Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

Much of the attention regarding Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects have been focused on "hard" policy issues. Yet over-emphasising "hard" policy questions means that crucial precursors for both making peace and for the long term sustainability of any peace agreement end up being overlooked.

One such crucial aspect is the willingness of each side's general public to view the other side as a legitimate entity, and to engage in interaction with it by peaceful means. This is a key element in building stable and lasting peace. such a change in perceptions starts with education.

Education in the Palestinian territories has long been a major source of concern for analysts and commentators, who emphasised the dangers of ‘teaching hate,' and thus perpetuating the conflict. Nowhere is this ‘teaching hate' trend more troubling than in Gaza.

Western governments will be closely observing the Iranian election process in the leading up to the Presidential poll on June 14 in the hopes that the outcome may encourage a change that will allow a diplomatic resolution to the impasse over Iran's nuclear program - though of course, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is actually the key decisionmaker and is unaffected by the poll. The contest - which looked likely to be dominated by conservative Khamanei loyalists - was on May 11 rocked by the last minute entry of two candidates; former President Rafsanjani, and a top aide to current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. The next drama will be the decision of a clerical body called the Guardianship Council about which of the candidates are allowed to run - it has reportedly already ruled that all of the 30 registered female candidates are disqualified by virtue of their gender - and is expected to issue a ruling shortly, though there will likely be a further round of appeals.

Israeli industry has received another vote of confidence, this time from near-legendary American business mogul and philanthropist Warren Buffett, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.

Buffett recently completed the acquisition of the last 20% of the Israeli company Iscar (IMC) for US$2 billion - twice the value of the shares offered during the first stage of the transaction in 2006.

West Bank crossings and checkpoints exist to protect Israeli civilians from terrorist attacks and they have been highly successful in doing so.  However, in recent years as security conditions have improved, Israel has greatly eased security restrictions in the West Bank, removing most checkpoints and streamlining procedures at both the remaining checkpoints and border crossings.

The Israel Defence Force has posted an information page "Reality check: The truth behind crossings in Judea and Samaria", which further explains what checkpoints and crossings are, why they exist, and especially, how they work - including the process for West Bank residents to obtain a permit to enter Israel.

This Update deals with a worrying trend some distinguished scholars are beginning to to identify in the aftermath of the so-called "Arab Spring" - the decline of unified Arab nation-states in the Middle East.

AIJAC welcomes the Australian Government's decision to honour Raoul Wallenberg as Australia's first honorary citizen at a Canberra ceremony on Monday. The tribute not only pays respect to Wallenberg's heroic legacy of moral courage but it also makes a tremendous statement about Australian values.

In a bizarre move, the hardcopy edition of the Daily Telegraph failed to run any coverage before or after a BDS protest on April 30 at the University of NSW against a planned Max Brenner outlet set to open on campus in June.

However, in the paper's "They Said It" section (May 1) which highlights quotes of the day, this appeared:

"‘These brigades have committed war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and are involved in Israel's continual ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Students and staff of conscience demand that the Max Brenner be shut down! We don't want companies that endorse the apartheid state of Israel and it's apartheid practices.' A Facebook page set up by UNSW students opposes a campus chocolate shop."

A pair of apparent Israeli cruise missile strikes on Syrian military targets this month brought with it near-unanimous public criticism from the regime of Bashar Assad, Syrian rebels and opposition groups, and Arab and Islamist countries in the region (although scattered Syrian opposition voices were quietly observed supporting the move).

While both Israeli and Syrian officials were reluctant to discuss details, it appears that, like a previous strike on January 30, these strikes were intended to enforce a red line Israel had laid out to Syria against the transfer of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah - reportedly in this case the highly-accurate Fatah-110 missile, which could pinpoint targets over most of Israel.

Today's Update deals with the aftermath of a candid interview recently "allegedly" given to the New York Times by Salam Fayyad - the Palestinian Authority PM who resigned last month but is still in office in an interim role - and especially what it says about the problematic state and policies of the Palestinian leadership. The nature of this problem is partly highlighted by the word "allegedly" in the previous sentence, because Fayyad is now denying having given the interview at all, calling the whole story a " forgery that carries political dimensions with the goal of causing damage and fomenting strife."

AIJAC policy analyst Or Avi-Guy talks with Sky News' Stan Grant about Israel's apparent air strikes in Syria.

This Update features two important articles on the state of play regarding the Iranian nuclear standoff - one looking at the effectiveness of current sanctions and another examining Iran's calculations, and especially what considerations might lead Teheran to stage a nuclear breakout. It also contains an important article on the growing and increasingly controversial role being played by the small country of Qatar in various Middle East conflicts and issues.

Contrary to recent headlines, the Arab League as a collective body did not substantially "sweeten" its 2002 Peace Initiative (API) for Israel on Monday.

Nonetheless, there is some reason to see this diplomatic movement, while relatively minor, as a small, positive step.

Earlier this week, AIJAC reported the vile anti-Jewish hate-speech that appeared on the Facebok event page for an anti-Israel rally opposing the opening of a Max Brenner outlet at the University of NSW...

Consequently, the dynamic on the page was transformed ... it seems that the page has been overrun by semi-literate keyboard warriors with axes to grind...

The ANZAC Day memorial ceremony at the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery on Mount Scopus, Jerusalem saw an unusually high turnout last week. The respectful, yet modest, annual commemoration traditionally gathers, and caters to, mostly official Australian and New-Zealand representatives and diplomats from their Embassies, expatriates and the occasional tourist from "Down Under".

While many Gazans struggle with poverty like many people across the Middle East, one may be surprised to find that there is another side to Gaza's economy - a booming property development industry supported by the smuggling trade that is estimated to have made a thousand millionaires in the last five years. In fact, property prices for luxury villas and apartments in elite Gaza areas like El Remal are reportedly on par with London and New York. 

This certainly came as a surprise to television presenter Seyi Rhodes, who filmed the documentary "Unreported World: Gaza's property ladder" which aired on the UK's Channel 4 on April 26.

On Monday, AIJAC reported on the first two days of vicious anti-Jewish hate-speech on the Facebook page for an anti-Israel rally held this afternoon at the University of New South Wales ('UNSW') to protest the opening of a Max Brenner chocolate shop...

Thankfully, the event saw little identifiable antisemitism -- although those present were likely 'on their best behaviour' due to the significant media presence. Nevertheless, the real story remains the Facebook page. Below is a continuation of yesterday's account...

Student activism in NSW seems to be taking a dark turn.

For those who follow this blog, it would not be especially surprising to hear that the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions against Israel ('BDS') movement is steeped in antisemitism. ...

In recent days, students at the University of New South Wales ('UNSW') have seen perhaps the most publicly explicit example of this phenomenon to rear its ugly head on Australian shores. A bizarre collective of Muslim students, students from the extreme left, prominent Muslim community leader Rebecca Kay, and "Jihad Sheila" Raisah Douglas, have come together...

With Israeli military intelligence concluding that Syria has been using chemical weapons against rebels - joining more equivocal claims by Britain and France - and now US intelligence sources largely agreeing, there are growing calls for the US to rethink its low-key policy on Syria - given that US President Obama last year said such use would be a "red line" which would change the American "calculus." This update contains discussion of the possibility and its implications.

The confusion after the bombing of the Boston Marathon last week saw a number of reactions that were 'colourful' to say the least. Australians will be familiar with radio broadcaster Alan Jones' claim that the perpetrators were most likely "left-wing radical students", as well as Bob Ellis' rather bizarre speculation that "it seems to me likely that this was not al-Qaeda or a lone madman ... but more likely, much more likely, the NRA."

The most shocking reactions, however, did not come from Australians. Be it an unnerving sense of vindication or an incomprehensible conspiracy theory, AIJAC has compiled five of the most 'out-there' responses to the awful carnage that took place.

Australians woke up yesterday morning to the shocking news that two bombs had exploded in the streets near the finish line of the Boston Marathon and had killed three people - Martin Richard an eight-year-old boy who was cheering on his father in the marathon, Krystle Campbell a 29-year-old woman described by her mother as having a "heart of gold", and a Chinese woman who was a student at Boston University. More than 183 people have been hospitalised, 13 people have had their limbs amputated, and 24 are in a critical condition.

As readers are probably aware, Palestinian Authority PM Salam Fayyad  - widely seen internationally as a competent, efficient and moderate state-builder - submitted his resignation on Saturday and had it accepted by President Mahmoud Abbas. This Update is devoted to analysis of how Fayyad's resignation came about, and the implications of this change for the future of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israeli-Palestinian relations.

There is a re-appearing assumption that "everybody knows" the general outline of a future two-state peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, that both peoples support the idea, and that it is only distrust and the politics and limitations of the leaders of both sides that prevents it from coming about.

But what do Palestinians really think about the "everybody knows" peace deal? Well, there's good news and bad news.

Today, Israel celebrates the 65th anniversary of its independence (Yom Haatzmaut).

On 14 May 1948, the day in which the British Mandate over Palestine expired, the Jewish People's Council gathered at the Tel Aviv Museum, and David Ben Gurion who became Israel's first Prime Minister, read out the State of Israel's Declaration of Independence.

On that day, the Jewish ‘hope' to be a free people in their ancient homeland became a reality - recalling the famous words of Theodore Herzl, considered the father of modern political Zionism, who said, "If you will it, it is no dream."

Thatcher's reputation as the "Iron Lady" reflected her self-proclaimed status as a conviction politician, and this is echoed in the eulogies delivered following her death. Though her legacy has divided opinion, when it came to Israel and the Jewish people, she is remembered for her strong, supportive and effective foreign policy credentials, and her dedication to fighting antisemitism in all its guises.

As a member of Parliament, representing a large Jewish constituency, and as Britain's longest serving PM in over a hundred years, Thatcher was widely recognised as both a true friend and strong ally to the Jewish people and to the State of Israel.

This Update deals with the apparent political crisis within the Palestinian Authority, with reports saying Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has either submitted or plans to submit his resignation following growing disagreements with President Mahmoud Abbas and the wider Fatah movement he chairs (Fayyad is not a Fatah member).

The latest round of talks over Iran's nuclear program ended on the weekend with a meeting in Almaty, Kazakhistan, which concluded with little substantive progress and no agreement even about when talks might resume. Moreover, despite Iranian claims to have presented an offer in the latest talks, participants say it was actually, "some interesting, but not fully explained, general comments on our ideas" and an "apparent return to debating modalities for negotiations " rather than any substantive proposal. Iran then followed up the end of the talks by announcing the opening of two new uranium mines and a yellowcake (uranium oxide) factory. This Update deals with the talks and the current state of the Iranian nuclear crisis. 

In a stunning example of cherry picking, Ruby Hamad has demonstrated that when it comes to Israel, a story of triumph can be turned into a damning parable. It just takes a little willful ignorance and some creativity.

This Update deals with growing signs that political and economic problems in Egypt may be coming to a head - problems which have been highlighted in the media primarily in the wake of the prosecution for various political "crimes" of Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef. It also features some analysis of the recent secret leadership elections within Hamas.

Ahead of PM Julia Gillard's cabinet reshuffle Michael Danby's name was touted in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (March 25) as a potential foreign affairs parliamentary secretary (in the end he got the gig for the Arts instead).

Danby of course has excellent foreign policy credentials...Unfortunately, unlike the five other MPs profiled whose professional experience was touched upon, Danby's only qualification appears to be that he is a "staunch supporter of Israel", according to the Fairfax papers.

Barack Obama's first visit to Israel as President last month has been widely analysed in the context of the Israel-Palestinian peace process and in terms of other regional security concerns, with a particular focus on the sometimes rocky relationship he shares with Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu. However, both Obama and some of Australia's less-informed commentators chose to emphasise what the visit tells us about the overall Israel-US relationship, above and beyond any personal issues between individuals. 

But despite the President's eloquence, some media commentators and pundits outdid themselves in attempting to use the visit to push the ugly but increasing well-worn argument that it is only because of the undue and often insidious impact of the "Israel Lobby" (or more crudely the "Jewish Lobby") that the US has the policy positions that it does on Israel, and the US-Israel alliance endures. Some go as far as to suggest that Israel somehow has direct control over the American government.

The Jewish people recently celebrated the festival of Passover, which recounts the Jewish exodus from Egypt. In the Middle East, this festival often leads to new outbreaks of the ugly antisemitic lie of blood libel - the claim that Jews use the blood of non-Jews to make Passover Matzah.  This year a particularly concerning case of blood libel promotion occurred in an article by Jordanian writer Nawaf al-Zaru published on the Arabic website of MIFTAH, an NGO founded in 1998 by Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, who still plays a senior role there.

AIJAC guest Professor Alan Johnson from the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre discusses US president Barack Obama's recent tour of Israel on ABC News 24. [link]

US President Obama ended his visit to Israel and the Palestinian terrorities on Friday, going on to Jordan and then returning home.

His major statements in Israel were his speech on arrival, his media conference with Israeli PM Netanyahu, his media conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and his major speech to Israeli students in Jerusalem Thursday night (video is available here). All are worth reading in their entirety, if you have the time. For those who don't, AIJAC analyst Sharyn Mittelman offered a preliminary evaluation on Friday, while this Update is devoted to further evaluations of their cumulative effect, along with President Obama's other major stops in Israel and the West Bank.

It is one of the seminal images that appeared over and over again in the early stages of last November's Second Gaza-Israel war. 
 
Distraught Palestinian father Jihad Masharawi, holding the dead body of his 11-month-old son, Omar, who was reported to have been the victim of an Israeli rocket hitting the family home.
 
Except on March 6 2013, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights announced that its investigation into the circumstances of Omar's death suggests he was most likely a victim of a rocket fired by Hamas or one of its affiliates that fell short.
 
So, yes, in a very real sense, Omar was a symbol - a tragic victim of the callous indifference of the so-called Palestinian resistance movement that is based in, and operates from, built up civilian areas in Gaza.

US President Barack Obama's trip to Israel and the Palestinian Territories has been vitally important - and apparently highly successful. In only three short days Obama seems to have been able to address core issues that appeared to be straining the US-Israel relationship and press ‘reset'.

Prof. Alan Johnson, Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM), addressed an AIJAC luncheon in Melbourne on March 15 on the new Israeli Government's likely approach to the Peace Process.

With the details of the new Israeli cabinet still being sorted out right up until the night before the cabinet was sworn in on Monday, this Update is devoted to the details of the cabinet and coalition, as well as the implications for both domestic Israeli and international policies of their composition.

In Melbourne on March 15, AIJAC hosted Dr. Steve Rosen, the Director of the Middle East Forum's Washington Project and the former director of foreign policy issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee from 1982-2005.

Following the Israeli elections and just ahead of US President Barack Obama's first visit to Israel, last Tuesday The New Republic published a lengthy feature examining the current state of the peace process, penned by Ben Birnbaum.

In part, the essay "The end of the two-state solution: Why the window is closing on Middle-East peace", looked at the prospective problem of Fatah uniting with the terror group Hamas, which remains in sole control of Gaza and maintains considerable support among the population in the West Bank.

After six weeks of haggling, Israel's thirty-third Knesset was reported on Wednesday to include 22 cabinet ministers (down from 30 in the previous cabinet) and several deputy ministers from the 68-strong coalition of Likud-Beiteinu, Yesh Atid (There is a Future), HaBait Yehudit (The Jewish Home) and HaTnua (The Movement) The new government is due to be sworn in on Monday, and there are already signs that its agenda will be administered with pragmatism.

Iran finds it hard to make friends these days. And now, another "blow"- Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, one of Iran strongest allies in the global arena, passed away.

Interestingly, the Iranians have formed an unholy alliance with none other than the Hungarian ultra-nationalist rising power - the Jobbik party.

When Australia's federal government decided to abstain and not oppose a UN vote to upgrade Palestinian representation, Foreign Minister Bob Carr justified the move explaining how "a good friend will share with his friend reservations about that friend's behaviour".

It would be interesting to know if Carr feels similarly after reading the Australian foreign editor Greg Sheridan's very public and eye watering critique of his and predecessor Kevin Rudd's attempts "to put more distance between Australia and Israel" (March 9).

The take down was even more startling given Sheridan's acknowledgement that he is broadly admiring of both Carr and Rudd in most respects.

In Australia and elsewhere, proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions ('BDS') campaign against Israel consistently claim that the campaign is about human rights and has no racial element. ... Yet time and again, leading BDS figures are exposed for supporting various neo-Nazi and/or Islamist thinkers because of what those thinkers say about Jews. ... The degree to which casual antisemitism has become acceptable in the pro-BDS discourse is probably what led to Australians for Palestine ('AfP') deciding that this was an appropriate image to use on their website...

Al-Jazeera's credibility as an editorially independent news provider is increasingly under the spotlight.  AIJAC has previously blogged about growing concerns that al-Jazeera, owned by Qatar, is being used by Qatar to promote its foreign policy interests - in particular the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni Islamism generally. There have also been a number of reports of journalists resigning from al-Jazeera citing its lack of editorial independence.

Now even the venerable Economist has endorsed these concerns in its piece "The Muslim Brotherhood: It's hard being in charge". The article notes that despite the early success of the Muslim Brotherhood in the beginning of the ‘Arab Spring', the Brotherhood's popularity is now falling, and with it, the popularity of a key sponsor - al-Jazeera.

Through resource management, innovation and planning, the Israeli water authorities ... have now beaten the intense drought which has gripped the country for several years. Now, the Israeli example stands ready to help others in the region to do the same. Unfortunately, not everyone is ready to take advantage of this opportunity.

This year's annual AIPAC Policy Conference attracted more than 13,000 delegates, and heard from an array of speakers including Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (via satellite), Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, US Vice President Joe Biden, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, US House Leader Eric Cantor (R) and US Senator John McCain (R).

A this year's conference observers attempted to gauge the Obama Administration's possible policies and preferences for the next four years - regarding US-Israel relations, efforts to advance the two state solution, the so-called "Arab Spring", and particularly regarding Iran's nuclear program

How did the story about a goodwill gesture by Israel in the form of increased Palestinian employment inside Israel, combined with another goodwill gesture of improved bus service for some of these workers, became twisted into another story of Israeli "injustice" against Palestinians? 

Maybe it's the fact that Hamas' outgoing leader Khaled Meshal and Fairfax's Paul McGeough both have a penchant for beards, or that they are both persona non grata in Israel but their bromance spilled over into three separate articles in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald on March 2 and 3.

The numerous obituaries and eulogies being written for the recently deceased Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez all seem to agree on one thing: the man was polarising.

