There's something beautifully surreal about pissing next to an olive tree, looking onto an encroaching settlement under a starry West Bank sky. The experience had an element of absurdity to it as just hours before I had been drinking and smoking joints with a friend, talking through the finer points of Marxist Palestinian liberation theory in a hip Tel Aviv café off King George Street.

At 10pm last Sunday, as we discussed whether Tel Aviv radical circles are a connecting point between Western Anarchist and Third World liberation currents, ‘Yossi' - a radical Israeli activist - called suggesting I go with him to the Bil'in ‘outpost.' Unlike traditional land grabs by Jewish settlers, the Bil'in outpost is a Palestinian claim to land cut off by Israel's vaunted separation wall around the expanding settlement of Modi'in Illit.

Established in 2005 and recognized as Palestinian farm land by the Israeli High Court, settlers and soldiers have still attacked the outpost numerous times. Yossi said on the phone that the previous week an army unit sevearly beat and hospitalized Farajn Burnat, one of the two Palestinians living on the land. He added that the same unit was on duty again, there were two places left in the car and it would be useful to have a journalist present to deter or document another beating.

Turning to ‘Mailyse,' I asked if she was interested in some impromptu direct action. We contemplated for a moment whether we should continue drinking, smoking and theorizing about the...

"Expel the Arab enemy" read bright yellow and black signs in English and Hebrew, carried by sweet looking Jewish grandmotherly women at Sunday's settler demonstration. The Jerusalem protest was called with the intention of marching through the neighborhood of Ala Abu Dhaim's, Merkaz Harav yeshiva attacker, and demolishing his family's home.

With chants like "Death to Arabs," the settlers tied to the religious Zionist movement fostered at Merkaz Harav, massed within blocks of Abu Dhiam's neighborhood. Rounding police lines with some ease, a branch of the demonstration rushed into the neighborhood, stoning cars and smashing windows of the Palestinian residents. Those who couldn't get around the lines threw stones by from a ridge above the road at Palestinian cars driving by.

Over 500 settlers and their supporters, danced, prayed, clashed with reluctant Jerusalem police and army, all the time fuming with the rhetoric of ethnic cleansing. "If they can't live peacefully here, [Expel the Arab enemy] 100%," says Aryeh Rosenberg - an Israeli settler at the demonstration who's originally from Toronto, Canada.

"At the begging I might have been against ethnic cleansing, but at this point, yes. They just can't live here," contends the bearded twenty-something frontiersman in front of several hundred dancing protestors. "I'm happy with them in Canada, I don't care as longs as they are not killing me over there," he adds, attempting to appear moderate.

This was the scene that Israel wanted the world to see: cops chasing settlers to ostensibly protect the Palestinian...

Posters around Jerusalem appeared on March 13 by rightwing settlers announcing a Sunday protest march to destroy the family home of Merkaz Harav yeshiva attacker, Ala Abu Dhaim's. However, with Israeli nationalists mobilizing both in the Knesset and at the grassroots, Palestinians aren't the only people being threatened.

According to refugee solidarity activists, nearly 1000 refugees - mostly from Africa, especially Sudan - have been arrested in police roundups since the beginning of March. While many of the asylum seekers have UN papers declaring their status, "Immigration police have been arresting people off the street," says ‘Nawal' a women from southern Sudan who was arrested on March 14. "They are telling us to leave city, fingerprinting people and forcing them to sign papers in Hebrew. When I asked the officer why this was happening, he said it was a government policy."

Most of the refugees entered Israel through Egypt, fleeing harsh conditions and abuse from authorities. Sudanese refugees have faced a consistent crackdown from authorities in Cairo for years. Referring to a letter between the Israeli immigration police and the UN commission on refugees in Tel Aviv, obtained by the activists, Karen Shayo says that police are planning to arrest 2100 people.

"It's a way of controlling the refugees," she says. "They're doing this to register people. They want to make a database of all the countries that the people are from, contact the countries embassy's and try to send them back," contends Shayo, who provides refugee support in Tel...

Dateline: March 11 2008, the Ramallah Stars and Bucks bureau, 4:35 p.m.

"Never believe anything until it's been officially denied," said famous radical British journalist Francis Claude Cockburn.

Since Thursday's attack on Jerusalem's Mercaz Herav yeshiva the ideological home of Israel's religious settlers, there's been enough denials issued by Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to indicate the existence of a commonly-held belief. In the days following the attack, first Jerusalem's police chief, Aharon Franco, and then Avi Dichter, the head of Shin Bet came out denying the likelihood of new Intifada. At the same time, Hamas claimed and then denied responsibility for the Jerusalem shooting, while the PA denied, in response to the killings, that the Annapolis peace process is dead.

If these denials were indeed ironic admissions, then the statements form the parties involved might actually reflect what the feeling on the ground is.

First hearing about the shooting on Thursday night at vernissage for street artists and culture jammers in a Florinten café, I couldn't have felt further from the events of Gaza or Jerusalem. It wasn't until preparing to head back to Ramallah the next day, realizing I had to pass through Jerusalem to get home, when my Tel Aviv bubble burst and I saw the news of the military imposed closures of the West Bank.

The ride back to Ramallah is always a strange journey as you feel the realities of occupation that make the Tel Aviv bubble possible start to wash over you. However,...

Dateline: Florentin, March 6, 9:00 a.m.
The occupied territories are teetering on the verge of a new uprising (Intifada, as it is referred to), as a result of increases in internal repression within the PA, and Israel's ongoing military activities in Gaza. But, sitting in my Tel Aviv bureau-cum-hip café in the city's Florentin neighborhood, it feels like I'm a lot closer to Montreal than nearby Tulkarem, or my present home in Ramallah.
I arrived in Tel Aviv on Tuesday after Qalandia's checkpoint was closed off and on for two days, courtesy of Palestinian youth confronting the Israeli army with stones. The West Bank has been in a frenzy of activity since Israel's massive assault on Gaza that left more than 120 Palestinians dead. The outrage the assault produced injected Ramallah's atmosphere of exhausted frustration with a kinetic street energy.
While Ramallah and the rest of the West Bank saw two general strike days - where almost all shops closed, numerous street protests and checkpoint confrontations, Tel Aviv has mostly stayed in its Western political and cultural bubble. It's true that there have been a few protests and several arrests at the Ministry of Defense, and anti-siege critical mass bikes rides, however Israel's Gaza campaign has gone largely unnoticed in a city that's used to turning off the news when it get hot.
Although Tel Aviv is much closer to Gaza than Ramallah, Ramallah's connection to the Strip has brought it to the edge of a third Intifada. In Tel...