Jonathan Cook

As US-sponsored peace talks have stalled over the issue of settlements, Israel’s national police force has revealed that it is turning to the very same illegal communities in its first-ever drive to recruit officers from among the settlers.

In all likelihood, I will be one of the very first non-Jews expected to swear loyalty to Israel as an ideology rather than as a state. Until now, naturalizing residents, like the country’s soldiers, pledged an oath to Israel and its laws. That is the situation in most countries. But soon, if the Israeli parliament passes a bill being advanced by the government, aspiring citizens will instead be required to uphold the Zionist majority’s presumption that Israel is a “Jewish and democratic state.”

Israel secretly staged a training exercise last week to test its ability to quell any civil unrest that might result from a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority requiring the forcible transfer of many Palestinian Arab citizens, the Israeli media has reported.

Rather than investing wasted energy in doomed talks, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators appear to be adopting the same alternative strategy: cutting a deal directly with Washington that circumvents the other party. Jonathan Cook analyzes.

The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by US President Barack Obama last week to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more skeptical about US and Israeli roles in the current peace talks. Jonathan Cook reports.

A vague security offense of “contact with a foreign agent” is being used by Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, to lock up Arab political activists in Israel without evidence that a crime has been committed, human rights lawyers alleged this week. Jonathan Cook reports.

Nuri al-Uqbi’s small cinderblock home in a ramshackle neighborhood of Hura, a Bedouin town in Israel’s Negev desert, hardly looks like the epicenter of a legal struggle that some observers say threatens Israel’s Jewish character.

History may be written by the victors, as Winston Churchill is said to have observed, but the opening up of archives can threaten a nation every bit as much as the unearthing of mass graves. That danger explains a decision quietly taken last month by Benjamin Netanyahu to extend by an additional 20 years the country’s 50-year rule for the release of sensitive documents. Jonathan Cook reports.

Measures designed to benefit Jewish school-leavers applying for places in Israeli higher education at the cost of their Palestinian Arab counterparts have been criticized by lawyers and human rights groups.

A police officer known as “Major George” who is accused of torturing Arab prisoners in his previous role as chief interrogator in a secret military jail has been appointed to oversee relations with Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, it has emerged. Jonathan Cook reports.