Richard Burden MP last night confronted Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Barak at the Labour Party Conference. Mr Burden called on him to respond to the findings of the recent UN report that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza during ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

In the first case of its kind since the publication of the Goldstone Report, a group of Palestinians are seeking an arrest warrant in the UK on Tuesday for Defense Minister Ehud Barak for alleged war crimes.

Last November, when Israeli Jerusalemites were voting in a new mayor and a new city council, the residents of Sawarha, a Palestinian neighbourhood in the Israeli-occupied part of the city and home to 25,000, people were ignoring the Israeli-run elections. Instead, they were focused on electing their own local council…

Neve Gordon writes: “A simple google search with the words “Palestinian violence” yields over 86,000 pages, while a search with the words “Palestinian civil disobedience” generates only 47 pages – this despite the fact that for several years now Palestinians have been carrying out daily acts of civil disobedience against the Israeli occupation…”

Roger Ebert, the film critic, changed his mind after initially criticizing the protesters. Ebert wrote: “I thought of [the Festival's decision to showcase Tel Aviv] as an innocent goodwill gesture, but now realize it was part of a deliberate plan to “re-brand” Israel in Toronto, as a pilot for a larger such program. The Festival should never have agreed to be used like this.” [...]

Dear President Obama:

Our wounds in Gaza are still open, our justice still denied. Israel’s 23 day offensive (28 December 2008- 19 January 2009) has left our children afraid to return to school, and feeling unsafe in their beds. The war, and the continued closure of the Gaza Strip, has undermined the capacity of mothers and fathers to act as protectors and providers. As a community, we will struggle for decades to live with the consequences…

War on Want urgently needs to you take action to free one of our partners detained in Palestine Mohammad Othman, a prominent Palestinian human rights defender has been arrested and is currently being detained without charge by Israeli authorities. It is believed that Mohammad is the first Palestinian to be imprisoned by Israel in response [...]

Andy Newman writes: “Over the last few years we have consistently argued on this blog that just because sometimes supporters of the Palestinians are unjustly accused of anti-Semitism by Zionists, that doesn’t mean either that anti-Semitism doesn’t exist, or that anti-Semitism doesn’t matter…”

..to spare no efforts to ensure war criminals do not get away with murder

Send an email to Foreign Secretary David Miliband NOW! We have only three days to influence the UK government’s decision on the Goldstone report [...]

Jeremiah Haber writes: When a young modern orthodox pulpit rabbi in Chicago calls for an unlimited right of return of Palestinian refugees to the State of Israel, and proposes a bi-national Israel-Palestine, conjuring up the ghost of Magnes, you know that “the times, they are a changin’.”

A senior prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague said Monday that he is considering opening an investigation into whether Lt. Col. David Benjamin, an Israel Defense Forces reserve officer, allowed war crimes to be committed during the IDF’s three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip this winter. This is possible because Benjamin is citizen of South Africa as well as Israel and South Africa is a signatory of the Treaty that founded the Court…

This posting carries some more responses to the Goldstone report, including ones by Richard Falk and Daniel Levy, a response by Richard Goldstone in the Jerusalem Post and, for good measure, a hysterical attack on the report by the Senior Vice-President, Netanya Academic College. [...]

Uri Avnery writes: “NO POINT denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten… instead of a shining achievement for the new American administration, we witnessed a humbling demonstration of weakness. After Obama was compelled to give up his demand for a settlement freeze, the meeting no longer had any content…

The “University Center of Ariel in Samaria” (AUCS) has been excluded from the Solar Decathlon, an international university competition promoting sustainable architecture.

The self-styled “Ariel University Centre of Samaria” claiming to represent Israel, though situated in the illegal settlement of Ariel in the occupied West Bank, was one out of 20 architecture teams short-listed from university entries last April to compete for the Solar Decathlon-Europe 2010[...]

Israel decided to mark produce grown in the settlements after the British chain Marks & Spencer returned millions of dollars in products, Dov Weissglas, former advisor and bureau chief to prime minister Ariel Sharon, revealed yesterday. [...]

Jonathan Cook writes:”An ill-fated light railway under construction in Jerusalem was originally heralded by Israeli officials as a way to cement the city’s “unification” four decades after the city’s Palestinian half was illegally annexed to Israel.
But the only unity generated… is general agreement that the project is rapidly becoming a white elephant…”

Miri Weingarten writes about a new article in Ha’aretz that: “In parallel to the coordinated counter-attack launched by the Israeli foreign ministry in the international media in response to the Goldstone report, some analysts in Israel are beginning to express regret for Israeli decisions in recent months. Israeli delegates abroad find it hard to answer the question why a State Commission of Inquiry, or at least some show of an independent domestic inquiry, was not established in Israel…[...]

A peace activist in Israel is due to be sentenced today after being found guilty of assaulting Israeli paramilitary policemen in the West Bank. Ezra Nawi was protesting about the Israeli demolition of a Bedouin shack deep inside the occupied West Bank in 2007, and his arrest was filmed and posted on youtube. Middle East correspondent Tim Franks, returned with Ezra Nawi back to the same West Bank Bedouin encampment.

Lisa Goldman is a Israeli-Canadian freelance journalist based in Tel Aviv. She runs a blog at http://lisagoldman.net/. And for the May-June edition of the Columbia Journalism Review she wrote a fascinating piece on how the Gaza invasion was covered on TV & radio and in the print media in Israel and the differences with coverage by journalists from non Israeli media outlets. [...]

Uri Avnery writes: “Now they have decided to slander the Jews with another blood libel. Not the old accusation of slaughtering Christian children to use their blood for baking Passover matzoth, as in the past, but of the mass slaughter of women and children in Gaza…THE OFFICIAL Israeli reaction to the Goldstone report would have been amusing, if the matter had not been so grave…
Nobody, but nobody, dealt with the subject itself. Nobody examined the detailed conclusions. With such an anti-Semitic smear, there is no need for that. Actually, there is no need to read the report at all.”