Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council

ABC Radio "Triple J"'s Sophie McNeill is probably quite proud of a half hour "special" aired on the "Hack" program she hosts dedicated to a recent visit she made to Gaza (May 2). But she really shouldn't be.

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.

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.

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

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".

On Fairfax's "Daily Life" site (April 23) Ruby Hamad, who has previously penned some ill-informed and one-sided pieces on Israel, presented a sober account of the escalating restrictions imposed by Hamas on Gazans.

Unfortunately her explanation for Gaza's economic difficulties was entirely predictable...

One of the most interesting and original aspects of Israeli national culture has been the coupling of Israel's Independence Day, Yom Haatzmaut, with the memorial day for victims of war and terrorism, Yom Hazikaron. Yom Hazikaron, is the 4th of Iyyar in the Jewish calendar, one day before Yom Haatzmaut, the 5th of Iyyar. These fell on April 15 and April 16, respectively, this year.

Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, an ingathering of the exiles took place with Jews from all over the globe flocking to find haven in the newly established Jewish state. There, against all odds, they bonded together into a melting pot of Shoah survivors, refugees fleeing persecution in Arab countries, Jews escaping from the underdeveloped societies like Ethiopia, discriminated Jews from the former Soviet Union, and others undergoing oppression - and succeeded in creating one of the most vibrant and resilient societies in the world.

Experts agree that the Israeli economy, while suffering no major illness, is nonetheless in need of some bitter preventive treatment if it is to avoid serious ailments down the road. At the heart of the situation that Finance Minister Yair Lapid inherited yawns a 4.2%-of-GDP budget deficit, the result of unplanned defence spending in the face of the Iranian threat, as well as expanded social spending following street protests back in 2011.

During his visit to Israel in March, US President Barack Obama arranged a dramatic telephone call on March 22 between Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Erdogan. Netanyahu spoke of Israel's "regret for certain operational errors" in the commando assault on the Mavi Marmara. Compensation, he said, would be paid to each of the nine families of the victims killed on the flotilla. The two leaders ostensibly undertook to put their acrimonious three-year-old dispute behind them and normalise relations.

Did you know that "the Israel-Palestine conflict" is "the central factor in Islam-West relations"? Not one of a number of factors, not an element of a larger, multi-faceted engagement, but "the" central factor?

Readers of the latest volume in Australia's "Islamic Studies Series" are presented with this "fact" as an attempt to justify a thin book on "Making Australian Foreign Policy in Israel-Palestine" being published as part of its catalogue.

The death of convicted Palestinian terrorist Maysara Abu-Hamdiya from throat cancer in an Israeli jail on April 2 amid Palestinian accusations that he did not receive adequate treatment prompted rocket fire from Gaza and violent demonstrations in the West Bank.

Coverage of these clashes unfortunately followed a familiar pattern of focussing primarily on Palestinian claims against Israel and on Israeli actions against Palestinians.

Transcending sentiment and pragmatic impulses was Thatcher's hard-nosed perception that the qualities of the Jewish community coincided precisely with her own aspirational vision for Britain: self-help and hard work, ambition and endeavour, enterprise, personal responsibility and social justice.

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.

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.

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 new Israeli coalition government - sworn in after weeks of negotiations only two days before the US President' arrival - was indeed an achievement, and one the President should be able to appreciate. Just as Obama was elected on a platform of "hope and change" an appropriate way to describe the new Israeli coalition would be as "the coalition for change".

US President Barack Obama's first visit to Israel as President will be remembered for many highlights, but none perhaps more important to the Jewish people than one simple paragraph he delivered in his remarks upon his arrival.

"I know that in stepping foot on this land, I walk with you on the historic homeland of the Jewish people," the President said. "More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was... a redemption unlike any in history."

Many well-meaning pundits and politicians seem to base their whole approach to the Middle East peace process on a single "fact" - namely, that if a two-state solution is not reached soon then "Arabs living under Israeli control" will outnumber Jews, thus either destroying Israel's democratic character or else turning it into a majority Arab state.

Guess what? This "fact" - postulating an imminent "demographic threat" to Israel and a two-state outcome - is simply wrong...

Did the leaders of the European Union rise up in their wrath to condemn Hezbollah for taking - and plotting to take - Israeli lives on European territory? Did they, like the United States and others, declare Hezbollah to be an illegal terrorist organisation? Like hell they did.

It took six weeks to hatch, and it is probably not quite the baby Binyamin Netanyahu had in mind when he called January's early election. Yet the coalition with which he is embarking on his third premiership - sworn in on March 18 - looks likely to prove the most reformist.

I think the world is headed towards a surprise. I think the United States and Israel are converging on a fresh initiative towards the Palestinians. I don't think this is merely being imposed on Netanyahu from the outside - I think this is what he wants.

Few outside of certain circles would be aware that a draft of the report by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (‘OHCHR') to the UN Human Rights Council (‘HRC') on last year's Gaza conflict was released in March.

Any report that the HRC releases on Israel should immediately arouse suspicion - it is not without reason that Israel is currently refusing to participate in any of the HRC's functions.

The tragic death of Australian-Israeli citizen Ben Zygier continued to play out in the media long past the initial revelations on February 14, and much coverage contained speculation on whether Australian Jews could feel warmly toward Israel and remain loyal to Australia.

"I'd love to sit at a cafe and just hang out," President Barack Obama told Israel's Channel 2 on March 14. Obama confessed: "Sometimes I have this fantasy that I can put on a disguise and wear a fake mustache." He mused about wandering Tel Aviv and meeting university students casually. In that spirit, I offer an alternative itinerary for his recent Israel trip.

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'.

Obama will find many fresh faces in [Netanyahu's] government - and also some new opportunities to push forward towards peace with all of Israel's neighbours, especially the Palestinians. He will also find a government likely very concerned about pressing regional issues - especially the Iranian nuclear threat and the Syrian civil war - but also one interested in achieving the maximum policy co-ordination possible with Washington on these issues.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Public debate in Australia has taken on a dark and worrying tone over the past few weeks. Recent revelations about the disturbing circumstances surrounding the death of Australian-Israeli Ben Zygier raised a spectre of racial hatred that most Jewish-Australians had hoped would have been left behind in the middle of the last century.

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.

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.

There is a great deal we don't know or that is pure speculation about the tragic story of Ben Zygier/Prisoner X.

But here is one thing we absolutely do know about this saga - the NGO Human Rights Watch again demonstrated that it does not need any confirmed facts whatsoever to condemn Israel.

The original ABC-TV "Foreign Correspondent" story on Feb. 12 which revealed Ben Zygier as the alleged Prisoner X quoted Bill van Esveld of Human Rights Watch extensively.

Jumping to hasty assessments can often be a mistake but, sometimes, looking further into those same assessments can lead to interesting discoveries. When first asked to write a column about coverage of the recent Israeli elections in New Zealand I said, without too much thought, "there wasn't much". Yet my research on the topic very quickly showed that assumption was, in fact, not correct.

Judging by his first State of the Union address since his reelection, US President Barack Obama will focus in his second term on domestic issues - from the deficit, defence spending, and neglected bridges to the minimum wage, gun control and trade relations.

After all this, there was very little time left in his speech for foreign affairs. Israel was only mentioned once and the Palestinians were not mentioned at all. Then again, several days earlier the White House had announced that Obama would be arriving in Israel on March 20 for a three-day visit that will include a sortie to Ramallah, and be followed by a visit to Jordan.

AIR correspondent Andrew Friedman caught up with Professor Eytan Gilboa, Director of the School of Communications at the Begin-Sadat (BESA) Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University and an expert on US-Israel relations, for an exclusive briefing about the presidential visit, the state of US-Israel ties and how these relate to general US policy in the Middle East.

When Yair Lapid's father, the well-known journalist and politician Tommy Lapid, was on his deathbed, he said to his son: "I'm leaving you the State of Israel."

