Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

Binyamin Netanyahu's meeting with Cypriot President Demetris Christofias in Nicosia on February 16 - the first for any Israeli Prime Minister - was not only historic, but likely strategically important for the futures of both Mediterranean countries, which are finding in recent years an increasing number of shared interests.

Once, such a visit would have been difficult to imagine. While Netanyahu said during his visit that warming ties between Israel and Cyprus was a reflection of the "natural relationship" between the two countries, Cyprus and Israel have never been as close as they are now...

Last night, ABC's Four Corners program focussed on the uprising in Syria. The program mostly featured a British Channel Four documentary on the Assad regime's systematic torture of Syrian opposition-members, including children, which gave a shocking insight into the events besetting Syrians opposed to their government's policies. The program ended, however, with host Kerry O'Brien interviewing notorious Middle-East correspondent Robert Fisk for 15 minutes in which Fisk was essentially given a pedestal to promulgate his views unchallenged...

In a story that has been largely ignored by the Western press, the African Union (AU) is flexing every international legal muscle it can find in order to protect Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir from his indictment on charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Bashir has recently travelled to ICC signatories Chad, Kenya, Djibouti and Malawi without being arrested, despite being wanted for genocide...

The bomb attack on an Israeli diplomat's car in New Delhi on February 13 by suspected Iranian operatives has opened a national debate among Indian commentators and lawmakers over the country's close trading ties to Iran.

Unlike China, Iran's other major trading partner, India maintains a close relationship with Israel as a top client of the Israeli defence industry, adding a layer of complexity to the situation...

This Update focuses on the growing prevalence of conspiracy theories that seem to be coming out of countries affected by the Arab Spring, especially Egypt, and the possible consequences.

First up is Washington Institute scholar David Schenker, who looks at the background to the Egyptian decision to prosecute 16 US citizens who lead NGOs in Egypt for accepting foreign funding to promote democracy. This decision risks the loss of $1.3 billion in annual aid from the US which Egypt desperately needs in order to import food for its citizens, but Egyptians overwhelmingly want  this aid to end anyway...

With the Syrian city of Homs dominating news from the Middle East as shelling there continues, (excellent reporting on the ground from Homs comes from Richard Spencer of the London Telegraph - see here and here.)  and international calls for action to put a stop to the bloodshed in Syria growing, this Update looks at some careful analysis of what could be done, and what could not be done, if a decision to intervene was made...

A political storm in Malaysia over controversial remarks by opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's on Israel has not yet come to a close.

Back in January, a war of words erupted between Anwar and several top government officials, including his former mentor Dr. Mahathir Mohammed, regarding Malaysia's policy on Israel - a raw nerve among the country's Muslim-majority population...

The Maldives is an island paradise in the Indian Ocean with an overwhelmingly Muslim population. Last week, the country experienced a coup, where, reportedly with a gun to his head, the democratically-elected President Mohamed Nasheed resigned, paving the way for his replacement by Vice-President Mohammed Waheed Hassan Manik.

The politics of the coup are complex and unclear, and part of the story appears to be that many of the coup plotters are associated with former President / Dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who Nasheed succeeded following elections in 2008. However it does seem clear that caught up in the mix is the growing influence of very extreme Salafist Islamist influences and factions in the Maldives. Moreover, these factions have been promoting bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy theories as part of their efforts to undermine Nasheed...

The first anniversary of the outbreak of demonstrations in Bahrain has moved the international spotlight back to the situation in the tiny Persian Gulf island-kingdom this week.

The so-called February 14 Revolution claimed the lives of several dozen civilians over the past year as a result of a brutal government crackdown. Sporadic demonstrations have continued into this year, with an uptick in activity in recent days leading up to the anniversary milestone...

In an interview with the ABC radio show "The World Today" yesterday afternoon, Geneive Abdo, a former Guardian journalist in Iran now working as an Iran expert at a Washington thinktank:

• Said it's "entirely possible" Israel bombed their own embassies to provoke a war with Iran.
• Complained about the "extremely powerful" Jewish lobby in the US.
• Argued that the "very extremist Israeli government" has not even considered the dangers of a military strike on Iran, and lacks "any voices of reason" - basing her argument on the grounds of what Israel "did for many years in Lebanon" (Abdo is of Lebanese-American extraction).

Also today: Egyptian authorities create an anti-American conspiracy while they respect the human rights of terrorists but not refugees.

Yesterday there was another failed act of terrorism in Bangkok, likely to be linked to Iran and Hezbollah.  This latest failed terrorist attack follows attacks on Israeli embassy personnel in India and Georgia a day earlier (see previous blog post). It also follows a string of attempted terrorist attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets that have thankfully been thwarted in places including Bangkok and Baku, Azerbaijan.

The question many are grappling with is that if Iran and Hezbollah, generally both thought to have dangerously competent cover operation wings, are behind these terrorists attacks, why weren't they more effective?

As the bloodshed continues in Syria, with no end in sight, there are increasing calls for something to be done. Joining the chorus today were both Angelina Jolie and Grand Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb, the head of Cairo's al-Azhar University, one of the most prestigious theological institutions in the Islamic world. As Reuters reported, Tayeb used strong language, deploring condemnations without action and seemingly calling for some form of intervention from the Arab League...

In the aftermath of the recent Qatari-brokered reconciliation agreement between Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, many have suggested that Hamas is moderating both its long-standing goals of Israel's destruction and its traditional rejection of any negotiations with Israel. But Hamas' leadership in Gaza, spearheaded Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar, has been making it very clear that they do not support any such change...

As was widely reported, Israeli embassy personnel were attacked in Georgia and India yesterday.

In the first attack, Tal Yehoshua-Koren, the wife of an Israeli Defense Ministry official and an employee of the embassy in India was wounded when a bomb exploded in her car.  In the second attack, an embassy staffer in Tbilisi discovered a bomb underneath his car as he was driving to the embassy.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Iran of being responsible for the attacks, which occurred one day after the fourth anniversary of the killing of a senior Hezbollah official, Imad Mughniyeh. Both Hezbollah and Iran have blamed Israel for Mughniyeh's assassination, and Hezbollah has repeatedly sworn revenge.

This blog post recommends analysis on what these attacks could mean...

Today: The Merchant of Venice, Kuwaiti elections, Jordanian Palestinians and civil wars in Yemen and Syria.

Literally Earth-shattering, according to Iranian state media outlet Press TV:

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei says the powerful feelings of the regional nations towards Gaza have been instrumental in the eruption of the region's volcano.

There is, of course, a chance that he was speaking figuratively, although this would not be the first time an Iranian cleric linked a natural disaster with global politics. There was, for instance, those earthquakes two years ago caused by promiscuous women, or the time that European countries stole Iran's rain, leading to a widespread drought. The more sinister part of Khamenei's statement, which emerged from a recent meeting with Ismail Haniyeh -- Hamas' leader in Gaza -- concerned Iranian support to Hamas...

Fascinating reports, interesting analysis and some stories that are just plain funny: a round-up of items from today's media.

The Australian Financial Review today ran an article from last month's Atlantic by Robert Kaplan, which was originally published under the headling 'Why John J. Mearsheimer Is Right (About Some Things)' but republished as 'Great Power Politics'. As revealed by the headline, the piece largely praises University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer, focusing on his self-dubbed "offensive realist" take on China. Mearsheimer, however, is a rather dubious acadamic, particularly for his record of fomenting antisemitism in mainstream discourse, but also for his generally biased and factually questionable material.

Kaplan does acknowledge Mearsheimer's most notorious work, the much maligned 2006 essay and 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that he co-authored with Harvard professor Steven Walt, as well as his recent endorsement of the abhorrent Gil Atzmon. Kaplan, however, glosses-over these controversies as "tragedies" that threaten to "obscure" his otherwise important work...

It's time to clear the air on an issue which has been the source of a misinformation campaign for years - Israel's environmental record in the West Bank...

Also today: Jewish refugees from the Arab world, Jews still in the Persian world, more on Palestinian unity, Egypt-US ties growing weak and Iran arming Syria to the teeth.

Just a few days after the highly-criticised Russian veto at the UN Security Council, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov arrived in Damascus and met with President Bashar Assad. At a time where countries, one by one, are recalling their ambassadors from Syria, this meeting was a rare sign of support for the crumbling regime. Lavrov was received with what has been described as "a hero's welcome" as thousands of Assad supporters gathered to express gratitude and greet him with both Russian and Syrian flags and blue, red and white balloons (the colors of the Russian flag). A banner with the portraits of Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin read "Thank you Russia and China".

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Lavrov came to Damascus to promote "the quick implementations of democratic reforms in Syria." Lavrov explained that it is Moscow's desire for the Arab peoples to live in "peace and agreement," he said, and while apparently turning to Assad he continued: "Every leader of every country must be aware of his share of responsibility. You are aware of yours".

Also today: Obama's pre-Superbowl interview, an imprisoned Iranian dissident and more going wrong with Egypt's "democracy".

This Update is dedicated to the latest Fatah-Hamas unity agreement, signed in Doha, Qatar on Monday, which calls for current PA President Mahmoud Abbas to also become Prime Minister.

First up is Robert Danin from the Council on Foreign Relations, who examines the actual significance of this agreement, the latest of many, as well as the key questions that will have to be settled if the agreement is to stick. He is sceptical Abbas can succeed with Hamas and says Abbas is likely to have to make the tough choice between the two he has been seeking to avoid.

Also includes: more on Iran's nuclear program and the possibility of an Israeli strike, Holocaust graves rediscovered, an anti-Israel "journalist" exposed and a man in Melbourne who flys the Swastika.

Iranian leaders have done it again - publicly stating their intention to destroy Israel.

As was widely reported, the Islamic Republic's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 3 said in a speech to worshippers at prayers in Teheran and broadcast on state TV, that Israel is a "cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut."

Khamenei also said, "From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this".

But less noticed was that other significant sources in Iran are discussing both the timing and the strategic details of an Iranian attack on Israel...

Why does the United Nations continue to consider the Gaza Strip to be "occupied territory" when Israel dismantled all settlements and withdrew the IDF from the area as part of its disengagement in September 2005?

Even Hamas, which has controlled Gaza since it overthrew the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, concedes that Gaza is no longer occupied...

Daily summary of news stories that readers may have missed otherwise.

While they come from opposing Muslim factions, Palestinian Sunni group Hamas and Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have much in common: they are both designated terror organisations in most Western countries, Australia included; they both hold extremist and violent ideologies; they both fought wars with Israel in the second half of the last decade; and they have both received significant backing from Iran and Syria. That said, they seem to be diverging on that last point. With the ongoing violence in Syria, the last Hamas operative from the Damascus-based political bureau seems to have fled for Gaza, however it seems that Hezbollah is unwilling to follow suit and remains resolutely behind the ruling Assad regime...

A round-up of news stories that readers may have missed today...

Venezuelan Supremo Hugo Chavez often accuses Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians.

And so voluminous is the Chavez definition of the term that it is a surprise he has failed to notice that half of his own country's 200-year-old Jewish community has disappeared since he assumed power in 1998. But then the evaporation of this patriotic, productive, and loyal group is largely a consequence of Chavez's hostile policies and rhetoric...

Wednesday was the 33rd anniversary of the return from exile of Iran's then-revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In celebration, the Iranian regime chose to stage a reenactment of the triumphant moment, with the Iranian airforce marching a larger than life cutout of the Ayatollah off an airplane in an elaborate parade.

Photographs of the event were made available on the semi-official Mehr news agency and have since created an Iranian viral sensation. David Goodman has reported the response...

Today's Update focuses on the situation in Syria and especially on what is known about the varied opposition to the Assad regime.

The first piece up comes from Nic Robertson of CNN, who just returned from a visit to Syria which is something increasingly rare for Western journalists. He notes an increasing sectarian polarisation occurring within Syria and sees the regime as successfully exploiting it, while the opposition is not doing enough to calm the fears of the Alawite and Christian minorities...

Some stories that readers may be interested in:

• An al-Qaeda inspired cell has confessed to plotting terror attacks in London. Their targets included "two rabbis" in addition to high-profile ones such as the London Stock Exchange and Westminster Abbey.
• Israel has been given a top score of 4.5/5 in preparedness for dealing with a cyber attack, making it one of the 3 top-ranked countries in a study by Belgian think tank Security & Defence Agenda. By contrast, Australia was in the middle of the pack with a score of 3.5.
• Tel Aviv's city council has determined to name several streets in Jaffa after prominent Arab figures.
• Proof that sanctions are biting: Iran has just determined to increase its interest rates.
• The New York Times's David Goodman has obtained some harrowing videos of intense street fighting in Syria.

Last week, Israel Defence Minister Ehud Barak spoke at the annual Davos Forum, and told listeners that tough sanctions on Iran may be too late because Iran was " drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical [military operation] could block them." Israeli concern over Iran's nuclear program is clearly reaching a crescendo. So an article by veteran Israeli security correspondent Ronen Bergman in last weekend's New York Times magazine on Israeli thinking on the possibility of a limited military strike to delay the project has gained considerable attention.

In yesterday's Age, Barney Zwartz has reported on a former editor of the Australian Jewish News questioning the amount that the community spends each year on security.

Goldberg is undoubtedly correct in one regard: the community could benefit from extra funding for education. That said, the unfortunate reality is that the money spent every year on security for the Jewish community goes to countering a very real threat.

For starters...

An AFP report yesterday indicated that, as predicted, Hamas and Fatah are dragging their feet on actually implementing the latest reconciliation deal.

This suggests that the current deal will go the way of the three previous deals: all have been introduced to much fanfare and then quietly lapsed as, once away from the public eye, no agreement could be reached on how to actually implement the requirements. The reason for this is that while "Palestinian unity" as an idea is appealing to both factions, they...

January 27 marks the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau - the largest Nazi death camp was liberated. In November 2005, the United Nations passed a resolution to designate January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD) to honour the victims of the Holocaust - the genocide that resulted in the annihilation of 6 million Jews, 2 millions Gypsies and millions of others by the Nazi regime.

The UN resolution establishing IHRD urges every member nation of the UN to honour the memory of Holocaust victims and develop educational programs as part of an international resolve to help prevent future acts of genocide. The UN resolution also rejects denial of the Holocaust, and condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity.

On this day and on every day, it is important to ask, has the world learnt the lessons from the Holocaust?

To its great discredit, the Melbourne Age has republished a Guardian newspaper feature that alleges mistreatment by the Israeli judicial system of West Bank Palestinian youths detained on suspicion of terrorism.

As a previous AIJAC blog post revealed, many allegations of Palestinian children being tortured, kept in solitary confinement, denied legal representation, and forced to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, rely on half-truths, manipulation of facts and figures and unsubstantiated claims by anti-Israel organisations.

That is, organisations with anti-Israel political agendas that extend beyond the remit of the specific goals they profess to be concerned with and into areas of delegitimising the Jewish state.

The Sydney Morning Herald's Hamish McDonald (Jan. 21) came away from a recent visit to Israel with the view that the country's "old liberality" is being whittled away by the right and the ultra-orthodox.

The latter, he wrote, "are 20 per cent of the population, breeding three times faster than more secular Jews." In fact the ultra-orthodox are 11 per cent of the Jewish population. He also wrote that they "are spilling out into the lands occupied since 1967, whittling down the territory held out to the Palestinians for their future state."

Wrong again. Settlements themselves take up no more than 1-2 per cent of the West Bank, a fact Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat accepted as true last November 3 on Arabic Radio As-Shams...

Two news stories emerged today, both reporting positive steps forward in the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. The first of these concerns an online conference being held by a group called YaLa-Young Leaders, designed to bring people together from both sides and have a productive conversation about the conflict, hoping to form some genuine reconciliation efforts.

As Kel Si Loos reported in the Miami Herald, the group has been attracting a large number of members from the Middle East and...

The New York Times' Lede blog is commemorating the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Egyptian revolution through a post containing reflections by an Egyptian activist, interspersed with footage he took from the protests in Cairo on 25 January last year. The piece is quite moving and manages to recapture the sense of optimism and determination that was being felt at the time:

Although the battles would continue later that evening and over the following days, we all knew that something profound had just happened. There was a raised collective consciousness amongst us...

How different to the feeling now?...

This update looks at the latest sanctions imposed by the US and European Union on Iran’s oil industry and Central Bank; how an Islamist-controlled Egyptian Parliament will affect the country's ties with Israel; and the chances of Hamas winning Palestinian elections mooted to be held in May.

This weekend's Fairfax papers included a report on an all-female Palestinian racing team by Ruth Pollard. While the piece was an interesting read overall, there are one or two small inconsistencies that are worth noting. In addition to this, there were a number of instances where the Age inserted small changes to make the tone of the article seem more anti-Israel. Some of these have been noted below.

Pollard profiles Noor Daoud, a Palestinian woman who won an Israeli formula-three competition last month. In the interview, Daoud explains how it is that she can no longer drive on the road.

''It is not the first time I have driven 200km/h - I lost my licence in 2009 when...

Earlier in the week, Overland editor Jeff Sparrow interpreted remarks from US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that Iran is not trying to develop a "nuclear weapon", but a "nuclear capability" to mean that Iran's nuclear program is entirely legal. While Sparrow was using this quote to help support a perverse conspiracy theory involving Israel, for reasons unknown, trying to dupe the rest of the world into punishing Iran, Panetta is not the only official to have stated that Iran is not developing a nuclear weapon. In fact, Panetta himself has made it clear that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within a year, were it to make the decision to build one. Furthermore, Reuters reported yesterday that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said something similar, albeit in more detail...

According to a recent AP report, after facing criticism from Israeli Knesset members for hosting two Hamas MPs at its recent conference, the International Parliamentary Union (IPU) has reportedly apologised to Israel.

Israel objected because the militant group has killed hundreds of Israelis in attacks over the years. Hamas is considered a terrorist group by the EU. and U.S.

The union's secretary-general, Anders Johnsson...

It is lucky that freedom of speech is not the main selling point for Palestinian statehood because the stabbing of a human rights activist in Gaza who dared criticise the Hamas government and resistance groups would undermine the enterprise’s bona fides.

Mahmud Abu Rahma, international relations director at the al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, was “stabbed multiple times by several masked attackers on Friday evening”, according to an AFP report.

This Update offers threes pieces related to recent news on the ongoing crisis over Iran's nuclear program.

First up, former security adviser to the British government Andrew Cummings explains the rationale behind the campaign of covert action against Iran, as epitomised by the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist last week. Cummings argues that those who assert that such moves are dangerous fail to understand that the alternatives are even more risky and fraught.

Jeff Sparrow, the editor of literary journal Overland, has written a missive in The Drum today on the "terrorism campaign" going on in Iran. This refers not to what first comes to mind when one reads "Iran" and "terror campaign" in the same sentence, but rather a horrendeous campaign of murder and intimidation against scientists being waged, of course, by Israel: (emphasis added)

Last Wednesday, a motorcyclist attached a bomb to a car carrying a man called Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, killing him instantly, and injuring his two companions.

That was merely the latest atrocity inflicted upon individuals and facilities associated with nuclear physics in that country ... this is terrorism, pure and simple - the systematic infliction of deadly violence launched against civilians and their families so as to create a climate of fear among Iranian physicists and other nuclear personnel. 

As Sparrow explains, the assassinations of Iranian nuclear physicists cannot be justified by pointing out that they are working towards a nuclear weapon. You see... 

This Updates leads with two articles on the likely policies of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood now that it has won the parliamentary election, gaining approximately 41% of seats with other Islamist groups taking the Islamist bloc up to something like 2/3 of all seats.

First up is Washington Institute expert on Egyptian politics Eric Trager, looking at the likely agenda of the Brotherhood in power. He says that the agenda will be theocracy internally, and confrontation internationally, and that expectations that the group will moderate are very unlikely to be met - offering some behavioural evidence for this.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), confirmed on January 10, that Iran has started enriching uranium up to 20 percent at an underground site at ‘Fordow', near the Shi'ite Muslim holy city of Qom.

Iran has maintained that its nuclear program is for civilian peaceful purposes. However, the underground enrichment facility ‘Fordow' casts further doubt on Iran's statements that the facility is for civilian purposes. The site was an Iranian secret that was only revealed in September 2009 by the US, France and Britain.

