The Israelis are obsessed with themselves, with their history, with the present time and with their destiny. Every nation has some of this but Israeli navel gazing is something else. At this level of intensity it makes compromise difficult and condemns Israel to political paranoia and limitless inflexibility. We will see in the next couple of days if it's different this time. The Israeli notion that they can have this land and no one else can is so anachronistic by any contem

We were standing in Hiroshima looking at a stone wall. All there was to see was a shadow of a man. It had been etched into the wall at the moment of his obliteration by the blinding light of the first atomic bomb. Olof Palme, prime minister of Sweden, stared hard at it. An hour later he had to give a speech as head of the Independent Commission on Disarmament of which I was a member. "My fear," he remarked, "is that mankind itself will end up as nothing more than a shadow on

The words still appear to ring in policy-makers’ ears from Harvard’s Professor Samuel Huntington's treatise, "The Clash of Civilizations", the book that in many ways triggered the paranoia that infects the politicians, the press and the public discourse. "The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, IT IS ISLAM", he wrote, (his capitals).   Too few in the Western leadership class seem to make the point that Al Qaeda is a deviant phenomenon within the Isl