New Year good wishes have taken on a customary character, which means it can be hard to attach real expectations to them. Yet the new year is a moment to wish and campaign for meaningful change in the way the world is. And despite the breathtaking enormity of human progress, there remains too much to wish for still in terms of ending violence, injustice and poverty. EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah lays out his three wishes for peace in Palestine and Iraq, and the restoration of the authority of international law, so badly eroded by US unilateralism in the wake of the end of Cold War. Read more about Three wishes for the New Year 

Eighty thousand Palestinian Bedouin Israelis live in unrecognised villages in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. The villages are deprived of basic services like housing, water, electricity, education and health care. With the adoption of the Israeli Planning and Construction Law in 1965, 45 villages in the Negev were not declared as existing. Recently, Bangani Ngeleza and Adri Nieuwhof visited the region. They write about the serious consequences this has had for villagers in these “unrecognised villages”. Bangani Ngeleza and Adri Nieuwhof say that pressure must be put on Israel to abandon its apartheid policies, including its refusal to recognize the existence of villages composed of its own citizens living within its national borders. Read more about Unrecognised villages in the Negev expose Israel's apartheid policies 

In 2003, Susan Nathan moved from her comfortable home in Tel Aviv to Tamra, an Palestinian town in the northern part of Israel. Nathan had arrived in Israel four years earlier and had taught English and worked with various progressive social organizations. Her desire to help build a just and humane society in Israel took an unexpected turn, however, when she became aware of Israel’s neglected and often oppressed indigenous Palestinian population. Despite warnings from friends about the dangers she would encounter, Nathan settled in an apartment in Tamra. There she discovered a division between Israeli Jews and Palestinians as tangible as the concrete wall that surrounds the Palestinian towns of the West Bank and Gaza. Read more about Racism in Israel 

Palestine/Israel is a strange place; here separateness is valorized by many decent people and presented as the ‘peace option’ and the not-so-nice-ones openly preach ethnic cleansing. Yet those who preach ethnic cleansing are often viewed as persons that ‘we can do business with’. In South Africa, apartheid was regarded by the world as the problem; here in Israel they, and much of the rest of the world, present it as the solution. For many otherwise decent people who do not experience dispossession and discrimination on a daily basis, stability in its preferred and somehow morally elevated package as ‘peace’ becomes the single most important objective that one must yearn for. Read more about The Choice to be Struck? 

One constant in the long conflict over Palestine is that Israel and its backers always have an excuse to avoid the central issues that prevent peace. Israel is adapt at creating complications which then absorb and exhaust all available diplomatic and political energy, while it uses the time to entrench itself ever more deeply in the occupied territories. EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah and co-founder Ali Abunimah write that attention is set to focus on the new distraction of an Israeli general election while the hard realities of spreading Israeli settlements, extrajudicial killings and the grimness of life in still occupied Gaza feature nowhere in all the heady talk about peace. Read more about Another checkpoint on the road to nowhere 

“What is more perplexing and amazing? Four dehumanized individuals blowing themselves and sixty other people to bits, or the wondrous lesson in humanity shown by a family that would not have been blamed for seeking revenge, but who instead repaid murder with magnanimity by donating the organs of their son, a non-Jew, to Israelis? The minds of murderers, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim; American, Israeli or Arab, are much easier to understand than the actions of Ahmed Khatib’s family. Unlike suicide bombers or IDF snipers, Ahmed’s family violated the grammar of the conflict and exposed the arbitrariness and barbarity of erecting walls, whether actual or metaphorical, between human beings.” Read more about Of transplants and transcendence: Questioning social and symbolic categories in Israel 

The second hudna (truce) between the Palestinians and their occupiers underlines the staggering and ridiculous state of the so-called “peace process”. Every time an incident occurs, the chorus from all directions can be heard that it “may endanger the peace process.” Nothing much has changed recently, except that the “hudna” has taken the place of the “peace process” in this sterile game. But dealing with them as if they were real has served an important political purpose for those who certainly know better. EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah says that all the diplo-babble about the truce may be soothing, but blinds us from seeing the cancer grow beyond cure. Read more about The hudna no one wants 

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran committed a diplomatic blunder when he told a student gathering in Tehran that “Israel must be wiped off the map.” Iranian authorities themselves realised the extent of the miscalculation and decided to back off. But says EI contributor Hasan Abu Nimah, we cannot simply condemn Iran while ignoring the context in which Iran itself is under constant military threat from its neighbors and the United States. The episode demonstrates once again that double standards, not international law, continue to dictate the agenda of the “international community.” Read more about Iran's blunders and counterblunders 

Debate and reportage from Israel-Palestine continue anxiously to focus on the symptoms, rather than the deeper direction, of the conflict. Media controversy whirls about how the Palestinians can navigate the immense challenges of the Gaza withdrawal, the electoral challenge from Hamas, and whether the PA can contain wildcat militancy. It even still whirls about whether the Sharon government intends to withdraw West Bank settlements or build them up-an impressively naive concern. But these controversies distract us from an underlying reality far more earth-shaking. Read more about "If You Will It, It is No Dream": Embracing the Anti-Apartheid Struggle in Israel/Palestine 

From Sharon’s point of view it’s a done deal. Israel has won its century-old conflict with the Palestinians. Surveying the landscape - physical and political alike - the Israeli Prime Minister has finally fulfilled the task with which he was charged 38 years ago by Menachem Begin: ensure permanent Israel control over the entire Land of Israel while foreclosing the emergence of a viable Palestinian state. Still, Israel needs a Palestinian state. Although the annexation of the settlement blocs gives Israel complete control over the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, it needs to “get rid of” the almost four million Palestinian residents to which it can neither give citizenship nor keep in a state of permanent bondage. Read more about Setting up Abbas