One group that was driven relentlessly towards the hostile pole is Venezuela's Jews. In addition to his generally poor rights record, Chavez had an ugly and long-standing habit of fostering enmity towards the Jewish community of Venezuela for his own political advantage...

Who are Samer Issawi and Ayman Sharawneh, the hunger-striking Palestinian prisoners that have become the latest "cause célèbre" for pro-Palestinian activists?

(See our update on how the prisoner issue appears to be a deliberate pretext for creating unrest in an effort to push the Palestinian agenda prior to US President Barack Obama's visit to the region later this month).

Unfortunately, many recent news reports on the pair have neglected to report on the background of terror activity of these and other Palestinian prisoners. In doing so, the media has omitted crucial information to give perspective and balance to their coverage on a very contentious issue.

In the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran last week, it was agreed to hold two additional meetings - a technical meeting in March and full political talks in early April - after the P5+1 powers softened their demands of Iran and offered greater incentives for agreeing to an interim agreement to ease concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. This Update looks at what can be concluded from the session about the state of efforts to prevent Iran from illegally constructing nuclear weapons.

The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday dedicated their front pages to a profile of Hamas leader Khaled Meshal - interviewed in Qatar by Fairfax senior journalist Paul McGeough. There were also a number of subsequent articles on Meshal by McGeough over the weekend in those papers.

McGeough's articles over the weekend with photos to match, provided a glorified picture of Meshal - painting him as a resistance leader capable of moderating but also an ‘every man' - a grandfather who plays with his grandchidren, a man who plays table-tennis and goes to the gym. McGeough does not detail Meshal's reported funding and organising of terrorist attacks on innocent Israelis.

UN agencies dedicated to the promotion of human rights, mandated with the protection of the world's most vulnerable and marginalised populations, have long been subject to widespread criticism for their politicization, hypocrisy, and anti-Israel bias. Over and over again, the UNHRC has proven to be plagued with the same problems which haunted its predecessor - most notably appointing egregious human rights violators to high-profile leadership positions.

The controversy stirred up during the confirmation hearing of US Senator Chuck Hagel, now appointed Secretary of Defense on Feb. 26, has once again opened debate on the relationship between the US and Israel. More to the point, it has prompted detractors to call into question the role of the "Israel Lobby", and push their claim that this lobby is somehow forcing the US to act against its own interests by maintaining close cooperation with Israel.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan on March 1 offensively equated Zionism to racism and fascism at the "Fifth Alliance of Civilizations Forum" in Vienna. During the forum, Erdoğan reportedly stated: "Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it becomes unavoidable that Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity."

Erdogan's decision to refer to Zionism, which is the foundation of the Jewish state and the movement of Jewish self-determination, as a "crime against humanity" is inflammatory, wrong and dangerous.

While sexual assaults in Tahrir Square are sadly not new, recently they reached "epidemic" proportions. And while many are asking the Egyptian government to condemn these organised attacks on women, instead some Egyptian parliamentarians have blamed the victims.

This Update features three pieces providing background to the growing - though still limited - West Bank demonstrations. While presented by Australian media as primarily the result of the death in Israeli custody of Arafat Jaradat on Saturday, and Palestinian claims he was tortured, this ignores the fact that demonstrations were already escalating last week, amid PA calls for the release of prisoners and threats of a new "Intifada". As all three of the pieces in this Update make clear, the death of Arafat Jaradat has simply become the latest justification for a campaign of demonstrations already being encouraged by the Palestinian Authority.

Readers following the extensive media coverage of the case of Australian-Israeli man Ben Zygier - who died in an Israeli prison in 2010 - will be aware that last week the Israeli courts allowed the publication of a redacted version of the report issued by the Rishon Lezion Magistrates court following the hearings held to investigate Zygier's death. Here is a verbatim translation of key excerpts from the report.

There are two Israeli films among the nominees for the 2013 Academy Award for best Documentary; Dror Moreh's "The Gatekeepers" and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi's "5 Broken Cameras".

There is more to this story than the success of a small and modestly-resourced Israeli film industry, and that is its role in the public discourse about Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how this role reflects the pluralistic nature of Israeli society, and its democratic institutions.

A new round of P5+1 (meaning the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) nuclear talks with Iran, the first since July of last year, is scheduled for next Tuesday, Feb. 26, in Kazakhstan. There are reports that Iran will be presented with a "substantial and serious offer" from the P5+1 to halt the more worrying enrichment activity - but expectations seems generally modest. Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran this week began installing much quicker second generation centrifuges. This Update offers some background to the talks and explores some of the reasons few expect a significant breakthrough.

Following the North Korean nuclear bomb test earlier this week, and the failure of the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting with Iran, this Update discusses the potential implications for the ongoing problems of preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons capabilities.

First up is an editorial on the subject from the Jerusalem Post, which notes that at the very least, the North Korean test was a morale-booster for Teheran.

Are NGOs imposing a double standard when it comes the demolition of Palestinian houses?

That is the question that Elliott Abrams asked Wednesday on his blog on the Council of Foreign Relations' website.

On Tuesday, the Palestinian news website Ma'an reported that Hamas was moving ahead with plans to demolish 75 homes belonging to the Abu Amrah clan in the al-Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza. The Hamas government claims the homes were built illegally. The family is protesting the move, and resisting relocation.

AIJAC has obviously been following closely the reporting and speculation - both in Australia and Israel - concerning the case of "Prisoner X" who died in 2010 in an Israeli prison, and is alleged to have been Melbourne-born Australian-Israeli dual citizen Ben Zygier.

While we can add little to what is already in the media, and have no wish to further burden the bereaved Zygier family, below in full is the translation prepared by Haaretz of the Israeli government statement on Prisoner X released on Wednesday, which has not yet been published here, and we believe sheds some light on aspects of the case which have not gotten sufficient attention.

This Update features two pieces related to the increasing street violence in Egypt, and the Muslim Brotherhood-led government's response to it, plus an important piece on the sad reality behind the Palestinian Authority's state building efforts in the West Bank, led by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

Lately, racism in soccer made headlines after a decision by the management of the Israeli soccer club Beitar Jerusalem to introduce two new players to the team, both Chechen Muslims. Some stories in the Australian media implied that Beitar Jerusalem is a racist club and that somehow this reflects racism in Israeli society at large. This kind of commentary shows a poor understanding of Beitar Jerusalem fans and the club's history, and misrepresents both Israeli soccer history and Israeli society.

Gaza is under siege and Gazans are struggling to get in basic items to feed their families, right? You might think so if you follow most of the coverage and comment and you see on the Gaza situation, but it is actually far from the reality. Don't take my word for it - read the Al-Monitor article by Rana Baker, who lives and studies in Gaza and writes for the vehemently and violently anti-Israel website Electronic Intifada.

The release of The Art of Betrayal, by Gordon Corera, the highly-regarded veteran BBC journalist, should, if our media indeed has the commitment to truth which it constantly proclaims, rightfully see the last decade of often conspiratorial rhetoric about the 2003 war in Iraq fade to reveal a different and more complex and nuanced reality.

Around two weeks after the May 31, 2010 flotilla incident aboard the Mavi Marmara, when Israel's enforcement of its naval blockade on the coast of the Gaza Strip led to the deaths of nine Turkish activists, Israel established an independent public commission of inquiry to examine whether it complied with its obligations under international law. This was known as the Turkel Commission, after Jacob Turkel, the retired judge who served as its Chairman.

On Feb. 6, Israel received the Second Report of the Turkel Commission evaluating the manner in which Israel examines and investigates allegations that it has violated the laws of armed conflict. This report is also intended to be proactive - looking at ways to improve Israel's future ability to handle allegations about violations of the laws of war.

This past Tuesday, February 5, the 19th Knesset, Israel's parliament, convened for its inaugural session in Jerusalem, and all 120 members pledged their allegiance to the State. The composition of the new Knesset can reveal, and for some affirm, a change in priorities in the national agenda among the Israeli public.

Israel's attack on a Syrian weapons convoy generated considerable interest on ABC Radio.

Radio National's "Breakfast" (1/2) spoke to Ehud Yaari via telephone in Israel.

Yaari told Fran Kelly that Israel attacked a convoy carrying weapons that would give Hezbollah capabilities such as the "Yakhont coast-to-sea missiles that could threaten, for example, the Israeli gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean."

He also said that the Assad regime accused anti-government Islamist rebels in Syria of co-responsibility for the Israeli attack, "a collusion, which does not exist, of course."

US President Barack Obama has now announced that he will be visiting Israel in March, after coming under some criticism for failing to do so during his first term in office. Details on the visit and what US officials hope will accomplish are reported here. (It is worth noting the White House has been clear that a new peace plan is not part of their agenda.) This Update looks at some of the issues likely be raised during the Presidential visit, or to affect it.

The revelation that an Australian passport holder was allegedly involved in last year's bus bombing coordinated by Hezbollah which killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria understandably garnered much local media coverage. In addition to numerous radio and TV reports, news briefs in yesterday's newspapers were followed up with more extensive reports today.

Except, bizarrely, there was no mention of the allegation by Bulgarian authorities in the hard copy editions of the national Australian Financial Review (AFR) or in either of Melbourne's two daily newspapers - the Age and Herald Sun.

Reports are coming out about an agreement for a renewal of negotiations regarding Iran's nuclear program in late February following an exchange of remarks about returning to talks between US Vice-President Biden and Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on the weekend. This Update features analysis, policy advice and background on how such talks might go.

Following Bulgaria's findings that Hezbollah was involved in the 18 July 2012 terrorist attack in Burgas that killed six people - five Israeli tourists and a local Bulgarian bus driver, the European Union (EU) is now under increasing pressure to list Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation.

Providing an update on its findings into the investigation of the bus bombing, Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said: "There is data showing the financing and connection between Hezbollah and the two suspects..." and that "the two suspects with Canadian and Australian passports had been living in Lebanon, one since 2006 and the other since 2010."

Revelations by Bulgarian investigators that one of the suspects in last July's terrorist bombing of a bus carrying an Israeli tour group near the airport in Burgas, Bulgaria last July was both a Hezbollah operative and an Australian national should unfortunately not come as any great surprise.

Those who have closely followed the operations of Iran's terror proxy in southeast Asia and Australasia in recent years know that its presence in the region is substantial, and that Australia is regularly listed as one of the countries in which Hezbollah operates.

AIJAC policy analyst Or Avi-Guy appeared on Sky News "NewsNight" with Stan Grant on February 4, discussing Israel, including Syria, elections, the UN Security Council, relations with the US and the two state outcome.

The principle argument being made by opponents of strong action against Iran's nuclear program is that Iran is a "rational" actor, whose regime values survival above all else and a nuclear Iran can be contained just as the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.

Now a new report offers yet more evidence to doubt whether Iran's "rationality" is so obvious and assured. And the report concerns not the loud-mouthed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but the man everyone agrees has ultimate control over Iran's nuclear program, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Israel has been making headlines recently for its failure to show-up to its "Universal Periodic Review" ("UPR") session at the United Nations Human Rights Council ("HRC") and for refusing to cooperate with a recent "fact-finding mission" into settlements in the West Bank. ...

Sadly, it appears that the reforms to the UN Human Rights Commission and its re-branding as the "Human Rights Council" have had little effect...

Earlier today, this blog noted that Israel has been boycotting the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the Council's habitual singling-out of Israel for unfair, unwarranted, and utterly biased criticism.

A report on settlements in the West Bank, the commission of which spurred Israel's decision to cease cooperation with the Council, has just been released. Sadly, the Report entirely vindicates Israel's position on the matter.

Below is an itemised critique of the Report, highlighting numerous examples of errors and misinformation...

In the aftermath of reports of an Israeli attack on a Syrian weapons convoy, ABC Radio carried two interviews on Friday worthy of special notice.

On Radio National's Breakfast program, Fran Kelly spoke with Israeli Channel 2's esteemed journalist and analyst Ehud Yaari, who of course recently visited Australia and spoke at an AIJAC function, video available here. 

Hours later, on The World Today, Simon Santow interviewed former CIA operative Robert Baer.

ABC Radio's Melbourne host Jon Faine (23/1) should hang his head in shame for his line of questioning to Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the results of the Israeli election.

Even though the evidence showed the opposite, Faine claimed that "the Coalition likely to be elected in the new Knesset in Israel looks like it is going to oppose the peace process."

Increasingly January 27, ‘International Holocaust Remembrance Day' is being misused and abused. This year was no exception with three prominent cases: Gerald Scarfe's cartoon in the Sunday Times; former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's comments praising Italy's former fascist dictator Benito Mussolini who was allied with Hitler's Nazi Germany; and most concerning were the outrageous comments made by Fathi Shihab-Eddim, a senior figure close to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi who chose January 27 to deny the Holocaust.

Two years after the Arab Spring erupted in the Middle East, sweeping away long standing governments and leaders, the biggest winners are unquestionably the Islamists, particularly in Egypt. Today's Update considers the strategic outlook. To the north of Israel, Syria is roiling in the blood of 60,000 dead as the Assad regime and Islamist rebels clash. To the south of Israel, Egypt’s streets are once more filling up with protesters as the Muslim Brotherhood boldly exposes its antisemitic and anti-democratic colours at breakneck speed, while its offshoot in Gaza is approaching its sixth year of rule.

In a story for the Age/Canberra Times/Sydney Morning Herald (21/1) on Israeli Arab voters Ruth Pollard spoke to the controversial anti-Zionist Israeli MK Haneen Zoabi - an interview best described as softer than cashmere.

With all the ballots counted and the horse-trading beginning to see which parties will join what will almost certainly be a Netanyahu-led governing coalition, today’'s update looks at what it means for the moribund peace process.

First up, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz reveals his initiative last December to convince Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to restart peace talks.

Contrary to predictions prior to the election by many that Israeli politics is increasingly right-wing, with 99 per cent of the vote already counted the Knesset's character is looking decidedly centrist, with an almost even split predicted in early television exit polling.

AIJAC's Dr Colin Rubenstein discussed Israel's 2013 election results on ABC News 24, 23 January 2013.

The theme of most Australian media coverage of the Israeli election taking place tonight, Australia time, is that Israel seems to be shifting towards the right. This Update contains two attempts to challenge this conventional wisdom - as well as a unique eyewitness report from an Iranian regime insider about Iran's nuclear plans.

On Friday January 18 at the close of the Australia-UK Ministerial Consultations (AUKMIN) conference in Perth, Foreign Minister the Hon Senator Bob Carr and UK Foreign Secretary William Hague released a joint statement on the Middle East peace process, condemning Israel's settlements as "illegal under international law".

AIJAC released the following media statement to the press in response on Friday 18 January.

Today's Update features three articles on aspects of the Israeli election campaign - and especially devoted to correcting some myths about the campaign and its likely outcome.

First up is Barry Rubin, commenting on some strange features of the election campaign, but also the exaggerated claims being made about Israel moving toward the right. He notes that current PM Binyamin Netanyahu's opponents appear to be doing a poor job of challenging him, relying too much on American political consultants, fighting amongst themselves, and boxing themselves into a corner by ruling out involvement in a Netanyahu coalition.

In a speech on January 4, marking the occasion of the anniversary of Fatah's establishment, Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority President and leader of both the PLO and the Fatah movement, expressed a political vision about the aspirations for the future of Palestinians.

The speech was described by leading Israeli analysts as espousing "a radical political doctrine" expressed "using extremist rhetoric" that "may have marked a turning point in the relations between the Palestinian Authority president and the State of Israel".

Up to 100 million Christians are facing persecution globally, mostly by Islamic extremists, and especially in the Middle East and African regions, according to a new report by the Christian NGO Open Doors.

According to the organisation, of the top 10 countries on their list - North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, Yemen and Eritrea - eight are majority Muslim states threatened by Islamic extremism, with North Korea and Eritrea being the sole exceptions.

The report puts a spotlight on the underreported plight of minority Christians worldwide, particularly in the Islamist-dominated Middle East, where the number of Christians relative to the global Christian population has plunged to less than one percent. This is in contrast to a century ago, when the Middle East was home to 20 percent of the world's Christians.

In the Sun-Herald (30/12), Paul McGeough penned a long article devoted to offensively comparing pro-Israel voices concerned over President Barack Obama's possible nomination of former Republican Senator Chuck Hagel as his next Defence-Secretary to those Americans who defend their right to own guns in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school massacre.

Following the Iranian regime's violent crackdown on Iranians who protested the June 2009 election result, Iran's repression continued against anyone deemed to be a supporter of the ‘velvet revolution'.  As a result, citizens who dare to speak out against Iran's violation of human rights including lawyers, journalists, bloggers have been arrested and often tortured. While this issue has mostly faded from global attention, the death while in custody of a 35-year-old Iranian activist blogger Sattar Beheshti in November 2012 has put this issue back in the headlines.

This Update features some information and argument related to the always contentious issue of Israeli West Bank settlements.

First up is noted Israeli international law expert Alan Baker looking at the arguments about the legality of the settlements. He summarises the case that they are legal in the most concise way I have yet seen. He also has a strong discussion of the relationship between the settlement question and the Oslo accords, noting that the Palestinian demand for a settlement freeze as a precondition for talks is actually a violation of Oslo, just as the recent UN decision to upgrade Palestinian status to a "non-member state" was.

Al Jazeera TV, located in and financed by Qatar and owned by Qatar's ruling al-Thani family, has just bought the struggling US left leaning channel Current TV, founded by Al Gore in 2005. This will allow al-Jazeera to have access to millions more US homes.  Al-Jazeera reportedly plans to create a new channel, "Aljazeera America," instead of using its existing English-language channel.  However, this announcement has called attention to growing claims that al-Jazeera is being used a propaganda tool for Qatari foreign policy interests.

The notorious Islamist organisation Hizb-Ut Tahrir ('HUT') openly avows an ideology whose ultimate goal is to transform the entire world into an Islamic state. Despite being linked to a number of terrorist attacks -- most notably the '7/7 bombings' in London -- the group is generally careful to avoid being portrayed as pro-violence.

For example, the profile of local Australian spokesperson Uthman Badar on ABC's The Drum (for which he is an occasional contributor) describes the group as...

Everyone knows that, while Israel has eased its blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza, it is still blocking the import of almost all construction materials, arguing they can be used for military purposes, right?

You would certainly think so if you read the Australian and New Zealand press coverage of a recent deal between Israel and Egypt to allow 20 trucks worth of construction material into Gaza this week... But it is just not true that Israel has banned construction materials entering into Gaza...