Iran's enrichment of uranium at 20 percent also suggests that that its nuclear program is not for civilian use, which would enrich uranium at around 3.5 percent - the level needed for nuclear power plants.

The last two weeks have seen two meetings in Amman Jordan between Israeli and Palestinian representatives, in what are being called "preparatory talks", but are the first direct public contacts between the two sides since 2010. (Some more details on the latest rounds of talks are reported here, here and here.)

A good backgrounder from BICOM on both the significance of the talks and the political factors influencing them is first up. It puts the meetings in the context of the Quartet efforts to restart talks and significant pressure on the Palestinian side to renew negotiations, and discusses what is known about the contents of the two meetings.

Recently Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas claimed that Khaled Meshaal, the Hamas leader in Damascus, agreed during reconciliation talks between Fatah and Hamas on December 22, that "there will be no military resistance" and also agreed that "the permanent solution is on the ‘67 borders." Abbas and Meshaal also agreed to a new temporary leadership for the PLO, for the first time in tandem with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

However, it is unclear both the extent to which Meshaal accepts what Abbas said they agreed to and more importantly, whether Meshaal is speaking for Hamas - as many in Hamas have openly denied this new strategy, suggesting a rift between the Hamas leadership in Syria and the Gaza strip.

Israel has assumed the unwanted role as a world leader in developing medical technology and planning to prepare for disasters, and its innovations are being studied and disseminated to other countries to save lives.

In one example, American politician Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head and almost killed a year ago, but an Israeli-made bandage is credited with stopping her bleeding. Today she is alive and on the road to recovery.

Dr. John Cohn, a Professor of medicine and assistant professor of pediatrics at Thomas Jefferson University, recently wrote about his visit to Israeli medical centres to learn about their medical disaster management plans on a program now in its eighth year run by the Disaster Management Division of Israel's Ministry of Health...

A news story which received little coverage in Australian media surrounds the tragic news that Turkey committed a massacre that killed 35 civilians in an air strike into Iraq near a Kurdish village along the Turkish border on 28 December 2011.

Turkey has admitted that the attack was an error. Turkey claimed that it intended to target suspected Kurdish militants, but that the victims turned out to be civilians not terrorists. The victims of the attack are believed to have been villagers involved in smuggling cigarettes into Turkey from Iraq.

The attack was one of the deadliest attacks since the PKK took up arms in 1984 in a conflict in which more than 40,000 people have been killed.

Today's Update features two pieces on the situation in Syria, where 20 civilians were reportedly killed yesterday, bringing the death toll close to 6,000 according to rebel leaders, despite the presence of a team of Arab League observers in the country.

First up is David Kenner of Foreign Policy, detailing the fact that the head of the Arab League observers mission, Sudanese Gen. Mohammad Ahmed Mustafa al-Dabi, is himself alleged to have been involved in genocide in Darfur. The allegations are that General al-Dabi was responsible for creating the Arab "Janjaweed" militias responsible for most of the massacres there. Kenner makes it clear that given this and other problems with the Arab League mission, which he discusses, "Syrians are still very much alone."

The issue of public gender discrimination and harassment in Israel has received significant media coverage both in Israel and abroad.

It began with recent controversies over women singing in a ceremony for the Israeli army, which was boycotted by religious soldiers, and the informal gender segregation on some buses in ultra-Orthodox (haredi) areas. (See a previous blog post on these issues.)

It has now been compounded by an interview with an eight year old Orthodox girl from Beit Shemesh, Naama Margolis, who was visibly shaken when she talked about her fear of walking to school due to the harassment she has been subjected to by some ultra-Orthodox Jews who have insulted and harrassed her for being dressed ‘immodestly'.

Naama said: "When I walk to school in the morning, I used to get a tummy ache because I was so scared that they were going to stand and start yelling and spitting".

The harassment that Naama experienced has rightfully been strongly condemned by both Israeli political and religious leaders.

A young Italian journalist named Ruben Salvadori has prepared a film about how he and other photojournalists reporting from the West Bank not only report what they see but help to create the clashes and dramatic scenes which helps them sell photographs...

Two recent stories in the Australian newspaper by Middle East correspondent John Lyons - "Stone cold justice" (Weekend Australian Magazine, Nov. 26) http://tinyurl.com/6puavp9 and "Rudd seeks action on torture allegations involving Palestinian children" (Australian, Dec. 17) http://tinyurl.com/6rdzqjr - have generated a degree of controversy about Israel's judicial treatment of Palestinian minors in the West Bank accused of using stones and rocks as weapons.

On Dec. 3, the Australian published an opinion piece from NGO Monitor's Gerald Steinberg that provides context for the treatment of Palestinian minors and largely disputes the substance of the claims made in Lyons' stories. Steinberg's article can be read here - http://tinyurl.com/7m6j3wf...

In the editorial in the current January edition of the Australia/Israel Review, Colin Rubenstein takes on the false belief that antisemitism in the Middle East comes almost solely from the conflict with Israel and will disappear if there is an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal

In the course of the editorial, Colin noted:

It is true that, in medieval times, Jews in Muslim societies tended on the whole to be better off than in Christian Europe, but this is hardly to suggest that their human rights were fully respected.

Now, some material has come to light which illustrates this point brilliantly.

Despite its claimed opposition to terrorism, the PA continues to glorify terrorists.

This was reinforced again when Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas met with freed Palestinian terrorist Amna Muna in Turkey on December 21, along with ten other Palestinians freed and exiled to Turkey as part of the deal to release kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in October.

Muna is a 35-year-old West Bank woman who was serving a life sentence for using an Internet promise of romance to lure 16-year-old Israeli Ophir Rahum to the West Bank, where he was killed by waiting militants in 2001.

According to a PA statement Abbas "praised the prisoners for remaining steadfast in the face of Israeli wardens' mastery."

Today's Update features three pieces looking at the choices currently being made by  the Palestinian political leadership - both those associated with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Fatah in the West Bank, and with Hamas in Gaza.

First up is veteran Israeli Palestinian affairs analyst Pinhas Inbari, who looks at the push by Fatah and PA head Mahmoud Abbas for preparations for the election scheduled for May in which he says he will not run. Inbari notes that Fatah seems to be resisting Abbas' call to name a successor candidate and argues this is because Fatah is totally ill-prepared for either succession or elections.

There is good reason for being sceptical of reports suggesting Hamas is shifting from armed resistance to non-violent resistance and will settle for a Palestinian state in the 1967 borders.

In recent "Media Week" columns, I have reviewed the first three episodes of the British/French drama, "The Promise", shown on SBS TV. This series has been characterised throughout by rampant and crudely propagandistic political messages directed against Israel and Jews and selective, distorted portrayals of history, and it really hit its straps in the final episode (18/12).

There has been much written about the impasse in restarting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in recent years. Most recently, US Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta sparked controversy at the Brookings Institute on Dec. 2 when, following a speech, he was asked about what steps Israel "should take now" to move toward peace and replied "Just get to the damn table."

Recently the issue of public female discrimination in Israel has received significant media attention following recent controversies including over women singing in a ceremony for the Israeli army which was boycotted by religious soldiers, and the informal gender segregation on some buses in Ultra orthodox (haredi) areas. According to one stream of ultra-Orthodox tradition men should not listen to women sing. More commonly, Ultra-orthodox men attempt to avoid mingling with women who are not members of their family.

While any form of alleged public gender discrimination must be condemned and addressed, the incidents have been unfairly exaggerated as reflecting a general problem in all of Israeli society...

It wasn't even close. In fact it was a "landslide". That is how pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting describes its decision to bestow the Guardian newspaper the 2011 "Dishonest Reporting Award" for its relentless anti-Israel coverage.

Readers of Fairfax newspapers will be familiar with the Guardian's news stories and one-sided selection of opinion pieces via their regular appearance in the Age, Sydney Morning Herald and the Canberra Times.

This Update deals with some claims being made that Israeli democracy is supposedly eroding or under threat as the result of a variety of controversial legislative changes being discussed in Israel, as well as certain recent controversies concerning the treatment of women by sectors of the ultra-religious community in Israeli society.

First up is American law professor and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz, who makes it clear that the intense arguments he witnessed while recently visiting Israel over the issues in question actually make it very clear that Israel is a vibrant democracy under no threat.

Episode three of "The Promise" (11/12) sees British Mandate soldier Len, who has had his platoon raided and soldiers shot, has been caught in the King David Hotel bombing and has been shot on the street, kidnapped with two colleagues and held in a hole for 15 days, until he is released and his colleagues hanged. He must be the unluckiest soldier in the British army. In the present day, Len's grand-daughter Erin takes a Palestinian to the house, where he very pointedly asks her friend's parents where they are from "originally" and the mother begrudgingly tells him Hungary. She visits Hebron where she hears an Israeli tell a group, "You'll notice most of the streets around here are deserted. It's known as the sterile zone. Why? To make room for 500 Jewish settlers who have no right to be here under international law, almost the entire Palestinian population of Hebron has been moved out." This is a gross exaggeration and ignores the ancient history of Hebron's Jewish community, and its religious significance.

This Update features two pieces on how Damascus-dependent terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah have coped with the possible loss of President Bashar al-Assad as a key ally in the wake of the recent unrest in Syria.

First up is veteran Israeli Arab Affairs analyst Pinhas Inbari, who looks at Hamas' situation in the wake of the uncertain future in Syria and also Egypt. He notes that the leadership of Hamas is quite happy to be moving its alliance from Damascus to a Cairo dominated by their Muslim Brotherhood allies, as looks likely to eventuate.

The Assad regime's brutal crackdown in Syria has resulted in the death of more than 4000 people including at least 300 children, according to the UN.

On December 2, the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) passed a resolution condemning the continued widespread, systematic and gross violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms by the Syrian authorities.

The resolution was in response to findings of a new investigative report on human rights conditions in Syria prepared by the an independent Commission of Inquiry established by HRC which found that Assad regime's authorities and members of its military and security forces committed 'gross and systematic violations of human rights'.

The resolution while welcome clearly does not go far enough. It diagnosed the problem but proposed to do nothing at all useful to remedy it...

This Update features two pieces on one of the unpleasant surprises to come out of the first round of the Egyptian elections last week, the unexpectedly strong showing of the hyper-Islamist Al-Nour Salafist parties, who got 24.4% of the vote, second behind the also Islamist Muslim Brotherhood with 36%. Both reports are from analysts currently on the ground in Cairo.

Washington Institute scholar Eric Trager describes his own encounters with Salafist candidates and activists, as well as locals who support them. He finds them viewed by locals as honest, even saintly, despite the fact that they seem to have considerable inexplicable money for their campaign and it is unclear where this came from.

SBS TV is showing a four-part drama, “The Promise”. The series, from Britain’s Channel 4 and France’s Canal+ and Arte France, has been widely criticised for its rampant bias against Jews and Israel. The first episode (27/11) introduced the main character, Erin, an 18-year-old English girl who stays with a rich Israeli family. She has the diary of her grandfather Len who served with the British troops in Palestine immediately after World War II, so the story switches between the British battling the treacherous Jews and the Israelis oppressing the Palestinians.

Today both the Age and Sydney Morning Herald published an article by Harriet Sherwood regarding Israel's plans to relocate the Jahalin Bedouin from their camps on land which they do not own to a permanent Bedouin town.

The article, originally published in the Guardian does not provide a balanced understanding of the issues at hand. The Bedouin are living on land to which they have no legal title that has been within the municipal boundaries of Ma'aleh Adumim since 1977. Relocation has been periodically discussed with the Bedouin since the 1980s...

Oft-quoted Australian "strategic analyst" Hugh White had a piece in The Age yesterday day on the Iranian nuclear crisis which betrayed such a lack of serious and logical strategic thought, so many shallow and glib yet ill-informed assumptions, that it seemed to be simply begging for a thorough "fisking" (Urban Dictionary definition: "The word is derived from articles written by Robert Fisk that were easily refuted, and refers to a point-by-point debunking of lies and/or idiocies.") Here's my effort.

The US ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, has shown breathtaking ignorance, insensitivity and naivety by blaming Israel for Arab and Muslim antisemitism in Europe.

As we noted in a post last week, the EU lat weeked imposed new tougher sanctions on Iran, and today Australia followed suit.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd announced from Lithuania that Australian intends to impose additional sanctions in response to Iran's continuing non-compliance with United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions on its nuclear program.

Meanwhile, the US Senate has voted unanimously to pass the most stringent economic sanctions against Iran to date. However, the move was opposed to by the Obama administration.

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, expressions of explicit anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish sentiments are beginning to surge. In Middle East politics, it has long beem traditional to point a finger at Israel, "the Zionists" and "the Jews", who were blamed for all the problems of the Muslim and Arab worlds. "The Jews" were used by the regimes as a convenient distraction from their own peoples' misery and hardship, and its causes. Many had hoped that the Arab spring indicated a turn for the better and an end to this racist and counter-productive tradition, since intitially, Israel was hardly even mentioned as a cause for the fate of Arab societies. For once, the finger of blame was rightly being pointing at their own dictatorial regimes. Sadly, as prominent American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has noted,

Now in Cairo, and across the Arab Middle East, Israel and the Jews are serving once again as universal boogeymen. Once dictators used anti-Semitism to divert their citizens' attention away from their own problems. Now expressions of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories seem to rise up organically.

This truth doesn't conform to the generally accepted narrative of the Arab Spring, but ignoring it won't make it disappear.

Despite the widely-trumpeted new reconciliation deal between Hamas and Fatah, the two factions appear to remain irreconcilable.

... The Palestinian Authority (PA) itself seems to resent these accusations of reliance on Israel. This was made clear by Adli Sadeq, the PA's ambassador to India, in an article written for PA newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. The article, translated by Palestine Media Watch, unequivocally rejects the "common mistake or misconception" that the PA in any way recognises the right of Israel to exist. As Sadeq explains, this is merely a line of thinking that Israelis have "fooled themselves" into following...

AIJAC mourns the passing of our esteemed former colleague David Greason - a brilliant writer and contributor to AIR, especially in the field of far-right politics in Australia and the UK.

David came to us with a colourful background...

Following the Iranian ‘mob' attack on the British embassy, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands have recalled their ambassadors temporarily from Iran. The UK immediately closed its embassy in Iran and ordered Iran's dipxlomatic staff to leave London.

A meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels condemned the attack on the British embassy, and announced new economic and travel sanctions on Iran to deter its nuclear program.  The sanctions will freeze the assets of 143 companies and ban 37 Iranian nationals described as "directly involved in Iran's nuclear activities" from entering the EU.  However, the EU did not follow Britain, Canada and the US which severed all dealings with Iran's Central Bank.  France has also been urging collective EU action to follow the British example and also to stop oil imports from Iran.

The US Congress also seems poised to push stronger action on Iran. On December 1, the US Senate unanimously approved tougher sanctions against Iran, voting to penalise foreign financial institutions that do business with Iran's Central Bank - the main conduit for its oil revenues...

As readers are probably aware, in the first round of voting in Egypt earlier this week, the Muslim Brotherhood did even better than many polls had predicted, as did the even more extreme Salafists. This Update is devoted to analysis of this outcome.

First up is Israeli academic Barry Rubin, who says that he was criticised for being too pessimistic in projecting an Islamist win in Egypt - but the results from the first round are worse than anything he predicted. He points out that the "Facebook" liberals that started the revolution got barely 5% of the vote, and that things may well get even more extreme with the next round of voting...

Following on from this post concerning an accusation of Israel supposedly "pinkwashing" its public image by spruiking its record on gay rights to hide alleged injustices, a number of gay writers have penned scathing responses in the Jewish and international media.

Writing in the Forward, Jay Michaelson gives a critique of the piece by Sarah Schulman in the New York Times that began the whole kerfuffle...

Ilan Grapel, a twenty seven year old American-Israeli was finally released on October 27 in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners in Israel, after having spent four months in an Egyptian jail due to false allegations of espionage. In 2009, he was a Goldmann Fellow at AIJAC's Melbourne office.

A month after his release, Grapel has told his story in an interview with Yedioth Ahronoth. Grapel describes how he spent 150 days in a four-by-four metre room, two weeks of which he spent in complete confinement that made him "nearly lose his mind".

Following increasing threats of sanctions over the Iranian nuclear program, as was being progressively reported in the Guardian's liveblog, the UK embassy in Iran was stormed last night (Australia time) by a group of supposed "students". The British government has unequivocally held the Iranian regime responsible.

Even though France has been the strongest European champion of the new round of sanctions, as British journalist Christopher de Bellaigue noted in a 2008 article, the British hold a special place in Iranian paranoia...

On 29 November 64 years ago, the UN General Assembly voted on the partition plan, and the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 was adopted by a vote of 33 to 13, recommending the establishment of two states - Arab and Jewish. The Jews accepted the partition plan, the Arabs did not and five Arab states went to war with Israel.

However, November 29, is not called ‘Israel day' but rather the ‘International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People'. Marking this day at the UN was a General Assembly resolution on the "Question of Palestine" which condemned Israel, pre-empted the results of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians and failed to acknowledge Israel's legitimate security rights, amongst other concerning features of the resolution.

In response to the UN resolution, Ron Prosor, UN Representative to Israel delivered a stirring speech that condemned the UN's consistent attack on Israel and outlined the real reasons that have so far prevented peace...

In the lead up to Egypt's first ‘free and fair' election, the streets of Cairo have become increasingly chaotic.

On November 25, tens of thousands of people protested in Tahrir Square demanding an end to the military rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which has ruled Egypt since former president Hosni Mubarak lost power in February. More than a week of civil unrest and government crackdowns left 42 people dead and 3000 injured.

There are not only tensions between political parties in Egypt but also a resentment of ‘foreigners' - seen in conspiracy theories of ‘foreign meddling' in Egyptian politics, and also in recent attacks on foreign journalists including sexual assaults.

On Sunday night, SBS-TV screened the first of four episodes of a controversial British historical drama set in pre-state and contemporary Israel, entitled "The Promise". When it was screened in Britain by Channel 4 in February, it led to an official letter of complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, as well as strong critiques from Booker prize winning novelist Howard Jacobson, noted British academic expert on the Holocaust David Cesarani, and others....

I include below some of the critiques of "The Promise" from Britain for the benefit of Australian audiences.

As the AP reported on Sunday, the final results of the recent Moroccan elections confirm a victory, if not a majority, for Morocco's Islamist party. These elections form a part of the series of reforms implemented by the Moroccan King in order to quell the country's brief spell of Arab Spring-style protests.

Announcing final results Sunday, the ministry said the Justice and Development Party has taken 107 seats in the 395-seat legislature following the nationwide vote two days earlier.

The PJD - known by its French initials - is the latest Islamist party to win an election brought about by the Arab Spring. The right-of-center Istiqlal, a potential ally for the PJD, placed second with 60 seats.

Morocco may be the most recent country to have ostensibly voted an Islamist party into power, but it will not be the last...

The Sinai is not only a haven for terrorists, but it also a centre of people and organ smuggling.

The depth of the lawlessness was recently captured in CNN documentary "Death in the Desert", which reported on unimaginable violence experienced by Africans who cross the Sinai in the desperate attempt to make it to Israel.

Africans particularly from Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea fleeing their local hardships pay Bedouin tribes in the border area between Sudan and Egypt around $2,000 to be smuggled into Israel. But these smugglers often imprison and blackmail the helpless refugees or sell them to other Sinai Bedouin, who do the same, rather than fulfilling the deal.  If the Africans cannot pay the ransom, and sometimes even if they do pay, they are enslaved, raped, tortured and killed.

World-renowned Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz gave an important speech at "The Perils of Global Intolerance: the United Nations and Durban III" conference that took place on 22 September 2011 - designed to coincide with and counter the UN Durban III conference which promoted an anti-Zionist agenda and focussed on Israel as the world's sole nation mentioned as a source of "racism." It has just been made publicly available.

In his speech Dershowitz condemned the UN for failing to live up to its own Charter, and began his speech with this statement:

"One important reason why there is no peace in the Middle East an be summarised in tragically in two letters - U.N. That building dedicated in theory to peace has facilitated terrorism, stood idly by genocide, given a platform to Holocaust deniers, and disincentivised the Palestinians from negotiating a reasonable two state solution."

