Israel’s strategy of control via roadblocks and checkpoints, walls and no-go areas, has made some strategies of resistance inoperable. But this doesn’t mean Palestinians have to choose between negotiation or struggle. Both are needed in preference to passive waiting for outside deliverance argues Salim Tamari, director,Institute of Jerusalem Studies and associate professor of sociology at Birzeit University

A ‘pro-Israel’ lawyers’ group – UK Lawyers for Israel – is trying to make its mark by demanding the prosecution of the people who disrupted the Proms concert by the Israeli Philharmonic concert in London last September. The group has also acted against the Co-op Bank and the Palestinian Authority

The third annual conference of the Palestinian branch of the BDS movement was held in Hebron last Saturday, 17th December. Debates among the 450 participants debated encouraging, discouraging and difficult aspects of the campaign. Different reports from IMEMC and PNN, plus brief news on a London BDS event last month

The PA has accepted that it cannot get from the Security Council the veto-free majority it needs for its admission to the UN. In response, French diplomatic officials have said they will aid the PA in preparing a resolution for the UN General Assembly. Reports from Sydney Morning Herald and Palestine News Network.

A mass rally in Ramallah marks the passage of the statehood bid into the UN chambers, 1; a perceptive account of the forces that have brought the Pa to this position by Phyllis Bennis, 2; and for those who have floundered in the mass of material, a clear guide from the Afro-Middle East Centre

Graham Usher analyses the changes in the state of play which may follow from the request for statehood recognition by the UN, including a revival of mass action. Second, Omar Barghouti spells out the hostility felt by many Palestinians to what they see as the weak and appeasing role of the PA, exemplified by their desire for UN recognition and for more negotiations with Israel

The Italian NGO, Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), has published a set of MEDPRO reports on the sustainability of various Mediterranean states Its report on Israel/Palestine, ( below with footnotes etc stripped out) reaches a gloomy judgment because of Israel’s fixation on its status quo, isolation within its own region and failure of political leadership.

Guy Goodwin-Gill, Professor of International Refugee Law at Oxford University, wrote an opinion for the team preparing the Palestinian statehood bid that recognition could deprive the Palestinian diaspora of their right of return (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/238962-final-pdf-plo-statehood-opinionr-arb.html. for the original document) The question depends on the limited authority of the PA as a government, versus the PLO. Here Ma’an collects the opinion of four other experts

Joel Beinin examines the effect, or lack of it, of the Arab Spring on the players in Palestine’s future and concludes the 2-state solution is dead; 2nd, at a forum on Palestinian statehood, Samah Sabawi argued that the PA’s bid is a doomed strategy for resuming negotiations with Israel and will remain symbolic.

Al Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists with special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council provides an authoritative guide to the PA’s bid for UN recognition of its statehood

The PA’s bid for statehood has put it in hock to the USA – which is expected to veto recognition. So ‘Palestinians will still need to wage a robust, multi-dimensional, and global campaign to achieve self-determination’.

Caught between acting for the Palestinian national interest – as demanded by the Fatah/Hamas deal and the bid for UN recognition of statehood – and pleasing its hawkish funders, the PA is again paralysed and starved of income and reputation

In Ramallah, ‘revolutionaries have reinvented themselves as power-point professionals’. In this essay, Adam Shatz examines how the PA, the previous intifadas, the village of Bilin, the Nakba day mass movement and the Fatah/Hamas deal are viewed, at a time when Palestinians suddenly no longer expect or fear the US will determine their future

Israel launches a drive through eastern Europe, where the Palestinian voice has hardly been heard through the clouds of history, to pre-empt support at the UN in September for recognition of Palestinian statehood

Palestinians have one tremendous resource in their fight for independence says Jeff Halper. This is civil society – at home, in the Palestinian diaspora, amongst the millions abroad who support their cause. The Palestinian Authority should treat us, not the US, as their greatest ally

WHO attributes Gaza’s acute shortage of medical products to the fear of suppliers they will not be paid because Israel has withheld tax transfers to the PA after the Hamas/Fatah deal

Take an area where traditional heads of household have been dispossessed of all political and economic authority, add guns and drugs, take away any police authority and you are left with the violent chaos that is the Palestinian village in Area B

Jeff Halper looks into a future which coud hold Palestinian statehood and then a bi-national, democratic state from Jordan to the Mediterranean

Obama’s speech underscored ‘that self-government under Israel’s brutal occupation and blackmail is an illusion and it might be better to dissolve the Palestinian Authority that sustains this illusion’ writes Ali Abunimah

This story of an advert for Subaru in which a settler runs over 2 Palestinian children was put out, and translated, by the Chinese news agency Xinhua