The Bahrain-Israel deal is significant because the kingdom is a virtual protectorate of the Saudis. There are serious concerns that a Saudi involvement with Israel will only lead to further tightening of measures against the Palestinian cause. And Iran will rise in prestige in Palestinian global affairs.

The normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates is based in the mutual interests of both country’s elites, but this doesn’t mean Israel is closer to being accepted in the region.

Fifteen years ago Israel left its settlements in Gaza, and Gazans dreamed that the end of military checkpoints to protect Jewish settlers and bulldozed citrus groves and barriers to the Mediterranean Sea meant an end of occupation. What a savage illusion that was, though Emad Moussa recalls the dreams of that day.

The occupation is almost invisible when you drive from Jaffa to the Dead Sea. The Palestinian population has been increasingly pushed into little enclaves so Jewish Israelis can build luxury homes and swimming pools on top of our hills and over our olive-tree orchards, Emad Moussa writes.

As annexation is put into gear, Palestinians feel that occupation is becoming an eternal fate. Emad Moussa reviews an Israeli film seeking to explain the occupation, Foxtrot, and finds it is all about Israeli trauma: “The only scene of Palestinian death in the film is reconfigured as a metaphor for Israel’s internal and transgenerational trauma, repression, and guilt.”

In order to legitimise the Jews’ right to Palestine, Zionism sought to delegitimise the Palestinian existence in the land. That involved a largely psychological process of ‘nativisation’ of European Jews and ‘de-nativisation’ of Palestinians. The term ‘Arab’ was one of the tactics used to achieve such goal.

The Netflix series “Fauda” attempts to rewrite the cliched one-sided Hollywood narrative of the conflict, but only to a point. It has a hierarchy of victims, in which Jewish Israelis are at the head of the line, and repeatedly slips back into all-too-common Israeli narratives about the Other.