Since the Second Intifada, which commenced in September 2000 there has been an ongoing debate as to its origins.  This debate has finally come to an end, with Yasser Arafat's wife Suha admitting on Dubai TV on December 16 that her husband planned the Second Intifada and told her about it before he launched it.

This Update includes two pieces analysing some of the innovations in military technology and tactics which affected the Gaza conflict/Operation "Pillar of Defence", which occurred in November.

First up is an evaluation by Dr. Uzi Rubin, the father of Israel's missile defence program, discussing both Israel's Iron Dome missile and rocket defence system, and the innovations in rocket design and use on the Hamas side of the Gaza conflict.

Israel received strong international criticism when it announced its plans to build homes in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, in response to the Palestinian unilateral move to obtain ‘observer state' status at the UN General Assembly.

The Washington Post has responded to the wave of international criticism in an editorial on January 2 by noting that such criticism is "counterproductive because it reinforces two mistaken but widely held notions: that the settlements are the principal obstacle to a deal and that further construction will make a Palestinian state impossible."

The most heartbreaking consequence of any conflict is the unavoidable toll taken on the local civilian population. Sadly, in the hyper-politicised realm of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, these events seem unable to remain mere tragedies. Instead, each civilian killed takes on the additional mantle of a propaganda point scored in the conflict of public opinion.

This leads to the unfortunate tactic that Hamas and other Gaza-based groups seem to have adopted of cynically exploiting international sympathy...

UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO monitoring the UN, celebrated a little victory last week, when Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on "the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967," was removed from Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Santa Barbara Committee.

Why do news reporters often get their reporting about Israeli-Palestinian issues so badly wrong?

A new wrinkle to the controversy surrounding Israel's decision to approve housing projects in Jerusalem suburbs and east Jerusalem neighbourhoods (following up on my earlier blog posts on the subject on December 4 and December 11) suggests one answer.

This Update features two good pieces on the pitfalls in the upcoming phase of the Syrian civil war, especially in terms of US policy.

First up, repeat visitor to rebel-held regions of Syria Jonathan Spyer discusses the recent US decision to recognise the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), recently formed in Qatar, as the rightful Syrian government in waiting. Spyer argues that this decision appears to be a part of a larger strategy he feels is misguided, namely working with Muslim Brotherhood Islamists against the more extreme Salafists.

Iranian state run media, PressTV, may have surpassed itself this time airing the outrageous views of Michael Harris who blamed Israel for a number of mass shootings in America, including the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 26 people, including twenty children, two of whom were Jewish. Harris also blamed ‘Israeli death squads' for other recent shootings, including the Arizona shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, the Aurora ‘Batman' shooting, and the Breivik massacre in Norway.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy awarded its 2012 Scholar-Statesmen Award to Dennis Ross and Elliott Abrams on December 6. Ross served as special Middle East negotiator to President Clinton and Iran policy adviser to President Obama, and is currently counsellor to the Washington Institute. Abrams, served as Deputy National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush Administration, and is currently a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

In a post-award panel discussion, Ross and Abrams reflected on their careers in foreign policy and provided insights into the challenges of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran's nuclear program and the 'Arab Spring'.

This Update deals with three pieces of analysis on the state of Israeli-Palestinian relations in the wake of the UN  vote on "non-member state" status and other recent events.

First up is noted Israeli academic analyst and former UN Ambassador Dore Gold, offering some advice on Israeli diplomacy in the wake of the UN vote. He notes that, despite hints to the contrary prior to the UN vote, there is no sign that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is at all prepared to drop its preconditions and resume peace negotiations with Israel - and indeed the long-standing pre-conditions for talks have now been publicly re-affirmed by PA President Abbas.

December 7th was a big day for Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas political bureau. Hamas marked its 25th anniversary, and on the occasion Meshal made his first ever visit to Gaza, which was not only a personal experience, but also his opportunity for a political resurrection.

In his speech, Meshal proved once again that he is just as committed to the "resistance" and "liberation" of Palestine as the most extreme voices. He also proved that not much has changed in the 25 years since Hamas first emerged, with its hateful, antisemitic charter and the call for the annihilation of Israel.

In an update to my blog post from December 4 on the controversy surrounding Israel's decision to allow the planning of a new neighbourhood for the Jerusalem suburb of Ma'ale Adumim in an area known as E1, we look at some new developments to the story.

Recently it has been reported that the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blaming Israel for allegedly targeting Palestinian journalists during operation "Pillar of Defence" in the Gaza Strip. New York Times journalist David Carr went even further, as he accused Israel of intentionally targeting journalists.

Two main issues are mixed up in the story. Firstly, the use of journalists and press as human shields for terrorist activity, further endangering journalists reporting from conflict zones. And secondly, terrorists' use of journalist status to cover up for their violent activities.

After the current conflict in Syria had commenced, observations quickly began piling-up that it was receiving noticeably less coverage than it would if it were taking place just over Syria's eastern border in Israeli territory ... Occasionally, something comes up that really illustrates the extent to which the international community treats the mass murder in Syria as completely insignificant in comparison to even the most marginal allegations against Israel.

A perfect example is the recent UN General Assembly ('GA') discussion on Syria -- the first since last August -- as depicted in...

On December 5 Egyptian Prosecutor General Talaat Ibrahim Abdallah - who was just appointed by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi a few days ago - referred for investigation a complaint accusing three former presidential candidates - Mohammed ElBaradei, Hamdein Sabahy and Amr Moussa of engaging in a "Zionist plot" of espionage and sedition to overthrow the Morsi government.

This Update deals with the aftermath of the UN vote to upgrade Palestine to "non-member state" status last week, the Israeli response in terms of announcements of preparations to build new housing units in east Jerusalem and settlements, and the strong reaction this decision has promoted from many foreign governments, including Australia's.

Australia's biggest oil and gas firm, Woodside Petroleum has announced it is buying a 30 percent share, valued up to $2.5 billion, in Israel's Leviathan natural gas field.

Israel, a nation once thought to be devoid of natural resources in recent years has found vast amounts of natural gas deep under its Mediterranean waters.  The gas finding may not only make Israel energy self-sufficient for decades but also a world leader in energy exports - including possibly to Europe and Asia.

The Woodside deal also highlights the changing political and economic ramifications of the new gas fields in the East Mediterranean.

On Friday, following an all night session, Egypt's constitutional assembly rushed through a new constitution, which was promptly approved by Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi, and will be put to a referendum on Dec. 15. The rushed constitutional process follows increasing political unrest there after Morsi published on Nov. 22 a decree giving himself near absolute powers, not subject to judicial review, to take measures he judges necessary " to protect the country and the goals of the revolution." But the unrest shows little sign of ending anytime soon.

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was honoured at the Saban Forum in Washington on November 30, where she delivered an insightful speech on the challenges confronting the Middle East and Israel in particular. It's worth reviewing because Clinton offered a number of insights and historical reminders that anyone seeking to unravel the Middle East Gordian knot should understand.

An international furore has arisen over Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's decision to move forward with the long-stalled planning of a new Jewish neighbourhood in the area between Jerusalem and Ma'ale Adumim known by the name E-1. Construction on the project itself would not begin for, at the earliest, one or two years, and would require additional political approvals...

Beyond the exaggerated rhetoric, however, evidence shows that the reality of the E-1 plan, which was originally developed by the Rabin government in the early 1990s, is far less sinister than these reports would suggest.

Western countries that abstained or voted for the United Nations General Assembly resolution on Thursday upgrading the Palestinian representation in the UN to that of a non-member state have depicted their decision as a vote in favour of a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians and a two-state solution.

However, Palestinian officials have been telling their own people that the vote was a substantive step towards forced Israeli capitulation, not compromise. Significantly, Palestinian officials say they intend to argue that their increased recognition of statehood automatically entitles them to massive political dividends, including a presumption of final borders.

There is never a dull moment in Israeli politics, let alone when the upcoming elections are right around the corner. This week three main developments took place, any of which could significantly influence the political outlook.

Israel has now arrested suspects responsible for the Tel Aviv bus bomb attack on November 21 that injured 28 people, three seriously.

One suspect is an Israeli-Arab formerly from the West Bank who obtained Israeli citizenship on reunification grounds.  Therefore, this latest terrorist attack has again put the spotlight on how family reunification laws can be exploited by terrorists to gain entry into Israel to commit their crimes.

The Palestinians introduced a much-anticipated resolution giving "Palestine" a status of "non-member state" at the UN General Assembly on Monday.  A vote is expected today, New York time, which is Friday here, and the Australian Government's decision to abstain has been much in the news given that Prime Minister Julia Gilliard was reportedly forced by cabinet and caucus colleagues to abandon her own preference to vote "no". This Update is devoted to analysis of the significance and likely effect of the resolution - which is widely expected to pass easily.

The Hamas Charter of 1988 calls for the destruction of Israel, and includes rampant antisemitism and genocidal incitement. However, Hamas' use of genocidal rhetoric is not confined to its Charter and continues today. For example, Palestinian Media Watch reported that during the latest Israel-Gaza conflict, Hamas' al-Aqsa TV station aired calls to kills Jews, such as "Killing Jews is worship that draws us close to Allah".

From the moment Israel's Operation Pillar of Defence began last week, news of Syrian President Bashar Assad's bloody suppression of the rebellion against his rule was pushed down the news page, and in some cases knocked out of the paper entirely.

This, in spite of the fact that more Syrians than Palestinians were killed over the same period and that the death toll in Assad's crackdown is approaching 40,000 - many times more than the total number of Palestinians killed during fighting with Israel in decades of conflict.

In the first few days of the current escalation in Southern Israel and Gaza (which hopefully may now be coming to an end) most of the media reported that the violence escalated after a Kornet anti-tank missile was launched at an Israeli military jeep on November 10, injuring four soldiers. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) took responsibility for the attack. Shortly afterwards, a barrage of dozens of rockets aimed at Israeli cities and towns was launched from Gaza.

Perhaps the 10 days that have passed since that incident has blurred the memory of some reporters. Some media reports are now framed around the assumption that this whole thing began on the 14 with the strike on Jabari. And even more bizarrely, other reporter and commentators are stating or implying that it was the death of 13-year-old Hamid Younis Abu Dika on Nov. 8 near Khan Younis that sparked the current round of violence.

This Update offers more top-flight analysis of how the Gaza conflict got to this point - with more than 1150 rocket hits on Israel since Wednesday (on top of the 150 in the few days before that) and over 1400 Israeli strikes on terror targets in Gaza - and what the end of the conflict might look like. (Report now say a deal on a ceasefire being negotiated in Cairo might be close to completion, with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton now in the region to try to assist in a ceasefire deal.) Good constant updates on what is going on militarily are being provided by the IDF's website.

Human rights organisations are supposed to advance a universal approach, according to which every person in entitled to certain rights and liberties, based simply on his or her humanity. The most basic of these rights is the right to life. Yet time after time those very same organisations prove that some humans - those from groups they personally identify or sympathise with - have more rights than others. Most recently, this double-standard was evident in the response by various human rights organisations to the ongoing rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza on Israeli cities and towns. In between 'code red' sirens, you could almost hear the silence of human rights organisations.

The most unfortunate consequence of any war is that innocent people are invariably caught in the crossfire. The current conflict in Gaza is no exception, as can be seen by the tragic deaths of members of the Dallu family on Sunday from what appears to have been an erroneous airstrike on the part of the Israelis. The IDF were trying to target Hamas commander Yihya Abayo and, for reasons still unclear, hit the nearby Dallu household instead. The incident is currently under investigation.

Nevertheless, there is overwhelming evidence that the human toll that the war is taking is being exacerbated substantially by the tactics that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad ('PIJ'), and other Gaza militant groups are employing...

Dr. Colin Rubenstein from the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council discussed the latest Israel-Gaza conflict with Sky News reporter Helen Dalley, 19 November 2012.

The conflict between Israel and Hamas is also being played out in the media including social media, with Hamas and anti-Israel activists attempting to demonise Israel with false accusations.

The latest fabrication exposed concerns the tragic death of four-year-old Mahmoud Sadallah from Gaza - whose picture made international headlines when his body was cradled by the Egyptian Prime Minister. News agencies including CNN wrongly reported that the child was killed by Israeli missile fire. However, it has now been revealed that he was killed by a Palestinian rocket fired from within Gaza that did not reach Israeli territory.

As ‘Operation Pillar of Defence' enters its third day, rockets have gone from shelling southern Israel to threatening Tel Aviv - placing millions of Israelis in range of rocket attack. To date the Iron Dome missile defence system has intercepted 130 rockets, but some 300 rockets and mortars have landed in Israeli territory and three Israelis have been killed - Itzik Amsalem, Aharon Smadja and Mira Scharf who was pregnant.

In Australia, the Government and Coalition have expressed bi-partisan support for Israel's right to defend itself from rocket attacks fired from the Gaza Strip.

The US, Canada and UK have also expressed their support for Israel and condemned Hamas for the latest escalation.

AIJAC's Dr Colin Rubenstein discussed the latest Israel-Gaza conflict with Nick Grimm on ABC News 24, 16 November 2012.

Following on from Daniel Meyerowitz Katz's news roundup yesterday, this Update looks at the reasons for and the possible trajectory of the current round of violence sparked by Gaza rockets, which the IDF has dubbed Operation Amud Anan ("Pillar of Defence").

Since the targeted killing of Hamas' military commander in Gaza on Wednesday, there are now reported to have been around 340 strikes by Israel on targets in Gaza - reportedly killing 15 Palestinians (it is unclear how many are combatants versus civilians) - and 305 rockets fired into Israel, killing three civilians, including a pregnant woman. This also included perhaps four rocket attacks on the Tel Aviv area - the first since the 1991 Gulf War - which fortunately caused no damage or injuries. Israel claims to have neutralised most of Hamas' medium range Iranian-made Fajr-5 missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv in its initial strikes.

Last night's Update dealt with the escalating violence between Israel and Hamas over Israel's border with Gaza, and included a number of analyses predicting that if the constant rocket fire on southern Israel did not cease, Israel would launch a large-scale military operation to destroy terrorist infrastructure there associated with Hamas and other violent groups.

The operation was actually launched very shortly after. This post rounds-up all of the important information that has been coming out since the Israeli airstrikes began...

On Monday the UN General Assembly elected 18 countries to serve on the United Nations Human Rights Council. Sadly, as is the usual pattern, at least six of those elected are major human rights abusers who do not meet the criteria the UN itself set for membership of the Council.

"Pakistan, Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Cote d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gabon, and UAE systematically violate the human rights of their own citizens," said UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer, "and they have consistently voted the wrong way on U.N. initiatives to protect the human rights of others."

This Update deals with the latest major outbreak of violence from Gaza - resulting in more than 140 rocket hits on Israel since Saturday, a number of Israeli retaliatory strike on Gaza targets, and rocket attacks still occurring as of a few hours ago, despite claims of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire. Details of the rockets and the injuries that they have caused are summed up in this pdf document prepared by Israeli security officials.

The West-Bank village of Nabi Saleh has become a battleground for local Palestinians and international activists. But this is no ordinary battleground, it is a battleground in a propaganda war. Based on what could now be called the "Bil'in model", every Friday a supposedly "non-violent" demonstration takes place, in which protesters intentionally confront and clash with Israeli soldiers in front of dozens of photographers, who document the soldiers' every move. The most disturbing aspect of these staged demonstrations is the involvement of Palestinian children in the weekly "production". A new video shows just how far Palestinian children are prompted to go in this effort to provoke a reaction by Israeli soldiers that can be used for propaganda purposes.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas says he is determined to go forward with an exhumation of the remains of Yasser Arafat for forensic tests following a controversial investigation by al Jazeera earlier this year. 

According to reports, French investigators, Swiss experts and a Russian government team will take part in the probe following the November 26 exhumation of the former Palestinian leader, who died in France in 2004.

The original al Jazeera documentary on the subject, which reignited the controversy over Arafat's death, was shown here in Australia for the first time on free-to-air channel ABC 24 this week.

Five UNRWA employees have been killed in the Syrian conflict and shells have hit and damaged both an UNRWA health centre and an UNRWA school. However, UNRWA has only issued weak statements deploring the deaths and calling for "all sides must refrain from conducting the conflict in civilian areas..." This significantly contrasts with the condemnations and calls for war-crimes investigations that occurred when an Israeli shell struck outside an UNRWA school during the 2009 Gaza conflict. Analysts Asaf Romirowsky and Alex Joffe explore UNRWA's obvious "double standards".

Last night, the long-awaited Draft Resolution for the Palestinian UN statehood bid was filed by the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine. The Draft's most substantive point is the request to alter Palestine's status in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). This is contained in the third paragraph, which reads that...

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad once painted himself and his father as the champion of the Palestinian cause. But now the situation appears to have changed, as Assad's army reportedly fired on the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk killing 20 on November 4, raided Hamas offices and there are fears of mass Palestinian deportations from Syria.

Over 400 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian civil war, with little to no coverage by the Australian media. The self-proclaimed Palestinian advocates have also been all-but silent.

With the US election finally decided on Tuesday, and President Barack Obama returned to office reasonably comfortably, this Update looks at his Middle East challenges over the next four years.

An excellent starting place is the Washington Institute for Near East Policy forum on the subject, held yesterday, which is available for online viewing here (no transcript yet available).

Palestinian debate has been touched off by comments Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made on Thursday appearing to accept concessions on the Palestinian "right of return" to pre-1949 Israel.

Earlier this year, I was standing at the top of a ridge in the Wadi Ara Valley in Israel, overlooking the Arab settlement of Arara. I was with representatives from Givat Haviva, an Israeli-Arab reconciliation organisation. In the town below, I was told, lived a man who represented a new trend within Israel's Arab citizenry.

On reaching 18, some form of national service is mandatory for non-ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel, but Arabs are exempt from the requirement. As a rule, members of the Druze and Bedoin communities voluntarily serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, however the vast majority of Israel's Arab population refuses even non-military national service...

As Islamist parties and groups gain power in countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya in the aftermath of the upheavals in the Middle East, and with growing chaos and uncertainty in neighbouring Syria, Turkey has been seen by many analysts as a model for balancing political Islam and democracy. But in this debate about whether the "Turkish model" can be exported and successfully implemented in other countries in the region, the many flaws of the Turkish democracy have often been ignored, overlooked or downplayed. Some concerning new reports from Turkey suggest that, rather than regarding Ankara as a possible model to be exported, the question that should be asked is whether democracy will survive even within Turkey itself.