In Libya people have long speculated about Gaddafi's ancestry. While Gaddafi claimed to have been born in a tent in Sirte to the son of a poor Bedouin sheepherder and his wife, this story has been in doubt.

Now that Gaddafi has fallen, many feel that they are finally able to talk freely about Gaddafi. And what many of them are now saying is that he was a Jew.

In March, NBC's Richard Engel reported from Libya that one in five rebels was fighting Gaddafi because of the belief the Libyan dictator was Jewish.

More recently, Middle East analyst Andrew Engel reported from Libya in the New York Forward that throughout Libya he saw Graffiti depicting Gadaffi as a Jew and that many people he met were eager to tell him that Gaddafi was Jewish.

Post Continues

In the latest development from the ongoing saga surrounding the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, the UN will be holding off on the prosecution of the suspected assassins for the time being.

As reported, legal proceedings against Mustafa Badreddine, Salam Ayyash, Hussein Anaissi and Assad Sabra, Hezbollah members considered responsible for the assassination of Hariri, will not proceed in absentia.

Rather, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the UN-backed body tasked with prosecuting and resolving this matter, will wait for Lebanese authorities to arrest the four suspects.

This Update features three pieces commenting on the international debate about a new round of sanctions on Iran - with the US, Britain and Canada announcing new measures on Monday, and Europe agreeing "in principle" to expand sanctions a couple of days later

First up is an editorial from the Washington Post, in which the paper argues that the new sanctions announced by the US Administration amount to "half-measures". Instead, the paper argues, the sorts of tough sanctions proposed by French President Nicholas Sarkozy early this week should be adopted - including a freeze on the assets of Iran's central bank, and a complete embargo on all petroleum purchases from Iran being adopted by a coalition of Western states.

As part of its "Lost Worlds' series, SBS TV is showing a seven-part series from Britain's Channel 4 titled "The Bible: a History". The second instalment (13/11), "Abraham", was presented by Rageh Omaar, a former BBC journalist now with al-Jazeera. He described Israel as "land the Palestinians have occupied for centuries and which the Jews believe belongs to them." He seeks to cast the Jewish claim to Israel solely in religious terms, neglecting to mention that Jews have occupied the land continuously for thousands of years.

Fast becoming a viral sensation, a new YouTube video (below) shows two Spanish men "photobombing" an al-Jazeera broadcast by engaging in a long, passionate kiss in frame as the reporter is talking. 

The irony of the video is that while the two were supposedly making a point about marriage equality in Spain, they happened to do so on a state-owned network from a country in which homosexuality is punishable by lashings and imprisonment. Indeed, a report from the UN High Commission for Refugees has this to say on homosexuality in Qatar:

Homosexual behavior is illegal [in Qatar]. Islamic laws against homosexuality are applied. [In Qatari society], homosexuality is taboo. There is no visible social support for gay and lesbian rights.

On the topic of homosexuality in the Middle East, Sarah Shulman has written in the New York Times on the prominence of the gay community in Israel and Israeli officials speaking out against the intolerance shown to homosexuals in...

New York Times journalist Rick Gladstone has reported on a rare act of defiance from Iran's internal media, stemming from an all-too-familiar crackdown on the messages that media officials disseminate.

Iran's main government-run newspaper was published Tuesday without a front-page headline, replaced by photographs of its headquarters during an assault the day earlier by forces working for the judiciary who briefly arrested its top official - the media adviser to the president - and more than 30 others.

The presentation of the front page appeared to be an act of protest by the newspaper over the unusual episode on Monday, which judiciary officials described as...

In another example of UN dysfunctionality, Syria has been admitted as the Arab representative to UNESCO's human rights committee, just a day after a UN report criticised the country's massacre of 3,500 anti-government protesters.

The decision is even more bizarre in light of the Arab League suspension of Syria over the Assad regime's human rights' abuses.

This Update provides analysis of the increasingly "Arab Spring" instability which seems to be developing across the Middle East - in Egypt, Syria and Jordan.

First up are Washington Institute experts David Schenker and Eric Trager on the background and implications to the re-ignition of significant violence between Egypt's military SCAF goverment, and protestors gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square over the weekend - which has led to the death of upwards of 24 people and hundreds of injuries.

Former DFAT head Richard Woolcott wrote a piece for the Age (11/11) critical of Australia's vote against Palestinian membership of UNESCO. Having spent more than half his article setting out the merits of Australia obtaining a seat on the UN Security Council, he then wrote, "In these circumstances, I find it both surprising and a decisive setback to our election prospects that the Prime Minister decided Australia should vote against the admission of Palestine to UNESCO."

A media stunt by a group of Palestinians trying to falsely tar Israel as an apartheid state not only caused some in the fourth estate to fall hook, line and sinker but to abrogate basic journalistic standards.

Six Palestinians called The West Bank Freedom Riders cynically tried to lay claim to the legacy and imagery of African Americans who fought against segregation in the 1950s/60s in the United States by "proving" they are banned from using Israeli public buses to cross over from the West Bank into Jerusalem.

But an analysis by Simon Plosker from Honest Reporting of the claims made by the six "Freedom Riders" and the media coverage shows the absurdity of the stunt and how easily it could be proved as dishonest propaganda.

A constant talking point on the Middle East is that Israeli building in settlements in the West Bank is supposedly taking up more and more land and supposedly making Palestinian statehood unviable...

So how much of the West Bank is covered by settlements?..

The Palestinians appear to have failed in their bid to even force the US to veto a UN Security Council decision to recognise them as a UN member state, and seem a bit confused about their next step. PA President Mahmoud Abbas seems to be now pushing for a unity government with Hamas following secret talks in Cairo. He is planning to meet Hamas head Khaled Meshaal next week, and it seems likely PA Prime Minister Salem Fayyad may be forced out of office.

This Update deals with the general state of play in terms of where the Palestinian could head next.

Following up on the post Tuesday concerning controversial Israeli proposals to limit or tax foreign government funding to "political' Non-Governmental Organisations in Israel, a Jerusalem Post editorial on the subject has an interesting fact that may help explain why some Israelis are so concerned about the issue:

...European governments spend more on left-wing NGOs operating in Israel - between $75 million and $100m. a year - than their total contributions to nonprofit human rights groups in other Middle East countries, according to NGO Monitor.

As I wrote earlier this year, a great deal of the problems facing the Arab world as it stumbles towards democracy stem from a conservative culture that is inhibiting female participation in society. Some very illuminative data on this issue is provided by Sara Hamdan in today's International Herald Tribune. As Hamdan explains, initiatives to develop an entrepreneurial culture in the public-sector dominated Arab states only address a small part of the issue; a much greater problem facing the Arab states is the absence of a great deal of their population from the workforce, this segment being overwhelmingly female.

Encouraging entrepreneurs to start new companies is one way to tackle this problem and promote job creation ... Analysts say these efforts will not make a big difference, however, if social attitudes do not change in societies that traditionally embrace culturally enforced gender roles and the social traditions of a patriarchal hierarchy - particularly in the Gulf countries...

Today's Update features two pieces on the worsening international position of Syria's Assad regime, in the wake of Syria's suspension by the Arab League, a call by Jordan's King Abdullah for Assad to step down, and new European sanctions. All this occurred as the killing went on in defiance of an Arab League peace plan (at least 40 people were reportedly killing on Monday, some disturbing video is here) and following attacks in Syria and Lebanon by pro-regime mobs on the Embassies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and Jordan.

The old saying to "never waste a good crisis" takes on a worrying meaning in Greece as the LàOS party with an antisemitic track record wins a major breakthrough for the far right by securing ministerial positions in the new unity coalition.

And with everyone focussing on the potential implications of the Greek debt crisis for Europe and the world economy, no one seems to have noticed.

There has been some controversy in Israel over a proposal coming out of Israel's Ministerial Committee for Legislation which would limit or tax the ability of foreign governments or international bodies like the UN to fund Israeli NGOs...

American law professor David Bernstein has an excellent post challenging the idea that such a law (and it is by no means clear that such a law can get through the Knesset, Israel's parliament, or what its provisions would be if it did) would be undemocratic...

Eric Falt, assistant director general for external relations and public information at the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has issued an official letter of protest from UNESCO's director general, Irina Bokova regarding a cartoon which UNESCO claimed constituted incitement.

This could have been an encouraging sign that UNESCO is finally acting against incitement, racism and specifically antisemitism prevalent in Arab and Muslim media, especially in the state-sponsored press. However, the cartoon that so inflamed UNESCO officials was published in Haaretz, an Israeli independent newspaper, which is protected under Israel's laws regarding freedom of the press. Moreover, the only incitement that seemed to concern UNESCO is incitement against UNESCO.

On October 22, the Age and Sydney Morning Herald "Good Weekend" magazine ran a profile written by Jane Wheatley of prominent American linguistics expert, radical author and political activist Noam Chomsky. It is not available online, but was almost wholly complimentary to its subject - so much so that it completely re-wrote the history of one of the most controversial aspects of Chomsky's long career in public controversy, his 1979 defence of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson...

I penned a letter to "Good Weekend" setting this matter straight.

As outlined in yesterday's update, the UN's atomic energy watchdog has just released a report that just falls short of definitively stating that Iran has a nuclear weapons program - seemingly the closest that the UN ever comes to an unequivocal condemnation of a country that is not Israel. The report has emerged amid rumours that Israel is gearing-up for an attack on Iran and is busy soliciting support from allies in the UK and the US.

Predictably, Iran did not respond with steps to assure the international community that its nuclear program is peaceful, but instead blamed an American conspiracy and then threatened to destroy Israel.

Iran denies the allegations and says the evidence used by the U.N. nuclear watchdog was fabricated by the United States and its allies. It has insisted that its nuclear program is aimed only at generating electricity and ensuring an independent fuel supply for its nuclear power plants.

... "If smoke columns rise from our nuclear facilities, then this scenario could happen in other areas," said Brig. Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, deputy chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces. "The Dimona station in Israel is the easiest...

This Updates features three informative pieces on the seemingly increasingly Islamist tint colouring the Arab Spring movements, from Tunisia, to Libya, to Egypt, and beyond.

First up is one of Israel's most respected and sober Middle East experts, Dr. Asher Susser from Tel Aviv University. He takes issue with the way the media and commentators have focussed too heavily on the "computer-savvy younger generation, skilled in the social networking tools of Facebook and Twitter and the modern media" which were allowed to overshadow the vast strength of the forces of tradition in Arab society. He argues that it is actually secularism that is in crisis across the Arab world, and the Arab Spring has "in many ways become a launching pad for Islamist political ascendance" with unclear effects on democracy hopes.

Writing in the Australian (4/11) in support of the decision by UNESCO to grant membership to the Palestinians, Izzat Abdulhadi, head of the General Delegation of Palestine to Australia, claimed, "Israeli occupation has not seen the protection and preservation of these riches. Israeli occupation has seen deliberate neglect, damage and the ongoing seizure of Palestine's cultural heritage and territory as its own, violently and with impunity, excluding the interests and rights of all others. Yet Australia voted no to Palestinian membership of UNESCO, preferring, it would seem, the theft and destruction of Palestine's and the world's heritage and saying no to peace." By contrast, he claimed, "Palestine is committed to the protection and preservation of these treasures." The track record shows the opposite to be the case.

Just after the Palestinian Authority admitted that they are not going to win the votes needed to secure UN Security Council recognition as a state, a report prepared for the Security Council on the subject has been leaked to the media. The report, written by the UN's Committee For the Admission of New Members, has has been leaked to American Arabic news network Al Hurra and published by Foreign Policy's Colum Lynch. The general impression from the report is that the Committee was unable to determine whether or not Palestine can qualify for statehood, but there were a few points that were a little curious.

For starters, see if you can pick what stands out from the following paragraph...

As readers may be aware, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Tuesday released a report into Iran's nuclear program which is being described by diplomats as "the most damning report ever published by the IAEA." The report itself is available in full here - the key extracts are collected here and here.

We lead with a summary of the report's key findings from Washington Institute for Near East Policy expert Simon Henderson. He pays particular attention to the report's revelations concerning where Iran obtained its nuclear technology - from Pakistan mainly, but also  possibly from Russia.

As readers may have seen reported, a private conversation between US President Barack Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy at Cannes last week was accidentally overhead by reporters. In it, the two were talking rather unflatteringly about Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. According to the reports, Sarkozy said of Netanyahu "I can't stand him anymore, he's a liar" while Obama responded, "You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day."

This story has sparked a fair amount of comment from various quarters concerning what it says about the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu (which all informed observers already knew was hardly notable for its warmth), and the wider US-Israel relationship.

A breaking report from the AP reveals that the Palestinian Authority (PA)'s Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Malki, has admitted that they have failed to muster the nine votes needed in the UN Security Council in order to approve their statehood bid.

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki told The Associated Press Tuesday, "It is clear now, with the U.S. counter effort and intervention, that we are not going to have these nine votes." They can still apply to the General Assembly.

That the US has been campaigning strongly against the bid is unsurprising given the difficult situation that the PA has been placing the Obama administration in through its recent UN antics...

Pakistan is a foreign policy conundrum for the West. While Pakistan has publicly been an ‘ally' to the West in fighting al-Qaeda and supporting the war in Afghanistan, privately its intelligence agencies work with the Taliban and support terrorist organisations. In addition, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is considered by many to be unstable, and therefore poses a very real threat to international security should it end up in the wrong hands.

An important article by Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder in The Atlantic, entitled "The Ally from Hell' provide some interesting new insights and information relevant to the significant dangers posed by Pakistan's complex dual game:

"Pakistan lies. It hosted Osama bin Laden (knowingly or not). Its government is barely functional. It hates the democracy next door. It is home to both radical jihadists and a large and growing nuclear arsenal (which it fears the US will seize). Its intelligence service sponsors terrorists who attack American troops. With friends like this, who needs enemies?"

Critical discussion of Israel may be one thing, but increasingly ‘academic' discussion of Israel can cross a red line into blatant antisemitism.

Gilad Atzmon is an Israeli-born Jazz musician living in Britain who has declared himself a "proud self hating Jew." He is known not merely for being critical of Israel but for his antisemitic writings in which he encourages belief in a global Jewish conspiracy of world domination, casts doubt on the Holocaust and blames Jewish persecution - including by the Nazis - on Jews themselves.

Therefore, it is alarming that Atzmon's latest book The Wandering Who?, which reprises many of Atzmon's antisemitic themes has been endorsed by ‘respected' academics including John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Richard Falk of Princeton.

A new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report due to be released tomorrow is believed to contain compelling evidence that Iran is now at the end stage of its nuclear research program and is actively working on weaponisation technologies.

Ahead of the report's scheduled release we present a range of reading that predicts what the report will likely detail, where the effort to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program is at and whether the time has come to move from economic sanctions to military options.

The acceptance of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was criticised within the UN by none other than the Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

In an interview during the G20 summit in Cannes, France, he warned against further attempts by the Palestinians to join other UN bodies and agencies and stated that such efforts are "not beneficial for Palestine and not beneficial for anybody." He warned that "millions and millions" of people could be affected if UN agencies suffer budget cuts as a result of the Palestinian bids: "This will have implications for all the agencies of the United Nations. When an organisation is not properly functioning because of a lack of resources, you have to think about the millions and millions of people who are being impacted and affected," he said.

Ban's concerns are based on actions by the United States and Canada, which contributed 25% of UNESCO's funding, and have cut off their funding following the PA vote.

Richard Goldstone's op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week explaining why the claim that Israel is an "apartheid state" is baseless was primarily targeted against the so-called "Russell Tribunal on Palestine", due to take place this weekend in Cape Town, which will allegedly "examine whether Israel's practices against the Palestinians is in breach of the prohibition on apartheid under International Law."

One particularly pernicious and enduring canard that is surfacing again is that Israel pursues "apartheid" policies. In Cape Town starting on Saturday, a London-based nongovernmental organization called the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will hold a "hearing" on whether Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid. It is not a "tribunal." The "evidence" is going to be one-sided and the members of the "jury" are critics whose harsh views of Israel are well known.

Goldstone seems to have struck a chord with some of the Tribunal's organisers - Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Michael Mansfield have responded to Goldstone in the pages of the Guardian, defending the decision that the Tribunal has yet to officially consider...

On Wednesday a flotilla of two ships - the Canadian ship Tahrir and the Irish ship Saoirse quietly left a Turkish port with the aim to breach the Gaza blockade by Friday.

News of this latest flotilla "Freedom Waves to Gaza" was kept secret until the ships reached international waters.

According to the organisers, the 27 activists on board came from Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United States, and included Palestinians and at least one Israeli Arab citizen.

This Update features two comments on the vote by the UN Educational, Social and Culture Organisation (UNESCO) to admit "Palestine" as a full member on Monday, a measure opposed by the Australia (see AIJAC's media release on the Australian vote here).  It also contains some comments on reports originating in the Israeli press alleging that the Israeli Government is stepping up preparations for a possible military strike on Iran's nuclear program.

Jake Lynch, Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, criticised his university for holding a research forum between Israelis and Australians. He told Imre Salusinszky, "The university risks sustaining reputational damage if the forum goes ahead. It risks being seen as condoning the complicity by Israeli universities in Israel's breaches of international law and indirectly raises problems with the university's social inclusion policy" (Australian, 25/10). Salusinszky reported that, in a letter to the university's Deputy Vice Chancellor, Lynch "says the forum is contrary to the university's social inclusion policy, which requires it to reach out to students in western Sydney. He says most Muslim students live in the west and feel ‘a sense of resentment and alienation resulting from the predominance of pro-Israeli voices in Australia's political and media discourses'." Lynch, who is also an executive member of the Sydney Peace Foundation, which awards the Sydney Peace Prize, seems to have a very skewed notion of what peace actually entails.

A whole series of events last night made an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities suddenly seem far closer than had previously been the case. After a week of speculation in the Israeli press, Haaretz reported yesterday that the Prime Minister and Defence Minister are trying to gain cabinet support for a strike.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a "small advantage" in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.

Netanyahu and Barak recently persuaded Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who previously objected to attacking Iran, to support such a move.

This report coincided with the test-firing of a new long-range Israeli missile, which could be capable of reaching targets in Iran...

The US-Israel alliance has come under increasing strain in recent time with both academics and US policy makers suggesting that the alliance has become more of a liability than an asset for US national interests. For instance, the infamous Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer based their whole "Israel Lobby" slander on the assumption that being associated with Israel was obviously and unequivocally bad for the US, and only some undemocratic and vaguely nefarious lobby could possible explain the continuing US alliance with Israel, as noted Middle East scholar Martin Kramer analysed and debunked brilliantly a few years ago.

However, a new report released by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy "Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States" (‘the report'), does even more to refute this trend in analysis and instead argues that US policy makers should acknowledge that the US-Israel alliance strongly serves US national interests in several important ways.

As Fairfax's Ruth Pollard reported this morning, now that they have been admitted to UNESCO, the Palestinian Authority (PA) will begin pushing for heritage protection of holy sites in the West Bank.

JERUSALEM: Significant religious sites throughout the West Bank, including the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem and Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, will be among the first to be pushed forward for world heritage status now Palestine has been granted membership of UNESCO.

A Palestinian Authority spokesman there were many sites and shrines in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that until now had been unprotected because of a lack of recognition and funding.

''Now we will be able to protect them and make sure they are known around the world,'' he said. ''We believe that becoming a member of the UNESCO is an overdue right for a country that has such a significant amount of heritage sites.''

This follows from a bid launched earlier this year to gain heritage status for the Church of Nativity, believed to be the site where Jesus was born. The idea of the PA being responsible for the care of this church and other non-Muslim holy sites should raise a few eyebrows amongst those who are even vaguely familiar with their recent history...

South African Judge Richard Goldstone has written an op-ed in this New York Times on 31 October condemning the false allegation that Israel is an ‘apartheid' state. He writes:

"The charge that Israel is an apartheid state is a false and malicious one that precludes, rather than promotes, peace and harmony."

This is the same Goldstone who did a great deal of damage to Israel by lending his name to the biased UN fact-finding mission into the Gaza conflict in 2009 which condemned Israel for deliberately killing civilians and war crimes while all but ignoring the Palestinian rocket attacks into Israel.

Goldstone later recanted his support for the report after realising that much of the information relied upon in the ‘Goldstone Report' was not credible and biased. In an op-ed in the Washington Post in April this year he stated, "if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document."

