The bright red letters stand out starkly against the ugly grey cement. The wall that is slicing through East Jerusalem is some thirty feet high, but casts its shadow for miles. There is little the Palestinians hemmed in on both sides of the wall can do to oppose it. So, the wall is dotted with marks where rocks have been thrown at it in anger, and covered with graffiti. Some graffiti writers ask if the builder of this wall can be a “man of peace”. Some ask how a people whose history is full of ghettos can now be building one. And someone decided to remind us all, in those blood-red letters, that it was “Paid by USA”. Read more about The writing on the wall 

Palestinian prisoners in four different Israeli prisons started an open-ended hunger strike on Sunday to press for better living conditions of the nearly 8,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israeli authorities reacted to the strike with disciplinary measures and suspended several of the prisoners’ privileges such as confiscating television sets and radios, suspending newspaper deliveries and stopping visits. Since 1967 to date, Israel has arbitrarily detained over 630,000 Palestinians. In 1989 alone, Israel detained 50,000 Palestinians, representing 16% of the entire male population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip between the ages of 14 and 55. Read more about Imprisoned Decency 

“Because it represents a failure to be just, fair, forward-looking and charitable, US treatment of the Palestinian people represents a failure to be American. Palestine is not a sideshow in the current frightening uproar of political events in the world. It is the main event for Americans and for America. Palestine can and should be the proving grounds for all the values and principles — freedom, dignity, prosperity, justice, and fairness — that set the United States apart from other countries for decades.” EI co-founder Laurie King-Irani ponders the connections between America and Palestine by remembering the summer of 1964. Read more about "It's a small world after all" 

The positive spin on the negotiations to form a Likud-Labor-led coalition in Israel is that it will create a majority government capable of implementing a historic withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers from the Gaza Strip, and that this will somehow “jump start” the peace process. But EI co-founder Ali Abunimah says that a coalition headed by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Labor leader Shimon Peres seems more a dying gasp for Israel’s existing political order which will not save Israel from its fundamental predicament. Read more about An alliance of failures in Israel 

The International Court of Justice has determined that the present route of Israel’s West Bank Barrier is a serious and egregious violation of international law. In an interview given last weekend, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon contested the applicability of international law. Such a system was appropriate for the conditions of World War II, he declared, but not for the present war on terror. Apparently, as Ya’alon envisions it, in this war the armed forces are bound only by their own law. Indeed, a battle is being waged in the world today over the status of international law. Tanya Reinhart comments. Read more about From the Hague to Mas'ha 

On June 10, 2004, Amos Malka, head of Military Intelligence (MI) from 1998 until 2001, was interviewed in Ha’aretz. He castigated the reigning Israeli conception with regard to the Palestinian leadership. The conception is: The Oslo process was nothing more than a Trojan horse designed by Yasser Arafat to destroy the State of Israel. After four years of public silence, Malka states that his assessment, all along, has been completely different: At Oslo, the strategic goal of Arafat and the PLO was a viable Palestinian state beside Israel. Arafat wanted all along to reach a political solution, but his flexibility was limited by Palestinian public opinion. Read more about Imperial Misconceptions