Last year the International Court of Justice issued its opinion on the Wall Israel is constructing in the West Bank. The opinion, argues Andrew Rubin, should open up other arenas of resistance. Whatever the wall signifies for the precarious political and existential future of Palestinians, one thing is certain: it is part of Israel’s wilful repudiation of Palestinian existence. It is an attempt to make Palestinians physically invisible from the experience of Israeli daily life. New political and legal strategies of resistance may take the forms of various instruments of financial, political and diplomatic pressure, including boycotts, embargoes, human rights taxes, sanctions, and other restrictions on the flow of Israeli capital. Read more about One year on: We are No Longer Able to see the Sun Set 

Imagine that you live in the North End, but your grandparents live in the West End of Boise. Imagine that in order to visit them you must confront a 26-foot concrete wall that surrounds each neighborhood and separates you. Imagine that to cross a small break in this wall along Broadway you will be met by soldiers, who will ask to see your passport and who will interrogate you about why you want to visit your family while pointing guns in your face. Imagine that to go to work every day you must pass similar checkpoints, all of which are a cross between airport security and a military zone. This is what life is like for me right now living in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. Read more about Tearing down illegal wall only way to achieve peace 

The trip to Tulkarem is not easy for our driver. He complains that the roads in the West Bank are changing fast. The Israeli regime is working full speed on the construction of the network of highways cutting right through the occupied Palestinian territories and incorporating parts of traditional Palestinian roads. Adri Nieuwhof and Bangani Ngeleza recently visited the occupied Palestinian territories. On a hot summer day, they travelled with a Palestinian guide from Ramallah to Jarushya, north of Tulkarem. The aim of the trip was to visit families that are affected by the Wall. The guide had contacted a leader of the community in Tulkarem and arranged for a meeting. Read more about Israel does not want peace 

One year ago on 9 July 2004, at the request of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of Israel’s construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. But, the Court did not stop at Israel’s obligations. An overwhelming majority of the Court concluded that all states were obliged not to recognize the illegal situation Israel has created and to refrain from any financial support to Israel in maintaining the illegally constructed wall. Much remains to be done before States can be said to be in compliance with international law. Read more about One year on: Governments have obligations to hold Israel to account 

In occupied Palestine, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In the last several months, we have seen the death of former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, the election of Mahmoud Abbas, and preparations for the planned Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a few small settlements in the north of the West Bank. But what we haven’t seen is a change to the status-quo, a change that is desperately needed to prevent the situation from collapsing into something far worse than the first and second intifadas. While the world’s attention is diverted to the Gaza disengagement - where some 8,000 or so settlers are to be removed, a drop in the bucket of the total 415,300 illegal settlers - Israel is busily eating away at the land it prizes the most, and prejudicing final status issues. Read more about A very combustible status-quo 

Lid, an industrial pauperized city, not far from Israel’s Ben Gurion airport. Not a likely place for vistors and tourists to pass by. Lid faces the same problems as most metropoles and cities all over this world: drugs, pollution, unemployment, gangs, racism and violence. This is the dark side of Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East,” with its own black minority: the Palestinians who stayed after the Nakba in 1948. Lid is the home base of Israel’s first and best Palestinian Hip Hop band DAM (“Da Arabic Microphone Controllers”). DAM started to perform in 1998 and steadily built a reputation in Israel and abroad. They played in Europe and released a song with the French Algerian group MBS. Read more about Where There's the Ghetto, There's Hip Hop 

While rock stars made poverty the central issue in the world’s biggest concert at the weekend, the world’s most powerful leaders are under increasing pressure to do something concrete about it. This week the leaders of the G8 — the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia — meet in Gleneagles (Scotland), hosted by Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. But while African poverty may feature in the G8 debate, poverty in Palestine is man-made. The expansion of Israeli settlements and the completion of the Wall render a two-state solution as wished for by the G8 impossible. Palestinians are not asking for charity but justice. Read more about G8 and Disengagement: Palestine needs justice not charity 

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict gets a disproportionate share of mainstream western media attention, as compared, say, with conflicts in Africa. Yet the public, particularly in the United States, remains grossly misinformed. Even respected outlets like National Public Radio fail to provide objective and consistently fair coverage. EI co-founder Ali Abunimah examines trends in media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and finds that as news organizations come under increasing pressure from pro-Israel groups, there are fewer places to go for solid, independent coverage. Read more about Gross Misinformation: the media in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict 

As with all dialects spoken by people who are close to the land in their daily cycle, the fallahee Palestinian dialect has a homely feel to it. Like the embroidered dresses that older fallahee women still wear in Palestinian refugee camps, villages and cities, this dialect, with its warmth and earthiness, is a national locus for a people whose identity the Zionist project in the Middle East has long tried to suppress, writes EI contributor Rima Merriman. In a PR stunt, Israel has placed people at checkpoints who speak the Palestinian dialect. But despite the smooth talk, what is Israel really saying to the people of Palestine? Read more about With Jerusalem not its capital 

This week the Israeli soldier who shot and killed Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old British peace activist, in Rafah in the Gaza Strip was convicted by an Israeli court of manslaughter. The judgment was a belated and incomplete victory for Tom’s parents. Journalist Jonathan Cook investigated a much earlier killing of a British citizen by an Israeli soldier, who has gone unpunished to this day. Iain Hook, a 54-year-old United Nations worker in Jenin refugee camp, was killed in cold blood by an Israeli marksman in November 2002. Both the Israeli army and the United Nations investigated the killing but the matter was quietly dropped by both sides. Read more about The Killing of Iain Hook: Why the Time for Justice is Now