The admission of Palestine into the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, little more than a symbolic victory for the Palestinian Authority (PA), has severe repercussions on the largest funder of both the PA and UNESCO: The United States. As AFP has reported, US legislation prevents US funding of any UN body that admits the Palestinians as a member.

"We were to have made a $US60 million ($A57.11 million) payment to UNESCO in November and we will not be making that payment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters on Monday.

Nuland said the Palestinian admission "triggers longstanding (US) legislative restrictions which will compel the United States to refrain from making contributions to UNESCO."...

Abdisalan Hussein Ali, a 22-year-old Somali who grew up in America and is believed to be one of two suicide bombers who struck African Union forces on Saturday, called for jihad against Australia in a recording obtained by The New York Times. In the recording, Ali repeats the Al-Qaeda mantra that jihad is an obligation from God incumbent on every Muslim and then calls for his "brothers and sisters" to fight jihad in America, Canada, England, "anywhere in Europe", in Asia, Africa, China and Australia.

As noted in the Times article, Ali was seemingly an average, well-adjusted American teenager...

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This Update features some comment on the outcome of the Tunisian elections last week, and their wider implications.

First up is the Jerusalem Post arguing in an editorial that Tunisia demonstrated why it is the most promising candidate for democracy in the Arab world - as shown by the fair and violence-free elections. Yet the country also gave a plurality to an Islamist party, Ennahda, albeit one often described as "soft Islamist". The paper notes, however, that the head of Ennadha is not only violently anti-Israel, but his comparison of his party to Turkey's AKP is not as positive as some seem to imagine.

International legal scholar Louis René Beres, US Admiral (ret.) Leon Edney and US Lt Gen (ret.) Thomas G. McInerney have written an insightful article in Haaretz, looking at the current Iranian nuclear predicament and the various possible responses, focusing on the legality of a pre-emptive strike. They argue that the risk presented by a nuclear Iran is so great that a US strike is at least likely to be justifiable.

The Caroline Doctrine notes an implicit distinction between preventive war (which is never legal ), and preemptive war. Even the latter is not permitted merely to protect oneself against an emerging threat, but only when the danger posed is "instant" and "overwhelming."...

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As readers will note from the accompanying media release, AIJAC is very relieved and pleased that Ilan Grapel, a bright young Israeli-American student, has now been released after more than four months of detention in Egypt. Ilan served a 2009 stint in AIJAC's Melbourne's office as a visiting Goldman Fellow, part of a program run by our American partner, the American Jewish Committee...

In honour of the occasion of his release, it seems worth recalling some of the work Ilan did for AIJAC back in 2009...

Meanwhile, there has been some interesting discussion internationally about the motivations for Grapel's arrest and detention by Egypt's interim government, and what it says about where Egypt is going...

The Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange prompted various editorials. The worst, an inaccuracy-riddled effort in the Age (20/10), remarkably expressed the hope that the exchange would "prompt a rethink in Israel" and "be an incentive to renew negotiations". It doubted it would be, continuing, "In part, this is because Mr Netanyahu...refuses to end Jewish settlement activity on Palestinian land." This is clearly untrue, as the recent ten-month moratorium on building of houses in settlements demonstrated. That this did not lead to negotiation shows that Palestinian intransigence, not building within the existing boundaries of settlements is the problem. In addition, the land is not "Palestinian". The borders are to be settled by negotiation. The editorial goes on to advocate that Israel "accept Mr Abbas's conditions for talks." It should urge the Palestinians to talk without preconditions, as the Middle East Quartet proposed. Similarly, the Sydney Morning Herald editorial (20/10) stated, "The Israeli Prime Minister should also be reviewing his stance toward the Palestinian Authority."

Here is something that I would not have been able to write until today: with election results pouring in, Tunisia's Enahda party has declared victory. In its breakdown of the results thus far, Tunisia's fledgling English-language news agency Tunisia Live has reported that Enahda has won 43 of the 101 seats so far declared in the 217-seat Constituent Assembly and is expected to win a further 45, making a total of 88 seats or roughly 41% of the total. The Assembley will be tasked with appointing an interim government and will then have a year to design and implement a new constitution, allowing for Parliamentary and Presidential elections to be held.

Al Jazeera's live election blog has reported that as it searches for coalition partners,  Enahda issued a press statement indicating that it would cooperate with other parties and attempt to represent all Tunisians.

"We are pleased to see that the political climate has left behind the tension that was naturally part of the election campaign, and we are pleased to hear mature and responsible stances from political leaders. We certainly need to learn new democratic principles, including the fact that the opposition has an important role to play...

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According to AP reports, the Palestinian Authority (PA) envoy to Canada, Linda Sobeh Ali, was recalled yesterday after she tweeted a link to a Youtube video calling upon "millions" to "destroy the Jews".

Of course, the Canadian Authorities were very hostile towards the video and pressured the PA into recalling Ali. The PA, however, not only made excuses for the poem but went on to blame the "Jewish Lobby" for having to bring their envoy home.

Joseph Lavoie, a spokesman for Canada's foreign affairs minister, said Monday it was a serious enough matter for the Palestinian Authority that they recalled Sobeh Ali...

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Many reactions in the Palestinian street and media to the release of prisoners in exchange for the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit reveal a worrying and disturbing narrative of glorification of the returning terrorists and support for their heinous crimes and violent ways. Calls for future abductions of Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips for future prisoner releases were also common.

The death of long-standing Libyan Dictator Muammar Gaddafi on Thursday has led to the effective end of the NATO-supported Libyan revolution against his rule. This Update is devoted to understanding Libya's outlook and dilemmas in the wake of Gaddafi's death.

First up is noted American Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, who comments that the end of a despot like Gaddafi is always odd and somewhat anti-climactic, revealing the mighty dictator as only a petty, frightened man - and comparing Gaddafi's end to that of Saddam Hussein.

On Sunday 23 October, Tunisia held its first truly free election since its independence. Tunisian Hadiya Al Sabie said:

"It's the first time I have voted from my heart....Not for something that I am forced to vote for, but from my heart."

The polls have now closed after a voter turnout out of around 90 per cent of the country's 7 million registered voters. Tunisians voted to elect a 217-seat interim government to write a new constitution and govern until proper parliamentary and presidential elections can be held.

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The Australian (13/10) titled its editorial about the deal to release Gilad Shalit "Upholding a hallowed principle". With typical insight, it concluded, "It is galling to see terrorists released. We take comfort however from Shalit's imminent release from detention, which was against all international norms. We will share his joy when he is reunited with his family. The Israelis emerge with honour, having upheld the principle that human life is sacred and needless suffering cannot be endured. We can only hope that the returning Palestinians will do the same." A Sydney Morning Herald editorial (14/10) also sensitively considered Israel's dilemma, stating "To accede to the demands of any kidnapper is repugnant. It is all the more so when Hamas, which controlled Shalit's fate, has never abandoned the destruction of Israel as its stated aim. Yet equally, to abandon a captured soldier goes against human nature, as well as political good sense and the interest of Israel's defence force." 

Kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit is free after five years and four months in captivity in Gaza, and the elation in Israel is overwhelming. (An excellent collection of news and analysis on the release and its aftermath has been assembled by Britain's Telegraph. Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu's remarks welcoming Shalit home are here.) This Update focuses on the significance and aftermath of his release.

Interviewed last night by ABC Lateline's Ali Moore, former Haaretz editor David Landau, who once infamously told then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that he wished to see Israel "raped" in a US intervention forcibly imposing a settlement to the conflict, expressed his horror at the "weakness" that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is displaying to the world. According to Landau, Netanyahu did so through his sudden reversal of his previous refusal to agree to a prisoner exchange for Gilad Shalit.

I find myself in a strange and invidious situation because I'm not naturally of the right. I'm very much of the peace camp of the side of the sort of, so to speak, political spectrum that's always encouraged dealing with the Palestinians in the hope of making a final peace deal with the Palestinians, yet I find myself frankly horrified and, as an Israeli, also mortified by this shameless turnabout by the prime minister, Mr Netanyahu...

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In the wake of Gilad Shalit's release overnight from captivity in Gaza, major international NGOs have come in for criticism for not publicising his illegal incarceration by Hamas, an organisation on whose behalf these same NGOs have tirelessly campaigned to pressure Israel to lift its legal blockade of Gaza.

As noted in the last Update, the recently exposed alleged Iranian plot to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US at a Washington restaurant - and commit a number of the other terror attacks in the US - is a big story which has provoked much commentary and analysis.

Some of that analysis, such as by former CIA agent Robert Baer on ABC-TV's "Lateline" has cast doubt on the story, arguing the alleged plot, as outlined, appears too amateurish and slapdash to be the work of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp.

As the five-year hostage ordeal of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit draws to a close, we offer up some of the standout commentary from the last week on the merits of the deal reached by the Israeli government with Hamas.

The tension in the debate concerns the personal interest and the national interest and how these two forces interact have caused intense heartache and headaches for Israel.

Israel released the names of the Palestinian prisoners to be released in deal to free IDF soldier Gilad Shalit who has been held captive by Hamas since 2006. The prisoners include some of the most notorious terrorists perpetrators against Israel including individuals involved in the Sbarro and Café Moment suicide bombings, murderers of Nachshon Wachsman and the video taped October 2000 lynch of IDF reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami in Ramallah.

Yesterday, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected four petitions against the prisoner swap deal to free Shalit. The petitions were filed by the Almagor Terror Victims Association and relatives of Israelis killed in Palestinian attacks.

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Media commentators on the Palestinian prisoner swap deal to free Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas have at times wrongly insinuated that there is a degree of moral equivalence on both sides.

For example, in Ruth Pollard's "Israel names prisoners to be free" on The Age (17/10/2011), she writes:

"For Palestinians, who have at least 6000 loved ones in Israeli prisons, some for serious crimes, some for political activism and many held without charge or trial, the release of 1027 is not enough. Anxious relatives of prisoners gathered in town squares throughout the West Bank at the weekend, holding photographs of family members and praying their names would be on the list of those to be released."

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There has once again been a plethora of pieces about the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN. Probably the most misguided was by Malcolm Fraser in the Age (4/10). Dismissing as "thin" the sensible argument that agreement should come through negotiations, he disturbingly claimed that Western opposition to the Palestinian bid was "because of the lock that Israel has over the policies of too many Western countries." His "two major stumbling blocks to peace" were not Palestinian intransigence, but Palestinian division and "the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, the daily diminution of what might become Palestine." In fact, building in settlements since 2003 has only been within the existing settlement boundaries, so there has been no diminution of land.

It would appear that there is no room for Jews in the Arab Spring.

Last year, before the Arab Spring, veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas caused outrage when she recommended that Israeli Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else."

As an American of Lebanese descent, the 89-year-old Thomas should have known that the Arab Middle East was home to approximately 850,000 Jews known as Mizrahi (Eastern) Jews for thousands of years.

This morning (Australian time), US Attorney-General Eric Holder announced that two men had been charged with attempting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the US and, more significantly, doing so on behalf of the Iranian government. The two men were Manssor Arbabsiar, a naturalised US citizen of Iranian origin, and Gholam Shakuri, who is believed to be in Iran. Incredibly, Arbabsiar cooperated with the US authorities once arrested and so much of the information on the assassination plot was collected from his testimony.

Naturally, the Iranian government has denied the allegations and blamed a Zionist conspiracy.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast called the claims a "prefabricated scenario" and a "ridiculous show...

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It won't stop the revisionist propaganda underpinning the Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence campaign, but newspaper accounts from 1949 prove that the nascent State of Israel supported the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and opposed the land being absorbed by surrounding Arab countries.

The Israeli Government confirmed that a deal has been reached with Hamas for the release of 25-year-old IDF soldier Gilad Shalit - kidnapped by Hamas on 25 June 2006 - in exchange for 1027 Palestinian prisoners.

As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu announced:

"In the coming days we will return Gilad to the bosom of his parents, Aviva and Noam, to his brother Yoel, his sister Hadas, his grandfather Tzvi and the entire people of Israel".

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AIJAC's Jamie Hyams explains the Palestinian UN bid on Melbourne community television program "The Shtick"

As readers are hopefully aware, the big news out of Israel is the approval given overnight by the Israeli cabinet to a deal that will see long-captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit released by Hamas in exchange for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners. (The reported details of the deal have been summarised by AIJAC's own Sharyn Mittelman.) Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's statement on the Egyptian-German mediated agreement is here. AIJAC's statement on this news is here.

On Sunday, 9 October, many federal parliamentarians - reportedly all of them - were emailed a copy of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion' ("The Protocols").

The Protocols is a fraudulent antisemitic text that purports to be the minutes of a late 19th century meeting of Jewish leaders discussing their plan for global domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903 and was used to blame Jews for the Russian Revolution... and virtually all subsequent wars, conflicts or other negative events. Since that time it has been translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the twentieth century.

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The Australian Government has rightly condemned the Iranian decision to punish Iranian actress Marzieh Vafamehr with 90 lashes for participating in an Australian-made film that was critical of the Iranian regime. In a sense, however, Vafamehr is lucky that her "crime" had an Australian connection - this was enough to muster international support for her situation and will hopefully lead to her receiving better treatment. Unfortunately, the reprehensible abuse in Vafamehr's case is just another episode in the Islamic Republic's constant suppression of any dissent or criticism.

As noted in yesterday's Wall Street Journal by American-Iranian journalist Roxana Saberi, who was arrested in Iran in 2009 but freed under international pressure, while foreigners with international backing tend to be quickly released by the Iranians, Iran's hundreds of domestic political prisoners are rarely as lucky.

Just after my release from a Tehran prison in May 2009, an Iranian prisoner wrote an open letter entitled, "I wish I were a Roxana." Haleh Rouhi, a follower of Iran's minority Baha'i faith, was serving a four-year sentence for antiregime propaganda, although she said she was simply "teaching the alphabet and numbers" to underserved children...

Violent clashes between Coptic Christians and Egyptian Security forces on Sunday have killed at least 26 people mostly Christian and injured over 300 people. The clashes mark the worst violence in Egypt since the fall of Hosni Mubarak.

It started when thousands of Copts protested outside a state television station over the September 30 burning of a church in Aswan and demanded that the military sack the governor of Aswan, who had backed the burning and blamed the Copts for provoking it. It was also a protest against the role of state media inciting violence against Coptic Christians. When clashes broke out between protestors and security forces, some Muslims tried to support the Copts and joined in the call for resignation of the military council's chairman, Field Marshal Mohammed Tantawi. However, security forces were later joined by Muslim groups who attacked the Copts. According to the Associated Press, state television called on viewers to rush to the army's rescue, "casting the Christians as a mob seeking to undermine unity between the people and the military".

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In recent weeks, "price tag" crimes, committed by right-wing extremists, have intensified in Israel. Those acts included burning mosques in the West Bank and spraying them with graffiti, setting private Palestinian vehicles on fire, breaking into an IDF military base and sabotaging army vehicles in the base's auto-shop and leaving threatening graffiti at a left-wing activist's residents in Jerusalem. While the police and Shin - Bet are investigating these incidents, last week's signalled yet another red line crossed as price tag acts were committed within Israeli town inside the 1967-lines (the "Green Line"), and fierce condemnations were expressed from all sides of the political spectrum.

Today's Update looks at Syria, Iran and Turkey against the backdrop of the veto by China and Russia of sanctions by the UN Security Council against the Assad regime in Damascus for its ongoing violent crackdown against anti-government protesters. The resolution was supported by nine members but, significantly, Lebanon, which occupies a temporary seat on the Security Council, abstained from the vote, as did South Africa, India and Brazil. After the vote the EU indicated it intended passing its own sanctions against Syria. Meanwhile Turkey's PM Recep Erdogan continues to use the Syria issue and relentlessly attacks Israel for his own regional ambitions. We offer a number of articles that reveal the changing dynamics in the Middle East that are are not receiving sufficient attention in Australia and elsewhere.

In an amusing slip up captured by Foreign Policy's Colum Lynch, Dr Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, has been photographed sitting behind the Israeli desk. As Lynch notes, Iran rejects Israel's existence to such an extent that Iranian representatives are not permitted to utter the word "Israel" and rather refer to the "Zionist entity", making the photo (above) sadly ironic.

In fact, Iran seems to have been making the headlines a little over the last two days. Continuing the trend of leaving the important issues to the last minute, Iran's nuclear program is again on the agenda while the world's leaders are still gathered in New York. Graham Allison argues in today's Washington Post that the US should take-up the offer Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made at the beginning of last month to stop enriching uranium in exchange for being sold pre-enriched uranium...

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The PLO ambassador to Brazil, Alzeben Ibrahim, has told a group of Brazilian university students that "Israel should disappear," according to a Portuguese-language media report.

On October 5, the Palestinians passed the first stage towards full membership at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), when the UNESCO board voted in favour of a Palestinian state being given UNESCO membership.

Forty of the 58 countries voted in favor, 14 abstained and the four countries that voted against were the US, Germany, Romania and Latvia.

The Palestinian application for UNESCO membership will now move to the General Conference, where UNESCO's 193 member states will vote on it. The next General Conference is scheduled from October 25 to November 10. A two-thirds majority of conference members is necessary for membership.

The Palestinian application to UNESCO has been highly criticised. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:

"I ... would urge the governing body of UNESCO to think again before proceeding with that vote because the decision about status must be made in the United Nations and not in auxiliary groups that are subsidiary to the United Nations."

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After weeks of controversy over a Palestinian statehood bid of little real consequence, some in the UN have been attempting to shift their focus onto one of the many situations in the world in which innocent people are being killed on a daily basis. To this end, the UN Security Council attempted to pass a motion to prevent Syria's ongoing crackdown on dissenting citizens. Initially, the European countries were attempting to sanction Syria through imposing an arms embargo. As Foreign Policy's UN correspondent Colum Lynch reports, even a watered-down version of this that merely condemned Syria and did not call for any tangible sanctions was vetoed by Russia and China...

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Today's Update looks at last week's controversial approval for a proposed plan to build 1,100 homes within the boundaries of the Jewish suburb of Gilo in Jerusalem. Gilo lies just over the Green Line and is now home to 40,000 Israelis. As Commentary's Jonathan Tobin explains, Gilo is a symbol for many Israelis, having been a target for numerous terrorist sniper shootings during the Second Intifada and "was the laboratory where Palestinian terrorists sought to discover whether they could force Jews into abandoning their homes. They failed".

The latest news on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has focused on the announcement of the planned construction of new homes in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Gilo, which is located over the 1967 Green line.

Meanwhile, on October 1, Hamas leader Khaled Meshal also made an announcement that is a serious blow to peace efforts, yet this announcement was barely reported by the media.

Meshal told an international conference in Iran called the ‘5th International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Intifada', that: "Palestinians must resort to resistance no matter how costly it is, until Palestine is free and Israel is destroyed". Hamas' founding charter calls for the destruction of Israel and a Palestinian state in all of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

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The Palestinian unilateral move for the UN to declare them a state again produced a vast array of media comment. The Australian (19/9) featured pieces by Israeli Ambassador Yuval Rotem and head of the General Delegation of Palestine Izzat Abdulhadi. Abdulhadi gave a history of the peace process that somehow omitted the offers of a Palestinian state and the Palestinian terrorism. Instead, he claimed, "Negotiating in good faith for 19 years, Palestinian people have not achieved freedom and independence in their own state, nor the end of the Israeli occupation."

Today's Update focuses on the recent events at the UN. The Palestinians submitted their formal application for full membership of the UN, and both Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly. The Palestinian application is here, the speech by Abbas is here and the speech by Netanyahu is here. Following the speeches, the Quartet of the UN, the European Union, Russia and the US released a proposal for the resumption of negotiations. Israel has decided to accept the proposal, but the Palestinians seem likely to reject it.

ABC TV Lateline's Ali Moore interviewed Palestinian Authority official Nabil Shaath last night about the PA's UN statehood bid. Shaath , an experienced statesman, gave what on the surface may be perceived as a compelling argument for supporting the statehood bid; however, further analysis reveals inherent problems in his argument.

A key point that Shaath was attempting to put across was the PLO's supposed recognition of Israel:

Up till this minute, Israel have not recognised the right of the Palestinians to a Palestinian state on the border of '67. We still recognise Israel as an Israeli state...

