Some 17 Palestinian municipalities in the occupied West Bank have petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to strike down a new law that retroactively sanctions the theft of their lands by settlers. Lawyers representing the villages have in the meantime asked the court to impose an immediate freeze on the so-called Regulation Law, passed by the Israeli parliament on Monday night.
If the Trump's White House approves a relocation of the US embassy, it would overturn decades of international consensus on Jerusalem. The message to the Palestinians and Arab world would be clear and provocative, said Nabil Shaath, a senior Palestinian official. "Moving the embassy is the same as recognising Jerusalem as Israel's united capital. It's a war crime."
A Greek Melkite archbishop, described as an "icon" of the Palestinian liberation struggle, has died in Rome at the age of 94. Hilarion Capucci, who was appointed the Patriarchal Vicar of Jerusalem in 1965, was jailed nine years later by Israel for arms smuggling. Hanan Ashrawi said Capucci "embodied the activist church - spiritual leaders who were prepared to translate their principles into action and struggle against injustice."
For leftwing Israelis, as well as Israel's Palestinian minority, Netanyahu is considered the king of incitement. His current conduct has revived memories of the mid-1990s, when Yitzhak Rabin, was drumming up support for the Oslo Accords. Footage of the period shows Netanyahu addressing crowds holding aloft placards of Rabin in Nazi uniform. Months later, Rabin was assassinated.
Many are still unaware of the economic reality in Cuba.
A former Dutch ambassador planted 1,100 olive trees in the West Bank on Sunday to make amends, he said, for the fact that Israel had exploited his family’s name to “cover up an act of ethnic cleansing”. Erik Ader said the trees were his way of apologising for a similar number of pine trees planted in Israel in the 1960s to honour his father by the Jewish National Fund.
Taking advantage of the renewed quiet at al-Aqsa, Israel allowed record numbers of ultra-nationalists to visit the mosque during its recent high holidays. Parties of Israeli soldiers also entered the site. For Palestinians, Israel’s treatment of this supremely important Islamic holy site symbolises their powerlessness, oppression and routine humiliation.
As world leaders congregated in Jerusalem to eulogise Shimon Peres as a "great peacemaker", the peace camp of which he was the figurehead went to war against its main Palestinian partner in Israel. Ayman Odeh, head of the only Jewish-Arab party in the Israeli legislature, enraged the Israeli Jewish public by refusing to attend Peres’ funeral.
The death of Shimon Peres, aged 93, marks the departure of the last major figure in Israel's founding generation. Peres spent his long political career in the public spotlight, but his greatest successes – from overseeing the construction of Israel's nuclear bomb to devising an interminable "peace process" via the Oslo accords – were engineered in the shadows.
