ahmed. Then three bulldozers began tearing apart the concrete of the mosque’s base, watched from behind cordons by a growing crowd of onlookers.

At the checkpoint at the entrance to the West Bank town of Qalqilya, Monder Nazzar was slumped over the wheel of his ambulance. His 19-year-old patient, Ahmed, was next to him in the passenger seat, creased up in pain from a gastric infection. Behind them, lying on a stretcher, was Ahmed’s mother, looking pale and dazed. “We’ve been sitting here half an hour while the soldiers check our papers,” Nazzar said. He had brought his patient from the nearby city of Nablus for emergency treatment via bumpy back roads to avoid as many checkpoints as possible along the way. “He’s in agony from all the movement and his mother is car sick,” he said.

The roadmap looked dead last week, wrecked by the combined actions of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the militant Palestinian factions as they launched a series of tit-for-tat strikes. This week, following heavy American pressure, the roadmap was resuscitated. But while the words of the document remain unchanged, its guiding spirit has emerged in much sharper relief. The lofty vision articulated at Aqaba on 4 June, when Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas promised to force their two nations onto the path of peace and reconciliation, has been replaced by much more familiar terrain as the Palestinians found themselves once again hostage to joint political manoeuvrings by the US and Israel.

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.