Tommy, a Holocaust survivor, meant that metaphorically; the generation of survivors was entrusting the gift of a Jewish state to its children. But with the rise of Yair Lapid, head of Yesh Atid ("There is a Future"), which emerged from nowhere to become Israel's second-largest party in the election of Jan. 22, Yair's "inheritance" could become literal. More than any other politician aside from Prime Minister Netanyahu himself, Yair may now determine the next phase of Israeli politics.

As a former head of the Australian Jewish community and now resident in Israel, I was bombarded with endless calls from the Israeli and global media soliciting comment on Ben Zygier, the Australian who committed suicide while in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison.

What is an academic and cultural boycott of Israel intended to achieve? The purported reason for launching a universal boycott of Israeli academics is their country's alleged breaches of international law. Supposedly, the smarting academics will help turn around Israeli policy... Of course, those Israeli academics who are smarting will tend to do the opposite, to fight back like the rest of us when pushed against the wall. The academic boycott will never be effective in its supposed objective of changing Israeli policies.

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.

North Korea's latest nuclear test has again brought into focus the growing urgency of stopping the nuclear weapons program of another country on the road to nuclear weapons capability - Iran. The rapidly closing window of opportunity to either persuade Iran to change course or, if all else fails, disable its nuclear facilities by force, is the backdrop for US President Barack Obama's visit to Israel next month.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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...

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."

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.

The dust is settling after the election in Israel, and the efforts to establish a stable coalition are well underway. Prior to the election, concerns were raised in the global media and the blogosphere, about the rise of the so-called ultra-nationalist religious right in Israeli politics.

Doomsday-esque predictions about a right wing coalition dominated by the ruling party Likud-Beitenu along with Ha-Bayit Ha-Yehudi (the Jewish Home) and the ultra-Orthodox parties prematurely eulogised the two-state solution, warning against settlement expansion and supposed Israeli reluctance to negotiate.

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.

This week's election in Israel has produced a legislature with broad ethnic, gender and ideological diversity, demonstrating yet again the strength and vitality of the Middle East's first genuine democracy.

Under its proportional representation system, no party in Israeli history has ever received enough seats in the 120-member Knesset (Parliament) to govern on its own and negotiations have commenced to determine the make-up of the coalition government.

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.

The ballots have been counted for Israel's 19th Knesset, and Israelis have demonstrated once again why the Middle East's first genuine democracy is still the most mature and successful - a country where every citizen, regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion or political persuasion has an equal opportunity to decide the nation's future.

One of the issues that has been raised in the US controversy over the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hagel as US Defence Secretary is some comments he made in an interview in 2006 that "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here [in Washington]."

Now in fact, the opposition to Hagel's appointment is related to many more issues than his stances on either Israel or the so-called "Jewish Lobby" - not that you'd know it from most of the coverage of the controversy in Australia. Other sources of opposition include the general disdain and dislike for Hagel among most of his former Republican colleagues, a preference of many Democrats for a Democrat to get the job, remarks about gays which have led to accusations of homophobia, complaints about his temperament, conservative views on abortion, and a generally idiosyncratic approach to most foreign policy issues, including his consistent past opposition to even sanctions on Iran.

Anyone who was expecting to know the agenda of Israel's new government on the morning of January 23 was likely to be sorely disappointed, and not only because it will likely take weeks before we know the Knesset's exact composition. Few overarching debates on policy have materialised during this election campaign. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not seem to be seeking any new mandate for action, despite being widely expected to win in most surveys with his right-of-centre bloc retaining 65 of 120 seats, a slight drop from previous polls. It is curious that an incumbent, who understands the rough and tumble of policy fights, is not seeking a public mandate for specific policies.

In many ways, Naftali Bennett is a study in contrasts. He is an unapologetic supporter of Israel's right to settle the open spaces of Judea and Samaria, but he makes his home in Ra'anana, a leafy, upscale town just north of Tel Aviv. He believes Israel should annex Area C, the section of the territories that is home to nearly all Israelis who live over the Green Line, but he also says Israelis must take care not to settle on privately owned Palestinian land. Officially, he is the chairman of an Orthodox party, but his election list features an attractive secular woman. He is a hi-tech millionaire, but he believes fervently that the country must do more so that middle class Israelis can make ends meet at the end of the month.

Egypt is the country that counts [in the Middle East]. I lived for years in Egypt but I cannot tell you - and the same goes for my friends in Egypt and I have many - whether Mr. Morsi, the President, sees himself as the ‘Mr. Morsi elected to be President' or as the errand boy of the Muslim Brotherhood. My inclination so far is to suspect that he has been tamed by the Muslim Brotherhood movement. When you look at the room allocation in the Presidential Palace in northern Cairo you will see that next door to the President are the rooms allocated for the old party thugs of the Muslim Brotherhood. I'm not sure the President is calling the shots.

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.

For more than half a century, retired generals have checkered Israel's political scene, and at certain critical junctures even dominated it and shaped the country's course.

Fifty-five years after newly retired Chief-of-Staff Moshe Dayan was appointed as Minister for Agriculture, the trend may be finally drawing to a close.

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.

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.

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.

Predicting the outcome of Israeli elections is always tricky, but especially this year, as we witness a late surge by charismatic businessman Naftali Bennett's Jewish Home party, which is drawing some support away from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud Beitenu list.

Meanwhile, the strength of Centre-left and Left-wing parties has been obscured by the large number of undecided voters - almost one in three, according to a recent poll.

Ehud Yaari, addressed an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) luncheon in Melbourne on Monday 14 January 2013. This is the Q & A session following his main address on Israeli and Middle East issues.

Ehud Yaari addressed an AIJAC luncheon on Monday 14 January 2013 on the following topics:

• Australia and Israel, including Woodside's successful bid for developing Israel's gas reserves
• Israel's elections
• Egypt and challenges for the region
• Syria
• Israel, the Palestinians and the Two-State outcome
• Iran's march towards nuclear weapons capability and American and Israeli strategy

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.

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.

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.

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...

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."

Now that the dust has settled on the Palestinian UN upgrade bid; now that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has received his applause and kudos from the UN Plenary, from the Europeans, and from many Israelis as the hero and saviour of the Palestinian people; now that the UN General Assembly has returned to its regular and wasteful agenda of repetitive, pointless, and inane resolutions; now that some Israeli legal and non-legal commentators are already forecasting that Israeli leaders, officials, officers, and settlers are about to be put on trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity; now that Palestinian lawyers are busy preparing their criminal charges against Israel - now it is perhaps the time to place things in their correct proportion, without misleading exaggeration, imaginative embellishment, wishful thinking, and false predictions.

Iron Dome is a hero and a comfort for the residents of the south, who, after years of facing rocket fire without protection feel, at last, that they are being taken into account. The anti-rocket system was developed in record time and performs a task that many felt was unfeasible - locating, tracking and intercepting Hamas's rockets in a matter of seconds. During "Operation Pillar of Defence", the missiles intercepted 86.3% of the 421 rockets fired toward populated areas in Israel.

CLAIMS that Israeli settlement building has made a two-state outcome impossible are completely untrue. Settlements are only one of many contentious issues that must be addressed - along with water, Jerusalem, refugees and security arrangements - and far from the most difficult to resolve.

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'.

The United Nations General Assembly vote on November 29, upgrading the Palestinian mission at the UN to the status of an "observer state" was a unilateral move which violated a core tenet of the Oslo Accords, stipulating that neither party would attempt to unilaterally change the legal status of the West Bank and Gaza.

While the UN vote may lack the authority to effect such change, it's clear that Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas is hoping to use the vote as a political crowbar in order to pry away the West from their allegiance to the principles set in place by the vastly more weighty UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967.

Hamas leader Khaled Meshal made international headlines on Dec. 7 when he made a particularly uncompromising speech in Gaza promising never to recognise Israel and to liberate all of Palestine "from the river to the sea" via armed "resistance".

It's worth specifically parsing what he had to say about why all of Palestine must be liberated by armed violence. He said "Palestine - from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, from its north to its south - is our land, our right, and our homeland. There will be no relinquishing or forsaking even an inch or small part of it... Palestine was, continues to be, and will remain Arab and Islamic... Palestine belongs to us and to nobody else."

