Israel has quietly revoked the citizenship of thousands of members of its large Palestinian minority in recent years, highlighting that decades of demographic war against Palestinians are far from over. According to government data, some 2,600 Bedouins are likely to have had their Israeli citizenship voided. Officials, however, have conceded that the figure may be much higher.
The annual "March of Return" by Palestinians in Israel, commemorating the Nakba - the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 - has been blocked by the Israeli police for the first time in its history. The police have denied the organisers a permit, saying there is a shortage of officers to oversee the march. But Palestinian leaders in Israel accuse the government of Benjamin Netanyahu of being behind the decision.
The one-man show “Taha” receives its English-language premiere this week in the United States. It offers not only a rare chance to learn about Taha Muhammad Ali, one of Palestine’s finest poets, but provides a visceral account of what it was like to live through the Nakba – the Catastrophe that befell hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were expelled from their homeland in 1948.
The forest fires that ravaged Israel over the weekend inadvertently drew attention to the deeper goal of Netanyahu's "muezzin bill". For many Israelis, the call to prayer threatens the contrived "European idyll" created after 1948 by a programme of planting thick pine forests – creating a fire hazard – over hundreds of Palestinian villages Israel destroyed after it had expelled their inhabitants.
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.
The chauvinism implicit in a new Israeli foreign ministry video portraying Jacob and Rachel as the only normal folk, stoicly enduring barbarians butchering each other in their living room, is ugly enough. But it is harder still to take seriously an account in which the Palestinians suddenly appear out of nowhere in 1948, as Britain departs.
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.
Israel is locking away millions of official documents to prevent the darkest episodes in its history from coming to light, civil rights activists and academics have warned as the country's state archives move online. They claim government officials are concealing vital records needed for historical research, often in violation of Israeli law, in an effort to avoid damaging Israel's image.
"I am sure one day I will return to Saffuriya," Ameen Muhammad Ali says of a Palestinian village only two kilometres outside Nazareth that Israel destroyed during the Nakba in 1948. He pauses, then chuckles as he injects a note of realism: "If not me, then my son - and if not my son, then my grandson." Unlike the majority of refugees from the 1948 war, 81-year-old Abu Arab lives near his former village, in a neighbourhood of Nazareth whose residents are all refugees from Saffuriya or their descendants.
Details of the biggest massacre committed by Israeli soldiers during the 1948 war have finally surfaced, decades after the documentation was locked away. Israel is still trying to silence its army's new generation of whistleblowers, even in an age of 24-hour news and social media. But Israel must face facts: the days when such systematic brutality could be kept under wraps are now over.
