Even as Israelis mark the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem in the June 1967 war, the Palestinians and most of the world consider the eastern half under occupation, and the city remains deeply divided. But after five decades, dealing with Israel has become unavoidable for residents of East Jerusalem.

Gershom Gorenberg writes, “It’s the settlement enterprise that has chained Israel to occupied territory. It’s settlement that creates a two-tier legal and political regime in the West Bank—Israelis living with the rights of citizens; Palestinians without those rights. It’s settlement that steadily undercuts Israel’s status as a democracy.”

Israel’s government on Sunday nixed an ambitious plan approved last year to allow mixed-gender religious services at the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest prayer site, angering many American Jews, who said they felt insulted and abandoned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.

The heads of the Reform movement in the U.S. and in Israel have decided to cancel their meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in protest of the government’s decision to freeze the implementation of a deal to see a non-Orthodox prayer space erected at the Western Wall.

Shaked has no legal standing to ask for an investigation. While the function of justice minister entails some administrative control of Israel’s legal apparatus, it has no authority in matters relating to actual investigations and prosecutions. Nonetheless, Shaked used her position to press for an investigation of a dissident group that she and her Habayit Hayehudi  party, along with much of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, routinely describe as traitors who must be silenced.

“On a strategic and principled level, the State of Israel will not take part in and will not legitimize any Palestinian political move under the guise of culture and heritage,” said Israel’s ambassador to UNESCO, Carmel Shama-Hacohen.

The IDF on Sunday arrested three people during clashes surrounding the demolition of an illegal structure in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, the army said.

The decision to cut off the salaries of the 277 former Hamas prisoners is not related to the Israeli and US pressure on the PA to stop paying the allowances of current Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and their families. The decision to stop paying the 277 former prisoners falls within the context of the Palestinian division (Fatah-Hamas) and comes as part of the PA’s pressure on Hamas to cede power in Gaza to the consensus government.

The Palestinian Authority has reportedly been preventing residents of the Gaza Strip from leaving the coastal enclave for medical care as part of its ongoing power struggle with the Hamas terror group that rules the coastal enclave.

Palestinian security forces forcibly suppressed a sit-in Sunday, which was organized more than a week ago in front of the Palestinian Ministers’ Council in the central occupied West Bank city of Ramallah by former political prisoners of Israel in protest of having not received their paychecks this month.

Since Israel Hayom appointed last month a new editor, Boaz Bismuth, who reportedly was hand picked by the Adelsons, the newspaper, once considered Netanyahu’s mouthpiece, has dramatically downsized the coverage of the Israeli prime minister and his wife.

Noam Sheizaf writes, “This is a dangerous fantasy that led the American Jewish community to a bad place – holding liberal values at home and supporting illiberal policies in Israel as long as those policies were directed at Palestinians and did not affect the interests of the community itself.”