Indonesia's public stance towards Israel - established by a long precedent - is still characterised by loud, almost ritualistic denunciations and rejections, yet equally established is the precedent of pragmatic, private flirtations, including the constant stream of tourists and visits by influential journalists and powerbrokers.

Israel has, in its 65 years, seen some major electoral upsets, most memorably Benjamin Netanyahu's defeat of Shimon Peres in 1996, and Menachem Begin's rise to power in 1977.

No one is expecting a comparable upset in the general election scheduled for Jan. 22. As things currently appear, the main struggles are within the centre-left, while the premiership itself is almost universally predicted to be retained handily by Netanyahu. Unless something drastic happens and current polls prove obsolete, Netanyahu will be re-elected with something close to twice as many votes as Labor and its leader, Shelly Yachimovich.

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.

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.

The former Prime Minister John Howard spoke at a dinner in Sydney conferring upon him AIJAC's Distinguished Leadership Award, attended by 280 supporters on November 29.

He was introduced by AIJAC National Chairman Mark Leibler at the function MC'ed by AIJAC's NSW Chairman Barry Smorgon, received his award from Frank Lowy and a vote of thanks from AIJAC Executive Director Dr Colin Rubenstein.

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.

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.

It is simply not true that Israel is ''continuously expanding Jewish settlements'' and ''creeping towards the de facto creation of a Greater Israel that swallows up the Palestinians and their land'' as Peter Hartcher and many of the Labor figures he spoke to for his story on Australia's vote on the Palestinian bid to be a ''non-member state'' at the UN seem to believe (''Right call sees Israel on the outer'', December 4).

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.

The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) today labelled the intense focus on the issue of Israeli settlements by Foreign Minister Bob Carr "misplaced", "disproportionate" and "counter-productive."

AIJAC Executive Director Dr. Colin Rubenstein AM stated " Foreign Minister Bob Carr's decision to publicly rebuke Israel's Ambassador to Australia based on the contention that construction in settlements constitutes a major obstacle to progress toward a two-state solution is severely misplaced."

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.

"Mr President: independence, freedom, the right to self-determination; these are principles that have been enshrined in the United Nations Charter." Those words were spoken by Daffa Alla Elhag Ali Osman, the Sudanese Ambassador to the UN as he introduced the draft resolution at the General Assembly to recognise the non-member state of Palestine.

Nothing could better signify the absolute farce taking place before the representatives of the international community than the government of Sudan pontificating about justice and human rights. As Osman spoke, the government that he represents was busy waging a brutal campaign to deny the Nuba people the rights to independence, freedom and self-determination.

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".

BARRING a last-minute change of heart, tomorrow the UN General Assembly will vote on upgrading Palestine's representation in the forum to the status of non-member "observer state".

On these pages, former foreign minister Gareth Evans (November 24) encouraged Washington, and by implication Australia, to support the measure.

Evans notes, correctly, that the resolution will certainly pass, given the automatic pro-Palestinian majority in the General Assembly, and that it contains little extreme language.

Yet no matter how you sugar-coat it, this resolution is a poison pill for the peace process. It should not be supported by any country that supports the creation of an independent Palestinian state living in peace alongside a secure Israel.

Israel's eight-day "Operation Pillar of Defence", which ended with a ceasefire agreement on November 21, was a limited operation with a primary objective - to staunch the flow of rockets launched from Gaza and landing on southern Israel's cities and villages.

Some 764 rockets had struck Israel from the beginning of this year until the onset of the operation, 150 in the four days before the operation commenced. A further 1,506 rockets struck Israel during the operation itself, bringing the year's total to more than 2,200.

In the recent Gaza conflict, as in 2008-2009, the media was obsessed with "disproportionate" body counts - the fact that more Palestinians were dying than Israelis. Such counts of course, have nothing to do with the actual international law principle of "proportionality", which says that the damage from military attacks must not exceed "the direct military advantage anticipated." That is, anticipated non-military damage and casualties must be proportionate to a legitimate military goal. Nothing to do with relative casualty counts.

Tel Aviv tends to revel in its image as a bastion of hedonism and frivolity that defies Middle Eastern tensions, but as autumn's seagulls overflew its fishermen's piers the city received a stark reminder of where it is situated.

As sirens ululated across the cosmopolitan metropolis, sending thousands running for cover, Tel Aviv's elegant boardwalk absorbed what it had last heard in 1991, when Saddam Hussein lobbed Soviet-made Scud missiles in its direction. Saddam and his supplier are now long gone, but the urge to target Israel is alive and well, and it now produced a week-long military conflict whose military, political, and diplomatic repercussions will become apparent in upcoming months.

In mid-November, Israel embarked on "Operation Pillar of Defence", the second time it's gone to war against Hamas in the past four years. The proximate cause of this campaign, according to Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak, was "the incessant rounds of artillery rockets and mortars into the heart of our southern communities." But that rationale was surely coupled with a build-up in Hamas' weapons arsenal - including the Iranian-made Fajr-5 missile, capable of striking Tel Aviv, and Kornet anti-tank missiles, one of which was fired on an IDF jeep and injured four soldiers on Nov. 10.

Unlike the result of the latest round of intense Hamas-Israel engagement, the winners and losers in Australian media coverage of the conflict were obvious.

After spending a week somewhere in the Gaza Strip, Fairfax Middle East reporter Ruth Pollard appears to have ended her coverage of the war the way she started it - framing reports decidedly tilted with sympathy toward the Palestinian perspective, while openly sceptical of Israeli claims.

The setting was the "Fourth World Peace Forum", an initiative of a major Indonesian Islamic group and a Malaysian NGO whose leader promoted the philosophy of Confucius, in the Indonesian city of Bogor.

The discussion began when I was asked about my recent visit to Poland, and within a few sentences, the topic was how an area which was once the home to tens of thousands of Jewish people now counted precisely one Jewish person in its population.

The group who were listening were all from Asia, were Muslim and Hindu, and had only a cursory knowledge of Nazism and the Shoah.

Now the terms of a ceasefire have been agreed upon, Israel hopes this means the rockets from the Gaza Strip will stop, despite the fact rockets have already been fired into Israel from Gaza since the ceasefire came into effect.

But, when a ceasefire was negotiated between Israel and Hamas in 2009, it did not bring an end to rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza. In fact, even before this conflict hundreds of rockets were launched at southern Israel this year alone, disrupting and terrifying the lives of Israelis who had to flee to bomb shelters on a regular basis.

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.

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...

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.

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...

US voters are presented with a stark contrast between the foreign policies of the two candidates. Each has pros and cons, but what is the best approach for Australia and Israel?

Regular readers of this column will know that I have frequently collected evidence here as to the historical state of Jewish communities in Arab lands in the years prior to Israel's establishment. I do this because one very frequently hears claims about the historical situations of these communities which amount to, if not exactly myth, at least to gross over-simplification.

The claim one hears is that in the absence of both Zionism and the import of European-style antisemitism - that is, before the late 19th century - the Jews of the Middle East were relatively free from persecution or race hatred, and thus, overall, in a pretty acceptable situation. The kernel of truth to this claim is the reality that in the Middle Ages, the Jews of the Middle East probably were better off than those in Europe. We know this because Jews voted with their feet - they were much more likely to flee persecution in Europe to Middle Eastern lands than the reverse.

Well-known Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi made headlines in Australia in 2003 when she was controversially awarded the Sydney Peace Prize. Now she has been in the headlines again with an article published in a number of Arab media outlets in late August insisting that "the claim that Jews who migrated to Israel, which is supposed to be their homeland, are ‘refugees' who were uprooted from their homelands... is a form of deception and delusion."

Though it was the first parliament in which the main opposition party was larger than the ruling party, Israel's outgoing Knesset will have served a full four years - the first since the 1980s to have done so - by the time the 19th Knesset is elected on January 22.

