As Israel’s Remembrance Day and Independence Day roll past again some reflection is in order. Combatants for Peace and the Forum of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Parents organise a joint meeting on the eve of Remembrance Day, Uri Avnery reports. And Tony Karon writes about 65 years of Israeli independence – only it was 60 years when he wrote it, but who’s counting? Karon: “without justice for the Palestinians, Israel is no closer now than it was 60 years ago to being able to live in a genuine peace with its neighbors…”

A sobering discussion by Adam Horowitz on what it is to be Jewish and who still counts as family, what transgressions are acceptable and what unpardonable.

Anyone who sees Eli Valley’s cartoons and his brilliant creations such as Bucky Shvitz, Sociologist for Hire or Stuart, the Jewish Turtle is unlikely to forget them in a hurry. But Valley, like other bitingly satirical cartoonists you can name, does not have an easy ride. Here the anonymous blogger of the Philosophy and Law website defends Valley against the charge leveled against him in Commentary magazine of being – you guessed it – self-hating. And we link back to earlier postings about Eli Valley on this website.

Ahead of President Shimon Peres’s visit to France to discuss the Middle East peace process instructions were issued that there be “no blacks or Arabs” among the baggage-handling staff, because “no Muslim employees should greet the Israeli head of state”. It follows on the heels of Air France being fined for taking a student nurse off a plane to Ben Gurion on the grounds that she was “not Jewish”…

Zvi Bar’el writes: “The nakba terrifies Israel. We cannot forgive the Arabs for exiling themselves from Palestine, for destroying their own villages, for becoming refugees and for causing the cleansing of the War of Independence. Neither can we forgive them for the fact that many of them remained in Israel, destroying its aspiration to be a pure Jewish state, not only a state for Jews… We may one day have “peaceful coexistence” with the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza. With the Arabs of Israel, it will take much more. We need sincere reconciliation.”

Dissatisfaction with a two-state approach to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict is tempered by the fact that the difficulties with a one-state approach appear at least as great, with neither Israelis nor Palestinians willing to give up their legitimate claims to self-determination. And in international diplomacy the two-state approach is the only game in town. Many discussions are currently taking place in Israel-Palestine about this dilemma and a search for other approaches:

1.Oren Yifachel, author of Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, elaborates on his idea for a confederation as a possible solution to the colonial deadlock he diagnoses; and

2. Jeff Halper of Icahd reflects on the deafening silence which greeted Icahd’s move to endorsing one state last year, provides an overview of who holds what position, and rethinks the options. He also provides an extensive reading list!

The debate on the politics and morality of stone-throwing continues, after Amira Hass lobbed in her grenade that “Throwing stones is the birthright and duty of anyone subject to foreign rule.” She follows up with an article arguing that stone-throwing is an old Jewish custom and quotes from a wonderful Bundist song Barikadn: ““The police are running to and fro − the children are throwing stones.”‏ And Mairav Zonszein argues that “Israelis who don’t know occupation can’t preach to Palestinian stone-throwers: only those who have seen occupation can understand”.

A new report published by Al Haq – Water For One People Only: Discriminatory Access and ‘Water-Apartheid’ in the OPT – focuses on the control of water as an instrument of exploitation and subordination along colonial, racial lines in the Occupied Territories. It is – surprise, surprise – in violation of International Humanitarian Law.

A simple story by Yossi Gurvitz highlights the complicity of the IDF in the illegal settlement enterprise. Relentless pressure on Palestinian farmers in a repetitive pattern: attacks by people described by the victims as settlers, the stealing of equipment, cutting off trees, burning trees, attacks during the harvest… And generally the soldiers, when they see anything at all, stand idly by…

Yesh Din, on whose website this story is reported, works to defend the human rights of the Palestinian civilian population under Israeli occupation. It takes up individual cases and uses the accumulation of individual incidents to highlight structural violations of human rights and campaign for change…

Some communal identitities are stronger than others and none so strong as the religious identities of Islamist and Zionist. They are uniquely totalising, claiming to have the answers to everything, have only one route – supreme power – and admit no hyphenated identities. There has been no clash of all ‘civilisations’ as predicted by Samuel Huntington, but, writes Rumy Hasan, many Muslims feel the west has declared war on Islam, and some Islamists have responded in kind.

It is impossible to sum up briefly the achievements of Professor Noam Chomsky, one of the best-known public intellectuals of our age. Here we post his Edward Said memorial lecture, given from his long history of critiques of modern imperialism. Its theme is the contempt shown by the powerful – as in the ignoring of Palestinian rights in the Oslo Accords – the deliberate policies of humiliation and how the insistence on dignity is the hall mark of those who resist.

Wherever ancient land ownership is disputed, archaeology is a highly contentious issue, and nowhere is this more true than in Israel/Palestine. Alerted by Noam Chomsky’s reference to the Mamilla cemetery (above) we have posted some of the pieces written about this in recent years. Presumably, if anyone had known the location of the Greyfriars church containing the tomb of the last Plantagenet king, Richard lll, it would have been regarded as sacrilege to have built a car park over it.

Writer Susan Abulhawa travels to Durban’s Time of the Writer literature festival, leaving the disturbing Palestinian book ‘Time of the White Horses’ on her bedside table to listen to disturbing thinker/preacher of black consciousness, Andile Mngxitama . Shaking off the demands for irony, politeness and nuance, she asks if Mngxitama’s uncompromising rage is the more truthful response to colonialism. And muses on why its victims so often become victimisers.

From a trailer at Ben Gurion airport and a mobile phone, President Obama effected an unheralded reconciliation between the Turkish and Israeli governments, who had not been on speaking terms since the lethal IDF raid on the Turkish boat Mavi Marmara in 2010. Given the importance of Turkey’s status with Mediterranean Muslim governments, the renewed contact confers benefits on the Israeli and American governments; PM Erdogan clarified his hostile remarks on zionism a few days earlier so restoring his status with western governments.

The long-known history of Jewish emigration to, and rule of, the Khazari kingdom, and the mass conversion to Judaism of its Turkic people, is just one item restored to prominence by Shlomo Sands (below). The Zionist message of Jews’ unshaken biological line to Israel is not true. Other evidence of 8thC Jewish converts is given.

In this interview , historian Shlomo Sand describes the discoveries he made which contradict, or are omitted from, the new mythology of Jewish attachment to the land of Palestine – from the myth of Jewish exodus to that of return. The clearest origin of Zionism is with British Christians and imperialists, for their own reasons..

These are the facts that provide the evidence that Israel is a racist state – the more than 50 laws, many passed by the last Knesset, that ensure Palestinians living in Israel are second-class citizens – and a few laws that confirm the lack of rights of Palestinians in the oPt. The new settler government will build on these.

The Palestinian town of Nazareth is, in terms of amenities and facilities, ‘a village with work camps’ says Sami Abu Shehadeh. The Israeli districts in which Palestinians live are sharply marked off from Jewish ones by poorer amenities, services and infrastructure. But Palestinians in Israel do not get the outside attention of those in the oPt.

The port town of Jaffa has one of the oldest and most cosmopolitan histories on the Mediterranean, home to Arab and European Christians, Muslims, Sephardi Jews. In 1948 it was attacked by both the Stern gang and Irgun and most Arabs fled. The Palestinian population is now on the edges, with few amenities and unable to get permits to build new homes. It is popular with Israel’s wealthy elite.

Joseph Levine picks apart the charge – ‘you are denying Israel’s right to exist and so are antisemitic’. By building a wall around what constitutes ‘the Jewish people’ and saying these people have a right to a state, fatal confusions between civic and ethnic status, a right to self-determination and a right to an exclusive state are being made.