This Update contains two pieces from leading intellectuals dealing with the rise of "new" forms of antisemitism - forms where anti-Zionism is mixed with antisemitic beliefs and tropes - with a special focus on Europe. In addition, it includes a piece re-considering conventional wisdom on where Lebanon is heading in the wake of the assassination of intelligence chief Wissam al-Hassan two weeks ago.

Emboldened by its increasing acceptance among Arab governments, Hamas has changed its tactics in Gaza and is openly leading the rocket fire against Israel and moreover, making it clear that it effectively uses the Gaza population as human shields to do so.

There are new allegations regarding the Chinese telecommunication company Huawei, with Reuters reporting that an Iranian partner of Huawei, Soda Gostar Persian Vista, last year tried to sell embargoed American antenna equipment to an Iranian firm.

This latest report of breaching US sanctions, may further undermine Huawei's concerted efforts to improve its image in Australia, following an Australian government decision in March this year to block Huawei from bidding on its National Broadband Network (NBN) due to national security risks.

Often, in the aftermath of antisemitic attacks on Jewish communities, hateful and apologetic claims are somtimes made that the victim was in fact the instigator of hatred and provoked the attackers. However, there are cases that undermine this premise - at times it seems that amazingly there can be antisemitism without Jews. Malaysia is a case in point.

Last week AIJAC published a blog post, taking a critical look at Gideon Levy's article in Haaretz which published a report on a very misleading poll with the original title "Survey: Most Israeli Jews would support apartheid regime in Israel".

Haaretz has now published a clarification in the print edition of its newspaper in Hebrew regretting the title of Levy's report. Further, in a new article Levy himself admits that the headline of the report was "misleading", and apologises for an incorrect claim in his analysis of the poll, in his attempt to "fix a few mistakes".

This week Gideon Levy of Haaretz published an article on the results of a very misleading and flawed poll with the title "Survey: Most Israeli Jews would support apartheid regime in Israel" on October 24.

As a result of the Haaretz publicity, false reports that Israeli Jews support apartheid, made damaging headlines around the world, including in Australia.

The headlines were concerning, but once people were able to access the polling data, it became clear that not only was the poll's methodology questionable, but the analysis being presented of the poll data was both distorted and politically skewed.

Southern Israel suffered through an intense rocket barrage from Gaza earlier this week, with more than 80 rockets fired in a 24-hour period, before an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire took hold yesterday. Hamas has been itself taking credit for many of the rocket launches, a break with its behaviour over most of the past year. This Update explores why, and whether the visit to Gaza by the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Hamad al-Thani, the first by any Arab leader since Hamas took power there in 2007, had anything to do with it.

Earlier this week it was reported in the Age that visiting Israeli Human rights activist Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) had, at a public meeting, expressed concerns that "the very idea of equality under the law for all citizens in Israel is increasingly under threat." To back up this claim, El-Ad asserted, according to the article, that Arab citizens of Israel were discriminated against by the Israeli government when it drew the map of "national priority areas." El-Ad's description of civil rights in Israel, and in this case the rights of Arab citizens, is grossly misleading.

There is growing evidence over recent weeks that the Iranian economy is in serious trouble, in no small part due to the international sanctions imposed because of Teheran's illegal  nuclear program,  - with a major plunge in the value of the Rial, Iran's currency, down at least 80% this year; signs some ordinary Iranians are starting to panic over the economic situation;  and even unrest from demonstrators angry about the economic situation, and currency dealers who have been the victim of a government crackdown designed to arrest the plunge. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency says the sanctions are starting to have a major effect on oil exports.

As a matter of course newspapers make changes to stories. Some of these can be spelling or cuts for length.

But a number of questionable alterations were made to a story from the New York Times' Middle East correspondent Isabel Kershner that appeared in Fairfax papers noting Gilad Shalit's first major interview.

While women are suffering from extremism throughout the Middle East, Israel remains an exception where all women, regardless of race, religion or ethnicity, enjoy equality before the law, and despite some shortcomings, the most substantial social equality in the region, comparable to virtually any country in the world. Israel's Declaration of Independence grants "all Israel's inhabitants equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race or gender."

This significant point is sadly often lost in the headlines about Israel. But one Israeli-Arab woman, Boshra Khalaila is trying to draw attention to this important issue, as she travels around the world as an advocate for Israel.

A group supported by a cross-section of Australia's anti-Israel movement has been revealed to be pedalling overt antisemitic propaganda.

On 1 October, Jewish Agency for Israel employee Avi Mayer stumbled across an alarming tweet by the Free Gaza Movement ('FGM'), the principal organisers of the infamous 'Free Gaza Flotilla' in 2010, and several other flotillas to Gaza. The tweet said 'Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews', and linked to...

This Update focuses on analysis of the growing tension between Turkey and Syria, in the wake of a series of confrontational incidents, including Turkish shelling of Syrian territory in response to a Syrian shell which struck Turkey, an earlier incident involving Syrian fire on a Turkish warplane, and most recently, Turkey forcing down a civilian  plane claimed to be illegally smuggling Russian arms to Syria.

Many analysts have expressed concern about the potential costs, economic and otherwise, of a military strike to stop Iran's nuclear program - and rightly so. However, it is also important to take into account the heavy economic costs associated with inaction that would allow Iran to achieve nuclear capabilities.

The last two months have seen a wave of disturbing antisemitic attacks in France, including a grenade exploding in a kosher store. French antisemitism is even sweeping the ‘Twitter-sphere', where this week's top trending words on French language tweets was the hashtag #unbonjuif, which in English means "a good Jew". This led thousands of Twitter users to enter what the French daily Le Monde called "a competition of anti-Semitic jokes."  Meanwhile, DNA from the grenade attack led French police to conduct raids across France which uncovered a dangerous terror network of home grown radical Islamists with bomb making material and weapons that were planning their next attack.

In March this year the Australian government decided to block Chinese telecommunications company Huawei from bidding on the National Broadband Network (NBN) due to security risks.  Recently Canada stated its intention to exclude Huawei from helping it build a secure Canadian government communications network, due to security risks. Now a report by the US Congress on Huawei released on October 8 appears to support Australia and Canada's security concerns.

Today marks ten years since the ‘Bali Bombings', which tragically killed 202 people, including 88 Australians and 38 Indonesians, and injured more than 240.

For many Australians, the memory of the Bali bombings are now part of our collective national consciousness, an acute awareness of the evil of terrorism in its ability to destroy innocent lives indiscriminately - both those who were murdered without reason and those who have been grieving for their loved ones ever since.

The issue of Palestinian refugees is arguably the single largest impediment to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. None of the other 'final status issues' -- borders, security, and sovereignty over Jerusalem -- seem to leave such a gulf between the positions of the two parties that a compromise is difficult to imagine. Yet, as new research demonstrates, the refugee situation could have been solved very early on.

The solution to the borders issue is relatively clear: Israel will hold on to the major population blocs in the West Bank in exchange for equivalent land from Israel proper. Similarly, current security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority ('PA') has already gone most of the way towards resolving this issue. Jerusalem is a little more contentious, however there are several proposals that could be adopted...

As readers will probably be aware, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu announced earlier this week that he will seek early elections, and later announced that he is requesting a poll take place on January 22. His speech, calling for the election, and citing an inability "at this time to pass a responsible budget", is here. This Update looks at the reasons for this move and previews the election campaign.

Australian-born Israeli peace negotiator Dr. Tal Becker received extensive media coverage on his recent visit to Australia.

Here are links to some recordings from his interviews and events.

Egypt is back in the spotlight in this Update, which covers some important new developments in Cairo, the Sinai, and beyond that deserve closer attention. In Egypt after his US visit and speech at the United Nations last month, President Mohamed Morsi held his first interview with state-run media - a soft-hitting, pandering piece which many Egyptians said reminded them eerily of the way Egyptian media once presented Hosni Mubarak. Yet all is not well in Cairo, as the Muslim Brotherhood continues to reshape the country in its image. This week, for example, as Egypt’s new Constitution nears completion, many Egyptian women are up in arms over an erosion of women’s rights in the current draft. Meanwhile, a top advisor to Morsi has reiterated a call for revising Egypt’s Peace Treaty with Israel to allow for the removal of UN peacekeeping forces from the Sinai buffer zone with Israel – and fill the vacuum with Egyptian troops.

When news first broke about violent Muslim protests in response to the film ‘The Innocence of Muslims', significant media outlets failed any test of reliability by reporting that the film's producer was Sam Bacile an Israeli/Jew who funded the film with help of ‘100 Jewish donors'.  It would later be revealed that Sam Bacile was not a real person; neither was he Jewish or Israeli, but rather Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a Coptic Christian, and the "100 Jewish donors," was also a lie.

Rather than apologise for wrongful reporting, much of the media simply moved on to the next story. Nevertheless, the damage was done. And as a result it will feed into the hands of extremists and conspiracy theorists around the world.

This Update takes us to New York, at the 67th session of the United Nations General Assembly. Taking centre stage is a headline grabbing speech by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu following the predictably defiant, caustic and offensive anti-Israel speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas once again announced a renewed effort to upgrade the status of the Palestinian Authority at the UN to non-member observer state. The gathering also offered US President Barack Obama an opportunity to speak out on US foreign policy ahead of November elections, while Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi had his first turn at a UN podium. Finally, for Australia, this session was fraught with import, with Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s speech before the plenum culminating her government’s intensive effort to secure Australia’s first temporary seat on the UN Security Council since the 1980s.

The summer of 2005 was especially hot in Israel, but not just because of the high temperatures and Middle-Eastern climate. That summer the heat was political, as Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. It wasn't long before Hamas took over the strip. The showers of rockets into Israel proper never stopped.

Seven years later, Mahmoud al-Zahar, co-founder of Hamas finally admitted the obvious. In a recent (18.9.2012) interview to the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency he declared that "Gaza is free of occupation."

Anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe told Geraldine Doogue on ABC Radio National's "Breakfast" program  (17/9) that the "mainstream Zionist leadership from the very beginning understood that... they could not have a Jewish state as long as the Palestinians remained in Palestine".

The fact is that the mainstream Zionist leadership accepted and still accepts partitioning the disputed territory into Jewish and Arab states - in 1922 (when Jordan was created), 1937, 1947, 2000, and 2008.

Moreover, Zionist documents have always discussed the expectation that the Jewish state would have a non-Jewish minority.

Sydney Morning Herald/Age correspondent Ruth Pollard's report (10/9) on protests by West Bank Palestinians angry at increases in the cost of fuel essentially offered up a one-word explanation - Israel.

It has been a week of often violent protests worldwide (including some in Australia's region  as well as in Australia), leaving dead at least 30 demonstrators and the four American diplomatic staff in Libya,  and sparked, ostensibly, by an amateurish and offensive trailer for a movie about the prophet Muhammed posted on YouTube. This Update looks at the wider context of such reactions to an ugly and bigoted but insignificant movie clip.

ABC Radio National's "360documentaries" series (9/9) featured a 50-minute program from Australian anti-Zionist activist Peter Slezak with interviews he recorded on a recent trip to Gaza and the West Bank.

The program's producer was Cathy Peters - the Marrickville Councillor from the NSW Greens party who was instrumental in proposing the notorious BDS motion in 2010.

Despite this pedigree, ABC presenter Kirsti Melville meekly introduced Slezak as a "Jewish writer and commentator" without mentioning his activism.

The program itself is the equivalent of "the best of the worse of the anti-Israel" NGO and UN brigade featuring the usual array of one-sided claims. Neither Hamas nor any Palestinian violence was so much as mentioned.

Recently two Israeli commentators have focussed on a disturbing trend in Australian media, and its problematic coverage of the delicate issue of the role of Palestinian children in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This Updates deals with the implications of yesterday's mob attack on the US Embassy in Cairo  (see video here) and the armed attack of the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which left US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead. While these attacks have been reported as a response to a crude and objectionable anti-Islam film "Innocence of Muslims" made by some Americans and previewed on Youtube, there is growing evidence that the Cairo demonstration was scheduled for Sept. 11 weeks ago to call for the release of the blind Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman, convicted for his role in the first World Trade Centre bombing. Meanwhile US officials say the Libya attack looks like it was also pre-planned, (see also here), possibly by an al-Qaeda-linked group, before the film issue ever surfaced.

This Update features material on the growing demonstrations - sometimes violent -  in the West Bank against both cost of living pressures and against the Palestinian Authority (PA) more generally. (A report on the demonstrations yesterday, which left 50 injured is here. PA PM Salam Fayyad response in withdrawing unpopular austerity measures is discussed here.)

Israel came under some criticism lately when Israeli authorities were refusing to allow entry to a group of Eritrean asylum seekers stuck at the Egyptian border. The Israelis eventually relented after one week and permitted some of the asylum seekers to cross the border.

One of the most prominent critics of this incident was William Tall, the local representative from the UN High Commission for Refugees ('UNHCR'), one of the two UN bodies tasked with catering to the world's refugee populations.

The other body is, of course, the UN Relief and Works Agency For Palestine Refugees -- which regularly goes by the acronym 'UNRWA'.

The omission of the 'FPR' from the acronym makes it sound as though UNRWA were simply another arm of the UN, rather than an organisation established soleley to cater to one population. Unfortunately, the 'FPR' is a part of UNRWA's name and mandate, which must be glaringly apparent for the unfortunate Africans who attempt to find refuge in Israel...

Canada announced on Friday (7/9/2012) that it is closing down its embassy in Iran, and has also expelled all Iranian diplomats from the country. "Canada has closed it's embassy in Iran, effective immediately, and declared persona non grata all remaining Iranian diplomats in Canada," states Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird in a press release, which later further explains that "Diplomatic relations between Canada and Iran have been suspended. All Canadian diplomatic staff have left Iran, and Iranian diplomats in Ottawa have been instructed to leave within five days."

Hanan Ashrawi has caused controversy by recently writing in an article intended for an Arabic-speaking audience that there were no Jewish refugees from Arab countries. She wrote, "the emigration of Jews was a voluntary act that was influenced by factors of pressure and temptation by Zionist movements and the Jewish Agency." Ashrawi explained that: "If Israel is their homeland, then they are not ‘refugees;' they are emigrants who returned either voluntarily or due to a political decision."

However, Ashwrawi is clearly ignoring history for political reasons. In 1945, there were more than 870,000 Jews living in the various Arab states, some communities dated back 2,500 years. From the 1940s onwards many of these Jews were persecuted, their property and belongings confiscated and in some countries they were expelled - including Egypt, Libya and Algeria.

Mud-slinging allegations by the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq that Israel had committed "war crimes" by purportedly allowing the Israeli Dead Sea cosmetics company Ahava to "plunder" Dead Sea resources inside the West Bank became the focus of a controversial article by Fairfax's Middle East correspondent Ruth Pollard this week.

In the September 4 article "Cosmetics firm accused of plundering Dead Sea", Pollard regurgitated uncritically allegations from the Palestinian group that Ahava has been using materials in its products supposedly excavated from an undisclosed mining site in the jurisdiction of the Megilot Regional Council, where Ahava maintains a factory and outlet store.

With the cost of living skyrocketing as falling revenues forces the Palestinian Authority ('PA') to stop paying salaries to its employees, the PA is struggling to hold onto what legitimacy it has left amongst its people. In spite of this, the PA is reportedly increasing the money it pays in support of terrorists who have murdered innocent Israelis.

This blog has been following the PA's escalating financial crisis as foreign aid donations have dwindled over the past few years. We have also been following the repeated attacks on the pipeline through the Sinai that used to supply Israel with natural gas from Egypt and the Egyptians' eventual decision to unilaterally call-off the trade agreement.

It seems that these two issues are now coming to a head...

A series of articles in Fairfax newspapers focusing on the gifts and trips received by Australian Federal MPs offered sweeping and problematic generalisations on trips parliamentarians have made to Israel.

This Update looks at the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report on Iran's nuclear program, as well as other important aspects of the debate about what to do about Iran's nuclear program.

First up, noted American strategic analyst Anthony Cordesman summarises the key elements of the IAEA report, quoting from the report extensively to do so. He notes that Iran has refused to cooperate with the IAEA on the Parchin site suspected of being used for explosives testing for the nuclear program, has strongly increased its stockpile of both low enriched uranium and uranium enriched to 20% (well on the way to weapons grade) plus the UN has seen signs of even higher levels of enrichment...

Today marks forty years since the Munich massacre - when eleven Israeli Olympic athletes, coaches and officials, as well as a German police officer, were killed at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games by Palestinian terrorist group Black September. This tragedy has recently been given renewed attention following the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) defiance of an international campaign to hold a minute's silence to remember those killed at this year's London Olympic's opening and closing ceremonies.

Four decades later and the many unanswered questions about the attack has fuelled rumours, criticism and conspiracy theories.  Now Germany and Israel have recently released once classified documents that shed new light on some of these questions.

Australian Palestine Advocacy Network vice-president Robert Newton offered up a series of red herrings in the Canberra Times (21/8) to justify why "Unless Israel stops the illegal construction of settlements in the West Bank there will be no resumption of negotiations which have been stalled since December 2010".

Between 1993 and 2009 the Palestinian Authority (PA) did not insist on a settlements building freeze as a precondition to peace talks.

Israel may not have picked up a medal at the London Olympic games, but it is a little known truth that when it comes to the Paralympic games - Israel is a superstar.

Since the Paralympic games began, Israel has won 334 medals, including 113 gold, and those numbers are expected to grow at the London 2012 Paralympic games. The national medal total ranks Israel 13th overall in the history of the Games.

This Update contains two pieces on the state of the civil war in Syria, where rebel efforts over recent weeks to gain footholds in Damascus and Aleppo, the two largest cities, appear to be being pushed back by the regime.

First up is a report from Aleppo courtesy of the Economist, which makes it clear that many, both inside and outside Syria, are now arguing that the rebel move into Aleppo was an over-reach by rebel forces - and was not well-received by residents of the city. The story also discusses at length the problems of lack of unity in rebel forces, with no overall command even of the brigade attacking Aleppo...

An anthology of stories by former IDF soldiers regarding the treatment of Palestinian children in the West Bank and Gaza assembled by the controversial left-wing Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence has drawn the attention of Yediot Ahronot in Israel, the UK's Guardian and Independent, Iran's PressTV, as well as News Limited's John Lyons and Fairfax' Ruth Pollard here in the Australian press - but few other journalists worldwide.