Not only did the Knesset prove durable, the six-party coalition Binyamin Netanyahu cobbled together proved stable, and faced no serious crisis. Even Labor's split in January 2011, in the aftermath of which Defence Minister Ehud Barak lost more than half his Knesset faction, proved meaningless from the coalition's viewpoint.

Despite the testy foreign policy debate between President Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney of Oct. 23, it is difficult to assess any candidate's foreign policy ideology - let alone how that candidate will act as president. Predicting how a president will function in foreign affairs is as reliable as guessing how first-time parents will act when their children become teenagers - lovely theories succumb to tumultuous unforeseen squalls.

Where must the line be drawn regarding Iran's dangerous and illegal nuclear weapons program? At what point should the very strongest measures, including the possibility of military strikes, be implemented in order to derail it?

This is the question at the heart of a subtle yet significant disparity in diplomatic language regarding the Iranian nuclear threat. It divides Israel from the US, but it is also one of the few concrete differences in foreign policy between US President Barack Obama and his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Last year, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas went to the UN Security Council (UNSC), attempting to have "Palestine" admitted to the UN as a member state. It soon became clear, however, that the Council was not going to approve the bid, as "Palestine" does not yet meet the criteria for statehood.

As anyone acquainted with Israel and its people can attest, the conclusions of the poll of Israelis reported on in the Herald seem puzzling (''Poll finds Jewish Israeli support for segregation'', October 25). However, detailed scrutiny of the poll data and questions reveals that, in fact, the poll itself is methodologically questionable, and the interpretation being placed on its data even more so.

As in every other country with minorities, social gaps and some discrimination exist in Israel. But the government, high court and civil society are achieving much to reduce both...

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.

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.

The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) today welcomed the election of Australia to a two-year temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council in New York overnight, and congratulated the Australian Government on achieving this outcome.

AIJAC National Chairman Mark Leibler stated, "AIJAC welcomes a successful end to Australia's long-fought efforts to gain a temporary seat on the UN Security Council. We also congratulate the Australian Government - especially Prime Minister Julia Gillard, Foreign Minister Bob Carr, his deputy Richard Marles, and all the professionals who worked diligently to achieve this very happy outcome so emphatically. Our success is well-deserved - as a middle-level, principled, democratic nation and good global citizen, we won the respect and ultimately the support of others internationally, on our own merits and without compromising our support for Israel."

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.

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.

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.

What do the Palestinian Authority's (PA) deep-seated economic problems have in common with its unstinting hostility towards Israel and reluctance to work towards resolving the conflict?

They are each symptomatic of a failure of Palestinian leadership. And, if you feel a sense of déjà vu over the PA's intention to circumvent the peace process by again seeking to upgrade its status at the United Nations, you may also appreciate the repetitive character of these failures. Those who fail to learn from their past mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

In the spirit of September's Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's Iranian policy has become a focus of the season's soul-searching.

A lot has happened since Netanyahu's return to the Premiership, two months after Barack Obama landed in the White House. What his predecessors saw as an international problem whose treatment should be led by the United States, Netanyahu aired loudly in high-exposure forums like the United Nations General Assembly, the US Congress, and the AIPAC policy conference.

There is no doubt that "5 Broken Cameras" is a moving, emotional and powerful film. It tries to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by telling the story of one Palestinian town, Bil'in, which became a symbol of what the film describes as the non-violent resistance against the security fence. In the film, Bil'in is presented as a metaphor for "Palestine", while the security fence is cast as "the occupation". This is achieved via a sophisticated, almost subtle, technique - focusing on one very personal story of a man, Emad Burnat, the film's co-director, a self-proclaimed Palach [farmer], journalist and now filmmaker, along with his youngest son, Gibreel, who was born around the time the construction of the fence had begun.

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.

AIJAC guest Dr. Tal Becker, an Israeli senior political adviser and peace negotiator, was interviewed on ABC Radio National on Israel, Iran and the Arab Spring.

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.

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.

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.

During his recent visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Carr showed true statesmanship by giving the moribund Middle East peace process a shot in the arm.

Stressing the need to ''bring the two parties together'', Carr met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah, nudging the Palestinian Authority back towards the negotiating table and emphasising the need for a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians negotiated directly between themselves.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Israelis agree that Iran's nuclear program must be stopped, and their debate regarding a strike's cost-effectiveness, urgency, and impact on relations with the United States is coming to a head.

With the heat of the summer has come an unprecedented flare-up in Israel's public debate on whether and when to unilaterally strike the advancing Iranian nuclear program.

I recently returned from a trip to Israel. I met with a handful of very senior foreign policy and defence officials, but did not speak with any member of the “Forum of Eight” – Israel’s security cabinet that is responsible for key decisions concerning war and peace. With that important caveat, I thought I’d share several random impressions...

In a typical Middle Eastern dynamic, what began with a hail of bullets soon produced political casualties, diplomatic fog, and strategic perplexity.

The physical fire originally erupted near the Rafah border crossing between the Sinai Desert and the Gaza Strip, when presumably Islamist terrorists ambushed and killed 16 Egyptian soldiers while they were breaking the Ramadan fast.

The current growing economic, political and military strength of numerous Asian countries has led observers to refer to the "Asian Century," and the world has taken notice. Indonesia exemplifies Asia's ascendancy: as the world's most populous Muslim-majority nation, it has experienced significant economic growth in recent years and has been lauded as a model for successful democratisation in an Islamic context since the end of dictatorship in 1998. Increasing engagement is occurring between Indonesia and Western countries, and enhanced ties between Jerusalem and Jakarta also have the potential to generate mutually beneficial advantages.

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.

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.

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".

The London Olympic opening ceremony should have commemorated the 40th anniversary of the murder of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes, killed by the Palestinian terrorist group ''Black September'' at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Shamefully it did not. An official Olympic commemoration was rejected despite a global petition to hold a minute's silence at the opening ceremony to remember the Munich victims, a campaign supported by world leaders including Prime Minister Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, and numerous national parliaments, including Australia's.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The explosion that ripped through a tour bus full of Israeli tourists in the seaside resort of Burgas, Bulgaria on July 18, killing six people - including a pregnant woman - was only the latest in a series of terror attacks perpetrated against Israelis abroad over the past decades.

Unfortunately, despite the Herculean efforts of Israel's intelligence services, it will likely not be the last. However, it is not too late for the world to learn a crucial lesson from the atrocity, the internalisation of which might potentially prevent a catastrophe of a far greater magnitude.

There is little doubt that the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt's presidential and parliamentary elections has been a major setback for Israel's foreign and security policy. It is too early to tell how bad this setback is - much will depend on how much control over Egypt's foreign and defence affairs the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in wresting from the military, and how much the Brotherhood chooses to focus on consolidating its internal power versus courting popularity and distracting the public from domestic problems by sparking crises with Israel. But at the very least it is possible to say that the situation will not be an improvement.

Except perhaps in one respect, and it concerns Gaza.

In January 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yaakov Neeman, the Justice Minister, turned to former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy to head a panel of legal experts that would look into questions of land ownership in the West Bank. The initiative came about when it was discovered that a housing project in the settlement of Beit El, north of Jerusalem, had been built years earlier on Palestinian private land, and the government decided to adhere to the judgment of the Supreme Court to have the Israeli building project removed. The panel was intended to study how Israeli decision-making had been made in the past and what could be done to avoid such situations in the future.

The "Levy Report" (officially the "Commission to Examine the Status of Building in Judea and Samaria", led by retired Supreme Court judge Edmond Levy) had been released in Israel for barely two hours when critics began accusing it of "undermining Israeli democracy" and signifying the "final death blow" to the peace process. (So many "final death blows" seem to have struck the peace process over the past decade that I can only conclude that it is continually reanimating in some form of undead state, only to be killed again by yet another announcement or report released by one party or another.)

The break-up in July of Israel's broad coalition in a dispute over how to reshape the place of the ultra-Orthodox in Israeli society will not change the fact that ultimately, this troubled relationship's future will be markedly different from its past.