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On 23 September, when the Palestinians presented their application for full membership to the UN, the Middle East Quartet (consisting of the US, EU, Russia and the UN) announced a proposal to bring Israel and the Palestinians back to direct negotiations.

The Quartet statement urged the parties "to overcome the current obstacles and resume direct bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations without delay or preconditions."

The operational paragraphs of the Quartet proposal included:

"1. Within a month there will be a preparatory meeting between the parties to agree an agenda and method of proceeding in the negotiation.
2. At that meeting there will be a commitment by both sides that the objective of any negotiation is to reach an agreement within a timeframe agreed to by the parties but not longer than the end of 2012. The Quartet expects the parties to come forward with comprehensive proposals within three months on territory and security, and to have made substantial progress within six months..."

Tony Blair, the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East, said that if the Israelis and Palestinians are serious about peace, they should respond positively to the initiative.

Israel did immediately respond positively to the Quartet's proposal, however, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas did not, responding instead negatively.

As expected, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas submitted an application for Statehood to the UN Secretary General. The application can be downloaded HERE. In addition to this, both Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN General Assembly and their two speeches (below) have provoked international uproar, especially in light of the speech one day earlier by US President Barack Obama. As The Australian reported, this was a different Obama from the one who spoke previously in the same forum.

That persistence has put the Palestinians on a collision course with the US and Israel. A frustrated Mr Obama told world leaders yesterday in his UN speech that "there are no shortcuts" to peace...

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This year's Durban III Conference also known as "World Conference Against Racism" held on 22 September in New York has lived up to expectations by promoting antisemitism and anti-Zionism.

The participants at the conference voted on a political statement affirming the declarations of the original Durban forum, in which Palestinians were labelled as "victims of racism".

In addition, a key speaker was Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, who spoke about the "human rights violations perpetrated by the Zionist regime" against the Palestinians.

Durban III was boycotted by major democracies for its antisemitic and anti-Zionist agenda including: Australia, Israel, the USA, Canada, Holland, the Czech Republic, Italy, New Zealand, Germany, Bulgaria, Austria, Britain, France and Poland.

US President Barack Obama's UN Speech yesterday was a milestone, in that it Included an unusually lucid explanation of Israel's strategic situation and its right to normal relations with its neighbours.

As readers are aware, the UN General Assembly session for 2011 has begun in New York amidst considerable drama of various sorts. While the media focus has mainly been on the status of the Palestinian bid to gain UN recognition as a state, there's a great deal more going on. This Update focuses on the various dramas occurring.

There is little doubt that the phenomenon of WikiLeaks has lost the excitement and positive glow it once sparked among journalists, pundits and activists. Infighting in the organisation, the lack of anything terribly surprising in most of the more recent releases of information and the loss of novelty partly explain this change. But the recent "accidental" release of the entire unredacted database of US diplomatic cables not only led to widespread condemnation, but helped put the final nails in the coffin of WikiLeaks as the global "cause celebre" it once was among many, including in Australia.

Now Nick Cohen of the Guardian has written a piece suggesting the possibility that the unredacted cable leak could well have been an intentional act by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange...

As the day of reckoning for the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN, now reportedly slated for Friday, draws ever closer, there is a frantic last-minute effort to avert the potentially disastrous showdown in favour of peace talks. Such talks are widely recognised as the only possible way to reach a genuine and lasting solution to the decades-old conflict. For example, Quartet Middle East envoy Tony Blair said yesterday that:

"What we will be looking for over the next few days is a way of putting together something that allows their claims and legitimate aspirations for statehood to be recognized whilst actually renewing the only thing that's going to produce a state, which is a negotiation directly between the two sides...

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New Zealand has decided to withdraw from the Durban III conference to be held on 22 September in New York. The previous two Durban "anti-racism" conferences are known to have been hijacked by antisemitism and anti-zionism, and as noted in a previous blog post, the document released for this conference make it clear that this one is unlikely to be an improvement.

New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Murray McCully stated:

"We remain concerned that the commemoration of the 2001 Durban Declaration could re-open the offensive and anti-Semitic debates which undermined the original World Conference. For these reasons, we have decided not to participate".

In addition, Poland is also attempting to distance itself form from Durban III, as it has been reported that Poland does not plan to send an official delegation to participate in Durban III.

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AIJAC readers may be interested to read an interesting Q&A featured by the Guardian on the Palestinian bid to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

Answering readers questions on this topic are Hussein Ibish is a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine and Yossi Klein Halevi, an Israeli journalist and writer who is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute.

It interesting to note that Ibish is not enthusiastic about the Palestinian UN bid as he is concerned that it may result in economic turmoil for the Palestinians with the US threatening to cutoff of US aid

In addition, Klein makes a critical point regarding Israeli security and how the establishment of a Palestinian can be both an existential necessity and an existential threat.

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The Syrian situation continues to simmer along, although it seems to be slipping out of the headlines.....

A story that got almost no coverage but should have was the theme of the protests for last Friday - to call "for foreign protection" of Syrian civilians...

This followed an appeal from the leading opposition groups for "the international community to send in human rights groups to monitor and help deter military attacks on civilians" in the increasingly bloody crackdown.

So my question is where are the human shields and flotillas?

Much is being written about the worsening security outlook Israel currently faces - with Turkey, once an ally, now seemingly an irreconcilable opponent, (and Turkish PM Erdogan currently visiting various Arab states and engaging in sabre-rattling against Israel), and, as was highlighted in the last Update, the outlook vis-a-vis the peace treaty with Egypt looking pretty grim. This Update features three pieces focused on both analysing and explaining Israel's apparently worsening strategic situation.

With September 20 the Palestinian Authority's proposed date to seek United Nations recognition of a Palestinian state - also known as the "unilateral declaration of independence" (UDI) - we present selected quotes and links to a series of articles that explain everything a person might reasonably need to know about the issue.

Perhaps one can dismiss the opinion in the Canberra Times (8/09) of Peter Rodgers, former Australian ambassador to Israel, that Israeli intransigence prevents a Palestinian state on the basis that his tenure ended there in 1997.

Perhaps Rodgers doesn't know that Israel offered a statehood deal in 2000 so generous that former US/President Bill Clinton "couldn't believe anyone would be foolish enough to let it go", or Israeli PM Ehud Olmert's even sweeter offer in 2008 was humbly declined by the same leadership now demanding UN recognition for a state previously rejected as unacceptable because of the need to grant Israel peace in exchange.

According to a report by Oren Dorell in USA Today, the Palestinian emissary to the US has told a press conference that no Jews would be permitted to live in the planned Palestinian state.

"After the experience of the last 44 years of military occupation and all the conflict and friction, I think it would be in the best interest of the two people to be separated," Maen Areikat, the PLO ambassador, said during a meeting with reporters sponsored by The Christian Science Monitor.

The territory to which Areikat refers would include places like the ancient city of Hebron. As Jeffrey Goldberg notes, Hebron is not just any city, but is the second holiest site in the Jewish faith...

For the third time in three months, on September 13, the Senate debated the Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. In a fiery debate, the Coalition criticised the Greens for failing to condemn BDS in Parliament.

Senator Ron Boswell, (Queensland, Nationals), moved that Senate:

a) Condemns the intensification of the Global Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign being conducted against Max Brenner chocolate cafes;

b) Rejects this tactic as a way of promoting Palestinian rights; and

c) Agrees with the New South Wales Greens MP Mr Jeremy Buckingham's assertion ‘that the tone and the public perception of the Max Brenner protests may be counterproductive to the cause of peace and human rights in the Middle East'.

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There is no question that Israel's strategic environment at the moment is looking grimmer than it has in a while. Its long-standing good relations, at times something close to an alliance, with Turkey appear to be history. Meanwhile, following the Cairo embassy attack last Friday, it became clearer than ever that the cold peace that has prevailed between Israel and Egypt for more than 30 years - a core component of Israel's security planning - is at serious risk...

There is a tendency to assume among many editorialists and pundits that this deterioration must have occurred because Israel has supposedly been intransigent, particularly in terms of offering insufficient concessions to the Palestinians.

Noted American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg has pointed out that this automatic, conventional analysis actually has it backwards.

The Jewish Chronicle reported on September 14, that the UK will not participate in upcoming UN sponsored Durban III anti-racism conference to be held on September 22 because it did not want to engage in an event with antisemitic association. The Durban conferences are known to have been hijacked by antisemitism and anti-zionism. British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that the Durban conferences saw "open displays" of "deplorable anti- Semitism," and said it would be "wrong" to engage in such events.

The UK is now the tenth UN member state to have pulled out of Duban III, and it joins the company of Israel, Germany, the US, Canada, Italy, Austria, Australia, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands who have already withdrawn from the Durban conference.

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As readers are probably aware, there was a serious attack on Israel's embassy in Cairo on Friday by an Egyptian mob, which saw the Embassy ransacked, several staff members trapped inside for hours before they were rescued and, eventually, all staff evacuated from the country except for the Deputy Ambassador. (Blogger "Elder of Ziyon" collected some very salient on the spot reporting about what actually happened at the embassy - including how Egyptian authorities refused to stop the crowd's attack, while protecting the Saudi Embassy on the next block, and how both the mob and soldiers reportedly targeted journalists for violent attack.) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's statement on the attack is here.

This Update looks at the wider implications of the attack for both Israeli-Egyptian relations and the outcome of the Egyptian revolution.

Following the release of the UN "Palmer Report", which vindicated Israel's blockade of Gaza, Turkey has not only rejected the findings of the Report and maintained that Israel's blockade is illegal, but the Turkish government has been engaging in extremely provocative posturing regarding its stance towards Gaza, even threatening what could be construed as an act of war against Israel.

For starters, there was the threat that Turkish Prime Minister Reccep Tayyip Erdogan was to visit Gaza from Egypt on his upcoming trip around the Arab countries in North Africa whose regimes have recently fallen. This embrace of Hamas terrorists has just been revoked, but would have been a snub to the US, Israel and the Palestinian Authority if it had gone ahead. That said, Reuters has reported that Turkey is now threatening to send Turkish warships with any future flotilla to Gaza, in order to "protect them from Israel"...

With the world focussed on other issues, Iran is continuing to both illegally enrich uranium and rapidly building up the infrastructure to do so even more quickly and efficiently.

It is clear that Iran is already well along on its course towards developing nuclear weapons for military purposes - and it is appearing inceasingly unlikely that anyone will stop it.

A nuclear Iran is also an immense danger to the Middle East. As former British PM Tony Blair, Peace Envoy for the Middle East, recently stated: 'If Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons capability it would destabilise the region very, very badly."

Blair said that while Al Qaeda poses a significant threat to people across the world, he believes the bigger evil is Iran, which "support groups that are engaged with terrorism and the forces of reaction".

Blair said that he believes regime change in Iran is necessary and there needs to be military intervention if it acquires nuclear weapons capability.

The Age (27/8) ran a profile by Guardian Middle East correspondent Harriet Sherwood of Gaza's only five-star hotel. Adopting the usual kid gloves on Hamas but iron fist for Israel approach the Guardian excels at, Sherwood blamed the blockade for the hotel's lack of guests: "At times there have been long delays in getting imported supplies through the tightly controlled crossing from Israel into Gaza".

The blockade was co-enforced by Egypt on its shared border with Gaza until recently but the article ran in Britain last month at a time when Egypt had supposedly lifted the blockade. Failure to mention either of these facts, suggests alarming ignorance, partisan bias or both.

The influence of public opinion polls is having a significant impact on the politics of the Middle East, given that the ‘Arab Spring' has taught us that the will of the people can be stronger than the will of its leadership.

Further, one of the accusations often hurled at Israel by its most vehement critics is that it is supposedly intent on "Judaising" Jerusalem, supposedly forcibly evicting Arab residents from their homes or driving them out of the city. So what do the city's 300,000 Arab residents say about their situation?

The Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs has conducted a rigorous survey of east Jerusalem Arabs to find out their views. In east Jerusalem the total sample was 1,039, and it covered the entire city, every neighborhood and was based on face-to-face interviews. The sample was representative of the overall Palestinian population of the city by age, education, gender, occupation, neighborhood, and income.

Interestingly, the survey found that more Palestinians in east Jerusalem would prefer to become citizens of Israel than be citizens of a new Palestinian state. Moreover, 40 percent said they would probably or definitely move in order to live under Israeli rather than Palestinian rule.

The Canberra Times today published this letter which I wrote in response to a particularly ill-informed piece by former Australian Ambassador Peter Rodgers arguing for an Australian ‘yes" vote on the Palestinian bid to have the existence of a Palestinian state unilaterally recognised at the UN...

I think the letter does a reasonable job of answering his main argument, which is based on the historically absurd assumption that Israel is refusing to recognise Palestinian aspirations for statehood. But I did want to say a little more about the point I make in the second paragraph about the supposed Zionist slogan quoted by Rodgers "A land without people for a people without a land."

While the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks were being commemorated around the globe, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chose to participate in the remembrances in his inimitable and subtle way - that is, by re-iterating his belief that it was all a US plot to have an excuse to kill Muslims.

The European Union (EU) is divided on how they will vote on the upcoming UN resolution to recognise an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

This weekend, European foreign ministers are set to meet in Poland (the current president of the EU) in a final effort to find a unanimous position on the Palestinian UN resolution. However, it is clear that there are stark differences between the 27 members of the EU.

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This Update is devoted to three different pieces reflecting on where the world now is,  ten years after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks - both in terms of the current understanding of those events and in terms of the their consequences.

First up is noted journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who reflects on the understanding that he think needs to be preserved of those events ten years ago - primarily that they were very simple, or at least should be understood in very simple terms. He take strong issue with the idea that it is the job of intellectuals to always introduce complexity into discussions of events - in this case, he says, these efforts end up as "as half-baked obfuscations or distractions." He continues to argue that what happened on Sept. 11, 2001 was " a direct confrontation with the totalitarian idea, expressed in its most vicious and unvarnished form."

It has s become increasingly clear in recent months that the Palestinian Unity deal signed by Hamas and Fatah in May is not leading to a lot of unity...

The extent of the ongoing differences between Fatah and Hamas was starkly highlighted in a recent dispatch from Reuters. Apparently, Fatah and Hamas cannot even agree on the time of day - literally.

"Dear government, share in the joy of your people, who will be hitting the streets again, en mass, Saturday night.... share in our joy. You have an opportunity, possibly the last one, to join the people and start marching. If you do not- if you dare not- you shall stay there alone, behind" wrote Stav Shaffir, one of the leaders of the social protest in Israel, just before Saturday night's rally, the last demonstration in this phase of the social protest that swept Israel this summer.

On Saturday night 400,000 Israelis filled the streets in the largest demonstrations in the history of Israel. After 50 days of demonstrations and marches and after dozens of tent sites appeared across the country, the demands for "social justice", solutions to the housing problem and to the sky-rocketing cost of living, were heard loud and clear.

Fairfax journalist Paul McGeough has written an op-ed in this morning's Sydney Morning Herald on the recently released "Palmer Report" - the UN investigation into last year's flotilla incident. As we noted yesterday, the report, while critical of Israel's operational response, essentially vindicated Israel's blockade of Gaza and was very critical of IHH, the Turkish Islamist group that organised the flotilla. A flotilla participant himself, as well as publicly sympathetic to its aims, McGeough had this to say on the first 3/4 of the report:

The panel headed by former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer sharply criticises the flotilla organisers and suspects their motives - why so many passengers, why so many journalists, why so little aid? It stops well short of "they deserve what they got" but it describes the flotilla as a "dangerous and reckless act . . . exposing a large number of individuals to the risk that force [would] be used . . . and people [would get] hurt...

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Over the weekend, the UN's Palmer Report into the Mavi Marmara maritime incident last May was published - the full report is available to read here, a good summary of its key provisions is here.  That report - which takes Israel's side on most questions relating to the Gaza blockade and the background to the incident - has led to an intensification of the crisis in Israeli Turkish relations - with Turkey expelling the Israeli Ambassador and threatening to cut off trade relations.  The response of the Israeli Government to the report - it was accepted with some reservations - is here.

According to recent reports Iran may be attempting to strike back at the West for the alleged cyber warfare that it has been suffering in recent months. As AP has identified, Iranian involvement may be behind recent attacks on US internet giants, as well as the CIA.

AMSTERDAM -- Hackers who broke into a Dutch web security firm have issued hundreds of bogus security certificates for spy agency websites including the CIA as well as for Internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Twitter, the government said Monday.

Experts say they suspect the hacker - or hackers - operated with the cooperation of the Iranian government.

While these hackings serve as further proof of Iran's persistent belligerence to the West, it is not only in the US and Europe that public opinion has been turning against the Islamic Republic...

Following the 2001 9/11 attacks, it was widely reported that, in the Middle East, conspiracy theories were rampant that the attacks were actually plots by the American government, the Israelis, or both. Ten years down the track, there is less reporting of such beliefs, but have they faded away through the passage of time and the give and take of debate?

Sadly, as recent polls make clear, the reality is very much the opposite...

The United Nation's "Palmer Report" into last year's flotilla incident on the Mavi Marmara has vindicated Israel by finding that the naval blockade of the Gaza strip, including Israel's right to enforce the blockade including in international waters is legal under international law and it has also rebutted many of the false assumptions that have been made about the flotilla incident.

The Palmer Report found:

"Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza. The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law."

The Palmer Report also urged that all future efforts to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza should be done "through established procedures and the designated land crossings in consultation with the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority", discouraging future Gaza flotillas.

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As reported by Al Jazeera, the US has begun a serious attempt to prevent the Palestinian unilateral statehood bid at the UN later this month. The Palestinian Authority, however, has remained steadfast and continued its refusal to back down.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that the US has launched an attempt to persuade the Palestinians not to seek statehood at the annual UN General Assembly meeting beginning on September 20.

"When it comes to going to the United Nations, I think the train has left the station," Muhammad Shtayyeh, a member of Fatah's central committee who is overseeing the UN bid, said on Sunday...

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The phenomenon of ‘Temple Denial' is a campaign led by Palestinian political leaders, religious figures, academics and journalists to delegitimise the Jewish historical connection with the area of Temple Mount and Western Wall in Jerusalem - which according to Jewish tradition is Judaism's most holy sites.

It also attempts to increase the importance of Jerusalem, the Temple Mount and even the Western Wall in Islam as part of the effort to make Jerusalem a Muslim city under Arab governance - and to deny the need for any Palestinian compromise on Jerusalem with Jewish religious and national rights. This trend even includes the removal of archaeological material from the Temple Mount without archaeological supervision (see blog post by Allon Lee).

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Clearly piqued by the incessant anti-Israel bigotry, Dr. Denis MacEoin, a former lecturer in Islamic studies, has come out in a passionate defence of the Jewish state in a letter to the Edinburgh University Student's Association committee and separately to the leader of the British Greens party over their support for BDS.

First up, MacEoin, who is not Jewish, expressed his outrage that his alma mater had passed a motion to boycott Israeli goods, services and people on the grounds that Israel is an apartheid regime.

He makes the case that Israel is not a perfect state but to compare it to Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa is not true "even as a metaphor".

On the ABC TV panel show, "Q & A" (22/8), the conversation turned from Israel, to whether an Islamic country could achieve sufficient separation of church and state to become a true democracy. When the question was put to Labor Senator Doug Cameron, he replied, "Look, I think the issue of Israel and Palestine is huge in terms of trying to get world peace. I think Israel have had a massive amount of support from the world community over the years to establish the Israeli state but with that, I think, comes responsibility. And I don't think it's a beacon of democracy to have Operation Cast Lead. I don't think it is a beacon of democracy to use phosphorous bombs on kids. I don't think it is a beacon of democracy to be demolishing infrastructure in Palestine. So I just think we've got to get a bit of balance in this." It appears Cameron was so eager to attack Israel, he didn't care that it was irrelevant to the question.

This Update deals further with aftermath of the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, and particularly the prospects for the rebel "Transitional National Council" (TNC) to effectively rule the country and establish the "pluralist democracy" they claim is their aim. 

