Filmmakers Sheren Khalel and Abed al Qaisi wanted to know exactly how much the children who live in Bethlehem’s Aida and Beit Jibrin refugee camps understood about the military occupation going on around them, and how normal they believed their lives were. With their parents permission, Khalel and al Qaisi asked five children from the streets of the two camps what they thought. All of the answers were spontaneous and unrehearsed, and as it turned out, the kids understood — and have experienced — quite a lot.

“We live like dogs,” says a Kurdish resident of Grande-Synthe, a burgeoning refugee camp located in an industrial suburb of Dunkerque, France. As the refugee crisis continues to swell across Europe, Grande-Synthe stands as an example of the most perilous living conditions in modern Western society.

On the same day that Israel demolishes six Bedouin homes in the West Bank it also announces plans to appropriate a large tract of Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley.

The National Labor Relations Board has rejected a complaint filed by the Israeli lawfare organization Shurat HaDin against the the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE) that sought to overturn the union’s historic resolution in support of BDS.

Tiffany & Co was set to appear at Ethical Corporation’s Responsible Business Summit USA 2016, but disappeared from the schedule after the jeweler’s ties to an Israeli supplier which funds a unit of the Israeli military came to light.

On January 19 a coalition activist groups delivered a petition with more than 6,400 signatures to the Securities and Exchange Commission demanding that the agency enforce its disclosure rules by taking action against the Development Corporation for Israel, the corporation which sells Israel Bonds in the United States, for failing to disclose in its sales materials that proceeds from the sale of Israel Bonds are used by Israel to violate international law.

Megan Hanna reports from Bait al Karama – “the House of Dignity” – a cooking school situated in the heart of the Old City of Nablus. Established in 2008, the school rests on the principle that it is just as effective to fight the Israeli occupation through food as Molotov’s and stones.

Ambassador Daniel Shapiro’s sharp criticism of Israeli policies earned him the insult “little Jewboy” from a former Netanyahu aide. The flap demonstrates an important sociological trend: American Jews, even mainstream ones indoctrinated to love Israel, are breaking more and more publicly with the Jewish state. The Netanyahu government is proving to be embarrassing to American Jews; they do not want to be associated with rightwing apartheid policies.

Israel still portrays itself as a Jewish and democratic state. Yet in practice, as its Palestinian citizens can attest, it functions as a Jewish ethnocracy, leaving small margins of freedom for its Palestinian citizens that have been steadily shrinking in the past few years. Now the Israeli state has come under the complete control of the far right wing, which sees no need even for such limited margins of freedom. This is evident in the wave of discriminatory legislation and the use of the Emergency Regulations against established non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and movements such as the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel.

In the last nine days, Israeli authorities have cracked down on activists associated with Ta’ayush, the Jewish-Palestinian partnership that works to stop settlement growth in the occupied territories. There is a gag order on the case, but details have emerged. Israeli authorities have arrested Ezra Nawi, the great campaigner against human rights abuses in the occupied territories, as well as another member of Ta’ayush and a staffer of the human rights group B’Tselem.