Al-Shabaka advisor Samah Sabawi believes that Israel is good for democracy insofar as "it exposes the hypocrisy and faults that are inherent within other democratic systems." She writes of academic freedom's endangerment after an Israeli law firm threatened two professors with legal action.

"It is illogical for a country with mixed demographics to define itself on the identity of just one sector of society," writes Nadim Nashif with coauthor Gareth Bridgewater. "The Obama administration should take every opportunity to remind [Benjamin] Netanyahu that the United States takes equal rights very seriously."

It has been widely reported that the Palestinian Authority (PA), bereft of a mandate in the West Bank, has succumbed to the pressure from the US administration insisting it return to negotiations. However, little has been said of the PA's counterpart in Gaza. Also lacking a mandate, Hamas has felt the pressure of the Egyptian political turmoil that stripped it of what some had viewed as an ally in the Muslim Brotherhood-led government.

In order to understand the Oslo Accords and the extreme damage they have wreaked upon the Palestinian cause, one needs a historical contextualisation of the so-called "peace process".

See the original publication of this policy brief by Al-Shabaka.

Al-Shabaka policy advisor Sam Bahour translates a recent unverified leak about the peace talks that indicates major, very worrying, Palestinian concessions to Israel and the U.S. Bahour analyses the impact on the Palestinians and the region if the leak has any truth in it.

Alaa Tartir, Al-Shabaka Program Director, discusses four rules for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, arguing that “for peace talks to succeed, negotiators must have a popular mandate. It is essential to build up a legitimate national body that represents all Palestinians ... Otherwise, peace will be another form of colonialism wrapped up in modernity.”

There are many advocates of the renewed US-sponsored peace talks between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, despite widespread scepticism. One particularly active set of advocates is the group known as The Elders. Three of the Elders - former US President Jimmy Carter, former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari, and former Algerian Foreign Minister and freedom fighter Lakhdar Brahimi - recently spent time in Washington and London making the case for the peace talks. It is instructive to review their arguments, as I had the opportunity to do in July during their London visit.

The U.S effort, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, to revive negotiations between the P.L.O. and Israel recently brought negotiators to Washington D.C. to revive the peace process and settle the 65-year-old conflict. Yet, at the same time that peace is being promoted, the Israeli government has crafted a plan to forcibly displace some 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins living in the Negev desert. The plan was approved by the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) in a first reading on June 24 2013.

Next to U.S. support for Israel, the main reason why the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip continues is that the Europeans have reduced themselves to a subservient role in the Middle East Peace Process: one in which they underwrite the cost of Israel’s occupation by artificially propping up the Palestinian Authority, which created from the Oslo Peace Accords but has no sovereign authority whatever...