First up is former Middle East academic expert turned policy adviser Dr. Walid Phares, who makes a number of predictions; first that regardless of their policies, the new TNC rulers of Libya will face a lingering insurgency from pro-Gaddafi forces. But more importantly, he takes issue with the claim often heard that "we don't know the rebels", saying that we do know a lot about them, and while they are a mixed bag, the Islamist forces are the strongest and largest organised militia. He argues that they therefore pose a considerable threat of an Islamist takeover if liberal forces are not supported.

Haaretz has reported on a new bill being introduced into US Congress which would see US funding for the UN substantially reduced if the Palestinian UN statehood bid wins the upcoming vote.

A republican congresswoman introduced a bill on Tuesday, along with 57 co-sponsors, asking Congress to block U.S. funds for any United Nations entity that supports giving Palestine an elevated status at the UN.

The head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is also seeking to ban U.S. contributions to the UN Human Rights Council and an anti-racism conference seen as a platform for anti-Israel rhetoric...

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In a hard-hitting analysis that raises some important reasons why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has not been resolved, columnist David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen notes:

The Palestinians, so far as they are a people, have now a long history of being able to do things without consequences.

He compares this with how the world treats Israeli actions that are demonstrably undertaken in the cause of self-defence...

Is Iran starting to pull back from Syria's Assad regime, its closest ally, as the unrest and bloodshed in Syria continues?

Ostensibly, there are some signs that Teheran is, at least verbally, starting to create a bit of distance from Damascus.

Firstly, Iran's Foreign Minister publicly suggested Syria should meet the "legitimate demands" of the protestors. Then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on television that "the [Syrian] people should have the right to elect and get their freedoms"...

Protests are raging again in Iran, this time ostensibly over the drying up of a salt lake in Iran's East Azerbaijan Province. It is true that the local people are suffering from the damage that the lake's gradual erosion has done to their economy, however the familiarity of videos such as the one below, showing grainy images of Iranian police shooting at protesters, who throw rocks in return, point to a general discontent with the ruling Ayatollah regime that boils just below the surface of the Islamic Republic.

The 1979 "Islamic Revolution" was the first case of a relatively young Islamist movement actually gaining dominion over an entire state. The subsquent deterioration of Iran was mirrored in the other Islamist "successes" in Afghanistan, Sudan, Gaza and large portions of Algeria, Yemen and Somalia. The totalitarian ideology that promises a return to the "glory days" of Islam through forced regression to a 7th-century civil society has to date yielded nothing but misery to those living under it. Yet, as this blog has been reporting, the ideology remains perhaps the most influential force in the Arab world, with its adherents looking increasingly likely to hijack the "Arab Spring" revolutions...

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Rockets continue to be fired at Israel from Gaza, despite yet another ceasefire being called...

AIJAC recommends a new twitter feed - QassamCount - which provides realtime info on all of the rocket attacks, including where they hit and any damage done.

Most commentators seem to think that Gaza's Hamas rulers want a ceasefire and they certainly keep calling them... So why do rockets keep falling?

AIJAC guest Professor Efraim Inbar from Bar-Ilan University is in today's Australian on the Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations.

He notes:

Unfortunately, General Assembly resolutions cannot fix a Palestinian national movement that is hopelessly fractured and dysfunctional.

The UN cannot turn the Palestinian factions into one political entity. Can the UN bring Gaza and the West Bank together to present reasonable interlocutors for Israeli negotiators? Can it mellow Hamas's lust to kill Jews and to eradicate Israel? Can it eradicate the "shaheed" death culture?

Is the UN in a position to infuse pragmatism into Palestinian political culture?

Israel's respected Middle East Analyst Ehud Yaari speaks to Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Weisenthal Centre on the main reason behind Iran's Gaza Missile Gambit; Why Hezbollah is quiet (so far); Post-Tahrir Sq trouble in Cairo, as over 100 groups urge government to sever ties with Israel; Iron Dome's surprising and promising results...

Following the recent outbreak of terror attacks on the porous border between Egypt, Israel and Gaza, debate in Israel has been focussed on how best to prevent this violence from reoccurring. Egypt has been engaged in similar considerations, deploying 1,500 troops in the Sinai yesterday, supposedly to prevent a terror attack by Islamic Jihad that intelligence had warned of. Furthermore, according to MEMRI, reports surfaced last night that the Egyptian Government was considering implementing a buffer zone along the border with Gaza in a bid to crack down on the weapons smuggling that has become rife over the last few months; although these reports were swiftly denied. The Economist gave a good summary this week of the position that Israel finds itself in:

Israel faces a dilemma with far-reaching strategic consequences. Thirty years of peace with Egypt have rested, above all, on a demilitarised Sinai. The peninsula is patrolled by an international force and monitored by America from the air, to ensure that both sides keep their armies out, even though Sinai is sovereign Egyptian soil. Until now, Israel had said no to Egyptian demands to let more troops on to the peninsula...

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Both Libya and Syria have large arsenals of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and with the demise of Gaddaffi's regime and possibily the Assad regime, there are concerns that the WMDs could get into the wrong hands - with catastrophic results.

According to Ynet, most of Libya's chemical weapons are held at a facility located in Rabta, south of Tripoli. Western analysts believe that the country's WMD arsenal alone contains some 10 tons of various chemical agents which can inflict grave damage. It is also believed that Gaddafi was in possession of Scud-B missiles, over 1,000 tons of uranium powder and mass quantities of conventional weapons.

Western intelligence officials are trying to track Libya's chemical weapons arsenal. On CNN, US Envoy to the UN Susan Rice said that the US was taking steps to prevent the weapons from falling into the wrong hands.

Early Monday morning eight people were injured in south Tel Aviv, when a 20 year old from Nablus in the West Bank, hijacked a taxi and rammed it into a police road block protecting a Tel Aviv nightclub.  He then exited the vehicle and stabbed additional people screaming "Allah Akbar" [god is great]. The suspect was tackled to the ground by Border Police officers and taken into custody.

Tel Aviv District Commander Aharon Eksol said the attack was "definitely an act of terror". Israel Radio reported that the attack was coordinated to target a large youth party being held in the nightclub.

From the Hebrew-language Israeli press comes this rare good news story, showing that the relations between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians is more complex that it often appears from the daily news-reports, which focuses on violence and confrontation.

This Update deals with some new writing exploring the problems and pitfalls associated with the Palestinian intention to unilaterally seek UN recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state - sometimes termed a "Unilateral Declaratation of Independence" or UDI - next month.

We lead with a short primer on the whole issue compiled by Uriel Heilman of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Heilman has a useful summary of the various legal rules relevant to the effort, including what the UN General Assembly can and cannot do for the Palestinians. He also has a brief but helpful examination of the many uncertainties that will follow the UN effort and the various ways it could lead to violence or make peace more difficult.

Peter Van Onselen discussed the situation in Libya with Professor Efraim Inbar and Dr Daniel Pipes on Australian Agenda.

If the hiding place of recently deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is found, there is always the question of where, how and even if he will be brought to trial. Lawyer/activist Geoffrey Robertson has written an op-ed in today's Sydney Morning Herald, calling for Gaddafi to be handed-over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) rather than summarily executed or given a farcical show-trial a la Saddam Hussein. Robertson argues that only an ICC trial would truly expose Gaddafi as the monster that he is.

There must be no repeat of the Bush administration's error of allowing Saddam to be speedily executed for a minor offence while his greatest atrocities, such as the 1988 chemical attack at Halabja, which killed 7000 civilians, went uninvestigated and unprosecuted...

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This week the Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelled local government elections for the fourth time. This lack of democracy is a clear sign that the Palestinians are not ready for statehood.

Elections were scheduled for January 2009 but did not occur, then they were supposed to be held in July 2010, but were cancelled by the PA "for the sake of public interest." In February, elections were scheduled for July 2011 and then were cancelled "until better conditions are available" and rescheduled for October 22. This week PA President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree postponing them again - "indefinitely".

Media and NGOs have always been quick to condemn Israel, yet are often silent about real and much more extensive human rights abuses in other countries.

Therefore it should come as no surprise that news that the Turkish military had killed approximately 100 Kurdish people, while wounded more than 80, and done so across an international border was barely reported in the media.

Sari Nusseibeh's "A Jewish rethink" (AFR, 19 August) is gravely disappointing from someone regarded as a pragmatic Palestinian moderate genuinely interested in peaceful co-existence with Israel.

It is understandable that he endorses J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami's call for the US to impose a solution, although he fails to mention that the proposal he sets out - a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with land swaps and a shared capital in Jerusalem - has three times been offered or accepted by Israel and on each occasion rejected by the Palestinians...

The Iranian Government appears to either have an extremely warped sense of humour or is simply living on a different planet from the rest of us. This was displayed yet again today when the Iranian Foreign Ministry made the following statement, as reported by Bloomberg:

"Iran congratulates the Muslim people of Libya for the latest developments that arose from their months-long resistance and stand as another symbol of the popular movements in the region... The popular uprising in Libya shows once more that meeting people's rightful demands and respect for their opinions are undeniable necessities."

Of course, the most significant factor separating the Iranian rulers from Gaddafi's regime...

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Some analysts just cannot help themselves.

Take ANU Professor Amin Saikal who has articles in today's Age, the Australian Financial Review and on ABC's Unleashed website playing an old favourite love song - Libya's Colonel Gaddafi (or insert Middle East dictator's name here) remained in power for so long because the West supported him for his oil.

Well, analysts like Saikal who peddle a predictable line in blaming the West for all the Middle East's ills should note that Libyan rebels are unhappy, not with Western states but China, Russia and Brazil for abstaining from voting for the UN Security Council Resolution authorising NATO's use of force to impose a no-fly zone in Libya.

Please don't bother seeking out any references to China, Russia and Brazil in Saikal's pieces; they aren't even mentioned.

Dr Daniel Pipes was interviewed about radical Islam by Alan Jones on Sydney's 2GB radio.

As readers are doubtless aware, Libyan rebels are in the capital, Tripoli, and the fall of the Gaddafi regime now looks imminent. This Update features an article and some good links on the complex question of what might happen next. It also features some material on the ongoing tense situation on Israel's southern border where rockets continue to be fired into Israel from Gaza despite a supposed new ceasefire (see also here and here) and Egypt and Israel have had a public spat over the cross-border raid on Thursday which killed 8 Israelis, but which also apparently resulted in the death of three Egyptian security officers, possibly from Israeli fire.

According to a potentially very significant news story, Hamas and its long-time key patron, Iran, have had a falling out over the unrest in Syria...

While it is much too early to predict that the Hamas-Iran split will be permanent, if this did happen, it would be a major re-alignment of the Middle Eastern map, with important implications...

With apologies to Sydney's infamous beachside surf gang, let's call them "the other bra boys".

Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet has reported on how the Saudi Arabian de facto ban on female participation in the workforce requires the hiring of men to sell intimate apparel to women, making the buying of lingerie both embarrassing and difficult:

This causes much embarrassment for women customers seeking advice on cup sizes in lingerie stores. The shops are also not allowed to have fitting rooms. And the biggest complaint is that male clerks in general try to guess customers' bra sizes by staring at their abayas.

From the Epic Revisionist Handbook 2011, comes the kind of story that the West and pro-Palestinian apologists prefer to gloss over, a documentary on official Palestinian Authority TV reveals a bright glorious future.... without Jewish people in Jerusalem.

Broadcast on August 10, the documentary apparently labels Jewish worship as "sin and filth" and that "Jews will disappear from the picture". The show conjures up a nightmarish future, promising that the Western Wall Plaza - the most holy place for prayer in the world for Jews - will disappear and be replaced by an Arab residential suburb.

While Israel's Social Protest movement, which has dominated Israel headlines over the past few weeks, has been eclipsed for the moment by the major terrorist attack in southern Israel on Thursday and subsequent events, it is likely to remain a significant source of debate and political power in Israel for some time to come. I've therefore compiled a longish collection of recommended reading for those who want to better understand the movement and the debate it has sparked in Israel.

As readers are probably aware, there was a major terror attack in southern Israel yesterday, the most serious in a number of years, in which 8 Israelis were killed by a group of terrorists who apparently crossed from Gaza into Sinai, and then into Israel (a useful timeline on the attack is here). Israel responded with airstrikes in Gaza that reportedly killed the leader of the group believed responsible, together with five other terrorists.

The attack raises questions about diminished Egyptian control of Sinai, as well as the growth of extreme Salafist Islamist groups in both the Sinai and Gaza. As Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak stated: " The incident reflects the weakness of Egypt’s hold over Sinai and the spread of terrorist elements."

While Lebanon is under the control of a Hezbollah-dominated government, and it is hard to know when or how the stranglehold of this extremist terrorist group will end, it is worth remembering that the cosmopolitan, modernising Lebanon is still in there and not defeated yet.

A reminder of this is this "flash mob" orchestration of a spontaneous dance number at Beirut airport....

The Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment campaign became a focal point for passionate debate over the last two days as it reared its head in both the Australian Senate and Victorian Parliament.

First, the Greens maintained their 100 per cent success rate of refusing to vote in favour of any resolutions condemning boycotts of Israeli-owned or affiliated companies.

The Canberra Times (8/8) ran an op-ed by the Guardian's David Hearst who argued that Israel is so irredeemably racist that the only antidote is for the United Nations to first recognise Palestinian statehood on the 1967 borders in September, then subsume Israel into a Palestinian majority state.

According to a breaking news report by Reuters, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has informed the UN Secretary-General that police and military operations have stopped in Syria, implying that the violence that has been rocking the country may be over.

In a phone call with Assad on Wednesday, Ban "expressed alarm at the latest reports of continued widespread violations of human rights and excessive use of force by Syrian security forces against civilians across Syria, including in the Al Ramel district of Lattakia, home to several thousands of Palestinian refugees," the United Nations said in a statement...

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Israel has been accused of many deeds over the years. Removed from their context, the below paragraphs from a report in The Guardian could almost sound like an exaggerated report on an Israeli military operation in the 2008/09 Gaza conflict - the kind that would be released by Palestinian state-controlled media outlets.

UNRWA, the UN agency that aids Palestinian refugees, said the camp's residents fled after [the city] came under fire from gunboats and ground troops over the weekend. It was not immediately clear where the refugees were seeking shelter.

... The Local Coordination Committees, an activist group that helps organize protests... also confirmed troops fired at fleeing families. It said random gunfire erupted Monday in addition to a campaign of raids and house-to-house arrests...

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Following on from this post concerning the growing lawlessness in the Sinai, Haaretz has reported today that Egypian authorities have now taken action to prevent the situation from deteriorating further.

Egyptian security forces, pushing ahead with a crackdown on armed groups in lawless northern Sinai, on Tuesday seized four armed militants as they prepared to blow up a gas pipeline in the city of el-Arish, security sources said...

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An Egyptian religious TV channel has broadcast a mock trial of former leader Hosni Mubarak, who appears as a puppet, and is accused by child prosecutors, of being, essentially, a puppet of Israel.

The clip on al Hekma TV, includes a number of anti-Israel slurs that feed into the recurring motif of Israel and Jews as spoilers and poisoners of Egyptian society.

In Egypt, it is being reported that 14 political groups opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist parties there have united to form a new bloc - called the "The Egyptian Bloc" - to compete in the upcoming parliamentary elections...

This seems to be good news - a sign that the liberal forces which sparked the Egyptian revolution, and have not only looked unprepared for the elections, but been largely driven from the streets in recent weeks, are perhaps starting to get their act together.

However, academic Barry Rubin warns that there are reasons not to get too excited about this news...

As a post on the blog Harry's Place notes, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad running out of things to blame his current predicament on, he appears to be ramping-up violence to compensate. This is characterised by yet another watershed moment in the ongoing turmoil - Assad shelled the city of Latakia from the sea over the weekend, reportedly killing 21 people..

This week has been marked by a turning point in the Syrian uprising.

After playing the terror card, the Palestine card, the resistance card and the sectarian card, and with no sign of the Syrian uprising slowing down, this week the Assad regime has gone for broke by using gun boats to shell the city of Latakia... What do you do after gunboats? Aerial bombing campaigns?

To illustrate the extent to which the Syrian authorities are clutching at straws...

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Contradicting local boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) supporters who claimed their actions in preventing customers entering a Max Brenner chocolate store in Melbourne last month were peaceful, a prominent supporter of the campaign has condemned their behaviour as "indefensible" and "pretty stupid".

In an interview with the Australian, the president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, Reverend Jim Barr, warned that heavy-handed tactics which resulted in 19 activists being arrested had backfired.

If called upon to march on Israel's borders from the West Bank in the event a Palestinian state is unilaterally established on the 1967 borders come September; are Palestinians going to spoil their leaders' party by not providing the numbers?

But what do you do if you hold a rally and the main beneficiaries of the event won't show?

Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is worried because his own people are currently disinterested in attending anti-settlement protests.

Over the weekend in Syria, the regime was reportedly shooting people as they exited mosques after prayers near Damascus, and even used the navy to shell the port of Latakia, killing 21 people ...
Explaining why Assad is continuing to escalate the violence against his own people, noted American foreign policy pundit Walter Russell Mead has an excellent post describing Assad's strategy for survival. He says it relies on systematically attacking the centres of protest one by one with overwhelming force while assuming what the rest of the world does, or thinks, doesn't matter...

Is it too much of a stretch to wonder if the Palestinian campaign to have the UN declare its support for a state on the 1967 borders on September 20 will spill over into the "Third Durban Conference" which starts two days later?

In other words, will Durban III, being held to mark the 10th anniversary of the first, descend into the abject anti-Israel and antisemitic hate fest that marred the original and overshadowed the second?

And will the debate about UN recognition of Palestinian statehood be used to stoke the fires?

This blog has been following events in Egypt over the past few weeks, as the Islamist groups seem to have been becoming far more assertive, resulting in increased weapons smuggling to Hamas in Gaza and, potentially, a cosier relationship between Egypt and Iran.

The Sinai Peninsula, inhabited mostly by various Bedouin tribes, sits between the Egyptian heartland and the Israeli border, and has long been an area which the central Egyptian government has struggled to fully control. Smuggling from Sinai into Gaza has been a constant source of Israeli-Egyptian disagreement over recent years, with Israel urging Egypt to make greater efforts to prevent this, and Egyptian efforts in this regard fluctuating.

Unfortunately, as Alex Joffe has observed in Jewish Ideas Daily, recent events in Sinai following the Egyptian  have been far from encouraging...

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The internet, and especially social media, have been galvanising political action and allowing dissenters in dictatorial regimes to connect with each other in ways that were never before possible. However, one unfortunate by-product of the absolute "anything goes" forum that is the internet is that those who would preach hate and violence now have a new place in which to do so anonymously and more effectively. For instance, this post on Wednesday exposed some rather confronting antisemitism on Youtube coming out of the London riots.

In a similar vein, it seems that a new antisemitic meme has "gone viral" in the Arab "Twittersphere" in response to the ongoing "tent protests" in Israel. As reported in Global Voices...

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Anyone naïve enough to divine any signs of Hamas moderation in its quest for Israel's elimination or that it will play nice for the Palestinian Authority's September UN statehood bid, needs the services of a top ophthalmologist (although preferably not Syrian dictator Bashar al-Asad, who is a little busy at the moment anyhow).

According to an August 4 briefing paper from the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre, Hamas' top echelon repeated in different forums their opposition to Israel's existence or compromise in late July.

There are reports that the Palestinian leadership is again sending out mixed signals about how determined they are to press ahead with controversial plans to seek to have a Palestinian state recognised by the UN next month.

This Update features some additional pieces on those Palestinian plans - with a special focus on analysis of the possible meaning and implications of those plans for Palestinian society.

Perhaps taking their cue from Iran yesterday, the Libyan Government has released the following statement regarding the London riots (via Reuters):

"Cameron has lost his legitimacy and must go... after the massive popular protests that reject him and his government, especially after the violent police repression unleashed by his government against peaceful protesters... to force the British people to accept a government it rejects... The international community (should) not stand with arms folded in the face of this gross aggression against the rights of the British people, who are demanding their right to rule their country."

If this statement sounds a little familiar, that may be because...

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The Daily Telegraph's Tim Blair commented in the Spectator (July 30) on the motivation of Leftist activists directing their rage at Israeli-owned chocolate shop Max Brenner.

Blair suggested they are obsessed with the chocolatier as a rallying cause in lieu of criticising federal Labor policies identical to those they noisily attacked when the Coalition was in power.

