Recently, the right wing Israeli group Im Tirtzu created a highly inflammatory video singling out leaders of four leading Israeli human rights groups as “plants” by foreign powers seeking to undermine the State of Israel and supporting terror attacks. Defenses of these human rights workers and condemnations of Im Tirtzu have come not only from the Israeli left and its supporters, but also from key officials in the Israeli government, military and intelligence communities. Read them here.

The main cause of the current violence in Israel and Palestine is Israel’s “near fifty-year occupation (of Palestinian territory) and the system of radical inequality that it sustains.”

Within five years, from 2009 to 2013, more than $220 million was sent across the ocean and into schools, synagogues and playgrounds dotting the hills of Judea and Samaria. Millions of tax-subsidized dollars have gone to Jewish settlements in Hebron, helping to sustain a grim reality in the segregated part of the city, where Palestinian movement is sharply restricted and their economic life has been suffocated.

“Palestinian security forces are often derided as sub-contractors of the Israeli military occupation due to close cooperation with the IDF. Some are worried that might change,” writes Michael Omer-Man.

“The [Israeli] right is furious over the alleged use of torture against the suspects in the murder of a Palestinian family. But is it any surprise that the tools used against Palestinians would eventually be used against Jews too?” asks Noam Sheizaf.

2 smoke grenades thrown into home near Ramallah where a couple and their 9-month-old baby boy were sleeping; family unharmed.

Lehava group’s Benzi Gopstein says Christmas not wanted in Israel, and says of Christians: ‘Remove the vampires before they drink our blood.’

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says his national authority proposes to change its name on passports it issues to State of Palestine. Abbas says this will happen in about a year at the most, replacing the name Palestinian Authority.

Saleh al-Arouri, [allegedly] one of the planners of the murder of the three teenagers in Gush Etzion in June 2014, was expelled as Israel requested, but a full normalizing of ties is still far off.