This isn't really surprising, as there is evidently little new information contained in the report, which is essentially a repackaging of some 30 self-styled "testimonies" cherry picked from the organisation's 850-case archives (collected gradually over the past seven years) in an attempt to portray the IDF as systematic abusers of Palestinian children.

France's Jewish communities are deeply concerned by the rise in antisemitic incidents since last March's deadly shootings of a seven-year-old girl, and a Rabbi and his two children at the entrance to a Jewish school in Toulouse by radical Islamist Mohammed Merah.

One might expect that following the Toulouse attack, condemned by all political leaders and societal elites, it would inspire greater reflection and tolerance towards Jews. However the opposite appears to be occurring. Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris Shmuel Trigano said, "There is a before - and after-Merah... Despite the widespread condemnation of the killings, there was, among certain people in France, a desire to see this type of violence continue."

Yesterday, Israeli Judge Oded Gershon of the District Court of Haifa handed down his verdict in the civil case between the State of Israel and the parents of a young American woman killed in Gaza in 2003, acquitting the State on all counts. The circumstances surrounding the death of then 23-year-old Rachel Corrie are well known, however there has been a long-standing dispute regarding some key facts. 

Corrie's parents had claimed that the IDF either deliberately killed Corrie or was guilty of gross negligence. Judge Gershom dismissed the claim on the grounds that the IDF could not be liable for civil damages that occurred in a 'war zone' during the course of armed conflict.

Nevertheless, he went on to...

Former US diplomat Nicholas Burns argued that a diplomatic solution will only arise when America "create[s] a direct channel between Washington and Tehran and begin[s] an extended one-on-one negotiation with all issues on the table...To be successful, however, the US must be ready to compromise by offering imaginative proposals that would permit Iran civil nuclear power but deny it a nuclear weapon."

A Brazilian-Turkish deal in May 2011 offering Iran medium-enriched uranium for medical research came unstuck when Iran started putting impossible conditions on any such deal, Sydney Morning Herald (Aug. 17).

Rimsha Masih, a 12-year-old Christian Pakistani girl has been jailed for allegedly desecrating Holy Scripture, after a local cleric claimed that she burnt pages of Noorani Qaida, a children's textbook about the Koran.

On closer examination, it appears likely that putting the girl, and her mother, behind bars is claimed to be for their own protection. The case draws a sad picture in which one of the most severe implications of the blasphemy laws is "mob justice."

Time's Karl Vick (13/8) offered a simplistic account of the effect of the growing population of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem.

Vick implied that Jewish control over Jerusalem since 1967 has been bad for Christians and Muslims: "Millions visit the Holy City each year. Most are pilgrims to the signal sites of Christianity, though Muslims gather at their own great shrine above the Western Wall. Neither, however, are terribly welcome as residents. Since 1967, Jerusalem has become a resolutely Jewish city."

Except that Jerusalem has been a majority Jewish city since the 1850s. Furthermore the 68,000 Palestinians living there in 1967 have quadrupled to 288,000 in 2012, with Palestinian Arabs now making up 37% of Jerusalem's residents, compared to 25.8% in 1967.

Israeli leaders have responded with outrage at a pair of unrelated, racially-motivated attacks against Arabs last Thursday. Calls for swift justice, soul-searching and a new co-existence education campaign were voiced within the government, opposition and Israeli media commentators. Police responded with numerous arrests.

Next week, Iran is set to become the president of the 118-nation Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and host a six day Summit of the NAM in Teheran. As Golnaz Esfandiari of Radio Free Europe has reported, Teheran is going all out in an effort to use the Summit to attempt to " shed its image as a global pariah" and " gain much-needed support to counter Western pressure over its controversial nuclear program." Meanwhile, despite urgings from the US, Israel and others not to participate, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has announced he will attend the Summit. This Update looks at the implications of the Summit for the NAM, the UN, and especially efforts to maintain international pressure on Iran to halt its illegal nuclear weapons program.

The Times of Israel reported an official statement from the Palestinian Authority on Tuesday accusing Israel of "incitement". The source of the alleged incitement was a call from opposition MK Aryeh Eldad, from the hard-line National Union party, demanding that Jews be permitted to pray on the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem.

In an ironic twist, this statement was reported on the same day as reports emerged of a new mausoleum that the PA is building to honour the eight terrorists responsible for an attack on an Israeli hotel in 1975, which resulted in the deaths of eight civilian hostages and three Israeli soldiers...

This Update deals with the currently very intense discussion in Israel about the possibility of a military strike on Iran's nuclear program, as sparked by reports in the Israeli press last week that said that PM Binyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak were close to making a decision and were pushing for military action as soon as this October.

First up is an interview on the significance of the Israeli debates from veteran American Middle East diplomat Dennis Ross. He argues that the latest moves by Barak and Netanyahu are intended both to prepare international opinion, but more importantly, Israeli public opinion, for the reality that a strike may become necessary fairly soon.

As India and Israel celebrate their 20th anniversary of diplomatic ties this year, the number of cooperative ventures between the countries are expanding at an accelerating pace.

This week, Israel and India entered a fifth round of talks towards the creation of a much-anticipated free trade agreement.

Meanwhile, on July 31, Israel's Consul General in India Orna Sagiv spoke before a large audience in Bangalore ahead of Israel's opening next month of a Indian consulate in the city - India's third most populous - joining Israel's other consulate in India's most populous city, Mumbai, and its embassy in New Delhi.

Universities across Iran are reportedly closing their gates to women in many fields of study in an effort to suppress student activism via gender segregation. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia plans to create segregated women-only cities to prevent men and women mixing in the workplace.

An Israeli strike on Iran has been "imminent" for about two years now and commentators everywhere seem to be vacilating between alarm and dismissal. The volume of announcements, alleged leaks to the media, and public disagreement between various Israeli and US officials is leaving almost everyone scratching their heads over what is really going on.

The truth, as Elliott Abrams points out, is really anyone's guess...

Anti-Zionist writer Antony Loewenstein advanced his dream of a one-state solution on the Conversation (30/7).

Loewenstein wrote that for Israel the "occupation is a God-given right to populate land", and claimed that the recent Levy Commission had "found that its decades-long occupation of Palestinian land wasn't an occupation at all. The report granted quasi-legal justification for illegally moving Jews into the West Bank."

The report did not endorse unlimited settlement building. It confirmed that legally the West Bank is disputed territory since no sovereign state was established there when the British left in May 1948, and various decisions by international bodies grant Israel legal rights in the West Bank.  And, as the report noted, since 1967 Israel has adopted a "pragmatic approach" in the hope of encouraging peace negotiations about the future of the "the territories".

This Update deals with the dramatic announcement by Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi made on Sunday, firing the defence minister and all the heads of the armed forces - the major competing centre of power through  the transitional military council SCAF - and also heavily strengthening his own constitutional power via a decree altering the interim constitutional arrangements.

The defection of Syria's Prime Minister, Riad Hijab, to Jordan and the rebel side earlier this week - the latest in a string of high profile defections from the regime - has raised speculation that the bloody civil war there has turned a corner. This Update focuses on analysis of where things now stand in Syria, and how the changing situation might affect Western policy calculations.

First up is an argument for changing policies in the wake of the latest developments in Syria in an editorial from the Washington Post. The paper notes the defection of Mr. Hijab and also an International Crisis Group report which makes it clear, correctly, that the regime is long past agreeing to compromise or agreeing to a "managed transition - while the longer the civil war goes on the less likely a democratic and pluralist government will follow.

The Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA, 2.8.2012), published some statements by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made last Wednesday night in a meeting in Teheran with ambassadors and diplomats from Muslim countries . These reveal that while the Iranians love to claim they are only critical of Israel and "Zionism", and have nothing against Jews per se, the Iranians in fact simply and transparently use the word "Zionism" to paper over dangerously antisemitic views directed against Jews generally.

This Update is dedicated to the implications of the latest large-scale attack from Sinai into Israel on Sunday, which left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead, but caused no casualties in Israel. A good introduction to the news about the attack and its immediate aftermath appeared in Sharyn Mittleman's "Fresh Air" blog post on Tuesday - this Update will focus on the wider Sinai problem of a power vacuum increasingly being filled by violent extremist groups highlighted by this latest attack.

The latest terrorist attack on the Israel-Egypt border that killed 16 Egyptian soldiers is shaping up to be the first real test of Israel-Egypt relations under the leadership of newly elected Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.

The media's unwillingness or failure to probe glaring contradictions in pro-Palestinian propaganda was apparent in a Deutsche Presse-Agentour story in the Canberra Times and Sydney Morning Herald (28/7).

Last Dance director David Pulbrook was obviously cognisant that a movie about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict would necessitate negotiating a moral and political minefield. Tellingly, he stressed in numerous interviews that "we were careful not to take sides and worked closely with Palestinian and Jewish communities to ensure a balanced point of view".

He also went to some length to downplay the political significance of the film, telling the Australian Jewish News' Danny Gocs that "[t]he film is more about humanity and motherly love than the politically volatile issue between Israelis and Palestinians."

His efforts to engage with the Jewish and Muslim communities in Australia are laudable, as were his attempts to create a human drama from an inhuman conflict. His characterisation, however, missed the mark...

As Israel's 37-member delegation to the 2012 London Olympic Games finishes its first week of competition, the country's feisty athleticism is not the only thing on display. Nearly half of Israel's delegates were born outside of Israel and came there as olim from all corners of the globe, from South America, Africa, the former Soviet Union and North America. The delegation's diversity reflects Israel's own multiculturalism and presents an image of the country that belies the misconceptions that delude so many of its detractors.

Did he or didn't he?

The saga continues over the authorship of a note purportedly sent by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi to Shimon Peres, his Israeli counterpart, thanking him for his good wishes at the start of the Muslim festival of Ramadan.

This Update features two pieces of analysis which discuss worrying signs for the secular nationalist Fatah movement that dominates the Palestinian Authority -  emanating from both current Middle East trends, as well as developments in the West Bank itself.

First up is academic expert and recent visitor to Australia Dr. Jonathan Spyer, who sees the entire Palestinian nationalist movement as looking very vulnerable to the Islamist trends which are eclipsing Arab nationalist regimes across the Middle East.

The latest edition of Quadrant magazine featured a book review by Daryl McCann of Ben-Gurion: A Political Life (Schocken Books, 2011), which is highly recommended not only for what it says about the book, but because it explains clearly some truths and some long-forgotten facts about the origins of the Arab-Israel conflict that everyone should understand.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee in this November's US presidential race, made the most of a visit to Israel on Sunday, creating daylight - not between the US and Israel under a future Romney Administration, but rather - between his views and attitudes towards Israel and its neighbours and those of the current Obama Administration.

When Hamas is criticised for its antisemitic and genocidal rhetoric, the common trend is to refer to its 1988 charter, which repeats traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories, specifically cites notorious antisemitic propaganda document 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion', and contains some explicit calls to murder Jews. In return, apologists for Hamas have alleged that the charter is no longer a relevant document and accused Hamas detractors of using the document deceptively to demonise an innocent organisation.

Unfortunately, repeated statements from Hamas indicate that the spirit of the charter pervades the organisation to this day. A recent episode concerning Palestinian Authority (PA) official Ziad Al-Bandak is a case in point...

Israel's internal and external challenges often make headlines around the world. Israel's contributions to improving living conditions for people the world over, however, are finally starting to get the world's attention. Here are just a few recent examples which caught our eye.

As expected, the Olympic opening ceremony was held on July 28 without a minute's silence to honour the memory of the eleven Israeli athletes, who were brutally murdered by members of the Palestinian terrorist group ‘Black September' forty years ago at the Munich Olympics.

However, many were disgusted by the International Olympic Committee's (IOC) refusal to agree to such a tribute and provided their own remembrance of Munich. In support of the cause, during the American broadcast, Bob Costas silenced his microphone for five seconds to honour the Munich victims. In another show of solidarity, some 30 members of the Italian Olympic delegation held a moment of silence at the entrance to the Israeli delegation's residential compound in London.

Hamas officials, who had responded with elation over the election of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Muhammad Morsi to Egypt's presidency in late June, have come calling in Cairo twice over the past week, seeking to collect on Morsi's campaign promises to open Gaza's border to more trade and easier freedom of movement.

Despite calls from the victims' families and world leaders across the globe, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will reportedly not honour the memory of the 11 Israeli Olympians and one West German police officer murdered by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics in Munich at the opening ceremony for the London games tomorrow.

The plight of Christians in the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip has recently been in the spotlight following allegations by the Orthodox Christian Church, that a group of armed Islamists kidnapped five Christian Palestinians and forced them to convert to Islam.

On July 16, hundreds of Christians staged a rare protest in Gaza's main church, demanding the return of members of their community. A solidarity protest was held at the same time in Bethlehem on the plaza of the Church of Nativity.

This Update features pieces covering the rising regional and financial clout of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas as a result of the changes re-shaping the Middle East over the past eighteen months in what is sometimes called the "Arab Spring."

First up is noted American Palestinian Affairs analyst Jonathan Schanzer, who focuses on the financial signs of Hamas' growing clout compared to the Palestinian Authority (PA). He notes that while the PA is effectively broke, Hamas is riding high financially thanks to growing support from two new benefactors - Qatar and Turkey - despite the weakening of Hamas' ties to traditional patrons Syria and Iran.

Kochava and Yitzhak Shriki were supposed to be celebrating right now. They recently found out that after years of fertility treatments their greatest wish was being granted - 44-year-old Kochava was finally pregnant with their first child. They were on their way to a short summer vacation in Burgas, Bulgaria. A few hours later, the Shriki's dream has turned into a horrible nightmare when a suicide bomber exploded near a Bulgarian airport, right next to tourist buses packed with Israelis on their way from the airport to their hotels. Seven people were killed, five of them Israeli. One of them was Kochava.

In his book The Flight of The Intellectuals, Paul Berman noted a pivotal point in Arab antisemitism during the WWII-era alliance between Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Palestine. One of Husseini's greatest "achievements" was to take Nazi anti-Jewish tropes and not only translate them into Arabic, but to put them in terms that made sense to the Muslim Arab population in the Middle East.

Decades later and the depth and degree of antisemitism in mainstream Arab discourse has become extremely confronting. A quick glance over all of our posts tagged with "antisemitism" will show how common this phenomenon really is, and for those of us who watch constantly see this material, the volume is unfortunately enough that we become a little desensitised to it.

That said, there will be times when anyone will be jolted out of their complacency. For this writer, the below video did the job...

This Update features some additional material on the changing situation in Syria following the bomb blast there on Wednesday which killed and wounded several leading regime figures.

First up is noted Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, who looks at the ethnic reality of the Syrian state behind the recent killings and the current stage of the civil war. Ajami stresses that the Assad regime remains rooted in the Alawite minority, and the latest killing of some key regime players - two important Alawite commanders, and the much-less important Christian defence minister -  illustrates how this regime has brought this minority both spoils and peril.

This Update focuses primarily on the aftermath of the election in Libya earlier this month, but also looks at the apparent turn of battle in Syria, with rebel forces now engaging in extended battles with the regime in Damascus and a suicide bombing overnight killing several key regime figures - including the Defence Minister and President Assad's brother-in-law - and wounding others, including the Intelligence Chief and Interior Minister.

Ruth Pollard in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald (2/7) asserted that former Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir's "most criticised decision...was to undermine the 1987 agreement on Palestine reached by his foreign minister Shimon Peres and Jordan's King Hussein".

Contrary to Pollard's implication, the agreement would not have created an independent Palestine but seen a resumption of Jordanian rule over the West Bank.

The Pew Research Centre's Global Attitudes Project has just released the results of surveys it conducted throughout the Middle East in the wake of the "Arab Spring." The surveys reveal some interesting insights about attitudes in the Middle East in the wake of the recent uprisings, including how Middle Easterners weigh democracy, Islamism, economic strength and political stability in their own societies.

Hamas and its rival Fatah-run Palestinian Authority (PA) have learnt well the old dictum "Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man", with both groups running annual summer camps that prime the next generation of Palestinians to hate Israel and become desensitised to terrorism.

Dr. P R Kumaraswamy talks about the history of India-Israel relations, as part of an AIJAC Breakfast lecture held in Melbourne on July 16.

Dr. Kumaraswamy is a Professor with the Centre for West Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India. He has studied Israel since 1982 and is the author of India's Israel Policy, published by Columbia University Press in 2010.

The Iranian regime is well-known for joining its call for Israel's destruction with Holocaust denial. But it also dabbles in more classical antisemitism in its propaganda efforts. One theme currently getting play in official Iranian media outlets is the malevolent power of Jewish bankers.

Israel has slammed a UNESCO decision to endow a science chair at a university in Gaza which is a Hamas stronghold involved in weapons production and storage, terrorist training and vile anti-Israel and antisemitic indoctrination.

Today's Update features some new, valuable pieces on various aspects of the nuclear negotiations with Iran.

First up, Michael Makovsky and Blaise Misztal of the Bipartisan Policy Institute, a US thinktank, strongly argue against meeting Iran's demand in the negotiations that its "right to enrich uranium" should be acknowledged. Looking at the text of the Nuclear Non-Proiliferation Treaty, they document that the treaty grants no such right, and moreover, Iran has violate  the conditions the treaty sets out in order to receive "the right to peaceful use of nuclear energy".

This Update deals with the implications of the Levy Committee report into settlements and outposts set up by Israel's Netanyahu Government. Its three legal expert members, led by a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge, found that the law of belligerent occupation "as set out in the relevant international conventions cannot be considered applicable to the West Bank" and that therefore settlements are not illegal, as is so often claimed in international discourse. The report has sparked some controversy both in Israel and internationally. (A translation of the conclusions and recommendations of the committee can be downloaded here.)

Joseph Wakim revealed on ABC "Unleashed" (27/6) the true cause of internecine violence that has roiled Syria since February 2011 and blackened the good name of the Assad dictatorship:

There is nothing civil about the war in Syria - it is a proxy war to protect Israel from a nuclear Iran. This was confirmed when Israel's defence minister Ehud Barak declared that toppling Assad 'will be a major blow to the radical axis [Iran] ... It's the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the Arab world ... and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza'.

But this hardly amounts to a smoking gun for proving Israel is fomenting civil war in which more than 13,000 people have been killed; more a desperation to blame shift onto the usual scapegoat.

As the Arab and Palestinian media went into the usual conspiracy-theory frenzy over yet another attempt to crack the mystery of the death of former PLO head Yasser Arafat, locals in Ramallah, his former city of residence, were not as excited about the "news."