Dr. P.R. Kumaraswamy, Professor with the Centre for West Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, spoke to community members at an AIJAC event on July 16 about India's relations with Israel.

Professor Kumaraswamy, who has made Israel the focus of his academic career since 1982, noted that while India recognised Israel in 1950 and privately expressed interest in establishing diplomatic ties in 1952, it took four decades before formal ties were established in 1992. India's decision to establish relations when it did was a response to the changing global realities ushered in with the end of the Cold War. "Normalisation [with Israel] was an Indian message to the outside world: ‘The world has changed, the Cold War has ended, [and] I am reacting to the world with a significant measure.'" Furthermore, he noted, India recognised that for any country with a serious interest in promoting Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, normal relations with Israel are a necessity.

Since suffering a crippling stroke on 4 January 2006, Ariel Sharon has lain in a persistent vegetative state beyond hope of recovery. It truncated his prime ministership without ending his life, which lingers on in an irreparably broken condition. This is a mournful last stage in the life of so active a man; one of the true giants in the modern history of Israel. He was the protégé of David Ben Gurion, who gave the young Ariel Scheinermann the Hebraic name ‘Sharon'. He fought or led in every one of Israel's wars: 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, right up to the second intifada of 2000 which catapulted him into the prime ministership. And he arranged the strategic withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 in a fruitless quest for peace.

The shocking and deadly attack against a busload of Israeli civilians preparing to holiday in the Bulgarian sea resort of Burgas was still insufficient for some media outlets to use the dreaded "T" word - "terrorism".

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.

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.

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.

A petition calling on Australian Jews to denounce Israel's administrative detention policy has apparently been circulating for some weeks without attracting much attention. The handful of signatories, including most of the regular anti-Israel crowd, claim that "the Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike" highlights the policy - not seeming to have realised that a deal to end the strike had been reached more than a month before the petition was launched.

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.

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.

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.

The passing of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, aged 96, marks the departure of the last of the founding generation of Jewish leaders who devoted themselves to establishing, nurturing and securing a flourishing Jewish state.

Steadfast, modest, dour, lacking the charisma, wealth and powerful friends of some of Israel's later premiers, he was in some ways the antithesis of a politician. He played a straight bat in his single-minded goal of serving the security and welfare interests of the Jewish state as he saw them, and became one of Israel's longest serving prime ministers.

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...

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.

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.

There are a lot of things to worry about following the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood's Muhammad Morsi in the Egyptian Presidential election. The Brotherhood is of course effectively the parent organisation and model for all radical Sunni Islamist groups - from al-Qaeda, through Hamas, to Somalia's al-Shabaab, Nigeria's murderous Boko Haram and Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah. It also comes with a worldview which places absolutely no intrinsic value on democracy - to them, democracy is tactically valuable only as long as it helps achieve Islamist ends and the moment other ways of doing so appear to be better, it becomes an obstacle to be eradicated. Even if the Brotherhood allows relatively free elections to continue, its theocratic worldview makes it unlikely to encourage the development of the free public square which is essential for genuine democracy to flourish.

Since Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr announced on May 28 that he would be increasing funding to the UN Relief and Works Association for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), there has been a great deal of focus on the true nature of UNRWA and its activities.

UNRWA is the single biggest influence on the current situation of Palestinian refugees (or more correctly, ‘Palestine refugees'), which itself is perhaps the most serious outstanding issue in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The Palestinians insist that the millions of descendants of Palestinians who fled the 1947-1948 war have a "right" to return to what is now Israel. This would mean, in effect, the destruction of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. For this reason, it is a condition that no conceivable Israeli government could accept, but on which Palestinians refuse to compromise.

Compared to the revolutionary upheavals in the Arab states, the Jewish state is a haven of political stability, domestic quiet and economic prosperity. And while it involves a hazardous, overland desert journey fraught with Bedouin marauders and human traffickers, Israel's largely unfenced Negev border with the Egyptian Sinai has nonetheless seen between 1,000 to 2,000 foot-weary, traumatised Africans crossing into Israel each month over the past few years.

However, entries are expected to fall dramatically when the 247-kilometre-long fence being constructed along the Sinai border is completed by the end of 2012, according to Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu.

In recent years, Israel has been coming to sees its future as increasingly linked with Asia. This fact is underscored by changing strategic realities, the region's influential emergent economies, and American and European woes in an unresolved global financial crisis. Three of the world's largest economies (Japan, India and China) are Asian, and four out of every seven persons on this planet live in Asia.

The Jerusalem-based Israel-Asia Centre (IAC), established in 2009, aims to promote a shared future, "investing in the next generation of leaders in Israel-Asia relations, by building dynamic networks to maximise their continued engagement and cooperation."

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.).

Anti-Israel activists have been sponsoring intense campaigns of intimidation, emotional blackmail and misinformation to encourage prominent musicians to boycott Israel by not performing there, as reported on June 4 ("Stars under fire for concerts in Israel").

These activists claim that they are acting in the name of peace, but in reality what they are actually doing is precisely the opposite. They are participating in a new version of a decades-old effort to reject any co-existence with Israel.

What's even more ludicrous and hypocritical about efforts to culturally boycott Israel is that they ignore a compelling reality of today's Middle East. Even as activists in Western states demand that artists refuse to have any association with Israel, the opposite is actually happening in the Middle East.

There, despite decades of boycotts, people from Turkey to Iran are embracing the works of Israeli musicians in increasing numbers, often at great personal risk.

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.

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.

In a famous incident on an episode of ABC's QandA, almost exactly one year ago, comedian Sandy Gutman (aka Austen Tayshus) berated Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon for her defence of the NSW Greens’ decision to adopt a boycott of Israel.

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."

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.

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.

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".

In his recent article, Robert Newton of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network offered Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr ("Carr should press Obama on peace for Israel and Palestine", June 4) some poor advice on moving forward with the Israeli-Palestinian Peace negotiations.

Newton suggests that Israel alone is wholly to blame for the current ‘impasse' in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, ignoring the element of Palestinian responsibility for perpetuating the conflict which has been all too apparent in the events of recent months. He neglects to tell readers that Israel has been continually stating that it seeks the "immediate resumption of peace talks without any preconditions whatsoever", but it is the Palestinian Authority that is refusing to talk with Israel, and has been doing so, with a few minor exceptions, over the past three years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AIJAC guest Dr Jonathan Spyer has discussed Syria and the wider Middle East in recent appearances in the Australian media, including ABC Radio National, ABC News 24, Sky News, 2GB radio and lectures at the Sydney Institute and the Centre for Independent Studies. (links)

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.

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."

Israel's new national unity government - one of the country's broadest coalitions on record - will have its work cut out in the months ahead. Domestically, in addition to the need to re-write the rules on military service for the ultra-Orthodox minority, and promised efforts to implement overdue political reforms, last year's controversies over social equity issues are also likely to resurface.

Internationally, the problem of how to deal with Iran looms over everything else, representing perhaps the most significant existential threat Israel has faced in more than a generation.

But almost as important will be adapting to the changing and unsettled situation in Egypt, as it continues its political revolution following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak last year.

A lot of international commentators have been taken in by Hamas claims to be ready to accept a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders as part of a deal with Israel (though most commentators gloss over the fact that Hamas always also demands a Palestinian "right of return" - which would lead to Israel's demographic destruction.) And Hamas has made enough ambiguous noises about accepting the results of a referendum of all Palestinians on a peace deal that some have rushed to argue that Hamas will agree to a permanent two-state peace if such a referendum can be passed.

But Hamas' deputy political leader Moussa Abu Marzouk made it very clear in an interview with the New York-based Forward published on April 27 that Hamas is saying nothing of the kind. He did say that any Israel-Palestinian agreement must be ratified by a referendum, stating "All of the Palestinians should vote about this." But he was explicit that even if such a referendum passes, it will still be merely a temporary ceasefire - a hudna in Arabic - to Hamas. He said "When we reach the agreement, our point of view is, it's a hudna." Abu Marzouk went on to mention ten years as an appropriate time frame for such a ceasefire.

