An Israeli checkpoint in Nablus, West Bank. Photo: David Ortmann (flickr)

Since Israel relaxed West Bank checkpoints in June, there's been a newfound sense of both security and economic freedom for the struggling Palestinian territory, according to the New York Times' Thomas Friedman.

Friedman says the economic improvement is largely a result of reformed police tactics and increased trade:

For Palestinians, long trapped between burgeoning Israeli settlements and an Israeli occupation army, subject to lawlessness in their own cities and the fecklessness of their own political leadership, life has clearly started to improve a bit, thanks to a new virtuous cycle: improved Palestinian policing that has led to more Palestinian investment and trade that has led to the Israeli Army dismantling more checkpoints in the West Bank that has led to more Palestinian travel and commerce.

Recent statistics for the West Bank support the claim that things are getting better. The International Monetary Fund is forecasting 7 percent growth, and construction is about to begin on the first new town in decades, according to a New York Times account.

Friedman is hopeful that economic improvements could lead to political gains:

Make no mistake: Palestinians still want the Israeli occupation to end, and their own state to emerge, tomorrow. That is not going to happen. But for the first time since [the collapse of the 2000 Oslo peace accords], there is an economic-security dynamic emerging on the ground in the West Bank that has the potential — the potential — to give the post-Yasir Arafat Palestinians another chance to build the sort of self-governing authority, army and economy that are prerequisites for securing their own independent state. A Palestinian peace partner for Israel may be taking shape again.

A Palestinian man looks out towards destroyed buildings following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photo: Amir Farshad Ebrahimi (flickr)

A stated aim of Israel's military strikes in Gaza was to destroy underground tunnels between Egypt and Gaza because they're used by Hamas to smuggle in weapons.

But Gazans argue that there are two kinds of tunnels running from Gaza to Egypt: militant and civilian. Hamas-controlled tunnels are "supposedly steel-ribbed and large enough for a car to pass through," according to Time. And unlike civilians, who dig in plain sight of the Egyptian border security and Israeli surveillance aircraft, Hamas members are more secretive and obscure about the location of their tunnels.

Gaza's civilians claim their tunnels are necessary. Israel essentially sealed Gaza's borders to everything but humanitarian aid after Hamas took control of Gaza in June 2007, making the tunnels the only means for transporting everything from medicine, cement, chocolate bars, and even lion cubs for the zoo, according to Time.

"It's a lie to say that we use these tunnels to only bring in weapons. We're bringing in the ordinary stuff that keeps Gaza alive. If the Israelis opened the border crossings, we wouldn't have to be doing this," a Gazan resident tells Time.

According to the New York Times, the tunnels are also a primary source of income for some 25,000 young men. Tunnel diggers can earn $100 for every meter they dig — making the tunnels one of the biggest sources of employment in the territory. And they were back to digging as soon as the truce was signed.

"If Israel keeps the borders sealed off, we'll keep digging and only Allah can stop us. Let the Israelis drop their bombs. Without the tunnels we can't survive anyway," says Aymad, a tunnel digger. "And if a bomb catches me underground, well, they won't have to dig my grave."

A Better Place sedan made by Renault-Nissan. Photo: Better Place (flickr)

Imagine there was a new way to charge an electric car that was as quick as filling up a tank of gas. What if you had the option of plugging your car into a vast network of charging stations or — if you needed to drive longer distances — were able to simply swap out your run-down battery with a fully charged one in locations as numerous as today's gas stations?

The dawn of this new paradigm is now. Better Place, as founder Shai Agassi explains, plans to revolutionize the way we look at the electric car by “putting a massive extension cord across the entire country.”

Better Place is teaming with Renault-Nissan to offer the option to buy or lease a vehicle. Agassi's company would streamline the way we fuel these vehicles by having the driver purchase miles on their car's battery much like cell phone users pay for minutes. As Thomas Friedman of the New York Times explains, “G.M. sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.”

Enthusiastically backed by President Shimon Peres, Better Place signed its first deal with Israel, and hopes to be up and running there in 2011. Better Place plans to start setting up shop soon in the Bay Area and Hawaii, with the goal to be fully operational by 2012.

Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm met with Agassi in November in hopes of attracting the new start-up and the resulting manufacturing jobs to her much-beleaguered state. November's unemployment rate was 9.6 percent in the Great Lake State, which the New York Times called "ground zero in the national economic downturn."

On January 7, A123 Systems — a battery manufacturer and partner of Better Place — announced plans to build the first of two proposed battery factories in southeast Michigan. Combined, the two plants would create more than 14,000 much needed jobs. This alone would be a big economic boost to an area of the country that sorely needs it.

Mercy Corps' Cassandra Nelson.

Despite Israel’s commitment to establishing a humanitarian corridor and daily three-hour ceasefire, delivering humanitarian supplies to the Gaza Strip has been a challenge. The Mercy Corps team on the ground reports that on the first day of the ceasefire, fewer than 40 trucks were allowed in — compared with nearly 500 trucks per day in spring 2007.

