Jonathan Cook

Zaki Khimayl’s home and cafe are located on Jaffa’s beach, a stone’s throw away from Tel Aviv. However, like hundreds of other families in the Arab neighborhoods of Ajami and Jabaliya of Jaffa, Khimayl is up to his eyes in debt and trapped in a world of bureaucratic regulations apparently designed with only one end in mind: his eviction from Jaffa. Jonathan Cook reports.

Israel’s enduring use of Palestinian collaborators to entrench the occupation and destroy Palestinian resistance was once the great unmentionable of the Middle East conflict. When the subject was dealt with by the international and local media, it was solely in the context of the failings of the Palestinian legal system, which allowed the summary execution of collaborators by lynch mobs and kangaroo courts. Jonathan Cook comments.

The window through which Salam Amira, 16, filmed the moment when an Israeli soldier shot from close range a handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainee has a large hole at its center with cracks running in every direction. “Since my video was shown, the soldiers shoot at our house all the time,” she said. The shattered and cracked windows at the front of the building confirm her story. Jonathan Cook reports from Nilin.

Yehudit Genud hardly feels she is on the frontier of Israel’s settlement project, although the huddle of mobile homes on a wind-swept West Bank hilltop she calls home is controversial even by Israeli standards. Jonathan Cook reports from Migron settlement in the occupied West Bank.

In the first hours of dawn, Nader Elayan was woken by a call from a neighbor warning him to hurry to the house he had almost finished building. By the time he arrived, it was too late: a bulldozer was tearing down the walls. Jonathan Cook reports from Jerusalem.

It must be the smallest Israeli settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories: just half a house. But Palestinian officials and Israeli human rights groups are concerned that it represents the first stage of a plan to eradicate the historical neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, cutting off one of the main routes by which Palestinians reach the Old City and its holy sites. Jonathan Cook reports.

The following is adapted from a talk by Jonathan Cook delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa on 21 June 2008. In 1895 Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favor sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to “try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country … Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Israel’s Palestinian minority staged a procession to one of more than 400 Palestinian villages erased by Israel in a monumental act of state vandalism after the fighting. In a sign of how far Israel still is from coming to terms with the circumstances of its birth, EI contributor Jonathan Cook reports that the march was forcibly broken up by the Israeli police.

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinians. EI contributor Jonathan Cook asks the question: if one state is impossible, why is Olmert so afraid of it?

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories. EI contributor Jonathan Cook comments.