Dr. Meir Litvak talks about the impact of the "Arab Spring" on Israel, as part of an AIJAC Breakfast lecture held in Melbourne on June 29.

Dr. Litvak is a senior researcher at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University and a senior lecturer in its Middle Eastern Studies Department...

On Wednesday, there was a "technical" meeting connected with the P5+1/Iran nuclear talks - the upshot of which seems to be that it looks likely high level talks will resume. Meanwhile, Iran has responded to the imposition of new European sanctions by threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz. This Update has some new entries concerning the sanctions regime on Iran. In addition, it includes new analysis of the struggle between Islamists and other forces in the Syrian opposition as the Syrian civil war continues to develop.

After the media excitement over the allegation polonium poisoning might have caused Yasser Arafat's death in 2004, some sober and cogent analysis is debunking the thrust of the al-Jazeera report - that the radioactive levels that were reportedly found recently on Arafat's personal effects, could have come from Arafat himself.

Dr. Ely Karmon, of the Interdisciplinary Centre, Herzliya's Institute for Counterterrorism, a specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism, told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday that the half-life of the substance would make it impossible for polonium to have been discovered at such high levels after eight years.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has denied Israel’s request for a loan to assist the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority (PA). Conflicting numbers have been reported regarding the precise amount of the loan that Israel requested, with some news outlets reporting that it was for US $1 billion and others reporting that it was for US $100 million. Regardless of the exact amount, Israel’s request highlights not only its interest in preventing the collapse of the Palestinian economy but also the precariousness of the funding situation the PA currently faces thanks to a global economic downturn that has decreased the ability of donor countries worldwide to make good on their funding promises.

Last Friday at the 36th meeting of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee, held in St. Petersburg, the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was added to UNESCO's World Heritage List as an endangered heritage site, registered under the location "Palestine."

You may be thinking "Another pro-Palestinian vote at the UN, so what else is new?" But the baffling and telling part of the story is not simply that the motion passed, but that it passed despite the better judgment of UNESCO's own advisory body and secretariat, and even against the wishes of the church's own custodians.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Israel last week, as part of a larger Middle East tour by the newly re-elected leader, is seen by analysts as a productive diplomatic exercise between the two countries.

At the same time, analysts agree, the visit demonstrated the limits of diplomacy in persuading Russia to change its policies regarding matters of key national interest to Jerusalem, especially regarding Iran and Syria.

Mitt Romney, the presumptive US Republican presidential nominee, will be visiting Israel in the near future, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.

According to the story, Romney is expected to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the US Ambassador Daniel Shapiro and members of the Israeli Opposition.

Romney's itinerary does not include a meeting with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, according to the Times.

A visit to Israel is becoming almost customary for US presidential candidates in an election season.

A June 14 speech by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's leader Mohammed Badie in which he dreams of a Muslim leadership ready to make the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem "the sole goal" does not engender hope the world's leading Sunni Islamist organisation is ready to moderate its extremist positions now that it's candidate has won the country's presidency.

In the speech, Badie, who selected Mohammed Mursi to run for the Egyptian presidency, says:

"How happy would be the Muslims if all Muslim rulers made the Palestinian cause a pivotal issue, around which Muslims, rulers and the ruled, would line up [and ally to make] the sole goal for all of them the recovery of al Aqsa Mosque, freeing it from the filth of the Zionists, and imposing Muslim rule throughout beloved Palestine."

Age/Sydney Morning Herald (June 23) Middle East correspodent Ruth Pollard reported on an NGO study claiming that Gaza drinking water is "too contaminated", "never in continuous supply because of daily power shortages," and the infrastructure distributing it is in disrepair because Gazans have lived under an "Israel-imposed military blockade for five years."

Nowhere in the article was Hamas mentioned, which is astounding given that it has been the sole governing authority in Gaza since 2007 and has been effectively at war with Israel while doing little for its own population's welfare or water needs.

Furthermore, she ignored or was unaware of IDF reports documenting at least 27 water and sewage purification projects in place in Gaza - all of them facilitated by Israel, and not a single one funded by Hamas.

In a rare admission this week of what many who follow the organization have long observed, the British Broadcasting Corporation admitted that significant aspects of its coverage of the "Arab Spring" uprisings had been biased. They have also apologised, albeit somewhat half-heartedly, for a failure to report one of the most heinous terror attacks in recent years against Israelis.

This Update focuses on new analysis from noted experts on the likely trajectory of Egypt under its new President, Muhammed Morsi from the Muslim Brotherhood.

First is Eric Trager, the expert on Egyptian domestic politics for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, who discusses whether the democratic election victory of the Brotherhood means that it will now behave as a democratic party. Trager discusses considerable evidence of undemocratic behaviour by the Brotherhood and their supporters during the lead-up to the election, including signals that the Brotherhood intended to fight for a Morsi victory by any means necessary if he failed to win.

A motion calling upon the International Olympic Committee to observe a minute's silence at next month's London Olympics for the 11 Israelis killed in the 1972 Munich massacre, has today been unanimously passed in the House of Representatives.

The motion was moved by Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Lib.) and seconded by the Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Lib.).

Did Israel's government covet the land it captured as part of the defensive war of June 1967, which ended with Israeli forces in control of the Sinai Peninsula, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza?

For the most part, not at all, according to 200 pages of newly declassified transcripts from cabinet and committee meetings in the days following the war, released by Israel's National Archive this month.

As readers are probably aware, the third round of "P5+1" talks with Iran over its nuclear program took place on Monday and Tuesday of this week in Moscow and ended not only with no sign of an agreement, but without any clear plans for further high-level talks. This Update deals with what happened in Moscow and the implications of the talks' failure.

First up, Barak Ravid of Haaretz receives some insights into the exact nature of  the discussions from an anonyomous participating diplomat. He says that the Western states attempted to correct an Iranian belief that they were interested in a deal at any cost, while the Iranians were vague and unhelpful in discussing plans to limit their enrichment of uranium to 20% - which is, in terms of technical difficulty, almost bomb grade - and refused to discuss the fate of the secretly-built underground Fordo enrichment complex at all.

Bülent Yıldırım, President of the Turkish aid organisation Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), which sponsored the ill-fated and controversial "Mavi Marmara" flotilla to Gaza in 2010, is under investigation in Turkey for allegedly providing financial support to al-Qaeda.

As discussed in my previous blog post, prominent Australian political leaders, including the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, signed a petition calling for one minute's silence at the London Olympics to honour the victims of the 1972 Munich massacre, joining a growing international chorus on the subject. Now Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Lib.) on June 19 in the House of Representatives gave notice for a motion on this issue.

Meanwhile on June 18, Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, ALP) made a speech in the House of Representatives criticising the ABC's alleged media bias, particularly against Israel, as well as the ABC's "laughably labelled ‘complaints procedure'".

This Update deals with the aftermath of events in Egypt over the weekend - both the run-off presidential election (which the Muslim Brotherhood's Muhammed Morsi claims to have narrowly won, though his opponent, Ahmed Shafiq, makes the same claim, but election authorities are reviewing appeals and it is not clear when an official announcement will be made ), and the military's announcement of a temporary constitutional arrangement which effectively strips the Presidency of most of its power.

A Sydney Morning Herald story (16/6) on the Egyptian Supreme Court overturning a ban on the presidential candidacy of former Mubarak-era Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq featured a picture of a male protester holding a poster of Shafiq covered in at least five Star of Davids.

The paper's accompanying caption stated: "Hatred....protesters hold a defaced poster of presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq". Perhaps "Stereotypical antisemitism that is a feature of Egyptian political discourse" might have been a more apt description.

Ties between Israel and Thailand increased last week following a visit to Israel by Thai Defence Minister Sukumpol Suwanatat, which culminated in the signing of an intelligence pact between the two countries.

According to the report in the print edition of Friday's Bangkok Post, Thai and Israeli defence ministries have signed a non-disclosure agreement over classified information on intelligence, military and security.

"The agreement is part of the two countries' cooperation on security issues. We also agreed to exchange information on anti-terrorism operations,'' Sukumpol told the paper.

According to the story, a Thai military source added that Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak offered his mine-clearing and other military technology to the Thai Defence Ministry to help Thailand cope with ongoing violence in the country's south.

The visit came in the wake of a terror explosion in Bangkok on February 14 which wounded five people. The bombers, reportedly linked to Hezbollah, allegedly intended to attack Israeli diplomats in the city.

Fifty international charities and UN agencies have made a joint media appeal to lift the blockade of the Gaza Strip. Some of the charities that have signed the petition have Australian branches including: Amnesty International, Oxfam, Care International, War Child and HelpAge International.  The petition states:

"For over five years in Gaza, more than 1.6 million people have been under blockade in violation of international law. More than half of these people are children. We the undersigned say with one voice: 'end the blockade now'".

The petition appears to overlook a number of key issues which are discussed in this blog post.

After more than a year of brutal repression of anti-regime protest, the atrocities against civilians in Syria keep reaching new heights. Growing attention to the bloodshed and violence in that country by the international community and human rights organisations, even if tragically belated, could have been a hopeful sign that something might finally be done to put an end to the bloodshed. In reality, however, no such steps appear to be in sight.

Dozens of rockets have been launched from Gaza into Israel during a new outbreak of fighting this week. Also, in a new twist, Hamas has taken responsibility for the attacks, rather than merely passively permitting other groups such as Islamic Jihad to launch rockets from its territory - a policy that had been in place for the past year.

What happens when small groups of Egyptian women (escorted by men) gather in Tahrir Square to protest against the alarming and widespread phenomenon of sexual harassment in post-Mubarak Egypt? They get groped, sexually assaulted and violently attacked by a mob of thugs, until eventually rescued by other groups of men who come to their aid.

Israeli President Shimon Peres' ability to foster positive relationships with the West, and in particular the United States was very much on display in Washington on June 13 when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the highest civilian award the United States government can bestow upon an individual. In a gala dinner held in Washington in Peres' honour, US President Barack Obama praised the Israeli President's legacy and efforts on behalf of peace.

Obama said of Peres, "In him we see the essence of Israel itself... an indomitable spirit that will not be denied."

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's hatred of Israel is no secret. His despotic regime's alliances with countries hostile to Israel, most prominently Iran, are also no secret. Less well known has been the devastating toll that his regime's overt embrace of antisemitic rhetoric and policies has had on the Venezuelan Jewish community - though AIJAC's Allon Lee blogged on this in February. Now, as the ailing strongman takes on Henrique Capriles in Venezuela's presidential election campaign, he is again resorting to antisemitism as a tactic.

Following my previous blog post on the subject, the campaign to have a minute's silence at the upcoming Olympic Games in memory of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich games 40 years ago appears to be gathering steam internationally.

Senior Australian leaders including both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader, and now the Canadian Parliament have joined in the call, despite the International Olympic Committee (IOC) having already rejected an appeal by the Israeli government in May.

The Egyptian political scene has been shaken up by a surprise court decision leading to the dissolution of parliament by the ruling military council - just days before the crucial second round of presidential elections were due to take place. Below, Washington Institute scholars David Schenker and Eric Trager look at the implications of this development, predicting instability and the likelihood of a military backdown on the dissolution if there is mass popular unrest. They stress that the key to what happens will be the attitude of the Muslim Brotherhood, and take a look at what Brotherhood leaders are saying so far.

In 1985, following the murder of wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro, Palestine Liberation Organisation Foreign Secretary Farouq Qaddumi famously denied responsibility for the attack, suggesting that perhaps his terminally ill wife had killed her husband for insurance money.

This unique brand of chutzpah resurfaced again this week.

In a follow-up to last week's blog post concerning the myth of Israeli backing for Assad,

Israeli president Shimon Peres has become Israel's highest level official to openly back the Syrian rebels against the forces of Bashar Assad.

Despite Israel and Russia holding strongly divergent views on key Middle East issues - the violence in Syria, Iran's nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - Israel and Russia have against the odds managed to retain good relations since the end of the Cold War.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was quoted last year saying: "Israel is, in fact, a special state to us. It is practically a Russian-speaking country..."

Russia's ‘friendliness' has been made even clearer with Putin's decision to visit Israel and the Palestinian territories in late June. It will be Putin's first visit to Israel since 2005.

Five years ago this month, Hamas militants turned their guns on Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) forces in the Gaza Strip. Following eight days of fighting, during which time over 160 people were killed, Hamas completed its purge of the PA from the Gaza Strip. In response, PA President Mahmoud Abbas dissolved a Fatah-Hamas unity government, replaced Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh with technocrat Salam Fayaad, and consolidated his control of the West Bank. Israel and Egypt instituted a blockade of Gaza, while the US and EU lifted diplomatic sanctions on the PA while at the same time imposing harsher ones on Hamas in Gaza.

With help from Iran, Hamas built a stockpile of smuggled imported arms - including longer-range rockets - and increased its rocket production as well as the number of attacks it launched against Israel. This eventually lead to Israel's strong military response in the form of Operation Cast Lead, launched in the final days of 2008.

None of this context, however, has found its way into recent coverage of the anniversary of the Hamas takeover in two UK newspapers, the Guardian and the Independent.

When Israel's largest opposition party, Kadima, joined the ruling coalition, a great deal of attention went to the impending non-renewal of the "Tal Law" -- the law exempting Israel's Haredi (ultra-orthodox) communities from compulsory national service. Another side of the deal between Kadima and the government did not receive quite as much attention: in addition to Haredim, the proposed replacement for the Tal Law also requires that Israel's Arab citizens participate in the national service program. This involves numerous options, including charity work within their own communities.

Israeli Arabs make-up around 20% of the Israeli population and Haredim make-up 10%. While the two communities may seem completely different on the surface, in many ways they are very similar...

Think of Israel, and, for many, the first images that come to mind are of endless conflict, war and the constant struggle to survive against impossible odds. The sum of its external and internal challenges combined might easily lead one to believe that Israel is a very unhappy society in which to live. The reality, however, is actually far sunnier. Based on findings in a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report on life satisfaction in the developed world, Israel was recently declared the 6th happiest country on Earth.

It is no secret that Israel has been receiving "special" attention and treatment from several human rights organisations, which is expressed not only by the disproportional scope of research efforts dedicated to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also in strong biases and double standards when it comes to evaluating claims about Israel and its policies.

Now, it has been revealed that a "giant" among international human rights NGOs, Amnesty International, apparently has 'personnel issues' - which may explain some of Amnesty's recent reports and statements on Israel, such as the controversial new report about administrative detention and Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes called "Starved of Justice: Palestinians detained without trial by Israel".

A Gaza-bound convoy organised by rabble-rousing British MP George Galloway's pro-Hamas British group Viva Palestina failed to reach its destination last month after being blocked by Egyptian authorities from entering the Sinai.

They have now observed that they are being ignored -- at least when theyaren't being shot at:

According to UN officials, UN vehicles are shot at almost every day in Syria.

Mr Ban [Ki-moon] told the 15-nation council that UN observers had seen Syrian military convoys approaching villages and tried to stop tank assaults against populated areas, but had been "ignored".

... Ban said shots were fired at the UN convoy which tried to get into the village of Al-Kubeir.

Fortunately, the observers were able to relay this information to the Secretary-General in time for him to take some incredibly tough action...

On Tuesday night a belated Israel independence celebration was held at the Windsor Hotel. Students for Palestine decided to target the event, and staged a protest outside the hotel. The protest has been described as ‘ugly', with protestors burning an effigy of the Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu for supporting ‘apartheid' and calls for the destruction of Israel as the protestors chanted "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free."

Despite the noise created by the protest, the celebration continued inside the Windsor with around 300 guests - including leaders in the Jewish community, Premier Baillieu, Leader of the opposition Daniel Andrews, Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem and other diplomats.  In addition, approximately 50 Liberal Party, ALP and Nations Members of Parliament were escorted by the police to the Windsor Hotel through the noisy throng of protestors to attend the event. The police are to be commended for their professionalism and effective crowd control.

The next day speeches were made in the Victorian Parliament affirming support for the State of Israel and praising the police response to the protest.

The impact of international sanctions on Iran's ability to do business with its neighbours as it pursues its controversial nuclear program is an issue that AIJAC has followed closely.

What is clear now is that the Iranian economy is in a state of sharp decline as sanctions cripple Iran's ability to do business with its neighbours.

This decline is today being exacerbated by the fact that oil prices are falling worldwide, and are expected to continue to do so.

Moreover, there is new evidence these dynamics, combined with governmental mismanagement are combining to significantly affect the lifestyle of the average Iranian - especially in terms of prices for basic food staples.

ABC radio's "World Today" reported on the growing recognition that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) may actually be perpetuating the ongoing Palestinian refugee issue (see AIJAC's update from June 6 2012 for more on the issue).

Unfortunately, a serious issue suffered from the not-so-subtle insinuation that the enterprise is essentially a right-wing plot to deprive aid to Palestinians rather than a question of who should rightfully be deemed a Palestinian refugee and how it might just be hampering solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This Update leads with two important pieces discussing the claims and counter-claims being made as part of the Iranian nuclear talks.

First up, Iran scholar and recent visitor to Australia Emanuele Ottolenghi offers a good de-bunking of the constant Iranian refrain that their right to peacefully develop nuclear energy is being denied them. Ottolenghi makes it clear that the key point to understand is that Iran, as a Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty signatory, has this right only as long as it meets its NPT obligations - but the International Atomic Energy Agency has been very clear that Iran is not doing so.

There has been considerable comment of late, both in Australia and the UN, about the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in the wake of a legislative proposal being discussed in Washington, and a recent grant of increased aid provided to UNRWA in Canberra. This Update provides some background on the controversy over UNRWA, and the idea behind the UNRWA-related legislative amendment which passed out of a Committee in the US Senate last week.

First up is a backgrounder on the American UNRWA proposal, sponsored by Senator Mark Kirk, written by American scholars Alexander Joffe and Asaf Romirowsky (Mr. Romirowsky is currently visiting Australia to speak at the annual Limmud Oz conference of Jewish educators.) They make it clear that the intent of the Kirk legislation is not to cut off Palestinians from needed aid, but to provide some clarity about the state of UNRWA's clients, the vast majority of whom are not refugees by the standards applied to every other refugee population in the world.

In the Australian (2/6), Greg Sheridan questioned Australia's ongoing support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) that is ostensibly "the lead UN agency for helping Palestinians" but is actually a major prop for perpetuating the Palestinian refugee issue.

Boycotting and isolating Israel culturally, economically, and politically has long been one of the goals of many of Israel’s neighbours in the Middle East, and more recently, of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. It is revealing, then, that growing numbers of people throughout the Middle East are themselves disobeying the call of the anti-normalisation and BDS movements by listening to music by Israeli artists.