To grasp how badly the security situation in Sinai has deteriorated, one fact suffices: Israel now receives as many intelligence warnings about Sinai-based terror plots as it does about terror from Gaza.

This, obviously, is of great concern to Israel. But it should also concern the international community because, unlike terror from the West Bank or Gaza, which, despite periodic Israeli counter-offensives, has never drawn other Arab countries into the conflict, Sinai-based terror could easily end up starting a war between Israel and Egypt.

In one of the strangest about-faces ever seen in its politics, the Jewish State woke up Tuesday, May 8 with the main Opposition party, Kadima, joining the Government, after the country had gone to bed the previous night with an early-election bill already in the process of being legislated.

The new broad government, whose backing by 94 of 120 lawmakers makes it the second largest in Israeli history (in 1969 Golda Meir headed a coalition of 102 MKs), is a result of momentary circumstances, but it may have longer-term implications.

Peter Beinart's call for a boycott of Israelis in the West Bank opposes the policy advice of almost everyone involved in the debate on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Similarly, the choice of my friend and former colleague in AUJS, Liam Getreu, to adopt Beinart's policy has place Liam at-odds with everyone in Australian Jewry bar the handful who fall far enough to the fringe of the political spectrum that they would consider a boycott, but are not quite ready to boycott Israel in its entirety.

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.

Before the deal that ended it last week, the recent Palestinian prisoners' hunger strike in Israeli prisons was being presented as some kind of grand, Gandhi-esque "resistance" movement, pitting peaceful Palestinian "political prisoners" against cruel Israelis. This is certainly the impression that Randa Abdel-Fattah attempted to give in her recent piece on the subject.

As with many claims in the sadly still-unresolved Arab-Israel conflict, this general narrative is little more than a propaganda exercise, aimed at winning undeserved sympathy for people who are far from innocent.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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 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.

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...

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.

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.

Following a period of increased international sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program, the P5+1 nudged Iran back to the negotiating table on April 13. The two-day talks, held in Istanbul, yielded little but an agreement to resume talks in five weeks time, on May 23 in Baghdad.

Whether you agree with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's assessment that Iran had been given a "freebie", or US President Barack Obama's description of the latest talks as an "opportunity for us to negotiate and see if Iran comes to the table in good faith," the fact remains that despite the sanctions and these negotiations, Iran's nuclear enrichment and development continues apace in defiance of the unequivocal Western and UN policy to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons.

Debate about Israel often leads back to the Shoah, the World War II Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust is of course a constant background for many Jews both in Israel and out - an horrific presence, but also an important source of shared experience, and nation building, as well as the ultimate argument for the belief that Jews need self-determination in their own state, i.e. Zionism.

But the Shoah is also increasingly being invoked by Israel's critics...

Livni, with her well-to-do background, is history, at least as a prime ministerial contender. Humbly-born Mofaz, on the other hand, emerged from his sweeping victory as a force to reckon with, a battle-tested general who, while an underdog, can be counted on to fight for the premiership tooth and nail.

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 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...

On the morning of April 25 people all around Australia will decorate their lapels with red poppies as they commemorate ANZAC Day. At the same time (give or take a few time zones) a much smaller nation, both demographically and geographically, will commemorate its own memorial day, as this year ANZAC Day falls on the same day as the Israeli Yom Ha-Zikaron (Israel's "Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism Remembrance Day"). In Israel, lapels will be decorated instead with red everlasting flowers (commonly known as 'Blood of the Maccabees' flowers).

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.

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.

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.

The question has arisen over Israel's position on the appalling situation in Syria, where the lives of over 9,000 civilians have been claimed in a crackdown on protesters and an insurrection by opposition groups.

Some commentators have unfairly interpreted the Israeli government's comparative silence over the bloodshed compared to other regional and Western countries as cold indifference, others as calculated.

Bizarrely and contradictorily, Israel has been criticised by some commentators for wanting to keep the current government in place and by others for seeking to topple it.

On Friday night, while the Christian world is celebrating Good Friday and the rest of Australia is celebrating a four-day weekend, the Jewish community in Australia will be holding the annual Passover seder, marking the beginning of the week of Passover.

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.

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.

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...

The "Israel Apartheid Week" festival continues to excite students on campuses across Europe (forget those pesky events in Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Iran). But while Apartheid Week has come and gone for another year, the BDS campaign - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - plods relentlessly on. Why has the Jewish state, the only liberal democracy in the region, become the obsessive focus of vilification, demonisation and delegitimisation? Why is it considered so uniquely evil - a "racist, genocidal state," in the words of one of the leading Israel Apartheid Week celebrants in London?

After a week of intermittent barrages of mortars, rockets, and missiles, relative quiet befell southwestern Israel, in bizarre synchrony with a blessed winter's belated departure.

The weather has been one happy story in Israel this year. After seven years of drought, the skies opened up and by early March, the Water Authority reported that overall rainfall for this year had already exceeded by more than 10% the annual average. 

Twenty years after establishing full diplomatic relations, India has formed a cordial network of Israeli bilateral ties aimed primarily at upgrading India's technological prowess, economic prospects, and military capabilities. These ties are based on converging strategic interests cemented by diverse cultural exchanges. They run on a separate, though contiguous track, from India's relations with the Arab and Muslim world - which are driven primarily by the need to secure vital energy resources in the Persian Gulf and defend India against Islamic terrorist groups.

The March 5 summit between US President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu marked an important milestone in the US-Israeli decision-making process on Iran's nuclear program. The meeting helped clarify positions and narrow gaps, yet significant differences remain to be addressed in the coming months.

Terror sponsorship has been around for as long as terrorism.

It's a phenomenon that has been widely recognised, which allows a group to use terrorism as a tool while insulating themselves from direct responsibility. As an added benefit, in some cases it allows for additional logistical possibilities in planning a terror attack.

Naturally, nobody should be fooled: a terror sponsor who provides planning and support for a terror attack is as responsible as those who are sent to pull the trigger.

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...

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has recently been the subject of much criticism because of what some see as an unnecessarily militaristic attitude regarding Iran, arguing that his statements indicate a clear gung-ho -- even warmongering -- attitude. The reality may actually be the very opposite.

Israel is believed to have previously taken-out two different nuclear programs: Iraq's in 1981 and Syria's in 2007. I say "believed to have" because Israel has never officially admitted to the second one; indeed, no Israeli public official ever even recognised that Syria had a nuclear program and in neither case was there any prior warning (in fact, prior to the strike on Syria's secret reactor in 2007...

Burgeoning relations between Israel and China has been the focus of considerable attention in recent months, including from us here at AIJAC (see here and here)

Now Israeli journalist Oren Kessler has written a new piece which is a must read for anyone interested in this subject - it's entitled "Shalom, Beijing" and appears in the American publication Foreign Policy this week.

Just days after being exposed for fraudulently blaming the accidental death of a 15-year-old boy on an "Israeli airstrike", Hamas officials have again attempted to implicate Israel in the death of a Gaza youth -- this time, seven-year-old Baraka al-Mughrabi. Just after Mughrabi passed-away last night, reports started emerging that he had been killed by an Israeli strike.

Not long after, however, these remarks were retracted as the truth of his death emerged...

The Kony2012 campaign was not the only viral campaign in recent days that spread some dubious information. A number of allegations of Israeli targeting of civilians that surface over the past few days have been outed as downright lies.

The most glaring example is the death of 15-year-old Nayif Shaaban Qarmout, who was killed in northern Gaza on Monday. The first reports emerged from Palestinian Authority-controlled media outlet Ma'an News, citing unnamed "witnesses" who attested that the boy was hit by an Israeli airstrike.

The claim caught the eye of the Israeli military, who were understandably confused, given that they had not launched any airstrikes on northern Gaza during the time that he was killed. An AFP reporter confirmed that there did not appear to be any evidence of an airstrike in the area, but the dead boy did seem to have been killed by an explosive device, albeit apparently one that he himself was carrying...

