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Palestine’s Street of Martyrs paved with anger and regret

I return to Ramallah from Taybeh, beer and wine in tow, to find Shehada, the Palestinian violin maker from bus 18, waiting for me outside the Al-Wehdeh hotel. He is here to take me to his home in the Old

‘Making beer is a form of resistance’: brewing West Bank tensions

The most famous section of the Israeli-West Bank separation barrier is also the shortest: the eight feet tall concrete slabs festooned with anti-Zionist graffiti, the vast majority of it written, somewhat tellingly, in languages other than Arabic, make up only

‘What is a Jewish state?’ The view from the Golan Heights

Reuven Shalev is round, balding and deeply fascinating: one of those voices that betray the complexity of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that hint at a too often unreported-upon willingness to compromise and a tendency towards self-criticism, and that at least tilt

Blogging between the Blue and Purple lines an uneasy Middle East

At the bottom end of Metula’s HaRishonim Street, where old men on tractors cart fruit into Israel’s northernmost building and boxes of fruit out of it again, Hadar Sela and I stand leaning on the yellow fence that opens out onto the

Tel Aviv and the bomb squad makes a guest appearance

Israel knew I was coming. Within seconds of disembarking Aegean flight 928 from Athens to Tel Aviv, on the darkened tarmac between the boarding stairs and the terminal shuttle bus, I find myself beset by one of Ben Gurion International’s

Jerusalem, a city of two halves, united only by disunity

The first thing that strikes you about Jerusalem is its specificity. Tel Aviv could be almost any beachside city in the world. It reminded me of Surfers Paradise, or a toned-down version of Venice Beach, while the guidebooks all seemed to

Death of Qaddafi: we like the crazy ones the best

In August 2009, Vanity Fair dedicated a tongue-in-cheek photo gallery to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, focusing on the dictator’s reliably outlandish sartorial choices. Entitled ‘Fashion Qaddafi-Style’, the piece was as notable for its pithy captions as it was for the selections