La Trobe University lecturer Luca Anceschi had a rather nonsensical piece today on academic opinion website The Conversation, concerning the Islamist parties in the Arab world. From the very beginning, Anceschi makes some basic factual errors...

The influential trade publication Defence Review Asia has reported strong growth for Israeli weapons system sales to a number of Asian and Australasian countries, including right here in Australia.

The story, which was published on Sunday, focused on burgeoning trade between Israel and India, but also looked at deals with Singapore and South Korea, among others.

The UN has often suffered from a ‘credibility' issue because of its choice of appointments, and the latest appointment of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe by the UN World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) as 'Leader for Tourism' illustrates once again why.

In the Australian (25/5) academic Philip Mendes analysed the conceptual and practical flaws underpinning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement noting that it "is a by-product of the second Palestinian intifada and the collapse of the Oslo peace process.... It is essentially war by other means...and intended to coerce Israel into surrendering to Palestinian demands".

A myth seems to have developed in some circles that Israel is either backing the Assad regime in Syria, or at the least, is somehow impeding international action against it, supposedly out of fear of what may follow.

This Update focuses on analysis of the outcome of the Egyptian Presidential elections last week, where contrary to most expectations, the candidates to make it into the second round were Muslim Brotherhood representative Mohamed Morsi and former air force head Ahmed Shafiq, who is seen as closely associated with the Egyptian military and the former Mubarak regime.

First up is the reliably well-informed expert on Egyptian politics from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Eric Trager, looking at the success of the Muslim Brotherhood. He notes that analyses and polls which had predicted a poor showing for Morsi failed to account for the fact that not only is the Brotherhood the best organised political force in the country, it is in essence the only organised political force.

In a move intended to encourage the Palestinians to return to peace negotiations, Israel returned the remains of 91 Palestinians on May 31, most of whom were killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said:

"We hope that this humanitarian gesture will serve both as a confidence-building measure and help get the peace process back on track... Israel is ready for the immediate resumption of peace talks without any preconditions whatsoever."

Equality for women in work and education; an assurance that Islamic dress will not be imposed; Christian senior political advisors and possibly even a Christian Vice-President; freedom of protest and expression - the list of pre-election promises made since last Tuesday by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate for presidency in Egypt, just keeps on getting longer.

Morsi won about 24% of the votes in the first round of presidential election. A second round will take place on June 16-17 between Morsi and Ahmed Shafiq, and it seems that Morsi is trying very hard to broaden his support base, attempting to appeal to women and minorities, the youth of the revolution and even the military.

Following the shocking reports and images of the massacre that occurred in the Syrian village of Haoula on May 25, there has been a chorus of international outrage. The UN reported that 108 people were killed among them 49 children and 34 women, by the Assad regime and pro-Assad militia ‘Shabiha'.

AIJAC welcomes Australia decision on May 29 to expel Syrian Chargé d'Affaires, Jawdat Ali, and another diplomat, from Australia.

The recent plight of Coptic Christians in Egypt has been the subject of significant attention since last year's revolution. The community suffered yet another outrage last week, as an Egyptian court sentenced 12 Copts to life-imprisonment, while acquitting eight Muslims, for their involvement in an incident of mob violence that resulted in dozens of Coptic homes burned and destroyed.

This incident did not receive the coverage that it deserved, however the world is at least broadly aware of the struggle that the Copts in Egypt are currently facing. What has been receiving even less press coverage is the similar situation in which Palestinian Christians are reportedly finding themselves in....

Despite an optimistic spin to last week's negotiations in Baghdad between P5+1 negotiators and Iran over the latter's nuclear program, as more details of those negotiations emerge, it is becoming more clear that Iran continues to flout both UN Security Council resolutions and Western demands. As negotiations proceed, Teheran appears to be in fact expanding its nuclear plans, instead of a curtailing them.

The recent "Nakba Day" protests in Sydney attracted some controversy due to a ruling by NSW Supreme Court Justice Christine Adamson allowing the protesters to block peak-hour traffic in the centre of Sydney's CBD. Adamson drew particular criticism for likening "Nakba Day" – a Palestinian commemoration of the establishment of Israel ("nabka" meaning "catastrophe" in Arabic) – to Australia Day, Christmas Day and ANZAC Day.

That said, something far more sinister took place at the protest. A video (below), posted anonymously on Youtube, depicts various scenes from the protest set to dramatic music.

What started as a protest of some 1,000 people in Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighbourhood on May 23 calling for the deportation of unauthorised African migrants to Israel, turned violent as demonstrators attacked African passersby while others lit garbage cans on fire and smashed car windows. Israeli police arrested 17 people during the protest.

The violence and incitement to violence by some speakers has been condemned by Israel's highest leaders, and many Israelis have taken to the streets to protest against the racist riot.

As readers may be aware, the long-anticipated P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran in Baghdad ended overnight without a breakthrough. Indeed, little seems to have been achieved except for an agreement to meet again in Moscow on June 17.

As discussed in this Update's first piece from the New York Times, an offer was apparently made to the Iranians by the P5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) and rejected. The P5+1 offers seems to have focussed mainly on getting Iran to, at a minimum, stop uranium enrichment to 20% (which is, technically, only a short distance from bomb grade) and agree to remove its stock of 20% enriched uranium from the country to be processed into reactor fuel, in exchange for a limited lifting of some sanctions and other cooperation.

While many in the international media have recently "coronated" Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as "King" of Israel following his formation of a national unity government, surely the use of the term, with its non-democratic connotations, would be more apropos when referring to Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Erdogan.

Erdogan truly has been consolidating his power in non-democratic ways, silencing his critics, and taking steps that are moving his country further and further away from democracy.

New New York Times Middle East Correspondent Judy Rudoren wrote yesterday that:

The rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah signed an agreement late Sunday in Cairo that paves the way for elections and a new unity government for the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, officials said.

If that sounds a little fimiliar, that's because it is...

Following up my previous AIJAC blog post regarding former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar's revelations that the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei told him in 2000 that "Israel must be burned to the ground" and forecasting an Iranian war to achieve this end, the Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces Major General Hassan Firouzabadi has also agreed that Iran's goal is to "annihilate" Israel.

After frequent calls on this blog for some action against Sudanese President Omar Bashir, it is welcome news that the US Congress is committing to halt aid to any country that hosts the indicted war criminal.

A US House of Representatives press release reports that the House Appropriations Committee has adopted an amendment to the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations bill for 2013 to this effect, proposed by Representative Frank Wolf...

In a quick followup to Sharyn Mittelman's recent blog on the growing numbers of international students who are coming to study in Israel and learn how Israelis innovate, the China Daily is the latest newspaper to run a story about this phenomenon, highlighting that China's growing ties with Israel are becoming more public within China and that more Chinese are starting to sit up and take notice of the benefits of the relationship.

Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird addresses American Jewish Committee's Global Forum in Washington.

Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has revealed that the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei unequivocally expressed to him, personally, his intention to destroy Israel, not politically but militarily and via Iranian military action.

Aznar told a crowd in Jerusalem on May 16: "In a private discussion we held in Tehran in October of 2000, Ali Khamenei told me that Israel must be burned to the ground and made to disappear from the face of the Earth."

The former Spanish Prime Minister also said that Khamenei told him "Iran's war against the United States and Israel is inevitable."

This Update is focussed on Palestinian politics - and especially the significance of the recent, secretive elections within Hamas which chose that organisation's leadership bodies.

First up is Ehud Yaari, leading Israeli journalist renowned for his sources in both Palestinian and other Arab governments, offering unique insights into both how the Hamas elections were carried out, the results, and what they likely mean. The key trends Yaari notes are an increasing predominance of the military wing over politics - as has occurred in Iran - and a growing dominance of the internal leadership in Gaza over Hamas leaders in exile, including especially the increasingly side-lined theoretical top leader Khaled Mashal.

Even as some Australian Palestinians and their supporters spent Tuesday evening disrupting commuters in Sydney in the course of their Nakba Day protests against Israel, SBS World News ran a segment on the recent resettlement of several dozen Iraqi Palestinian refugees in Australia.

(While the video will only be accessible on the SBS website for the next week, a transcript of the segment has been created for the purposes of this blog and can be referenced here.)

While the segment was framed by the SBS presenters as an opportunity to raise awareness of the issue of Palestinian refugees on the anniversary of Israel's creation, in reality the story had very little to do with Israel.

Go figure

An unattributed Age story (12/5) on Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails stated that a "fifth of all Palestinians living under occupation - some 700,00 people - have served time in Israeli jails, according to activist groups."

Although the article did not include the origin of the claim of 700,000, it is a number pushed by the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, a Palestinian NGO, and is not credible.

People from around the world are traveling to Israel to learn from its innovation and economic success.

Israel's President Shimon Peres recently told a visiting Australian delegation that included Financial Services Minister Bill Shorten, that part of the secret to Israel's economic success was that Israel had to use its brainpower to carve out a living, "We had nothing and that was our luck," Peres said. Peres also told the group that he wanted Israel to become "the Silicon Valley of the Middle East."

This Update features three pieces on the nuclear talks with Iran, scheduled to resume next week after a five week hiaitus - two of them focusing on the dangers of any agreement which does not adequately block Iran's ability to quickly build nuclear weapons whenever a decision to do so is reached.

First up is Iran scholar and recent visitor to Australia Emanuele Ottolenghi, who looks at some history related to the Iranian nuclear program to make the case that an agreement that does not take account of Iran's past weaponisation achievements will leave Iran able to build nuclear weapons.

Israel is the first country to formally legislate a ban against underweight models. The legislation also bans use of models who 'look underweight', and creators of ads must disclose whether they used Photoshop or graphics programs to manipulate images to make the models look slimmer.

The Australian's John Lyons (5/5) reported on an Israeli law passed during the Second Intifada in 2003 designed to prevent terrorists exploiting family reunion laws to enter Israel.

This has meant Israeli Arab Taiseer Khatib's wife, Lana, who is from Jenin on the West Bank, can only stay in Israel on a temporary residency visa, something Khatib denounces as "beyond apartheid".

The newspaper offensively headlined the piece Living under the cloud of Israel's cruel apartheid implying this was a statement of fact rather than Taiseer Khatib's opinion. The online edition has since rectified this error.

The Australian Budget was announced on May 8, and in order to bring the budget into surplus the Government decided to delay its promise to raise foreign aid spending to 0.5 per cent of gross national income (GNI) by 2015/16, pushing this goal back until 2016-2017.

This blog post looks at highlights from the foreign aid budget, and also considers the case for improving the effectiveness of Australian aid in the Palestinian Territories.

Egyptian presidential hopefuls Amr Moussa and Abdel Moneim Abol Fotouh held a televised debate on Thursday, but when it came to Israel, the candidates had little to argue about.

Both pledged to review the 1979 peace treaty Egypt had signed with Israel, while trying to outdo each other's antagonism towards Israel: Abol Fotouh termed Israel an enemy, while Moussa called it an adversary.

The candidate's caustic views were mirrored in a poll released on Tuesday, which revealed growing anti-Israel and anti-Western sentiment in the country. As Egypt continues to develop a new Constitution and readies for presidential elections on May 23 (with a likely runoff on June 16), the debate as well as the poll raise new concerns over Egypt's direction.

This Update follows up on Ahron Shapiro's blog post yesterday on Israeli PM Netanyahu's shock move on Tuesday night to cancel planned elections and instead form a National Unity government with Opposition Leader Shaul Mofaz.

First up to provide a general perspective on the move is Israeli political scientist Prof. Gerald Steinberg, who argues that the broad political base Netanyahu has created for himself provides a platform to deal with a series of major challenges facing Israel. He stresses the immediate trigger for the move was the court-ordered need to re-write the "Tal Law", dealing with deferral of military service for Israel's Ultra-Orthodox minority - which seemed insoluble within the confines of the existing coalition.

Palestinian refugees and the claims made of "right of return" for them have long been a major issue within the debate over a 'just solution' to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The claimed "right of return'" is still seen as a core obstacle to overcome in any future peace negotiations. Yet the refugees question is even more complex. Palestinian refugees actually represent the smaller of the two refugees groups created by the regional conflict between the Arab countries and Israel - the larger group being Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim countries.

The voices of these Jewish refugees, sadly, have hardly ever been heard or are generally too quickly dismissed. Listening to these voices could potentially shed light and new perspectives not only on the refugees question, but also on the nature and history of the regional context of the conflict. It might even promote reconciliation.

Prof. Shlomo Avineri... has just written a fascinating little piece about how, in 1976, he used a 1854 quote from Karl Marx to counter a Soviet-led effort at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to condemn and expel Israel for the alleged crime of "Judaising" Jerusalem - a claim which is still raised frequently today...

But there is another point in this quote from Marx which Avineri does not call attention to - and it relates to the treatment of Jews in Arab lands...

Two polls released last week provide new insights into the views of the Middle East's Arab population, with some very interesting findings.

In the first poll, Arab youth in the Middle East said their own economic future was a far greater priority in their lives than the outcome of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile, a second poll found Muslim support for al-Qaeda, while low compared to a few years ago, has stabilized even after the killing of Osama bin Laden.

This year marks forty years since the ‘Munich Massacre' - when during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian terrorists disguised as athletes attacked the dormitory housing the Israeli delegation and took Israeli athletes, coaches and officials hostages.  By the end of the ordeal, the terrorists had killed eleven Israelis and a German police officer.

For the past four decades, families of the victims have repeatedly sought to persuade the International Olympic Committee to incorporate a minute of silence during the opening ceremonies of the games to commemorate the Munich Massacre.  This year the IOC has again rejected their request.

The latest edition of the Weekend Australian has provoked outrage over an offensive and unprofessional headline used to accompany an article by its Middle East correspondent John Lyons that failed to include some vital facts, resulting in some very questionable journalism.

The election of French Socialist party leader Francois Hollande to his country's presidency on Sunday - a victory over Nicolas Sarkozy which had been expected following his strong showing in the first round of voting on April 22 - is certain to impact French foreign policy regarding Iran, as well as Israel.

Sarkozy had been seen as one of Europe's most strident opponents to Iran's nuclear program. According to Hollande's advisers, as well as many analysts, France is unlikely to continue in its role as a spearhead for European action on Iran under its new government.

Greek elections were held on May 6, and the main parties saw their support plunge in favour of extreme parties on the left and right, leaving no party with a clear majority to govern.

As a previous AIJAC post anticipated, the far-right Greek party Golden Dawn, often described as ‘Neo-Nazi', gained representation in parliament for the first time in Greek history, winning approximately 7 percent of the country's popular vote. Golden Dawn will apparently have 21 parliament seats out of 300.

The last-minute decision overnight by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and newly-elected Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz to create a national unity government and avert early elections planned for Sept. 4 came as a surprise to both most Israelis and most observers of Israeli politics. Yet in retrospect, it was a move that made a lot of sense for both leaders.

This Update contains two valuable pieces on the candidates for the highly important Egyptian Presidential  election (Barry Rubin had an excellent analysis of just how important here), as well as one of the many interesting pieces being written about the legacy of Benzion Netanyahu, the father of Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu, who died last week age 102.

Israel was abuzz this week with news that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had decided to set a date for early elections. While the official announcement is still days away, government sources reported the likely date of elections to be September 4...

Netanyahu, who is on pace to be Israel's longest serving Prime Minister since Ben Gurion and has benefited from a dearth of political challengers during his term, is seen by poll-watchers as having little to fear from early elections. Latest polling figures show that if the elections were held today, Netanyahu would be a shoo-in, with 48 percent of Israelis preferring Netanyahu stay on as prime minister...

With Netanyahu's re-election bid deemed likely, the more immediate question being asked is what impact, if any, the decision to hold early elections will have on Israel's strategy vis-à-vis Iran.

The UN Human Rights Council has long had a well-deserved image problem - due in no small part to the fact numerous egregious human rights offenders are regularly elected to serve on it, where they block effective scrutiny of themselves and their non-democratic allies. The latest episode in this sorry history is the unopposed bid by Venezuela for a seat on the 47 nation Council, despite the fact that Venezuela has a very poor record on human rights.

Today's Update looks at the options for dealing with the ongoing violence in Syria in the wake of the apparent failure of the ceasefire put forward by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan as part of his plan to settle the conflict and halt the killing (with at least 23 people killed on Tuesday).

First up is a good report on the aftermath of the Annan plan, consisting of numerous quotes from knowledgeable on all sides , written by Neil McFarquhar of the New York Times. He finds there is general agreement that the plan has failed, but little sense of what might come next from various quarters, and still very little appetite for any serious intervention from Western policymakers - few of whom, it seems clear, ever expected the plan to succeed in the first place.

As World Press Freedom Day approaches on Thursday, the Palestinian Authority (PA) looks to be headed in the other direction.

The PA has come under widening criticism of late for its worsening record on press freedom (as reported in a recent blog post by Or Avi-Guy). Part of that story centres on a number of Palestinians arrested after making critical comments about the PA or its leaders on Facebook. Now reports say the PA is also blocking off access to critical news websites.

According to the Palestinian Ma'an news agency, Palestinian internet providers have been instructed to block access to news web sites critical of Fatah and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

It is often fascinating to hear true stories from people about how their once fierce hatred for the State of Israel came to be questioned for one reason or another - such as a trip to Israel, a book/research or a meeting with an Israeli - leading them re-evaluate their preconceived ideas.

A common theme among these personal accounts is that prior to their individual journey that led them to learn more about Israel, they had not been exposed to positive information about Israel or Jews, and felt a sense of betrayal when they learnt the ‘truth' about Israel. Often their newly formed pro-Israel perspectives were not welcome in their home communities, and yet they are dedicated to speaking out in support of Israel.

In what was was considered another sign of the rapidly deteriorating ties between Israel and Egypt, a visit to Jerusalem by Egyptian Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa -- accompanying Jordanian officials -- caused outrage in Egypt's new Islamist-dominated Parliament last week. The Parliament demanded Gomaa's resignation for behaviour that risked "normalising" relations with Israel.

Despite Gomaa's statements that the visit was unofficial and that it took place under the supervision of the Jordanian authorities, the visit angered those opposed to normalizing relations with Israel.

Parliament Speaker Saad al-Katatny read out...

The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia and once powerful warlord, was a landmark ruling by an international tribunal - the Special Court for Sierra Leone. It was the first guilty verdict for a head of state in the history of UN war crimes courts.

