Jonathan Cook

For more than a decade, since the collapse of the Camp David talks in 2000, the mantra of Israeli politics has been the same: “There is no Palestinian partner for peace.” This week, the first of hundreds of leaked confidential Palestinian documents confirmed the suspicions of a growing number of observers that the rejectionists in the peace process are to be found on the Israeli, not Palestinian, side.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, appears to have driven the final nail in the coffin of the Zionist left with his decision to split from the Labor party and create a new “centrist, Zionist” faction in the Israeli parliament. So far four Members of Parliament, out of a total of 12, have announced they are following him. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

Half a million trees planted over the past 18 months on the ancestral lands of Bedouin tribes in Israel’s Negev region were bought by a controversial Christian evangelical television channel that calls itself God-TV. Jonathan Cook reports.

In October, the Israeli parliament moved to enshrine in law the right of “cooperative associations” — communities mostly established since Israel’s creation in 1948, comprising nearly 70 percent of all communities in Israel — to accept only Jews.

Jews must not rent homes to “gentiles.” That was the religious decree issued this week by at least fifty of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then “ostracize” fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared. Jonathan Cook reports.

The new WikiLeaks disclosures provide a useful insight, captured in the very ordinariness of the diplomatic correspondence, into Washington’s own sense of the limits on its global role — an insight that was far less apparent in the previous WikiLeaks revelations on the US army’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jonathan Cook comments.

Another setback for the Palestinian national movement may be unfolding as Barack Obama dangles a lavish package of incentives in the face of Benjamin Netanyahu in an attempt to lure the Israeli prime minister into renewing a three-month, partial freeze on Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank.

Asad Ghanem, a professor of political science at Haifa University, predicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet will eventually come to rue their obduracy. The intransigence and the unabashed espousal of “an ideology of Jewish supremacy” by Netanyahu and his supporters will lead to the gradual “reunification” of the Palestinian people, Dr. Ghanem said in an interview.

In the past few weeks, the usually tranquil town of Safed — one of Judaism’s four holy cities — has been making headlines. Gideon Levy, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week declared it “the most racist city in the country.”

Israeli police injured two Arab legislators on Wednesday in violent clashes provoked by Jewish right-wing extremists staging a march through the northern Arab town of Umm al-Fahm.