Yesterday a truckload of 7 tons food ($17,000 worth) for 2,000 people made it into Gaza. Mercy Corps staffer Cassandra Nelson shares her account of the transfer below.

Despite many obstacles and bureaucratic procedures presented by the Israeli authorities, Mercy Corps successfully delivered emergency relief food items to Gaza on Thursday.

The organization delivered a truckload of vegetable cooking oil, rice and canned tuna fish in sufficient quantities to feed 2,000 extremely vulnerable people for a week.

Mercy Corps spent the past 11 days working through Israeli red tape and protocols that seemed to change daily to secure the permission to deliver the truck today. The delivery was supposed to be made Wednesday, but at 2 a.m. the Mercy Corps team in Jerusalem received notice from the Israeli Defense Forces that the delivery was being postponed because it contained dates, which were not an essential food item. Today's delivery did not include dates.

The truck was repacked last night without the dates and with an extra three tons of rice. At dawn this morning, the truck and Mercy Corps monitors set out for the Kerem Shalom checkpoint.

The Mercy Corps vehicle joined a line of about 25 trucks waiting at the border. After about an hour long wait, the Israeli customs officials inspected the delivery and paperwork and allowed the truck to proceed into the unloading area for all shipments.

The vehicle was admitted to the unloading compound with several other aid trucks — all from various UN branches. The pallets were unloaded by forklift.

After all the items were removed from the truck and placed on the pavement of the compound, the security check began. Sniffing dogs were released to check the material. Next, a border control worker probed and stabbed every package with a long metal rod to check if anything might be hidden inside.

After the checks were completed, all the Israeli workers and other observers and monitors were told to exit back to the Israel side of the border. Once the compound was empty of all people, the gates on the Israeli side were slammed shut.

Next, the gates on the Gaza side of the compound were opened, allowing the Palestinians to enter the compound and collect the delivery with their trucks. No trucks were allowed to drive from the Israeli side to the Gaza side. Everything was offloaded from the trucks on the Israel side and then reloaded onto different trucks on the Gaza side.

Israeli guards said that at no point in the process are Israelis and Palestinians from the Gaza side allowed to meet each other.

The number deliveries are still far short of what is needed to serve a population that increasingly relies on outside aid to survive. On Wednesday, only 36 humanitarian-aid trucks were allowed to make their deliveries. Compare that to 2007, when an average of 500 trucks entered daily.

The Wall Street Journal reports on Mercy Corps' challenges in sending the delivery of food aid in this video.

Given the frequently gloomy headlines regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, many may not be surprised to hear of the latest violence in the region. But NPR reports the current conflict is the heaviest fighting the Gaza Strip has seen since the 1967 Six Day War — and some of the hardest hit seem to be Palestinian civilians.

Following the start of an Israeli ground invasion, the latest reports from the Washington Post indicate that 550 Palestinians have been killed and 2,500 injured — and according to Palestinian health officials, between 24 and 30 percent of those are women and children. Currently the Israeli government has closed Gaza's borders to everything except a small trickle of humanitarian aid, insufficient to meet the needs on the ground.

Mercy Corps is calling for immediate humanitarian access to Gaza to deliver food and other essential supplies. You can sign the petition by clicking here. This petition urges the U.S. government to push for aid to be allowed in now.

You can also help get critical humanitarian items needed once the border is open by donating to Mercy Corps' Gaza Crisis Fund. Mercy Corps has a four-ton shipment of food that's scheduled to enter Gaza tomorrow, and they're deploying additional aid workers to Jerusalem and Egypt to prepare to do more. Check out how Gazan youth involved with Mercy Corps are handling the crisis and keep up-to-date on Mercy Corps' response to the crisis.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process is getting an economic jolt from none other than Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps.

Dr. Bronner’s is an American company that has a 50-year tradition of environmentally and socially minded products. One of the company’s founding principles is that "constructive capitalism is where you share the profit with the workers and the Earth from which you made it!"

Following in that tradition, Dr. Bronner’s in 2005 started buying a majority of their olives from the Holy Land. Olive oil is the main ingredient in their magic soaps, and Dr. Bronner’s wanted to use its demand for olives to promote economic cooperation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Their magic soaps are now made with a mixture of Palestinian and Israeli olive oil. Dr. Bronner’s gets 90 percent of their supply from the Palestinian Canaan Fair Trade cooperative. The other 10 percent comes from the Israeli women’s fair trade association Sindyanna and the Strauss family farm in Israel.

"Blending olive oil from Palestine and Israel is a symbolic but significant contribution to promoting the concept of coexistence and cooperation in this area," Dr. Gero Leson, director of special operations for Dr. Bronner's, says in the video above.

Dr. Bronner’s initiative might be relatively small in the greater scheme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the project's ingenuity and potential has caught the attention of media such as American Public Media’s Marketplace.

While lots of companies have some sort of charitable arm or a mission that incorporates social responsibility, few are working in such a sensitive area and in such a deliberate manner to promote peace. Perhaps it's fitting for a company that has adopted this principle: "We are all brothers and sisters and we should take care of each other and spaceship earth!"