Obama leaning against final push for Israeli-Palestinian peace

What We’re Reading

US-Israel relations

Obama, trying to protect legacy, unlikely to act on Mideast peace,

U.S. President Barack Obama, keen to preserve his legacy on domestic health care and the Iran nuclear deal, is not expected to make major moves on Israeli-Palestinian peace before leaving office, U.S. officials said on Thursday.

Did Obama just sign the last waiver before Trump moves the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem?,

If Trump were to want to move the U.S. Embassy up the hill 40 miles from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, diplomats say it would require . . . virtually nothing.

Ex-general and settlements critic Mattis named new US defense secretary,

Retired general James Mattis is famously outspoken, having warned that Israel’s settlements threaten to turn the Jewish state into an “apartheid” system

Occupation/Human rights

For Palestinian citizens, Israel was and remains a Shin Bet state,

“Israel’s military rule over its Palestinian citizens may have ended in 1966, but the long arm of the Shin Bet and the police continues to meddle in our private affairs. I know from personal experience,” writes Yasser Abu Areesha.

Arab Israelis donate wood to rebuild Haifa synagogue damaged by fire,

Arab Israelis are donating timber to help rebuild a synagogue after it suffered extensive damage when wildfires ripped through much of Israel last week.

Israeli military isolates Palestinian neighborhoods in downtown Hebron, making daily life an ordeal,

For over twenty years, Israel has been enacting a policy of separation based on discrimination, implemented primarily through the many permanent checkpoints the military placed in Hebron’s city center and around the Tomb of the Patriarchs (al-Haram al-Ibrahimi).

Quarrying leaves West Bank villagers on shaky ground,

Residents of the West Bank village of Kur have been complaining for a decade that a nearby stone-crushing operation is harming the environment and threatening their historic landmarks and homes.

Palestinian politics

Opinion: Palestinians deserve more than Mahmoud Abbas,

“At the Fatah Congress this week, Abbas’s followers seem to have affirmed a choice Oslo’s signatories made more than two decades ago: that livelihoods matter more than liberation. Palestinians deserve an alternative to this status quo,” writes Samer Badawi.

Mahmoud Abbas Proposes Palestinian Unity Government With Hamas,

West Bank — Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority that operates in the West Bank, proposed on Wednesday the creation of a temporary unity government along with Hamas, the militant rival faction that controls the Gaza Strip.

Israeli politics

The face of Israel's far right wants to 'abort' Palestinian hope,

And he thinks Netanyahu is a coward. Meet Knesset Member Bezalel Smotrich, who envisions a Greater Israel where the Palestinian Authority doesn’t exist and who believes Reform Jews and LGBT people are living a lie.