Taylor's verdict could ostensibly be a warning for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir, who are both accused of committing atrocities.

A new controversy has broken out regarding women's rights in Egypt. It all started when al- Arabiya reported that the National Council for Women (NCW) appealed to the Egyptian parliament, requesting that two highly controversial laws, both affecting women's status, not be approved. According to the report, the first law would lower the minimum age of marriage to 14; the other would allow a husband to engage in intercourse with his wife's corps a few hours after her death. Al- Arabiya's original report was based on an article by Egyptian columnist Amro Abdul Samea in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram, and has since been picked up by many other media outlets. The web went into a frenzy over the shocking possibility that, if the 'farewell intercourse law' were approved, Egyptian men would be granted a legal right to have sex with their dead wives up to 6 hours after their death (not surprisingly, the implication that Egyptian women would be granted the same right in regards to their dead husbands was of little comfort).

A number of major news outlets, including ABC news here in Australia, have been reporting on the Yom Ha-atzmaut interview with Israeli Chief of General Staff Benny Gantz that appeared in Ha'aretz this week.

Unfortunately, most of these reports have taken the IDF chief's words out of context and in doing so, changed their meaning as well as their significance.

US President Barack Obama has announced that the US will apply new sanctions to prevent companies from using technology that help repressive regimes in Syria and Iran target dissidents.

The new US sanctions will target Syrian and Iranian government agencies and officials who directed the surveillance operations, as well private companies.

Last night, ABC Lateline featured an interview by Emma Alberici of former New Republic editor Peter Beinart. Beinart has been a figure of much controversy lately due to his new book The Crisis of Zionism -- an extension of his 2009 essay 'The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment' in the New York Review of Books -- in which he makes the case that the Jewish community in America is taking an incorrect line on Israel and provides his own perspective on how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict ought to be addressed.

The book provoked a litany of responses from across the political spectrum, with almost every senior figure in the American foreign policy world deriding or distancing themselves from his contribution. As a result, there is a very substantial body of work from which to draw in order to evaluate every point that he makes. In general, most experts agree that Beinart is largely well-intentioned and does genuinely want the best for Israel, however he is at the same time hopelessly naive and heavily encumbered by a lack of serious research on the topic. His views are those of...

Give him credit for his candour. In an extensive interview with the Forward published on April 19, Mousa Abu Marzook, Deputy Director of Hamas' political bureau and the group's second-highest-ranking official, told the Jewish newspaper that Hamas would not respect a peace treaty with Israel signed by the Palestinian Authority, even if the agreement was endorsed by a referendum of all Palestinians, as Hamas has always demanded.

Moreover, Abu Marzook vowed that Hamas would never recognise Israel. The most Hamas would consider would be a ceasefire agreement, he said.

Yesterday, this blog noted how serious the ongoing escalation in the conflict between Sudan and South Sudan could potentially be, pointing out some chilling sentiments coming from Sudanese President Omar Bashir -- who has been flaunting an International Criminal Court indictment for Crimes Against Humanity since 2008.

MEMRI has translated a recent speech given by Bashir that was shown on Sudanese TV, in which he uses what appears to be explicitly genocidal language against the people of South Sudan and the Nuba Mountains:

Our lands in the Blue Nile Province and in South Kordofan continue to be defiled by their forces. Your role and your jurisdiction right now -- we don't want any vermin left in the Blue Nile Province. We don't want any insects left in the Nuba Mountains. ...

On Thursday, Israel will turn 64. It therefore seems appropriate to reflect on some of the remarkable achievements this small country has racked up in that relatively short time.

Little Israel, a third the size of Tasmania, is now a global leader in technology, especially in cleantech. Without plentiful natural resources such as water and oil, from its humble beginnings Israel has been required to pursue creative ingenuity - and many believe this is the secret behind the incredible achievements of ‘Start Up' Israel...

The nascent State of South Sudan was not given much of a chance. It declared independence only nine months ago -- in what was hoped to be the end of a brutal, decades-long civil war. Nevertheless, the Sudanese regime seem intent on keeping the conflict going in perpetuity.

As the Sudan Tribune has been reporting, the regime in Khartoum has recently ramped-up its indiscriminate aerial bombardment of a contested border region and has been supporting...

This Update features some analysis of the aftermath of the meeting between Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian negotiators last week, where he was given a letter from Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas. Also included is a long but informative interview in which Netanyahu discusses several recent controversies in a German newspaper.

The Iranian nuclear question, Yom Hashoah and the controversy surrounding a recent poem by Gunter Grass, were the backdrop for a recent long interview Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave to the German newspaper Welt am Sontag.

In the interview, published on April 22, Netanyahu explained to the German audience what offended Israel most about Grass' poem "What Must be Said" - which depicted Israel as a potentially genocidal aggressor against Iran. Under questioning, the Prime Minister also defended his positions on the risks of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Later in the interview, he rebuffed claims that the continued existence of West Bank settlements are harming the prospects of peace with the Palestinians...

Greece is another European country that has recently seen the mainstreaming of the far-right and a resurgence of antisemitic rhetoric (see my earlier post on Hungary here).

Previous AIJAC blog posts have discussed how the far right LAOS political party in Greece, which has an antisemitic track record, last year secured ministerial positions in a unity coalition, and now these ministers are joining Greece's mainstream conservative party ‘New Democracy', in the lead up to an election scheduled for May 6.

There is also another example of this worrying trend, the Greek far-right nationalist, neo-Nazi group ‘Chrsi Avgi' known in English as the ‘Golden Dawn', which could enter Greek parliament at the upcoming election...

Yesterday, the Jewish world was commemorating the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom Ha'Shoah). Iran, however, decided to mark the day a little differently.

The Iranian regime is notorious for its persistent denial of the Holocaust -- for example, a huge controversy erupted in Germany last month when an interview with the Iranian President was aired on public television in which he denied the Holocaust. (For more on Iran's efforts to sponsor Holocaust denial internationally, see...

Far-right political parties appear to be making a comeback in Europe, especially in Hungary and in Greece.

In Hungary, the radical nationalist party commonly known as Jobbik - (‘The Movement for a Better Hungary'), has been growing in power and popularity and is considered by many scholars to be fascist and antisemitic.

These concerns were reinforced when on April 3, Deputy leader of Jobbik, Zsolt Barath made a speech in Budapest Parliament that revisited the Tiszaszlar Blood Libel Claim.

Jerusalem Post Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh has recently been writing prolifically on the oppression of the Palestinian people. Unusually for an Arab writer broaching this subject matter, while he does have some criticisms of Israel, the Israelies are not the primary objects of his criticism. In fact, the oppression that he is exposing comes at the hands of the Jordanians, the Syrians and even fellow Palestinians.

One of these pieces noted the redoubled efforts by the Jordanian King to marginalise Jordan's Palestinian population -- which he sees as a threat to his hold on power:

In 2009, Amman quietly began revoking the Jordanian citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, triggering strong protests from human rights organizations and pro-Palestinian groups around the world. ...

This Update deals with the "P5+1" talks with Iran that occurred on Saturday - with reports suggesting little diplomatic progress accomplished beyond agreement to another meeting in five weeks in Baghdad. On a separate issue, it also contains a look a the significance of the planned meeting tonight between Israeli PM Netanyahu and Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad to present a letter outlining the Palestinian position.

During a recent CNN interview, former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defence Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak noted that the all too common perception of an historically high rate of settlement expansion taking place is just wrong - not a single new settlement has been built under the current Netanyahu government. Barak also notes that construction in settlements is actually currently occurring at a slower rate than under previous Israeli governments.

The recent controversy over a house in the West Bank city of Hebron is having severe consequences for one unfortunate Palestinian. There was an outcry when Israeli settlers purchased and moved into a house in the "Arab" section of Hebron, ending with their eviction in a controversial move by Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak. While the evicted settlers are unhappy about the result, the man who sold them the house is facing a far worse outcome.

[Muhammad Abu] Shahala  reportedly was sentenced to death for his part in selling what has become known as the Machpela House to a group of Jews. He reportedly confessed to the sale after...

The Middle East Quartet (the US, UN, EU and Russia), which met in Washington on Wednesday, issued a statement on Middle East peacemaking following the meeting that is notable for its constructive tone.

This Update deals primarily with the apparent failure of the peace plan for Syria negotiated by UN envoy Kofi Annan, which appears to have failed after a promised pullout of  Syrian forces from major towns by Tuesday appears to have largely not occurred (though relative quiet is reportedly currently in place across the country.)

First up is Syrian opposition figure and analyst Radwan Ziadeh who argues it was absurd to have expected Syrian President Assad to have complied with the Annan peace plan given his track record. He points particularly to repeated promises by Assad to both Turkey and the Arab League which were not kept, and seemed to be simply a diversion.

Hypocrisy frequently rears its ugly head in the Middle East, but the Palestinian Authority (PA) has just succeeded in producing something close to a new examplar on the issue of media freedom. As a Jerusalem Post editorial ("Palestinian responsibility", 2/4/2012) has documented, the Palestinian Authority is intensifying an ongoing crackdown on journalists operating in the West Bank, while at the same time it's introducing a new award honouring press freedom.

Each year thousands of Christians make their way to Jerusalem to celebrate Easter. Israel's Tourism Ministry expects 125,000 visitors during Holy Week and 300,000 throughout April.

Over the weekend as Catholics and Anglicans celebrated Easter, there were media reports that claimed many Palestinian Christians were being denied entry into Jerusalem for their pilgrimage, claims which Israel strongly denies.

In my review of Israeli policy in regard to Syrian unrest which was published on Tuesday on ABC's The Drum.

I noted that "the one issue which might prompt Israel to come off the sidelines" in Syria's Civil War is the possibility that Syria's massive "arsenal of of some of the world's most deadly chemical weapons" might "find their way into the hands of terrorist groups." I also noted that this was not simply a problem for Israel, but a danger to the whole free world.

For those interested in more on this significant danger, I call your attention to a survey of Syria's WMD threat, by James P. Farwell published late last week in The National Interest.

A deal signed Tuesday between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas may or may not herald the end to the Gazan fuel shortage as discussed in my previous blog post on the subject, but a recent television interview with Hamas' Minister of the Interior and of National Security Fathi Hammad offers a glimpse into the strain the situation was causing within Hamas...

This Update features two pieces looking at the increasing signs that the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is abandoning past promises of modesty and moderation and attempting to impose near-complete domination over Egyptian politics in the near future.

First up is Eric Trager, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's expert on Egyptian politics. He notes the Brotherhood's decision to break previous promises and field a presidential candidate, its efforts to dominate both most Parliamentary Committees and the Constituent Committee writing the new constitution, and  scrapping of previous efforts to maintain a detente with the ruling military government constitute overwhelming evidence that the Brotherhood has abandoned any pretence of not seeking a monopoly on political power...

In its first story since December 2011 looking at Iran's nuclear program, ABC TV "7.30" (21/3) reporter Michael Brissenden described the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as "the most powerful Jewish lobby group in the United States". This may surprise the many non-Jews who attended AIPAC's recent annual conference, including pro-Israel Latinos, African-Americans and Christian delegates.

Welcome to Incitement Watch, a new feature on "FreshAIR" which collects and highlights the worst examples of antisemitism and incitement to violence from the Middle Eastern media.

A cold war will quickly turn into a hot one unless drastic action is taken.

As the drumbeat of war mounts in the Middle East, people wonder if an Iran-Israel war is inevitable.

Iran's rhetoric about wiping Israel off the map continues unabated - as does its quest for nuclear weapons. Israel views the combination of Tehran's relentless rhetoric against the Jewish state with a nuclear weapon as an existential threat...

The triumph of Shaul Mofaz, a former Israel Defence Forces Chief of Staff and Defence Minister (for a bio of Mofaz see here) over former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the Kadima party primaries this week has sparked a flurry of commentary and reactions inside Israel.

Widely noted by pundits was Mofaz's poor name recognition abroad. That, together with Kadima's weakened stature in the face of centrist challenges by the revamped Labour party and Yair Lapid's newly-launched party, has put a damper on analysis over Mofaz's win outside the region.

This Update includes three pieces which attempt to clarify the debate, centred on competing leaks from intelligence sources, about what is known about the present and future state of the Iranian nuclear program...

The Syrian Government's decision to accept UN and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan's six-point peace plan has been met with a lot of scepticism to say the least. A number of experts have been predicting that the initiative would only paper-over the Assad regime's continued violence and that there would be negative consequences felt in Syria as a result.

Another by-product of the issue has been some rather strange commentary emerging from Australia. Anthony Billingsley, a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, has written his thoughts about the Annan plan on Australian academic blog site The Conversation. His reasoning is a little difficult to follow – in more than one instance, his assessment of the geopolitics seems either misinformed or contradictory, particularly in regards to the American and Israeli role in the Syrian uprisings (emphasis added)...

Recently the Australian media has been focused on news that the Australian government blocked the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei from participating in the national broadband network (NBN).

While most commentators are discussing the cyber security concerns, few are raising Huawei's questionable activities in Iran - with reports that Huawei empowered the Iranian regime to track dissidents during the 2009 demonstrations.

An annual Palestinian day of protest commonly known as Land Day has been rebranded this year as the Palestinian camp seeks to maximize international exposure to their agenda with a "Global March to Jerusalem", scheduled for later today, March 30.

What groups are behind it? There is growing evidence that Iran has a significant role behind the event, as GLORIA Centre analyst Jonathan Spyer wrote for PJ Media this week...

As a step in the transition to democracy in Egypt, a body was formed to draft a new constitution prior to the presidential elections (scheduled to be held in May). This constitution is set to determine major issues such as the role of religion, the balance between the President and the parliament's authority and minority and women's rights.

It was always expected that heated debates would emerge around the content of the constitution. However, according to recent developments, the first political crisis regarding the constitution revolves around the make up of the panel itself, and that debate makes it clear that for all their assertions about having reformed and their expressed desire to govern Egypt in a democratic and pluralistic manner, it appears that the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is determined to use their political clout to Islamise Egypt.

On a family rip back to Australia, Gidon Bromberg, an Australian environmental activist now living in Israel, picked up a copy of Chris Hammer's book The River: A Journey Through The Murray-Darling. Bromberg was inspired by Hammer's description of the process that led to the Federal Government passing legislation in 2007 to protect the river basin; so inspired, in fact, that he decided to bring Hammer to Israel and attempt to replicate the feat and help the long-suffering Jordan River.

Bromberg has written about this in today's Jerusalem Post...

A fuel shortage in Gaza Strip has created some genuine hardships in the Hamas-run entity, affecting power generation as well as transportation. 

The crisis has produced a rare glimpse into the state of play between Hamas, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, as each side has begun blaming one another for the situation, with no role for Israel, except for Hamas to conspiratorially smear against its political opponents.

Following the tragic shootings in Toulouse last week that resulted in the deaths of a Rabbi, three children and three soldiers by a Frenchman of Algerian dissent Mohammed Merah, many in the media have been quick to paint Merah as a ‘lone wolf' and his actions as an isolated incident, the actions of one crazed individual, with no wider implications.

There has also been little media discussion/reflection on the dangers of antisemitism and the growth of jidhadi networks operating in the West including the indoctrination that can occur in prisons - where petty criminal Merah reportedly converted to radical Islamic beliefs.

We've seen this movie before.

Coming soon from the same producers of the discredited Goldstone Report on the 2009 Gaza War - the UN Human Rights Council - is a sequel: A "fact-finding" mission to investigate the impact of Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Palestinians. Co-sponsors of the resolution that authorised it include Syria and Iran.

In this post last month, I argued that the Jewish community in Australia does have the unfortunate need for security at Jewish schools, which remain a target for terrorists, a statement that I later affirmed after the Toulouse attacks. This was to rebut statements made by former Australian Jewish News editor Dan Goldberg, reported in The Age in January - well before the attack in Toulouse - suggesting that the money could be better spent elsewhere:

[Former AJN editor Dan] Goldberg suggested the rising costs of security were helping push up education fees so that ever more money would be spent on protecting ever fewer children...

The massacre of three students and a teacher (and father of two of the children) at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France has understandably prompted condemnations and statements of outrage from world leaders, diplomats and pundits that have followed similar anti-Semitic atrocities in the past.

Some analysts, however, have discerned a troubling equivocation in some of these responses. By failing to acknowledge the underlying antisemitism and anti-Israel incitement that fuelled the attack, the commentators said, a festering hatred is allowed to persist, and the next attack is only a matter of time.

With the self-confessed murderer, a 23-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origins named Mohamed Merah, now having been killed by French police, this Update looks at the aftermath of the horrific shootings of three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, earlier this week. (Some chilling details of the murderers actions at the Ozer HaTorah school, as revealed on security camera footage, are here.)

The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised this morning on the possible identity of the Toulouse shooter and pondered what group he may have been affiliated to. Curiously, these questions seem to have been answered just three pages earlier.

...As to whether he [the shooter] is a deranged loner or a fanatical terrorist acting for some group is unclear.  While this week's school attack was an atrocity against Jews, anti-Semitism alone does not seem to account for last week's murders in which the paratrooper victims were dark-skinned, hailing from either Muslim North Africa or the West Indies. One notion is that the gunman thought he was striking a blow for the Palestinian cause - French paratroops have served in Afghanistan...

Last month, I wrote in defence of the security concerns of Australia's Jewish community. With a heavy heart, I must note that these concerns have been unfortunately vindicated once again. Last night, a shooting attack outside Ozar Hatorah, a Jewish school in Toulouse, killed much-loved schoolteacher Yonatan Sandler, as well as his two sons -- Aryeh, age five, and Gavriel, age four -- as well as Miriam Monsonego, age seven. Another boy was injured.

According to the chilling AFP report, a masked gunman dismounted from a Yamaha scooter and began shooting, hitting Sandler as he tried in vain to sheild his sons. The shooter then chased after Miriam as she ran into the school, grabbing her and killing her at close range...

As has been widely reported in the Australian press today, on Wednesday the Guardian went public with a trove of messages that they had obtained which purportedly had been mined out of Syrian President Bashar Assad's personal email account.

What was less widely reported was that, as a key strategy, in the emails the Iranians told the Alawite Assad to shore up his image among the country's majority Sunni Muslim population by fashioning himself as an uncompromising opponent of concessions to Israel and as a defender of Jerusalem.

The United Nations' Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has done it again - in its annual session it condemned only one country - Israel, while ignoring the human rights violations of women around the world, including especially the current crisis in Syria - where women are being raped and murdered...