Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama's special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.

It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it's traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.

Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.

Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.

There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday.  As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint.  Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man's land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.

What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people's exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It's an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East - enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.

That's a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don't-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.

I wouldn't bet on it. But thanks anyway, guys.

President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain have deliberately raised the stakes in the confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme by dramatising the disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant. Their shoulder-to-shoulder statements of resolve, less than a week before Iran opens talks with six major powers in Geneva, raised more questions than they answer.

It turns out that the United States has known for a long time (how long?) that Iran had been building the still incomplete plant near Qom. Did it share that intelligence with the U.N. nuclear watchdog, and if not, why not? Why did it wait until now, in the middle of a G20 summit in Pittsburgh, to make the announcement -- after Iran had notified the International Atomic Energy Authority of the plant's existence on Monday, after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had delivered a defiant speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday and after the Security Council had adopted a unanimous resolution calling for an end to the spread of nuclear weapons on Thursday?

Is this all part of Obama's choreography to  build international pressure on Iran by getting Russia, in return for the dropping of plans to put a U.S. missile shield in Poland the Czech Republic, to threaten more sanctions against Tehran? A U.S. official says Obama shared the intelligence with Russian President Dimitry Medvedev at the United Nations this week and China had only just been informed. Did Obama try and fail to get Medvedev and Chinese President Hu Jintao -- both in Pittsburgh -- to join the three Western leaders on the podium? Or was his hand forced on timing by the fact that the New York Times had got wind of the Iranian nuclear plant and was set to publish the news on Friday?

The division of labour between Obama, Sarkozy and Brown was striking. The U.S. president sounded stern but his tone was measured. He stressed his commitment to dialogue and negotiation with Iran and to Tehran's right to peaceful nuclear energy. He did not mention sanctions, let alone the possibility of military action. It fell to the Europeans to inject a tone of menace.

Sarkozy accused Iran of defying the international community and taking the world on a dangerous path, and said that unless Tehran changed course by December, there would be tougher sanctions. Brown charged the Islamic Republic with deception and said the international community had no choice but "to draw a line in the sand", and that he did not rule out anything although sanctions were the preferred route. 

Will the latest disclosure on what Iran insists is a peaceful nuclear programme persuade Russia to renounce the sale of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Tehran? Will it persuade China, which reaffirmed its scepticism about more sanctions this week and has begun supplying gasoline to Iran, to change its mind? The West sees Iran's dependency on imported fuel as a key vulnerability.

Friday's dramatic announcement was a clear effort to appeal to the world court of public opinion and maximise pressure on Tehran before the Oct. 1 talks, but there is no sign that the Islamic Republic's leaders are even considering yielding on their nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, they seem convinced that the nuclear standoff will enable them to patch over deep internal divisions over the disputed June presidential election by playing the patriotic card.

Some nations who once criticised Mohamed ElBaradei over his approach to Iran’s disputed nuclear programme joined a roomful of effusive tributes to the outgoing chief of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency on Thursday.

But Israel, ElBaradei’s most public and caustic critic, left its seat empty to sidestep the succession of delegations hailing the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, participants in the closed-door meeting said.

The IAEA’s multinational board of governors presented ElBaradei, 67, with a silver platter, approved a resolution declaring him “Director-General Emeritus” for after he retires on November 30, and gave him a standing ovation.
 
He was moved to tears of appreciation.

The tall, slightly stooped IAEA chief said he felt “humbled and grateful” and picked up on his cherished theme of international cooperation to solve conflicts, poverty, disease and other iniquities of the world.

“We are all partners on a human journey and we are on the right track,” he said. “The human family is not a zero-sum game — we will either win or lose together. No problems can be solved alone,” ElBaradei said, gently alluding to past differences with a unilateralist United States under George W. Bush.

He repeatedly praised Bush’s successor as U.S. president, Barack Obama, for his commitment to nuclear disarmament and multilateral consultations to defuse conflict.

ElBaradei also said his successor as director-general, Yukiya Amano, a dry Japanese diplomat without the incumbent’s charisma who was only narrowly elected in July, would lead the IAEA with “competence, courage and vision”.

ElBaradei, a veteran Egyptian diplomat, and the IAEA jointly won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts to prevent the stealthy spread of nuclear weapons and foster peaceful and safe uses of atomic energy in the developing world.

The latter half of his 12-year tenure was also buffeted by spats with Israel, the United States and some European powers, especially France, over perceptions he was softpedalling the risks posed by Iran’s shadowy nuclear activity.