Here's a good news story it would be difficult not to smile at.

At a neo-Nazi concert in Germany, organisers were anonymously given souvenir t-shirts sporting the slogan "hardcore rebels" with a skull and nationalist flags. The t-shirts were given out to the 250 attendees at the concert in Gera.

However, when the t-shirts were washed, the original slogan and images disappeared. In its place appeared "If your t-shirt can do it, you can do it too - we'll help you get away from right-wing extremism" and contact information for a group called Exit, which helps neo-Nazis escape from the far-right scene...

The trial of former Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, which began last week, is certainly attracting a great deal of attention in Egypt. And it is a dramatic event - a symbol of the success of the Egyptian people in toppling a seemingly entrenched autocrat who had been in power for almost 35 years, and their desire to escape from the corruption and lack of freedom which characterised his rule. And yet a number of pieces have appeared arguing that the trial, the attention it is receiving, the way it is conducted, the outcome, and the reception in the streets may have potentially ominous consequences for the future of the Egyptian revolution.

The beheading of Ruyati binti Satubi - an Indonesian maid executed by Saudi authorities in June for the killing of an allegedly abusive Saudi employer - has stirred such revulsion in Indonesia that Islamic leaders there are openly challenging the harsh, Wahhabist creed of Islam that has gained a footing in Indonesia via the funding of religious schools.

A story by the Washington Post's Indonesia correspondent illustrates the depth of this backlash.

"Some Indonesians began to think that Wahhabism is the true teaching of Islam, but thanks to God, there has been a change of thinking," said Siraj, who heads Nahdlatul Ulama, an organization with about 50 million members and 28,000 Islamic boarding schools.

On August 9, the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) published an editorial "Fence-sitting, but the wisest course", which advocated that Australia abstain on the UN General Assembly resolution that is expected to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines.

The editorial was commenting on news that Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd held different positions on the Palestinian UN bid. According to the Age's Daniel Flitton, Rudd wrote to the Prime Minister suggesting that Australia abstain on the Palestinian UN resolution, while Gillard has declared strong support for Israel. The SMH editorial declared, "we believe Rudd's advice is the sound course".

Abstaining on the resolution is not a "sound course" but rather a counter-productive course. Australia should not merely abstain but should vote against the resolution in the interests of Middle East peace and a two-state solution. Unilateral acts by the Palestinians will not achieve either peace or statehood, but are likely to escalate the conflict.

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man" may have kicked off each new episode of the Twilight Zone but it can equally be applied to the alternate reality that is the United Nations.

Bizarrely, this week, North Korea assumed the presidency of the UN's Conference on Disarmament despite being under a sanctions regime for its nuclear weapons program.

The "tent protest" in Israel is well into its third week, and shows no signs of dying out. Last Saturday, more than 300,000 people, across the country - from Kiryat Shmona in the north to Eilat in the south, took to the streets, demanding "social justice". This protest is seen by many in Israel as a positive and refreshing awakening of an otherwise dormant public- the middle class. While the Israeli democracy is accustomed to protests, these are usually sectorial and revolve around one specific and limited issue, and many are related to issues of peace and security. This current protest, however, is a different story altogether.

The situation in Syria continues to worsen with violent government efforts to suppress protests continuing in Hama, Dor El-Zoir, and other towns and increasingly blunt denunciations of the Damascus regime coming from many quarters, including tough remarks from Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, and Al-Azhar University, the most senior Sunni Muslim religious voice in the world, now speaking out.

There is a tendency in the West to treat Palestinian society as if it were a full-blown democracy - after all, they appear to have elections, and Prime Ministers and Presidents and parliament and all the trappings.(This is despite the fact that election scheduled for two years ago still have not occurred and it remains unclear if and when they ever will.)

It is therefore worth pointing out that in many respects, the civil and political liberties that are the hallmark of genuine democracy are at best contingent and partial in the Palestinian Authority (PA) - to say nothing about Hamas-controlled Gaza.

For instance, media freedom is pretty limited in the Palestinian Authority, as a recent case reveals. Noted Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes about the plight of award-winning Palestinian journalist Majdoleen Hassouneh, who is in hiding after apparently upsetting local authorities by her reporting about a sit-in strike.

As yesterday's post noted, condemnation of Syria seems to have reached a tipping point - with more and more world leaders finally criticising the Assad regime, well into the fifth month of violence. Even "hacktivist" collective Anonymous have jumped on the bandwagon, hacking into the Syrian Ministry of Defence website and leaving photographs of mutilated protestors as long as a message of support in both English and Arabic...

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It is not often that "ignore the problem and hope it goes away" is a particularly effective strategy in international affairs. Amazingly, however, the international community seems to have successfully employed this tactic in Somalia to drive the terrorist group al-Shabab from the capital Moghadishu. Al-Shabab had held a large chunk of the city and had been fighting a small African Union force for control of the remainder; but after spending years in a bitter stalemate, they seem to have determined to just pack-up and leave. As reported by Reuters:

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - Thousands of Somali refugees, fleeing famine and years of violence, streamed into Mogadishu on Monday searching for food after Islamist rebels withdrew from the capital...

In an interesting turn of events, four of the 19 people arrested for engaging in the violent protests against an Israeli-owned cafe in Melbourne have been arrested for breaching their bail condition of not going within 50m of the cafe. As reported by the ABC:

Last month, 19 activists were arrested outside a Max Brenner store after allegedly chaining themselves to furniture. The group was not to go within 50 metres of the company's two two CBD stores. A spokeswoman for BDS says the four protesters were arrested early this morning...

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Another stark reminder of the astounding brutality displayed by the Assad regime in Syria surfaced last week when the Guardian translated and published a harrowing account of Syrian woman Samar Yazbek's shocking torture at the hands of Syrian authorities.

Two huge men entered the room. They stood in readiness, in plainclothes. One of them stood to the right and the other to the left. With a signal from his eyes, each seized me by the shoulders, though not roughly. They seized me as if I were some object, easy for them to move. I did not resist when they started to lift me out of my chair. I even stood up, surprised at what was happening...

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Iran's economy appears so inherently fragile, that concerted external financial pressure on its energy sector could bring the regime to its knees and Washington Institute for Near East Policy analyst Patrick Clawson shows how it can be done:

If oil prices decline -- or, more important, if the United States and its allies can dissuade countries and companies from paying for Iranian oil (Washington has no objections if they receive said oil, only if they pay for it) -- then the Islamic Republic could face serious problems paying for the checks to which the Iranian people are rapidly becoming accustomed.

As the tent protest movement continues to dominate headlines inside Israel, one of the facts often heard in explaining the background to its growth is that economic inequality inside Israel is very high...

Such claims are not necessarily wrong, but they do oversimplify a complex reality. Those widely cited OECD income inequality numbers reflect in part the diverse, multi-cultural nature of Israeli society...

While most eyes have been directed at the public spectacle of the trial of former dictator Hosni Mubarak, a less visible but far more important trial has been facing Egypt as a whole. As Sharyn outlined on Wednesday, the increasing show of strength by Islamist forces in Egypt has dramatically altered the fabric of Egypt's revolution.

The watershed moment came last Friday, when Islamist groups flooded Tahrir square - which had been occupied for months by liberal activists attempting to pressure the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) - in order to reclaim the revolution from the "infidel liberals". The square was promptly emptied by the armed forces, leaving the heart of Egypt's revolution lying empty and posing numerous questions about the future.

The Brookings Institute's Khaled Elgindy has written a detailed outline of the broad political landscape currently displayed in post-revolutionary Egypt...

As reported by MEMRI, Iranian summers just became a little less enjoyable when the Iranian Parliament moved to ban watergun fights, after  pictures of a waterfight in a Teheran park were posted online. Unfortunately, this was not the most absurd statement made by an Iranian official this week (in fact, with Iran's "moral police" patrolling the country, it is all too believable).

The cake in fact goes to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who made yet another claim that Iran's clandestine nuclear program, while off-limits to International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, is in fact for peaceful purposes. As reported by Reuters:

"When we say we don't want to build an atomic bomb it means we really do not want to build an atomic bomb"...

This Update features material explaining the Tent protest movement which continues to dominant the news inside Israel. It also offers an inside view from Cairo on the precarious state of the Egyptian revolution.

We lead with a useful BICOM (Britain-Israel Communications and Research Centre) backgrounder on the tent protests. It offers some detailed explanation of the make-up and goals of the movement - which began over housing but has now increased its demands to incorporate many other social issues - as well as its implications for the Netanyahu Government. It explains that the timing of the movement, which follows on from some previous public campaigns, but is also facilitated by summer vacation and pleasant weather, and relative quiet on the security front.

This blog post looks at the Palestinian UN bid and considers analysis from:

Veteran Washington insider Steven Rosen who writes that the current proposal for UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state does not meet the legal requirements for statehood.

Efarim Karsh and Asaf Romirowsky who have written an article in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the UN should not support the Palestinian UN bid, because it threatens to create a precedent of "land for war" rather than "land for peace".

Benedict Brogan, Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph who writes that Netanyahu's gesture to negotiate a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with land swaps demands a "swift and positive response from David Cameron and William Hague".

ANU PhD scholar Lee Schrader writing in the Canberra Times (22/7) doubted "whether any compromise is possible under the Netanyahu leadership, regardless of regional developments." Schrader's assessment is unduly harsh considering Netanyahu implemented a ten-month unilateral settlements building freeze in 2009 as a gesture towards restarting peace talks. With one month left of the freeze Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas took up the invitation but then only wanted to discuss extending the settlement freeze.

The forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad stepped-up their assault on the opposition stronghold of Hama yesterday. As reported by Nada Bakri for The New York Times:

Ignoring mounting condemnations, the Syrian military sent tanks, armored vehicles and snipers on Wednesday into the symbolic center of Hama, a rebellious city that has emerged as a linchpin of the nearly five-month uprising, in what appeared a decisive step by President Bashar al-Assad to crush opposition to his rule.

The military's assault on Assi Square, the scene of some of the biggest demonstrations against Mr. Assad's leadership, was an event that many activists and residents had thought impossible, evidence of the government's determination to retake by force a city that suffered one of the most brutal crackdowns in Syrian history in 1982.

This blog has been closely following the situation in Syria...

If two million Palestinians in the West Bank deserve a state, what of the 18 million Kurds in the region who have endured 100 years of persecution?

This is the tantalising question posed by Israeli analyst Dr. Guy Bechor who argues that Turkey should be careful what it advocates on behalf of Palestinians as it seeks regional popularity and leadership.

Following on from Daniel's blog post regarding the UN Security Council 'statement' condemning the violation of human rights in Syria, this blog post considers the weaknesses of the UN statement in that it did not call for regime change, support the Syrian demonstrators or contain provisions for punitive measures or sanctions.  In light of the UN's inability act, this blog looks at Western policy options that could put pressure on Assad to go.

Throughout its history, Israel has been at odds with the various leaders of Sudan. This enmity was demonstrated recently when Israel allegedly destroyed an arms convoy in Sudan that was headed for Gaza and when, also allegedly, Israel subsequently assassinated a key Hamas weapons smuggler in Sudan, who had allegedly been liaising with the Sudanese authorities to maintain said smuggling route.

With their mutual enemy in Khartoum, it is natural, therefore, that Israel and the South Sudanese would form an alliance. In fact, even before the recent declaration of statehood by South Sudan, Israel had taken in some 6,000 refugees fleeing persecution from the regime in  Khartoum. As noted by Renee Ghert-Zand in the Forward yesterday, Israel was tacitly supporting the South Sudanese rebels for some time during the decades of conflict with their Muslim oppressors, creating even more good will towards Israel within the South Sudanese leadership...

While democratic reform seems to have been sweeping the Middle East, the strongest Muslim democracy in the region may have been quietly moving in the opposite direction. This morning's Jerusalem Post editorial took a rather down-beat tone concerning the retirement Friday of several of Turkey's top military officials - the latest episode in the ongoing struggle between the military, the traditional defender of Turkey's secularity, and the soft Islamism of the ruling AKP.

Ominous changes are afoot in the old seat of the Ottoman Empire. In a stunning and unprecedented turn of events, Turkey's entire military brass - including chief-of-staff General Isik Kosaner and the commanders of the army, air force, and navy - resigned en masse Friday. The immediate cause was a crackdown waged by the judiciary on the army's top ranks, which put...

As explained in a previous post, the drought that is currently besetting East Africa has become a full-scale humanitarian disaster in Somalia, mostly because of the rejection of foreign aid by Somali terrorist group Al-Shabab, who have rejected claims that there is a famine whilst waging a violent campaign against international aid organisations. AP has reported that, in order to combat the ongoing humanitarian crisis, the US will be loosening its counter-terrorism laws to allow bribes and other payments to Al-Shabab in return for US-funded aid organisations being permitted to operate in Somalia...

Recent events and polling in Egypt indicate that pro-democracy activists are weakening, and that Egypt may be heading down an Islamist path.

New polls not only suggest that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood is likely to win the November election, but also that Amr Moussa, known for his criticism of Israel will be elected President. The polls also reveal that a majority of respondents want to amend or revoke the peace agreement with Israel.

Another worrying trend is the rise of the Islamic Sulafi movement - which calls for Egypt to become an Islamic state under Sharia law. Their force in Egyptian politics was recently on display on Friday July 29, when over 100,000 protestors demonstrated in Tahrir Square calling for an Islamic state.

The Obama Administration has released explosive details of how Iran has become a safe haven for al-Qaeda.

It comes as the Administration is reportedly interested in refocusing world attention on, in the words of US Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen, Iran's "unmatched support for terrorism" as well as its ongoing nuclear weapons program.

As readers are probably aware, all of the top leadership of the Turkish military resigned over the weekend - including the Chief of Staff, and the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force.

What is the signficance of this - in a country where the armed forces have long played a strongly activist role in national politics?

The Assad regime in Syria has been continuing its vicious assault on the city of Hama, which began on the weekend. As The Jerusalem Post reports:

AMMAN - Syrian tanks pounded residential neighborhoods across the city of Hama on Monday in the heaviest barrage of a two-day assault to crush street demonstrations against President Bashar Assad, witnesses said.

Earlier on Monday, residents said at least four civilians were killed by tank fire on the second day of attacks on the city, where memories are still vivid of the brutal suppression of an uprising in 1982....

The Israeli tent movement which began on July 14 as a grass-roots economic protest over housing costs has grown in strength and spread to many other cities in Israel and dominated the news there.

Thousands of Israeli protesters are camping in tents in the middle of central streets in major Israeli cities as a means of protest. Over the weekend police estimated that more than 100,000 people demonstrated in 10 cities across Israel. The protesters shouted: ''the people want social justice!'' and demanded that Prime Minister Netanyahu step down.

Not far away from the headline-grabbing Arab Spring, a power struggle is playing out under the Iranian summer sun as fissures in the one-time partnership between Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shatter into an unbridgeable abyss.

Veteran Iranian analyst Dr. Abbas Milani of Stanford University has written a follow-up to his June piece when it seemed Ahmadinejad would be impeached for sedition.

Following up on Daniel's post on the escalating violence in Syria earlier today, one potentially highly important development in the Syrian saga has gotten little media coverage or comment, but should.

It is being reported that a top Syrian military officer, Colonel Riyad al-Asad, has defected from the regime, and is setting up a "Free Syrian Army"...

The Washington Post reported last week that US counter-terrorism officials

...are increasingly convinced that the killing of Osama bin Laden and the toll of seven years of CIA drone strikes have pushed al­Qaeda to the brink of collapse. The assessment reflects a widespread view at the CIA and other agencies that a relatively small number of additional blows could effectively extinguish the Pakistan-based organization that carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks...

While this is certainly very good news if true, it's also important that such a claim not be misunderstood or over-dramatised...

This Update features some more comment on the pitfalls of the problematic Palestinian strategy of seeking unilateral recognition of statehood at the UN.

First up is the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl, who argues that this policy is additional blunder by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. He points out that reconciliation with Hamas, part of the strategy to present a unified Palestinian front, has gone nowhere, Palestinians are increasingly questioning what a UN vote can accomplish, and economically, the PA is in deep trouble. He even raises the possibility that Abbas may be seeking to provoke Palestinians to take to the streets in a third Intifada.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the Second Lebanon war, fought between Israel and Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. Since the conflict concluded, Hezbollah has been systematically consolidating power in Lebanon and amassing arms for the next round of violence. However, there has not been a shot fired from Southern Lebanon into Israel for which Hezbollah has taken credit. This is in stark contrast to the situation before the incursion, when Hezbollah would periodically fire rockets and mortars into Israeli territory in order to raise tensions.

To mark the anniversary, Israeli academics Abraham Bell and Gerald Steinberg have written a piece in Ynet about a study that they are conducting on different NGO responses to the 2006 conflict, which has some rather disconcerting findings...

The Palestinian UN bid to seek recognition of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 lines has been criticised by many commentators, including Hamas officials.

Haaretz reported that Mahmoud al-Zahar, a prominent Hamas member in Gaza called the Palestinian UN bid "just nonsense" and a "political scam".

Press TV, an Iranian state-controlled media outlet, has reported Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad seemingly blaming some kind of pro-Israel conspiracy for the anti-Iranian sentiment permeating the Middle East, 

"In the final days of their existence, plotters intend to cause difference and clash in our region to save the Zionist regime (Israel)," said President Ahmadinejad in the southwestern city of Ahvaz on Thursday...

Following on from Daniel's blog post about the tragic massacre in Norway where Anders Breivik killed 76 people, readers may be interested in some additional commentary and analysis on the attack beyond that in Australian media coverage.

This blog post looks at:

Dave Rich's blog post which examines Breivik's antisemitism;

Jonathan Kay's article which discusses the influence of the 'Unabomber' and 'The Turner Diaries' on Breivik's manifesto;

Alex Stern who criticises the way in which the Norway massacre has been used for political purposes to attack conservative theorists and Israel;

Barry Rubin's blog criticising an editorial in the New York Daily News, which minimises the threat of Islamic terrorism; and

Scott Stewart's article on the lessons that can be learnt from a lone wolf attaker.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) "is broke", and according to a recent New York Times article, "the immediate cause of the crisis is the failure of foreign - especially Arab - donors to fulfill promises of aid." According to AP, Arab donations have decreased dramatically over the past couple years, as "in 2009, the Arab countries gave $462 million, a contribution that dropped to $287 million in 2010 and $78.5 million this year."

The predicament has led even the usually optimistic PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to declare that "this is, without doubt, the worst financial crisis the Palestinian Authority has ever faced", noting that there could not be a worse time for this, with the PA's planned unilateral declaration of independence (UDI) coming up at the United Nations in September.

More than 150,000 state employees, whose salaries support a million people, had their wages cut in half this month. Palestinian banks have lent the government more than $1 billion and do not want to lend more. Some ministries have temporarily lost electricity because they have not paid their bills. Last week, the government ordered a reduction in the price of bread, leading to bakery strikes. Garbage is piling up.

The United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) - set up in 1949 to look after the humanitarian needs of Palestinians - has long been the subject of controversy, with critics accusing it of deliberately perpetuating the refugee problem....

Now Israeli researcher Arlene Kushner has written, in the latest edition of Middle East Quarterly, a detailed compendium and deconstruction of many recent examples illustrating, in her words "The propensity for senior UNRWA staff to make inappropriate, incendiary, and highly politicized statements - in stark contrast to the organization's mandate."...

A new article at the Jerusalem Post offers an interesting example of what might be done if UNRWA's insistence that Palestinian refugees must never be resettled, but must stay in refugee camps until the conflict is over, could be bypassed.

The catastrophic drought in East Africa has created an all-but unprecedented humanitarian disaster. Commendably, many world leaders - including Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd - have called for the international community to provide immediate aid relief to the millions who are suffering.

When describing the tragic situation in Somalia, Michel Gabaudan, the president of Refugees International, has made the allegation that the Somali famine is "man-made". Gabaudan provides a pertinent reminder of the recent anarchic history of the war-ravaged nation...

MEMRI has translated an interview with Nabil Shaath, Head of Foreign Relations in Fatah - the dominant party within the Palestinian Authority - which certainly provides cause for concern. Shaath essentially confesses that the PA's commitment to a two-state solution is merely part of a larger plan to eventually end Israel's existence as a Jewish homeland.

