There are not many aspects of Israeli life untouched by the celebrated Amnon Rubinstein, a lawyer, turned professor, turned political party founder, turned government minister, turned journalist and writer. His recent retirement from politics unfortunately means more of Rubinstein’s regular columns in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper.

The small brown-domed Roman Catholic church in the village of Rama, located in the foothills of the central Galilee in northern Israel, is hidden among steep narrow winding streets. That may explain why an anti-tank missile fired three weeks ago missed the church, presumed to be its target, and hit instead a neighbouring building housing a group of Brazilian nuns. The thick stone walls halted the missile’s progress, leaving only damaged stone and shattered windows. Three nuns who were inside needed treatment for shock. “There was a huge explosion. Had the wall been made of concrete, the missile would have penetrated the building and all three of them might have been killed,” said a trainee priest, Ibrahim Zbeit. “It’s like a little Lebanon here at the moment.”

The streets of Ramallah, unlike those of most other West Bank cities, are usually free of Israeli soldiers. Despite appearances, however, the army has stamped its control on the West Bank’s capital as certainly as its tanks have left deep tread marks on all the city’s roads.

The streets of Ramallah, unlike those of most other West Bank cities, are usually free of Israeli soldiers. Despite appearances, however, the army has stamped its control on the West Bank’s capital as certainly as its tanks have left deep tread marks on the city’s main roads. Nowadays soldiers move in only occasionally from their entrenched positions around the city to patrol the streets, make arrests or further humiliate the Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. Their power is so absolute they have little need to assert it. The besieged militants of Ramallah, at least those not dead or imprisoned, are apparently as cowed as Arafat, who has been holed up since December 2001 in the Muqata, surrounded by mountains of rubble which were once the buildings of his large compound of district offices.

As the dust settles in Israel, pundits and journalists have been digesting the meaning of the country’s election results: the huge swing to Likud, the unprecedented collapse of the left and the emergence of an embittered and anti-religious Ashkenazi sect in the shape of Shinui. The significance of these changes will only become apparent over the next months as Ariel Sharon struggles to form and hold together a coalition government made up of the new combustible elements at his disposal. But another seismic electoral shift has gone entirely unremarked: the severing of the last vestiges of political co-operation between Israeli Jews and Arabs.

After months of diplomatic inactivity, the phone lines between Jerusalem and Ramallah were again buzzing this week as meetings between Israeli and Palestinian officials were hastily arranged. The contacts began on Wednesday last week with a secret meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the chairman of the Palestinian parliament, Ahmed Qureia (Abu-Alaa). The talks, which came to light two days later, were reportedly held under intense American pressure and with the US ambassador, Dan Kurtzer, present. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat said he had approved the meeting in advance.

It’s strange to watch a film surrounded by most of the cast, especially when the presentation is not at a glittery London or New York première. But in the case of Elia Suleiman’s surprise hit movie, “Divine Intervention,” in which a fair proportion of Nazareth’s 70,000 inhabitants feature, it was difficult to avoid cast members at a screening in the city last week. Like everyone else, they paid to get in. Many critics have mistakenly assumed that the movie, a surreal and comic attack on the Israeli occupation, is set in the Palestinian territories. That is why, although it charmed audiences at Cannes, winning the Jury Prize, it disturbed the Oscar committee, which banned it from the competition on the grounds that its country of origin, Palestine, is not a “legitimate nation.”

Israel’s President Moshe Katsav called each of the political parties into his office in turn on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to ask who they wanted as the next prime minister. Apart from the demurring voices of Labour, Meretz and the Arab parties, Ariel Sharon won resounding support. If Israeli coalition-building were a simple mathematical exercise Sharon would have no problems in deciding his cabinet. With Likud armed with almost a third of the 120 Knesset seats he could fashion a government by mixing religious, settler and secular parties, thus securing the 61 MKs required to run the country. But Sharon looks almost as anxious after his rout of the left — Labour down to 19 seats and Meretz to six — as he did during the election campaign, when he and his party faced a series of corruption scandals.

A tangled mess of crumpled aluminium sheets and bent steel girders that a fortnight ago were the shops of Nazlat Issa’s market line the last stretch of the 100- metre stretch of road from the Israeli town of Baqa Al-Gharbiya to the military checkpoint guarding entry into the West Bank. Drivers, waiting to pass, sit idly in their cars next to the wreckage but already the strange sight is barely noticed. The demolished market is just another contour of the disfigured physical and human landscape Israel is fashioning out of the West Bank and Gaza. The demolition of Palestinian homes is now so commonplace that it barely raises eyebrows, let alone protest. But the razing of 62 shops, from grocery stores to a pharmacy and a furniture showroom, set new standards of destructiveness by the army. Even the Israeli media briefly took note.

