Mary: Why don’t you buy a car and get an international driving license? We are having a month-long permit to visit Jerusalem and now we cannot find a taxi driver who is going to bring us with my mother, who does not walk easily, to Jerusalem. The taxi drivers are all busy. Only a few have permits and the right licenses. Toine: Do you know what I read in an email here? Persons driving a yellow-plate Israeli car cannot anymore take Palestinians from the West Bank as passengers. So if I am going to rent a car in Jerusalem and come over here into Bethlehem, I will refuse you on behalf of the Israeli army the privilege of sharing my car. Read more about Review of Identity 

It has been an insane twenty-four hours in Lebanon. It began when a photojournalist friend called to invite me out to accompany him on his shoot. The first stop was the tent city sit-in downtown. I’ve been there many times, but he was going around with Aoun and Hezbollah officials so I was excited to have an opportunity to speak with them while my friend shot his pictures for a European newspaper. It’s so interesting periodically walking around this space. Each time I go there I see new elements of a mini village set up. One tent in the Aoun area has potted flowers and tents all around it and last night I met the woman who stays in that tent. Read more about Strike or Riot?  

WASHINGTON, Jan 22 (IPS) - As U.S. President George W. Bush puts the final touches on his State of the Union Address, an unusually broad group of Middle East specialists here is hoping that he will make his proposed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a centrepiece of both his speech and his last two years in office. Despite the political weakness of both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the group, the Campaign for American Leadership in the Middle East (CALME), believes that the current moment offers a major opportunity for a breakthrough in the 60-year-old conflict. Read more about Bush Urged to Make Israeli-Palestinian Peace Now 

The current public education system in Israel mirrors the wider divisions in society. It is divided into separate sectors: religious Jewish, secular Jewish, Orthodox Jewish and Arab. Although roughly one quarter of Israel’s 1.6 million schoolchildren are Arab, their parallel education system reveals fundamental inequality. The 2001 Human Rights Watch report “Second Class: Discrimination against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel’s Schools” details the extent of the inequalities in funding, facilities, teacher-student ratios. Integrated schools represent a glimmer of light in this picture of a discriminatory and segregated education system. Read more about Important Lessons: Integrated Education in the State of Israel 

HEBRON, Jan. 22 (IPS) - As the illegal Israeli occupation grinds on, the daily situation for Palestinians worsens by the day. Hebron presents a vivid picture of the cumulative face of this colonial project. Hebron, about 35km south of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, has historically existed as a mixed Muslim-Jewish city, but over the last few decades the Israeli authorities have been choking its 150,000 Palestinians while supporting the settler movement. Approximately 650 radical right-wing settlers have taken over parts of the old city, destroyed Palestinian neighbourhoods and the economic infrastructure, and are free to terrorise Palestinians at whim. Read more about Hebron Occupied, And Deserted 

Bassam Aramin spent nine years in an Israeli jail for being a member of the Fatah in the Hebron area and trying to throw a grenade at an Israeli army Jeep which was patrolling in Occupied Hebron. On Wednesday morning, an Israeli soldier shot his nine-year-old daughter, Abir, in the head. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry in Abir Aramin’s death. As far as the Israeli Defense Forces are concerned, the shooting did not happen. Read more about Let our children live 

It is the dead of winter here in Palestine. Slick rivers of mud and sewage drain into the gutters as hot tea is served in small glass cups, over and over again, to ward off the biting cold. People sit huddled near the gas heaters, rain pounding against the windows and steel doors as they brace for the next storm — not just the one coming down in a torrent from above, but the one just five miles up the road, past the illegal checkpoints, where Israel is planning the next step in its project of ethnic expulsion and sanitization. Six months after my last trip here, and I am once again in a permanent state of shock and fury. Read more about The Coming Storm 

Topography here is in constant fluctuation. From one visit to the next a whole area, or just a small street, can look completely different. In Gaza, maybe it has been destroyed or, sometimes, rebuilt. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, a flow of ongoing construction manifests itself in the wall, in the illegal settlements and in the construction of the discriminatory road system. Today, while driving through the western edges of the West Bank, we began to understand what the “forbidden roads regime” actually means — through an intricate series of road systems Israelis will travel on one set of roads while Palestinians will travel on roads built underneath them. Read more about The hate that dare not speak its name