As arms deals go, it was not the slickest. On an industrial street near the kasbah in the West Bank city of Nablus, a balding middle-aged man described his services. He couldn’t supply an AK-47 or a Tavor, the standard-issue Israeli assault rifle—those are too hard to find. In fact, he had no guns at all. But he insisted that he had the next-best thing: a friend with a lathe.

In the past few months, a veteran Israeli radio presenter lost half his airtime because he asked a top security official a tough question. Members of the foreign press were called before parliament twice to answer charges of “bias.” A lawmaker claimed that journalists were inciting violence to besmirch his nation’s good name, and The Washington Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief was briefly detained by police on suspicion of doing exactly that.

The message from the top Palestinian leadership, delivered with more than a hint of panic and desperation, seems to be this: You’ll miss us when we’re gone.

The residents of Jesus’s birthplace, snug in their beds on Christmas Eve, will hope that the only unexpected visitor is wearing a red suit and coming down the chimney. At least 55 people have been burgled in the city of peace over the past two months. Some of the thefts were quite serious, with more than $64,000 lifted from a house in the suburb of Beit Jala on December 11th.

The thousands of mourners gathered under a clear blue sky on Tuesday for the funeral of the four Jews who were gunned down at a kosher supermarket in Paris last week heard a stark and seemingly contradictory message: European Jews shouldn’t have to flee their countries — but they probably should, anyway.

For months, Salem al-Ajla, 65, has kept a lonely vigil outside the twisted heap of concrete that was once his home. One day, he hopes workers will arrive to help him to rebuild it.

Children across Israel went back to school on Monday, after a summer of war and unrest, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stopped by several classrooms for the obligatory photo ops.