[The French initiative] reshaped the issue of the "Jewish state" into a formula that is also unacceptable to us - two states for two peoples. They can describe Israel itself as a state for two peoples, but we will be a state for one people. The story of "two states for two peoples" means that there will be a Jewish people over there and a Palestinian people here. We will never accept this...

As translated by Iranian defector Reza Kahlili, Iranian Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi responded to the recent assassination of an Iranian scientist, shot by an unidentified man on a motorcycle, by saying:

The main plot for this criminal act was conceived by the American government, and since it is scared of the reaction by the Muslim world due to the uprisings in the region, it had the Zionist regime commit the heinous act... In order to protect the security of our country, we have no option but to have the Zionist regime wiped off the map...

While this year's Gaza flotilla barely caused a stir, the ongoing saga of last year's continues. Last night, the UN's Palmer Commission confirmed rumours that the report that the release of the report they have prepared on last year's effort will again be delayed in the hope that Israel and Turkey will settle their differences. As Herb Keinon reports in The Jerusalem Post:

The United Nations on Monday officially confirmed that the planned release Wednesday of the UN's Palmer Commission report on the Mavi Marmara has been postponed until late August. UN spokesman Martin Nesirky gave no specific date for the much-delayed report, which officials in Jerusalem said on Sunday was now expected on...

In its biggest concession thus far to the protest movement that has swept the country, the Syrian cabinet on Sunday approved a bill permitting new political parties to exist alongside the Baath Party, which has ruled the country alone for over four decades. Yet the opposition understandably views the bill, which has yet to pass a vote before the parliament, with deep skepticism, as it comes after the government killed over 1,500 protestors. Al Jazeera reports:

Yasser Saadeldine, a Syrian opposition figure living in exile, said the new law "is designed to show on paper that the regime tolerates dissent while continuing killings and repression".

Reporting from Beirut, Al Jazeera's Rula Amin said that protesters are dismissing the draft law. The people are demanding "political freedoms, not just a law to organise how to form political parties".

There are very few who will deny that democracy is of great value to the people living within a democratic society; certainly, overthrowing dictatorships often comes at a great cost - which, hopefully, will be offset by the benefits of outcome. What seldom comes to the fore is precisely what this cost entails. To tackle this problem, Foreign Policy researcher Ty McCormick has attempted to put a dollar value on the democracy efforts within the Arab Spring - observing that the unrest has caused numerous economic blows to the countries in which uprisings have occured.

The economies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia are projected to shrink by a collective 0.5 percent this year, reversing 4.4 percent growth in 2010, according to a report published by the Institute of International Finance in May. In Yemen and Libya, which are still in turmoil, the numbers will likely be worse; and the growth forecast for the North African region as a whole has fallen from 4.5 percent in 2010 to less than 1 percent this year, according to the African Central Bank...

Israel's leaders certainly know where Israel sits with regard to the horrific massacre that took place in Oslo over the weekend. Both President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have expressed their sorrow over the tragic events and expressed Israel's empathy with the Norwegian people, given the terrorist attacks that Israel is all too used to facing. As The Jerusalem Post reports:

After sending a message of condolence to King Harald V of Norway on Saturday, President Shimon Peres on Sunday followed up with a phone call to the King to personally voice his own and the nation's condolences...

The fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February led to a sharp increase in weapons smuggling to the Gaza Strip and continues today, according to a recent piece by Israeli security correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai. In the past six months alone, Bedouin smugglers have transferred three times the quantity of industrial explosives to Gaza as they did in all of 2010, as Gaza's terrorist organisations roughly doubled their number of rockets to an estimate 10,000, an amount equivalent to Hezbollah's arsenal at the start of the 2006 War.

Over the weekend, the Czech Republic, Italy and Holland have all pulled out of the UN's September 22 meeting to commemorate the 2001 Durban conference, a supposed anti-racism meeting that turned into a mass display of antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda. Canada, Israel and the US have already stated that they will not be attending the "Durban III" summit.

As the explanations for the pullout given by the Czech Republic, Italy and Holland demonstrate, we can expect this years Durban III summit to be a repeat of the first Durban conference in 2001 - which essentially labeled Zionism as racism, and Israel as the world's only racist state.

The Palestinian plan to seek UN recognition of an independent Palestinian state along the pre-1967 lines may be losing momentum, according to numerous media reports.

As the world continues to search for ways to meet the growing global energy demand without further damaging the environment, a new technology that harvests energy from the pressure caused by cars driving on roads is currently being tested in Israel. Developed by the Israeli start-up Innowattech, the innovation could soon be powering streetlights and homes in Israel. As Sara Toth Stub writes in the Wall Street Journal:

Using piezoelectric technology-the same technology that enables cigarette lighters to produce a spark-the pressure of vehicles on metallic crystals embedded under the surface produces electrical energy, explains Haim Abramovich, professor of aerospace engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and founder of the start-up Innowattech.

It would appear that the photo used online to illustrate pro-Palestinian activist Randa Abdel-Fattah's latest anti-Israel screed features a recycled picture from 2010 that has been discredited as a piece of confected theatre.

Lawlessness in North Africa appears to have opened up a new route for weapons smuggling into Gaza. Reuters has reported Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon explaining that weapons are now being smuggled from Libya through Egypt and into the Palestinian enclave.

"Weapons are available in Libya as a result of the unstable situation there, and Hamas has exploited it to buy weapons from Libyan smugglers," Yaalon told foreign journalists in a briefing, without elaborating on the kind of munitions involved.

The prospect of more weapons being funneled to Hamas is rather grim for Israel, suggesting that the conflict will never end...

An international public debate about male circumcision has been reignited by a San Francisco referendum - see an Australian report on this issue here - with anti-circumcision activists demanding that the circumcision of a minor be made a criminal act and treated as an assault. However, inconveniently for those who insist that circumcision is "barbararic" or comparable to the the terrible practice of female genital mutiliation, this week additional scientific proof of the possible medical benefits of circumcision revealed in a UN Announcement.

What do Malaysia, New Zealand, Pakistan and Egypt have in common?

In the past week, all four countries have been abuzz with conspiratorial news stories suggesting that Israel has been maliciously meddling in their internal affairs.

This Update features a couple of pieces on the apparent continued prevalence amongst Palestinians of the goal of eliminating the State of Israel, as well as an important comment on the problems created by the overwhelming importance of aid to the Palestinian economy.

After New Zealand media outrageously accused an Israeli victim of February's Christchurch earthquake of being a Mossad spy, Prime Minister John Key yesterday publically announce that an investigation demonstrated that neither the victim, Ofer Mizrahi, nor any of his friends, had any involvement in espionage. In a statement on Wednesday, Key said, "Security agencies conducted the investigation and found no evidence that the people were anything other than backpackers." It turns out Mizrahi held two passports, his Israeli and his EU one, rather than the five that a Southland Times article initially alleged. The story quickly spread throughout New Zealand newspapers, and was covered as one of the biggest stories of the week.

Only hours before Key's announcement, Fred Tulett, the journalist behind the initial story, said he was "unshakable in his conviction his facts are accurate."

In response to the passage of a controversial new anti-boycott law by the Israeli Knesset last week, AIJAC has issued the following statement:

AIJAC believes that anti-Israel boycotts represent a serious and significant political and diplomatic challenge to Israel as part of a larger campaign of delegitimisation, and that the Israeli government is fully justified in taking serious legal and political action to counter these threats wherever they originate. However, in AIJAC's view, overall, the anti-boycott law passed last week appears ill advised, will have opposite effects to those intended and may provide opportunities for Israel's detractors to further misrepresent the reality of its vibrant democracy.

On Wednesday, the Sydney Morning Herald featured a rant by Australian-born-Egyptian-Muslim-Palestinian pro-Palestinian activist Randa Abdel-Fattah arguing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the latters' ongoing suffering stems from Israel supposedly seeking to safeguard the ''purity'' of a Jewish-only state.

The ostensible motivation for her article was a desire to share the numerous experiences of racism she claims to have witnessed when visiting Israel and the West Bank in May. Yet nowhere in the article is she able to recount a single example of the alleged racism because her real motive is to justify her support for a one-state solution.

A new video from the Israeli Foreign Ministry does a good job of explaining, in a very brief and easy to understand way, some basic facts about the history and legal status of the West Bank.

This Update looks at policy options, as well as the potential benefits and costs, for Western governments seeking to pressure  Syria's Assad regime as the protests in Syria continue to spread and the death toll continues to mount.

The opening entry is an editorial from the New York Times, which urges that while a military invention is out of the question, Western nations "can bring a lot more pressure to bear" on the Assad regime. The paper notes that "awe" is the only possible response to the courage of Syrian protesters. It goes on to castigate US and European leaders for sending mixed message and various lifelines to the regime, urges the consumers of Syrian oil to stop buying it, and calls the Arab League's recent intervention on behalf of Assad a "disgrace".

The 2011 flotilla saga ended quietly yesterday when the only vessel to actually sail for Gaza was boarded without incident. As Isabel Kershner reports in The New York Times, the ship's crew lied to Greek authorities about their destination - claiming to be sailing for Egypt before diverting in international waters and heading towards Gaza. Then, when the Israeli authorities were certain of its destination and had given up on convincing the crew to change course, the ship was boarded by Israeli naval commandos...

American author, thinktanker and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead has used the anniversary of the publication of Mein Kampf to set out some important and valuable thoughts on modern expressions of antisemitism...

Meanwhile, some interesting thoughts on how the far left became susceptible to this sort of prejudice in their dedicated hatred of Israel have come from British academic and writer Alan Johnson, himself a man of the left...

Several weeks ago, the New York Times reported an Obama Administration effort to distribute a device it had developed called 'Internet in a suitcase', which could bring web access to dissidents in authoritarian countries across the world. The report stated:

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet...The State Department, for example, is financing the creation of stealth wireless networks that would enable activists to communicate outside the reach of governments in countries like Iran, Syria and Libya, according to participants in the projects.

This week, Iranian intelligence minister Heidar Moslehi responded to the news.

The situation in Syria took an even graver turn yesterday. As the ruling Assad regime continues to brutalise dissenting citizens, some Syrians appear to be lashing out at the regime's minority Alawite sect. In retaliation, several Allawites went on a rampage of their own. Nada Bakri reports in The New York Times:

On Sunday, residents of Homs, Syria's second-largest city, discovered the bodies of three Alawites mutilated and dumped in a deserted area, according to Omar Idlibi of the Local Coordination Committees, a group that helps organize and document protests. All three were armed government loyalists, he said...

Following up on Geoffrey Levin's post yesterday on the Jordanian Hashemite Monarchy's apparent success so far in weathering the Arab Spring, it is worth noting some other Arab countries which also appear to be managing the protest movements fairly successfully - especially Iraq and Morocco.

In another example of antisemitism sponsored by the Palestinian Authority (PA), this week the PA rebroadcast an antisemitic cartoon from a Jordanian newspaper regarding the division of Sudan on official PA television.

The cartoon had the headline "Division of Sudan," and it showed the distorted images of an American and a Jew toasting the division over barrels of Sudanese oil.

The New York Times has featured an article on Israel's remarkable in vitro fertilization program (IVF), whereby all Israeli citizens - Jews and Arabs - are entitled to free and unlimited IVF for up to ‘two take-home babies'. The article also appears on the Age Website.

Amid the cheers over the birth of the new nation state of the Republic of South Sudan, some commentators are noting the largely overlooked significance of what has just occurred, not least for an Israeli-Palestinian peace process eventually leading to a two state solution.

Compared with South Sudan, Palestine is the French Riviera. This raises serious questions about the moral justification for the Palestinians to take extreme stands that make compromise so difficult, while they continue to act as a bottomless drain on the ultimately limited resources the developed world can provide in aid.

Readers interested in the source of the UN's entrenched biases and hostility to Israel would do well to have a look at a new video (included below) which does a very good job of explaining the matter graphically.

Despite mass violence in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and leadership changes occurring in Egypt and Tunisia, Jordan has remained relatively quiet, with only limited protests and few deaths. As the Guardian points out:

Jordan has seen sporadic unrest since January but only on a small scale. Opposition demands - supported by youth groups, civil society organisations and Islamists - are for changes within the framework of the Hashemite monarchy. King Abdullah has pledged to pursue reforms that would allow the formation of future governments based on an elected parliamentary majority but gave no date. The slogan "the people want the reform of the regime" was in striking and deliberate contrast to demands elsewhere for the "overthrow" of rulers.

But does a recent act of police brutality signal a shift in Jordan?

In his column in the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and Adelaide's Advertiser (6/7), Andrew Bolt vented his disgust at the attempted picketing of a Max Brenner shop by pro-Palestinian activists. He wrote, "[In Australia] I never thought I'd see people picketing shops because their owners were Jewish...I've seen pictures of Jewish shops attacked before, of course, but they were in black and white, in another country at another ghastly time."

Israeli civil rights organisation director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has written a good primer in the Jerusalem Post on why the blockade of Gaza is legal and how flotilla activists are likely breaking US law.

Pursuant to the Oslo Accords ... the Palestinians agreed that the Gaza coastline would be placed under Israeli control and that no foreign ships would be allowed closer than 12 nautical miles from the shore.

Israel demanded this out of concern over widespread import of conventional and unconventional weapons into Gaza.

Noted Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh has written an article entitled "Palestinians cannot accept less than 100%" (published on the webiste of the Hudson Institue on July 12) which does a good job of explaining why the Palestinian Authority prefers the symbolic gesture of seeking UN recognition to renewing negotiations with Israel.

He argues that both radical Palestinians such as Hamas, and less radical ‘moderate' Palestinians such as the PLO, are unwilling to accept less than 100% of their demands. Most importantly, Toameh argues that even if Israel accepted all of their demands neither camp would commit to ending the conflict.

Following renewed unrest and a large public outcry against what is perceived as reluctance to dismantle the old regime, the Egyptian interim government is set to announce a major reshuffling of its cabinet today, with several senior ministers - including the Finance Minster and the Foreign Minister - resigning over the weekend. This comes shortly after the Government backed-down from an attempt to postpone elections. As The Washington Post's Ernesto Londono reports:

The expected exit of more than half of the Egyptian cabinet's members comes amid complaints that the interim military rulers have been slow to enact meaningful reforms. Activists say that the generals have failed to dismantle the power structure that remained largely intact when President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in February...

Sometimes, a news item comes along that seems far too convenient to actually be true. For a Middle East commentator, it's very rare to have clear-cut proof of something that you have been saying all-along. Today, however, is one of those occasions.

As noted in this post, the organisers of the (now mostly defunct) flotilla have worrying links to Hamas in Gaza. While there is undoubtedly suffering in Gaza, much of this can be attributed to its Hamas regime, which maintains control through torturing and murdering dissenters and censoring the press, while forcing Gazans to live in a perpetual state of war by refusing to negotiate with Israel or even recognise Israel's existence and renounce violence. It was, therefore, a no-brainer to point-out the hypocrisy of a group trying to make a political statement against Israel while cavorting with a far less savoury regime and ignoring much greater suffering elsewhere.

As a result many commentators - from Australian comedian Sandy Gutman to yours truly - have called for the flotilla activists to prove their self-proclaimed "humanitarian" intentions by going to Syria...

Writing in Foreign Policy, Rachel Shabi has interviewed a number of Palestinian activists and, unbeknownst to her, unearthed some startling and oft-overlooked views. Shabi found the activists to be disillusioned with the current Palestinian leadership and the direction in which they are headed - particularly on the upcoming UN statehood bid which, as they point out, is purely symbolic and will achieve few practical outcomes.

"September is a moment of truth for us," says Diana Alzeer, a 23-year-old social activist from Ramallah who cites the revolution in Egypt as inspiration. "We see that a dictatorship of over 30 years was gone in two weeks. So why not for Palestinians?"

On Monday, ABC Radio's The Spirit of Things  broadcast a fascinating interview with Sharon Rosen and Suheir Rasul from the Jerusalem offices of a peace initiative called Search for Common Ground. 

Sharon Rosen: Search for Common Ground is an international conflict transformation organisation that was founded 29 years ago by an American; his name is John Marks. It has now developed into the largest conflict transformation organisation in the world, with 37 offices in 25 countries. And the Middle East program, which was basically focussing on Palestinian-Israeli relations, began in 1990 and the actual office in situ on the ground in Jerusalem was opened in the year 2000. I became the acting director of the Jerusalem office in 2008 and Suheir joined me as co-director in 2009.

The prominent Friends of Israel Initiative formed under the leadership of former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar in 2010, has argued that a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state and international recognition of it would be a "huge mistake".

In an article published by the Jerusalem Post, the Friends of Israel Initiative (FII) argue that a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state is dangerous having "unforeseeable consequences" and maintain that peace can only be achieved though bilateral negotiations.

While Turkey has attracted much media attention for its willingness to take in Syrian refugees in the camps it has set up near the border, many Syrians have fled to other neighbouring countries such as Iraq. Thousands of Iraqi refugees who fled Iraq for Syria due to the war are now fleeing Syria, heading back to their home country. Agence France-Presse reports:

Hayat Saad, legal officer at the Baghdad Refugee Centre, said "every day we deal with between 60 to 70 cases of families who have returned to the country...Daily, about 20 come from Syria -- the largest contingent -- followed by Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and Libya," she added.

AIJAC's latest email Update looks at why and how the 2011 Gaza flotilla gambit fizzled out. In contrast to 2010's headline-grabbing political stunt that acted as a Trojan Horse for the Turkish Islamist IHH charity resulting in needless deaths and injuries, this was no replay.

AIJAC's latest email Update looks at US foreign policy positions in the Middle East that many analysts describe as alarmingly passive and which will effectively deliver the region into the anti-Western clutches of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

The prolific and insightful Dr Barry Rubin has written today on the Elephant in the Egyptian Parliament: namely, the overwhelming complicity that Egyptians seem to show towards Islamists and the worrying influence that extreme groups seem to be gaining.

Think about it. There is a powerful Muslim Brotherhood, openly seeking state power and Egypt's fundamental transformation into an Islamist state. Then there are the Salafists-a new label applied to even more radical Islamist groups-that were in the past simply called by the name of the individual organization...

Three bombs rocked crowded districts of Mumbai during rush hour on Wednesday, killing at least 21 people and injuring at least 141 people in the biggest attack on India since the November 2008 terrorist attacks also in Mumbai which were perpetrated by the militant Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taibe.

The myth that Lebanon's miseries are the result of Israeli policies has once more been punctured, with former Lebanese PM Saad Hariri blaming Hezbollah's weaponry for the country's chronic problems.

Israel's new "anti-boycott" law has understandably attracted plenty of criticism, but not all coverage of it has been as balanced as it should be.

The Middle East Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia) concluded a high-level meeting yesterday, aimed at re-starting Israeli/Palestinian peace talks, without agreeing on a concluding statement. As Barak Ravid reported for Haaretz, the disagreement was over whether or not the Quartet could demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish State.

"The goal was to give each side something that was important to them," a Western diplomat said. "The Palestinians were supposed to get 1967 borders with land swaps and the Israelis wanted to receive in return the recognition of Israel as the Jewish homeland, but...

This blog has been closely following the inexplicable failure of the Western World to apply proper scrutiny to Iran, as well as the internal strife that is currently gripping the Islamic Republic. A very poignant editorial in today's Jerusalem Post argues that the UN, too, has failed to apply adequate attention to the Ayatollah regime. The Post points-out the incredible amount of attention that the Palestinian Authority's upcoming statehood bid in the UN is receiving, juxtaposing this with the relatively negligible consideration given to Iran.

Former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, noted this disturbing fact in a meeting Tuesday with The Jerusalem Post editorial staff.

While the border between Gaza and Israel has been relatively calm since mid-April, the latest rocket attacks into Israel from Gaza suggest that violence in that area may again escalate.

The Jerusalem Post reported that on Wednesday morning a Kassam rocket fired from the Gaza Strip exploded in a field near a kibbutz in the Sha'ar Hanegev Regional Council. On Tuesday evening, two Kassam rockets were fired from Gaza, exploding in Sdot Negev Regional Council. One of the rockets lightly damaged a home, exploding just a few metres away from it, while the other landed in open space. Late last week, an IDF soldier was lightly wounded by an explosive device that was detonated near his vehicle along the Gaza border fence.