Former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans was quick out of the blocks to suggest Kevin Rudd's successor should still make the case for Australia winning a temporary UN Security Council seat in 2013/14.

"It will certainly be almost impossible if we paint ourselves into a tiny minority corner on the Palestinian statehood issue, should that come to a vote in the General Assembly before October," Evans wrote (Age, 1/3).

However, last October, Australia, the United States, Canada, Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Palau, Panama, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sweden, and Vanuatu all voted against admitting the non-existent state of Palestine to UNESCO as a full member state. A further 52 countries abstained from voting.

This Update deals with background to and details of the intensive flare-up over the weekend around Gaza, which saw over 200 rockets fired into southern Israel from Gaza (sending up to 1 million Israelis into bomb shelters) and Israel staging numerous counter-attacks at terrorist targets and rocket sites which reportedly killed around 25 Palestinians, all but three of them armed combatants, according to Israel. The violence was triggered on Friday when Israel assassinated Zuhair al-Qaissi, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and an assistant, who Israel said were planning attacks into Israel from Sinai...

Israel's cutting edge advances in water and agriculture are helping the country make commercial and diplomatic inroads into parts of Asia that have previously been difficult to reach.

Context is king and without it the most outrageous slurs can be given legitimacy.

Unfortunately, some pro-Palestinian activists are prone to only offer facts in isolation to give their false allegations the air of authenticity and aid the ongoing campaign to delegitimise Israel.

The most recent example of this appeared on Tuesday in an op-ed hosted on the ABC "Unleashed" website from Professor Stuart Rees called "Palestine matters, not Gillard-Rudd soapies"...

Today's Update contains two pieces focussed around the reality behind claims about "Apartheid" often directed at Israel by radical opponents (they organise something called "Israel Apartheid Week" on some college campuses, including some in Australia, every March. A summary of the various organisations behind it is here.)

The past few days saw an intense period of discussion about the Iranian nuclear crisis in Washington involving both US President Obama, and visiting Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The three focal points of analysis were Obama's Speech to the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on Sunday (video here), the subsequent meeting between the two leaders on Monday and their public statement following the meeting, and Netanyahu's Speech to AIPAC on Monday evening (video here). We recommend reading all three original texts, and provide analysis of the context of all three below.

On March 4, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee's (AIPAC) annual policy conference. In his speech Obama emphasised his strong support for the State of Israel, and policy on Iran.

This blog post looks at a variety of resposes to the speech.

As official estimates of Syrian civilians killed in the Assad regime's bloody crackdown climb steadily past the 7,500 mark, a couple of recent Op-Eds in the Arab media have compared the Arab world's strong outrage to Israeli military actions in the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon to their muted response to Syrian slaughter of their own people.

Putting aside the moral inequality of such a comparison (the pieces make no effort to differentiate the defensive nature of Israeli military campaigns from the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the Syrian dictatorial regime suppressing dissent from its own citizens) the pieces nevertheless mark a significant break from the traditional narrative in Arab media that the Palestinians are the region's principal human rights victims...

Seldom has there been such a brazen attempt to pass off pantomime as intelligent debate.

Saturday's edition of the Sydney Morning Herald's (SMH) weekly "The Question" section - which canvasses the opinions of four experts with presumed standing on a specific issue - addressed the topic of "Is the West destined for war with Iran? Deepening distrust is fuelling a new round of sabre-rattling."

A fair enough subject for discussion, however, the range of views left a lot to be desired...

This Update features two new and penetrating analyses of the ructions and political disagreements currently roiling Hamas, as well as an important new expression of Israel's dilemmas vis-a-vis Iran's nuclear program in the lead up to Israeli PM Netanyahu's trip to Washington next week.

First up is the always excellently informed top Israeli journalist, Ehud Yaari, sorting out the power struggles within Hamas. Yaari says that the once unassailable Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal now seems to be in deep trouble, cut off from a base of operations and with increasingly public denunciations of his policies from within Hamas' senior ranks...

On Monday, Wikileaks began releasing an alleged 5 million emails stolen by "hacktivist" group Anonymous from geo-political consulting firm Stratfor. The sensationalist title that Wikileaks gave the material -- The Global Intelligence Files -- as well as the statement announcing the release attempt to make the released emails out to be top-secret information from some sort of clandestine "private CIA".

The Stratfor emails reveal a company that cultivates close ties with US government agencies and employs former US government staff. It is preparing the 3-year Forecast for the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, and it trains US marines and "other government intelligence agencies" in "becoming government Stratfors"...

SIX federal Coalition MPs who recently returned from Israel said they were full of praise for Israel's achievements, more understanding of its challenges and ready to spread the word.

Bradfield MP Paul Fletcher, Tasmanian Senator David Bushby, Paterson MP Bob Baldwin, South Australian Senator David Fawcett, Brisbane MP Teresa Gambaro and Cowan MP Luke Simpkins all travelled as part of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council's Rambam program.

What's wrong with being religious in Israel? Nothing at all - though there is of course much controversy in Israel at the moment over the exemption from the draft for most ultra-Orthodox young men following a Supreme Court ruling last week, and other issues, including views on women's rights.

But these controversies, and the debates surrounding them, have led to the size and influence of Israel's ultra-Orthodox population sometimes being exaggerated in the media in order to make spurious comparisons between Israeli society and dogmatic Islamic states such as Iran or Saudi Arabia. So some firm facts are needed.

Recently, detailed accounts were published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz of the January round of Israeli-Palestinian "negotiations about negotiating" held in Amman, Jordan.

According to the Haaretz account, Israeli negotiators offered a somewhat vague but important statement of the principles which would underly a peace agreement to include a Palestinian state in the vast majority of the West Bank plus Gaza - one which Haaretz described as "similar, if not identical to that which was presented by [then Foreign Minister] Tzipi Livni during the negotiations that took place in 2008 after the Annapolis Conference."

In December, I wrote on AIJAC's "Fresh AIR" blog (available on-line at www.aijac.org.au/news/article/antisemitism-in-the-middle-east-in-1835) about a 19th century book that had been rediscovered which shed a great deal of light on the situation of Jews in the Arab Middle East in the 1830s - before Zionism became an issue, and before there was significant European influence on those societies. I noted that the book in question, An Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, by Edward William Lane and Edward Stanley Poole, based on numerous visits to Egypt, countered common but erroneous beliefs that the Middle East was largely free from significant antisemitism or large-scale persecution of Jews before these influences.

On February 6, 2012, Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal signed a new agreement to create a Palestinian national unity government for the West Bank and Gaza.

The Doha Declaration, like previous Fatah-Hamas agreements, emphasises the need to implement the agreements between the sides - once again demonstrating the difficulty of achieving institutional unity in the Palestinian arena in light of Hamas' declared ambition to assume senior status in representing the Palestinian people. The two sides will have to show great creativity to overcome the many obstacles facing the holding of elections, from unifying the separate civilian and security institutions in the West Bank and Gaza, to budget allocations.

Half-a-decade after it won its first and last general election, Israel's political centre is scrambling for a future in a rapidly changing ideological landscape.

At the heart of the jockeying is a three-way contest over the leadership of the main Israeli opposition party, Kadima, and the emergence of a new rival to the party for the middle of the road voter.

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a Muslim-owned café in an east Jerusalem suburb, discussing the complexities of Middle Eastern affairs with a Greek Orthodox Palestinian nationalist.

Hours earlier, I had met with a young, American-born Jewish woman, a high achiever academically who seemed to have the world at her feet in the USA or Europe. She spoke of her decision, as an independent young adult, to emigrate to Israel, where she is currently going through basic military training.

The Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council has hosted a meeting in Sydney at which three Australian members of Parliament told of their experiences on a recent visit to Israel.

Liberal Bob Baldwin member for Paterson near Newcastle, Shadow Minister for Regional Development and Shadow Minister for Tourism, Liberal Teresa Gambaro represents Brisbane and is the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for International Assistance and Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Citizenship and Settlement and Tasmanian Liberal Senator David Bushby spent a week in Israel as guests of the Rambam Program which has in its ten years has hosted more than 500 journalists, politicians, youth leaders, union leaders and clergy on specially guided tours of the Holy Land.

