News stories by Pierre Klochendler, page 17

In the past, whenever there was even a semblance of pressure from Washington on Israel, nerves in Jerusalem went all a-jangle.

Just beyond the main Israeli checkpoint, ten kilometres short of Jerusalem, a white Nissan station wagon is abruptly edging to the side of the road. It comes to a halt on the shoulder.

United States President Barack Obama’s intended broad Mideast policies are running into the complexities of peacemaking - especially after the ‘Prince of Peace’ began insisting on the necessity of, sometimes, fighting for peace.

One year after the devastating attack on Hamas in Gaza a new wave of reports castigating Israel for war crimes has emerged.

The sun is about to set over Jabel Mukaber. The call of the muezzin envelops the valley beneath Naim Aweisat’s balcony and, rolling from the mosques of Abu Dis across the wall in the West Bank, rebounds from the stark concrete Israeli security wall to answer the minarets that peer over the walled Old City.

After Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank torched a mosque and desecrated copies of the Quran in the Palestinian village of Yasuf, last Friday morning, they ran into a wall of condemnation.

'Get your hands off the Land of Israel and the people of the Land of Israel - that's what we need to tell Mr. Obama - get on the phone to the White House each and every one of you!'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Palestinian counterpart Salam Fayyad have both been scrambling earnestly to win the backing of European leaders in advance of what could be a major EU policy shift that aims at creating new impetus for Palestinian-Israeli peace prospects.

Without an efficient bureaucracy, occupation of the land of another people cannot be sustained. This is all the more true of Israel's 42-year occupation of Palestinian lands.

The fate of one prisoner locked in an Israeli jail could release the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process from its own jail - provided the timing is right.