Late Wednesday evening Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cinched a deal with Naftali Bennett’s hardline pro-settler group Bayit Yehudi to finalize a ruling coalition and secure his fourth term as Israel’s leader. Even with the deal, Netanyahu now hangs by a thread. His coalition includes a scant 61 out of 120 parliament members, down from the 67 votes he thought were in his pocket. The government will convene with a cabinet full of Netanyahu’s political rivals and a weak coalition—one of the weakest in Israel’s history. If Netanyahu cannot appease every member of his ruling government, he will need to seek support from his opposition led by the Zionist Camp’s Issac Herzog in order to survive.

The announcement of Israel’s far rightwing government, committed to taking over the West Bank, is a boon to the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement and a crisis for liberal Zionists who hang on to the dream of a two-state solution. Israel continues to drive itself off the rails of world opinion. When will the liberal Zionists take action?

Carly Fiorina promises to make Israel her first phone call as president. Mike Huckabee is “just nuts” about Israel. Jeb Bush calls settlements “apartments.” Ben Carson wants to transfer the Palestinians to Egypt. Marco Rubio has taken to dining with top-donor Sheldon Adelson. Ted Cruz is making the rounds with Fire Island’s pro-Israel community. And, Lindsey Graham who has not announced his bid, said if he is president he will have the first “all-Jewish” cabinet. As it shapes up, the Republican field in the 2016 U.S. presidential race is looking to be one of the most fiercely pro-Israel in memory.

The book of Israeli soldiers’ testimonies from the Gaza onslaught of last summer compiled by the veterans group Breaking the Silence includes a remarkable number of statements about shitting. The soldiers were occupying Palestinian homes, and often defiling them.

Jodi Rudoren plays down rightwing elements in Israeli society. Last week she said only a “small strain” wants the West Bank in Jewish hands, today she buries and then whitewashes the rightwing views of Ayelet Shaked, Netanyahu’s choice for justice minister. Shaked has made genocidal statements that Israel is “at war” with the “entire Palestinian people,” including elderly.

Elizabeth Warren attended an AIPAC event Monday at which Sen. Lindsey Graham said that everything in the Middle East that begins with “Al” is bad news. Will the progressive senator condemn these comments?

In recent weeks, the world’s attention has been fixed on Baltimore, MD, after 25-year-old African-American Freddie Gray died in police custody. Some observers of these events are turning their attention to the State of Israel, questioning the tactical training Baltimore police officers have received in Israel and asking whether the African-Israeli protests of recent days against police brutality were in part inspired by the #BlackLivesMatter uprising in Baltimore. While both of these Baltimore-Israel connections merit attention, there is another relationship between the two territories that also deserves to be explored. Since 2003, Baltimore has had a partnership with the notoriously racist Israeli city of Ashkelon, and ties between the two towns have been cultivated at the highest levels.

Tamara Ben-Halim writes about visiting Yafa and searching for the house her grandmother’s family was forced out of during the Nakba. She writes, “I stood on the street that my grandmother once stood on nearly 70 years ago. I listened to the sound of the same waves lapping onto the shore. I saw and touched the same beautiful old Arab, unmistakably Arab, buildings that she had walked past hundreds of times. I told myself it didn’t matter whether I found her house or not, but of course I knew that nothing could replace the feeling and the fact of actually knowing that this was her home, this was the place she had grown up in, the setting of all those stories we had been raised on, this was the place from which her and her father and siblings had fled in terror.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to appoint Ayelet Shaked as justice minister in his fourth government. During Israel’s summer 2014 attack on Gaza, Shaked essentially called for the genocide of Palestinians. In a Facebook post on July 1—a day before Israeli extremists kidnapped Palestinian teenager Muhammad Abu Khdeir and burned him alive—the lawmaker asserted that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and called for its destruction, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”

Fayez Tneeb marveled at his organically grown banana tree even though it is failing and rooted in a waste water stream. He and his wife Mona are proprietors of Hakoritana Farm in Tulkarm, located in the northern West Bank only 100 meters from Israel. For the Tneebs, harvesting pesticide-free agriculture that they take to a local market is a constant struggle. The couple’s plot of land is caught between an Israeli factory that manufactures fertilizers and agrochemicals, and Israel’s separation barrier.