The three politicians formed part of a group of six members of Federal Parliament.

While peacemaking visionaries talk about a future Israeli-Palestinian peace dividend - the concept that peace between Israelis and Palestinians will usher in a new era of mutual prosperity - the two peoples aren't waiting, as both Israeli and Palestinian stock markets continue to impress.

On February 20, the financial news organisation Bloomberg named Israel's stock market number one in the world in its Riskless Return Ranking - a measure of the safest investments for investors over the past decade...

Did you hear the one about the shipments of fuel from Egypt to Gaza stopped by Hamas because they refused to let them pass through the Israeli crossing at Rafah?

No? Well, that's because stories of Palestinian suffering caused by Hamas and Fatah rarely make the grade in most Australian and Western newsrooms. It's a case of news editors saying: "No Israel angle? Then there's nothing to see here folks"...

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

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

This Update includes two new pieces by experts attempting to explain how Teheran views the current nuclear standoff - a vital piece of the puzzle if policies are to be implemented to influence the behaviour of Iran's leaders.

First up is Ray Takeyh of the US Council on Foreign Relations, who points out that the primary reason the leaders of the Iranian regime believe they need nuclear weapons is because, for historical reasons, they both see themselves as the "natural hegemons" of the region, and are a revolutionary regime, whose purpose is to export their revolution to other countries...

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

The large crash sounded like something very big and heavy had fallen, hard - at least for those of us at the front of the bus. One friend at the back had grabbed his girlfriend and gone for cover, the loud bang and shattering glass made him think of a gunshot. Thankfully, we were not under fire. We were, however, under attack.

We were 13 Australian students on a tour through Arab East Jerusalem, there to learn about the situation in which the local population finds itself. Our bus was a clearly marked tour bus (albeit from an Israeli company) of a kind that is hardly rare in one of the world's most popular cities for tourists. We had nothing at all to identify us as anything other than Western tourists and, at that moment, we were between stops and not even paying much attention to our surroundings. What, then, motivated a local youth with an impressive arm to hurtle rocks at us as we drove past?

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

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

PROPAGANDA comes in many forms. The British/French mini-series, The Promise, recently shown over four consecutive Sundays on SBS TV, is a particularly insidious example. It tells the story of a British girl, Erin, just out of school, who stays with the family of her closest friend in Israel during the second intifada.

She has taken the diary of her grandfather Len, who served as a British soldier in mandate Palestine from 1945 to 1948, so the action switches between the British battling the treacherous Jews in the 1940s and the brutal Israelis oppressing the Palestinians today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Netanyahu attempted to point out, the assumption that Israel is becoming more isolated in recent years makes sense only if one's focus is mainly on a segment of opinion in Western Europe - ignoring the US, Eastern Europe and Israel's renewal of old ties in Sub-Saharan African. But a most important part of the real world, and an area of major opportunity for Israel, is in South, Southeast and East Asia.

Judging from media reports, Israel might appear to be in the midst of a radical and violent political and religious polarisation. "Hilltop youth" from the settlements are seen allegedly burning mosques, as well as attacking "peace activists" and even Israel Defence Force officers. Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) men are shown assaulting secular women in segregated buses and even on sidewalks, and members of Israel's democratically elected Knesset are portrayed as waging war against the courts and civil society.

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas swung through Europe in January he was feted by European leaders for pursuing the two-state formula, while obloquy was, as usual, heaped on Israel - if not for settlements then for roadblocks or water or the wall or the tunnel or the occupation or, most recently, for being niggardly about handing out citizenship on demand to Palestinians... the list goes on.

Lead Israeli negotiator Yitzhak Molcho met with his Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat in Amman on January 9 for the second time in as many weeks, with the aim of restarting direct peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. These were the first direct contacts between the parties since the breakdown of peace talks in September 2010.

While the rest of the world was following American military retreats, European economic meltdowns, and Middle Eastern bloodbaths, Israel was agog over one eight-year-old girl's five-minute walk to school every morning.

Frail, bespectacled, and shy, Naama Margolese appeared on TV and said she refused to go to her school in the town of Beit-Shemesh after local ultra-Orthodox men spat and shouted "prostitute" at her while she walked the short distance from her home to school. Though she is religiously Orthodox, and wears a skirt and long sleeves, her standards of modesty did not meet those of her attackers.

Over the past 10 to 15 years, China has become a rising power in the Middle East, rivalling the United States and Russia for strategic influence.

Its presence in the region rests squarely on a strategic relationship with Iran, and friendly, interlocking relations with Arab oil states to ensure a constant flow of energy resources to fuel China's insatiable economy, and to contain separatist movements among its Muslim Uighur Turkic ethnic minority in Xinjiang province, northwestern China.

This month's AIR cover story deals with the myths and realities of al-Jazeera televison, the Qatari network that undoubtedly helped to bring about the "Arab Spring" and re-shape the Middle East political and media environment over the past decade. And in its English language incarnation, it has been moving out of the Middle East into the wider world for a number of years now.

As the cover story demonstrates, while it's clear that the English language version of the channel does not contain the blatant radical political agenda that the channel often features in its Arabic incarnation, it is also apparent that, even in English, it is not simply another public broadcaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Palestinian human rights activist has inadvertently confirmed what Israel has always insisted, that terrorist groups live, train, operate and run riot throughout the Gaza Strip's residential neighbourhoods.

In a piece written for the Palestinian website Maan, Gaza human rights activist Mahmoud Abu Rahma reveals that the "resistance movements" are so entrenched and widespread in residential areas that civilians are suffering frequent injuries because of their activities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israeli President Shimon Peres's groundbreaking visit to Vietnam in November with a delegation of more than 60 prominent Israelis, including two government ministers and leading figures in finance, industry, agriculture and defense was a landmark event. The delegation was given a rousing welcome, including a dinner with all the members of the Vietnamese government in which Peres's hosts surprised him with a group of Vietnamese singers who had prepared renditions of Israeli songs in excellent Hebrew.

This document looks at the Israeli legal process regarding Palestinian minors in the West Bank (hereinafter, the "Area") accused of using stones as weapons, including a specific analysis of a recent two month period, August and September 2011.

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

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

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

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

The US Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, addressing a conference on antisemitism on November 30, controversially insisted that Muslim "hatred and indeed sometimes... violence directed at Jews generally [is] a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories" and should therefore not be seen as the same thing as "real" antisemitism. He went on to insist that a Mideast peace deal would see a "huge reduction of this form of labeled ‘antisemitism'."

Both Palestinian groups and pro-Palestinian Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) often accuse Israel of seeking to "Judaise" Jerusalem. For instance, following their admission to the UN cultural organisation UNESCO in October, one of the things the Palestinian Authority said they wanted to do was sue Israel in international forums for supposedly "systematically destroying and forging Arab and Islamic culture in Jerusalem." Similarly, at a controversial rally in Cairo on November 25 at which there was also recitation of a hadith [saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad] about killing all Jews, Sheikh Dr. Ahmed al-Tayeb, the head of al-Azhar University, proclaimed, "we shall not allow the Zionists to Judaise al-Quds (Jerusalem)."

A decade after it last held power, and some two generations after losing its hegemonic sway over Israeli politics - the rehabilitation of Israel's Labor party seems finally underway.

The election in September of Shelly (Rachel) Yachimovich as Labor Chairperson, the eighth election of a party leader since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, appears to reflect an ideological reckoning and a strategic reorientation that, in due course, may well bear electoral fruit.

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

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

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

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

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

SBS TV showed a four-part drama, "The Promise", from Britain's Channel 4 and France's Canal+ and Arte France, which was characterised by rampant and crudely propagandistic political messages directed against Israel and Jews, selective, distorted portrayals of historical events, and the sanitising of Arab behaviour throughout the past seven decades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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