Melanie Phillips

An invitation to appear as a Question Time panellist always sees your columnist dusting off her tin helmet, not to say donning full body armour and making her last will and testament.

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When it comes to shooting itself in the foot and other essential bits, Israel undoubtedly takes the all-time prize.

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Until recently, I had never been to Hebron. In the past three months, however, I have twice boarded an armoured bus to make the journey.

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For many years, Professor Sari Nusseibeh has been regarded as the epitome of Palestinian moderation. The urbane president of al Quds university in east Jerusalem, he has been regarded as a “two-state solution” moderate. His actual advocacy of a one-state solution and the swallowing up of Israel has been unaccountably ignored.

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Government ministers might be concerned to know quite how often I am now accosted by strangers in public places.

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Consider the following scenario. A church newspaper has a Jewish political editor. He reports in his paper on a troubling development.

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In both Britain and the US, there are now attempts to push back against the steady encroachment of sharia law.

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It is hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of the lamentable failure to understand the Arab world by Britain and the west than its response to the "Arab Spring".
Just about every single thing it is possible to have got wrong, it has got wrong.

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For a moment I thought it was a Purim spiel. The Guardian devoted an entire story last weekend to the claim that I was being investigated by both the Press Complaints Commission and the police.

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David Cameron's claim that failure to arrive at a 'two-state solution' to the Arab-Israel impasse has caused terrorism and instability and helped excuse authoritarianism is surely a first for a British Prime Minister in its perversity and ignorance.

First, the current unrest convulsing the Arab and Muslim world demon

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The first is that everyone in the bien-pensant world is now apparently a neo-con. You really do have to rub your eyes at this very hard.

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They were battling the usual mad barrage against Israel from the media, politicians on the left and rabid anti-Israel and Judeophobic lies and libels on campus.

Home from home, in other words.

But perhaps the most troubling aspect was that they appeared not to possess the verbal ammunition with which to respo

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CAMERA stands for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. The work it does in combating the media onslaught against Israel, through careful, calm and forensic exposure of the lies and distortions being promulgated about Israel, is of enormous value.

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Someone I met recently posed what I thought was an interesting question.

Like me, he had read and admired the moving interview in last Sunday's Observer with the Israeli novelist David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed when his IDF tank was hit by a rocket in the final hours of the aborted war with Hizbolla

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Among those bewildered and horrified by the fact that Israel has been turned into a pariah state, it is common to hear complaints about the uselessness of Israeli PR. But this is to miss the point by a mile.

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The flotilla episode provided the trigger for a frenzied demonstration of the world's collective loss of mind over Israel.

Israel did what it was entitled to do and what any other country at war would do: intercept boats that might be carrying weapons for an aggressor regime.

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When the Sunday Telegraph revealed the offensive and infantile suggestions for the Pope’s visit to Britain by a bunch of extremely undiplomatic diplomats, some in the Jewish community may have found themselves for once on the side of mandarins in the Foreign Office.

What was uppermost in these officials' minds was

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The Obama administration's fury at Israel over the 'insult to the US' of building more homes in east Jerusalem has provoked what is described as the worst crisis in US-Israel relations for more than three decades.

Leave aside, for the moment, the notable absence of 'insult to the US' caused by the Palestinian Authori

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To those of us of a nervous disposition, the way Lyne, formerly Our Man in Moscow, has been dragging Israel into the story of what happened in 2003 is more than a little grating.

It feels gratuitous, and seems to play to the odious narrative that the real source of Islamic aggression is Israel’s foot-dragging over

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Since then, a steady stream of senior Israeli officials have either narrowly escaped similar arrest in Britain through diplomatic immunity, or have had to cancel planned visits because such an arrest was all too likely.

In all that time, the government has sat on its hands.

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