Uri Avnery has been awarded the Leibowitz prize for his life’s work for peace. He recalls the life’s work of distinguished scientist and religious believeer Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-94) who prophesied that Israel would become a nation of work-gang supervisors and secret agents if it maintained the Occupation.

Not only may no-one say Palestine is not free on the BBC, in practice no-one may say anything at all about Palestine. Too hot to handle, or too difficult to understand for the BBC’s experienced journalists who have managed to conduct interviews with many Israeli politicians? Ameena Saleem reports on her long period of monitoring BBC output.

Three of Israel’s most right-wing organisations, Im Tirtzu, Academic Monitor and Isracampus, have named over 1000 of Israel’s most distinguished thinkers, writers and campaigners as being enemies of Israel and exploiting their positions to defame the country. This carries little weight in Israel – it is primarily for the diaspora in which some depend on believing only their support saves the country from extinction.

Last year, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry lodged a complaint of antisemitism with the SBS Ombudsman about the TV series The Promise shown in Australia last December. The Ombudsman for SBS – Special Broadcasting Service, a public broadcasting network– rejected the complaint. Harold Zwier argues that we need a definition of antisemitism which the mainstream can use. SBS adjudication at end.

Amnesty (1) and Addameer (2), the prisoners’ rights and support association, are both now campaigning urgently for Khader Adnan, arrested on 17 December 2011 and on hunger strike since then. He is held under military administrative detention, which means without trial or prisoners’ rights. He is associated with Islamic Jihad, the assumed reason for his several arrests, but has not been charged with any crime.

A statement from BDS Italy about their annual conference reports discussions of strategic thinking on when and how to run an effective campaign and advice from Hind Awwad to ‘work within a broad base of partners and alliances’ . Meanwhile at the grubby end, the American ADL Stand WIth Us and Prof. Gur are pulling out all the stops to smear this week’s BDS conference at The University of Pennsylvania.

The winter issue of Palestine-Israel Journal is devoted to the ‘Arab Spring’. In his essay for the collection, posted here, Tony Klug looks at the different trajectories taken by elements of Arab political life after the containing despotism broke, and, in particular, at the dangers of paranoia, patriotism and lack of flexibility driving policies in Iran, Israel and Palestine.

Calling the expanding rag-bag of conflicting and changing rules and regulations and officers and offices a ‘system’ is to flatter the Occupation authorities. In order to stay on top, measures of control are changed as and how the authorities need to. Machsomwatch women try to help Palestinians make their way through the maze – but does this make ‘the empire of prohibition’ work? Amira Hass reports.

A film that won the best documentary prize at the 2011 Jerusalem film festival — shown last week at the Sundance film festival — tracks the laws and precedents discovered which turned temporary settlement into permanent colonisation. If Israel does live under the rule of law, it is either military or apartheid law as far as Palestinians in the OPT are concerned

On the last stage of his European tour, in which he is seeking to increase diplomatic presure on Israel to stop settlement building, the PA President tells Russia’s RT that Israel might withdraw from a few settlements and try to persuade the world that this has changed the status quo of occupier and occupied. Which it won’t. But he remains willing to negotiate on the two things that matter – borders and security.

In an original argument, Lenore Skenazy suggests that fundamentalists – Judaic and Islamic here – are driven by the need to be different from today’s society and compete with each other to be the most censorious over women’s dress. Followed by news item from Ynet on failure of Israeli police to take seriously a violent attack on Natalie Mashiah by haredim

Holocaust memorial day – 27th January – received little attention in Britain – the Holocaust Memorial Trust ran a Speak Up Speak Out campaign against injustice. In Israel it prompted serious comment on how the state uses or abuses the holocaust as the uniting factor in the country, its only raison d’etre and justification for a state of existential anxiety. It does not prompt concern for others. Articles from Ha’aretz and 972.

Vijay Prashad looks at the Boycott, Divestment Sanctions movement from its emergence in Palestine in 2002 to its current possition as the most dynamic and divisive movemet in current Israel/Palestine politics. As the furor at the forthcoming BDS conference at Penn University suggests, the subject requires serious and open discussion.

28 January is the first annivaersary of the murder of 17 year old Yousef Ikhlayl who was farming family land when a group of ‘touring’ settlers shot him for no reason other than that he was in their sights Despite witness and photographic evidence no-one has been arrested. Bekah Wolf, founder of the PSP, which accompaies Palestinians to their farms, says this type of assault and judicial indifference is the norm.

Despite UN and EU condemnation, only resistance on the ground is putting up a fight against the rapid and repeated destruction of Palestinian homes, community buildings and amenities. ICAHD on what you can do to help the resistance, plus reports from Jeff Halper, the Alternative Information Center and Ma’an news

This time last year, delegates at the Davos World Economic Forum were watching TV coverage of the Egyptian uprising. This year, the new Arab leaders were on stage to reassure them that the new voters want jobs and an open economic system from their Islamic governments, not strict Islamic rule. PM Fayyad said the effect on Palestinians had been an international loss of focus on negotiations for their own state.

The American news channel NBC has uncovered a talk billionaire Sheldon Adelson gave to an Israeli group in July, 2010 when he said he wished he had served in the Israeli Army rather than the U.S. military—and that he hoped his young son will come back to Israel and “be a sniper for the IDF.” This surely gladdened the hearts of his audience if not loyal Americans.

Laws that were originally (1954) intended as an emergency measure to prevent Palestinians returning have been made permanent to keep out North Africans – and anyone else who might spoil Israeli ‘purity’. The other side of locking Palestinians and Africans out, or up in the world’s largest detention centre, is that Israelis are immuring themselves in the cleansed space inside massive walls and barricades.

Peter Jenkins, Britain’s former representative at the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that the West should grant what Iran wants – to be treated as an equal partner in the nuclear non-proliferation treaty – in exchange for accepting IAEA safeguards over its nuclear enrichment programme. Last November, Palestinians at Gaza’s CPDS discussed the implications for them of the Israel/Iran conflict, 2nd

The race to win the Republican nomination for the presidential election has been transformed by the intervention of one man – casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, fanatical supporter of all right-wing causes in Israel and now super-generous donor to Newt ‘Palestinians are an invented people’ Gingrich. It is Newt’s contempt for, and ignorance about, Palestinians that have attracted Adelson’s mega-bucks