Netanyahu’s speech to a frenzied mob of crazed American Zionists was quite appalling to behold. Juan Cole dissects with a steely brilliance Netanyahu’s wildly unhistorical claims. This should be compulsory reading for all people interested in politics anywhere:

Netanyahu mixed together Romantic-nationalist cliches with a series of historically false assertions. But even more important was everything he left out of the history, and his citation of his warped and inaccurate history instead of considering laws, rights or common human decency toward others not of his ethnic group.

So here are the reasons that Netanyahu is profoundly wrong, and East Jerusalem does not belong to him.

http://www.juancole.com/2010/03/top-ten-reasons-east-jerusalem-does-not.html#comments

What modern Israel most closely resembles is apartheid South Africa. Those who deny that Israel is a racist state should read this – just one of hundreds of thousands of such personal stories:

http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/12903-israels-no-renting-to-arabs-policy-jewish-couple-lose-court-battle-to-help-bedouin-friends.html

Miliband did his level best today, in his parliamentary statement on the expulsion of the Israeli “diplomat” over forged British passports, to avoid mentioning the murder in Dubai at all. For those who criticised my decision to rejoin the Lib-Dems as “Zionist”, I point out that it was Lib Dem spokesman Ed Davey who first introduced the oppression of the Palestinians of Gaza into the debate.

William Hague also deserves congratulations for pointing out that formal assurances given by Israel in 1987 that such document forgery would never happen again, had been broken. He failed to press home the obvious point that it was therefore otiose of Miliband to ask for a further such assurance now. But in general the Tories have been less blindly pro-Zionist than Labour. I still recall the passion of David Mellor when an FCO minister, on seeing the suffering of Palestinians at first hand. There was a man with the same approach diplomatic as me!

Which brings me back on a stream of consciousness to the moment a few weeks ago that started me towards rejoining the Lib Dems.

Nick Clegg was speaking at Prime Minister’s questions in disgust that Kraft’s takeover of Cadbury was financed by a massive loan from the British taxpayer owned Royal Bank of Scotland. Clegg was visibly moved by real passion on the issue – a feeling I share. The sight of an MP moved by real emotion about the national interest, as opposed to how to make money for himself from expenses and consultancies, was viewed as so risible by both Tory and Labour MPs that they sought to drown him out with catcalls and gusts of forced laughter.