From Occupied Palestine

An army in power
AMNON KAPELIOUK
Le Monde diplomatique, November 2007

Israel’s army no longer represents the Israeli people (religious exemptions have narrowed its conscript basis), while the people have lost confidence in the army. It has grown used to being an army of occupation and a police force for the settler movement, not to fighting wars – especially unwarranted wars

Laboratory for a fortressed world
NAOMI KLEIN
The Nation, 2 July 2007

Gaza in the hands of Hamas, with masked militants sitting in the president's chair; the West Bank on the edge; Israeli army camps hastily assembled in the Golan Heights; a spy satellite over Iran and Syria; war with Hezbollah a hair trigger away; a scandal-plagued political class facing a total loss of public faith.

1967: A personal testimony
URI AVNERY
Gush Shalom, June 2007

On May 25, 1967, twelve days before the Six-day war, I published in Haolam Hazeh, the news magazine of which I was the editor, an article entitled "Nasser Has Fallen Into a Trap". That sounded crazy, because, at the time, all Israel was in the grip of mortal fear.

The road from Mecca
HUSSEIN AGHA and ROBERT MALLEY
New York Review of Books, 10 May 2007

1.

Peter MacKay in Israel and Palestine
JON ELMER
The Dominion, 25 January 2007

The greatest settler
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 6 January 2006

Among the many obituary notices published by various groups after the death of Teddy Kollek, one group's notice was conspicuous in its absence: the Yesha Council of Jewish Settlements. It is a bit difficult to comprehend this ingratitude by the settlers toward the person who brought approximately 200,000 Jews to the occupied territories - perhaps more than any other person. The settlement enterprise owes a great historic debt to Kollek. Neither Rabbi Moshe Levinger nor Hanan Porat nor Aharon Domb nor Ze'ev "Zambish" Hever are responsible for settling so many Israelis beyond the Green Line as Kollek, the enlightened Viennese liberal.

Palestinian interior minister interviewed on Executive Force, other issues
BBC Worldwide Monitoring, 23 October 2006

Al-Jazeera Television at 1732 gmt on 22 October broadcasts a recorded 25-minute interview with Sa'id Siyam, interior minister in the Hamas government, by HUSAYN ABD-AL-GHANI in Cairo, from the "Today's Encounter" programme. The date of the interview is not given.

Foreign reporter challenges GPO over visa policy
SHAHAR ILAN
Ha'aretz, 15 October 2006

Could a situation arise in which a senior foreign correspondent posted here is arrested as an illegal resident, jailed and then deported? This scenario seems fictional, but what is not fictional is the fact that Joerg Bremer, correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the most important newspapers in the world, was in Israel for several weeks as an illegal resident. He left Friday for a vacation, and does not know whether he will be allowed back in. A correspondent for another world-class newspaper told Haaretz that he has been in Israel for the past year on a tourist visa, a status that ostensibly bars him from working.

Olmert should have more of an insight than most into terrorism
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Guardian, 14 September 2006

Sixty years ago the sort of atrocity that Israel's leaders habitually condemn helped bring the country into being

After Tony Blair's latest - and perhaps final - trip to the Levant, the TUC must have seemed almost a relief. There were no banners in Brighton reading "Blair, you killer, go to hell", like those that greeted him in Lebanon last weekend - on a visit that seemed a very long time since the prime minister told the Labour conference, in the wake of September 11: "The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalour from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause."

New Yorkers to study about Israel
YANIV HALILI
Yediot Aharanoth, 8 September 2006

NEW YORK - The New York City Council's education committee approved a curriculum on Israel initiated by the public relations department of the Israeli Consulate in New York.

The curriculum will be integrated into the training program for educators teaching in 1,400 public high schools in New York City. The teachers will be able to register to a 30-hour course dealing with the history of the State of Israel, its economy, the high-tech industry, Israeli art and Ethiopian Jews.