Two days before polling, two Knesset candidates for the extreme right-wing Jewish Party Herut, which advocates the expulsion of Palestinians, tried to enter the northern Arab town of Umm Al-Fahm in what they termed an attempt to “examine up close illegal construction” — an inflammatory comment in the wake of the Sharon government’s populist decision to demolish several houses in Arab areas over the past few weeks. One of the candidates was Baruch Marzel, a former leader of the outlawed racist Kach movement. Before setting out on their visit, Marzel and Herut’s leader, Michael Kleiner, announced to the media that they would go armed. Large groups of local residents gathered in Umm Al-Fahm to block their entry to the town. But they needn’t have bothered.

It is a reflex question for Palestinians, always posed early in the Arab greeting ritual, to ask a stranger, even another Palestinian, “Where are you from?” before enquiring: “Where do you live?” Few Palestinians live where they feel they belong.

Earlier this year the Israeli novelist A B Yehoshua wrote at length about Zionism, the Jewish nation- building ideology formulated by Theodor Herzl, explaining that at its core lay the concept of a border. Jewish identity in the diaspora, he observed, inherently lacked borders: “It wanders around the world, a traveller between hotels. A Jew can change countries and languages without losing his Jewishness.” The Jewish state, on the other hand, required territorial limits, it needed to define the extent of the sanctuary it provides to Jews. “Borders are like doors in a house which claim everything inside as the responsibility of the master. That is what Zionism means: realising Jewish sovereignty within defined borders.”

The documentary Jenin, Jenin opens with the wild gesticulations of a young mute man charging around the now-famous lunar landscape of the Palestinian refugee camp. Seemingly dragging the camera by the force of his will alone, he points in passing at bullet holes in walls, at the rubble of demolished houses, at the air from which helicopters once rained down missiles. An incomprehensible mumble subtitles everything he remembers. Intermittently he clutches at his chest and makes as if to fall down dead, then quickly regains his footing and heads down a new alleyway to begin afresh. Later in this 55-minute film, his energy and recollections spent, he points an imaginary gun to the centre of his forehead and pulls the trigger.

The three cities most closely associated with Jesus – his birthplace in Bethlehem, the town of his boyhood in Nazareth and the place of his death in Jerusalem – are all resigned to another year without tourists or much seasonal joy this Christmas. Even the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will not be able to make his way to Bethlehem to lead the Christmas service in the Church of the Nativity.

When Israel began in the mid-1990s to prepare for the pope’s millennium visit, officials realized that decades of underinvestment in the Arab city, and the congestion resulting from the confiscation of its lands, would be on show as John Paul II toured the holy places. Hurried facelifts were given to the city’s two most important churches.

Israel is keeping Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti in solitary confinement for giving a press interview. Is this a telling sign for the fairness of his upcoming trial. Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah leader being held by Israel on terrorism charges, was placed in solitary confinement for five days over the Eid Al-Fitr weekend as punishment for giving an interview through one of his lawyers, Khader Shkirat, to the media last week. His legal team said Barghouti was being “victimised” for expressing his political views and that this did not bode well for his receiving a fair criminal trial, expected to begin early next year.

Stand where the Israeli army sniper stood and the questions come flooding in. Foremost among them is how the soldier who shot Iain Hook in the back in Jenin refugee camp could have mistaken the lanky British UN official with a mobile phone to his ear for a Palestinian youth waving a gun, as the army claims.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s response to the twin attacks on Israeli citizens last week in Kenya was as melodramatic as it was swift. He activated “sleeper” spies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen to wreak revenge for the hotel explosion that killed three Israeli tourists and 10 Kenyans and a near-miss missile fired at an Israeli- owned Arkia charter plane carrying some 260 passengers. A group calling itself the Army of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attacks in Mombasa, but Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad is working on the assumption, as are most other nations, that Osama Bin Laden’s Al- Qa’eda network is the real culprit.

he United Nations has been accused of downgrading, or even trying to bury, an investigation into the killing of one of its British workers, Iain Hook, in Jenin refugee camp 10 days ago. Sources say the UN is worried the inquiry could lead to a further deterioration in its bruised relations with Israel and the US. A diplomatic source said that, despite UN statements describing as “totally incredible” Israeli claims that there were Palestinian gunmen in the compound where Hook was shot, the final report of the UN inquiry was being delayed and “may not be publicised at all”. The source said that the UN depended on cooperation from Israel and the US in the future, and much of its funding came from Washington.