Green metal panels shutter recently out of business storefronts along al-Wad Street, a narrow stone road inside of Jerusalem’s Old City walls that links Damascus Gate to the holy sites of the Western Wall and the al-Aqsa mosque. During the summer foot traffic was heavy on this Muslim quarter walkway lined with souvenir mongers and restaurants. Yet six stores on al-Wad street alone have closed since October when violence erupted across Israel and the West Bank in what many Palestinians are calling the start of an uprising.

IMEMC reports: The Israeli Supreme Court refused to reconsider a decision to demolish the unrecognized Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran, and ordered to evict all its residents, Adalah center reported on Sunday. Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights in Israel, requested that the court reconsider its decision to approve Israel’s plane to evict the village’s 1,000 Palestinian Bedouin residents, in order to build Jewish town of Hiran, and expand the Yatir Forest over its ruins.

While in Hawaii, Hatim Kanaaneh uses the local homelessness crisis to explain Middle East politics.

Beginning to get a bad feeling about Peter Baker, the likely next Jerusalem chief for the New York Times: He has twice offered Israel as a model for American conduct, in how to deal with terrorism and with prisoners accused of terrorism.

Omar Barghouti writes, “Though Human Rights Watch does not endorse BDS or call for a boycott against Israel or companies profiting from its violations of international law, it actually calls for something quite radical: sanctions against Israel.”

Over the weekend, in a victory for diplomacy, the U.S. lifted sanctions on Iran in place since 2006 as the two countries also completed a prisoner exchange. But no sooner than the plane carrying released prisoners had left the tarmac in Iran, the U.S. Department of Treasury slapped new sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile testing last fall, breaking the spirit of the agreement with Iran.

The Democratic presidential nomination debate on Sunday night was remarkable in part for Senator Bernie Sanders’s strong support for normalizing relations with Iran, and Hillary Clinton’s demurral on that same question. The difference is likely to play out in the Democratic primary process.

For Ahmed Jaber, the new year has brought nothing special to his cramped house which he shares with his parents and other seven siblings. 2016 has started in Gaza in abysmal darkness as the power crisis has worsened, putting nearly all facets of life into serious danger. “What does it mean to celebrate the New Year,” Ahmed asks. “The word celebration does not even exist in our terminology; it is a very luxurious expression which has no place in Gaza”.

There is not much difference between the Israeli settlers of 1967 and those of 1948. The liberal Zionists anguish in “shoot and cry” fashion about the moral corruption of the settlement enterprise, but they actually furthered it, and it serves their nationalist purposes.

In a groundbreaking new report, Human Rights Watch has joined the chorus of voices calling on countries to label goods made in the Israeli occupied territories as the products of settlements, and calls on countries to withhold aid to Israel that can be used to “offset the costs of Israeli government expenditures on settlements.” The report titled Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights puts pressure on a “multitude” of private companies to stop doing business in the occupied territories, because they are helping to sustain an illegal settlement project that deprives the Palestinian population of their human rights.