They bridled at ElBaradei’s outspoken warnings that only negotiations, not isolating sanctions or last-resort war

(”bonkers”, as he undiplomatically put it), can bring a lasting solution on Iran. Some Western officials, including

former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, accused him of “speaking outside his box” as head of a technical U.N. agency.

The Bush administration’s relations with ElBaradei had curdled in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war, when he publicly challenged what later proved to be fabricated intelligence about an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programme used to justify the U.S.-led invasion.

U.S. officials in the Bush administration circulated transcripts of wiretaps of ElBaradei’s telephone in an ultimately futile attempt to undermine his election by the IAEA’s board of governors to a third term in 2005.

U.S. relations with, and public respect for, the IAEA have improved dramatically since Obama took office in January.

But old tensions resurfaced last month when France and Israel suggested ElBaradei was sitting on IAEA findings pointing more concretely to a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme than information the agency has released to date.

He angrily denied any such cover-up. The Islamic Republic’s nuclear activities under investigation, he said in remarks to governors on Wednesday, were highly suspicious but investigations so far had unearthed no hard proof of “weaponisation” work.

Twenty-four hours later, all the political tugs-of-war  between ElBaradei and Western powers seemed forgotten as 39 national delegations including the United States and big European allies sang his praises in the send-off ceremony.

But not Israel, which accused ElBaradei of glossing over  what it considers an undeniable Iranian lunge for nuclear weapons capability under the noses of IAEA inspectors that will pose a mortal threat to the Jewish state in the near future.

Israel’s chief envoy sat quietly at the back of the conference chamber during the tribute rites, then returned to his seat for a bit of routine board business that concluded the meeting.

At his penultimate meeting with governors of the U.N. nuclear watchdog before he steps down in November, Mohamed ElBaradei gave diplomats a reminder of the colourful prose and no-nonsense authority they may soon miss.

   A veteran of the long-running dispute between the West and Iran over its contentious nuclear programme,  the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency  urged the 35-nation governing body to “put (your) heads together to break the logjam,” on the same day that Tehran submitted a package of proposals to foreign powers.

   He criticised countries – he did not name them but was clearly referring to Israel and France — who have suggested he hid evidence from his latest written report on Iran, pointing undeniably to illicit Iranian research into the making of atomic bombs.

   “Talking about formalities, whether the work plan has been implemented or not,  whether people telling us how to suck eggs, how to write our reports, whether there is a (secret) annex  (on Iran)  — these are not the issues,” he said in a swipe at both sides of the debate.

   “If anybody…has any information we have not shared, that has passed muster, been assessed critically in accordance with our practices, please step forward today. Otherwise, as a preacher would say, you should forever hold your peace,” ElBaradei told delegates.

   “We have, in our reports, always tried not to understate the facts or overstate the facts. We have serious concerns, but we are not in a state of panic. Because we have not seen diversion of nuclear material, we have not seen components of nuclear weapons. We do not have any information to that effect.”

   ElBaradei’s Aug. 28 report lent credence to a Western the intelligence dossier implying military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear activity.  But ElBaradei said caveats were still in order.

   “It’s alleged (studies), the whole question is about accuracy, whether this is real — that is the $64,000 question. That is where we are stuck, we have a limited ability to authenticate,” ElBaradei said. “People talk about assessments. I’m not a rocket scientist,” the 67-year-old lawyer and diplomat said.

   But the agency is losing patience with Iran, he said, for stonewalling IAEA efforts to verify that its nuclear programme is peaceful.

   “I know you have been reacting to others,” ElBaradei told Iranian ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh, referring to Tehran’s 2006 decision to stop wider-ranging agency inspections because of U.N. sanctions. “But you are not penalizing others, you are penalizing yourself.”

   Further, ElBaradei prodded Iran to stop evading a U.S.-led big power offer of negotiations that would provide it major trade benefits if it reined in its nuclear activity and made it transparent to non-proliferation inspectors.

   “I’ve told (Iran) I don’t see where the problem is. The U.S. is making an offer without preconditions on that base of mutual respect. Soltanieh has said they are ready to have a comprehensive dialogue. I say the offer by the US can not be refused because it has no conditions attached to it and is based on mutual respect.”

   He also warned  Iran’s strongest Western critics against hyping the Iranian threat by talking about supposed IAEA cover-ups.  “(You are) trying to undermine the agency, (but) in the end (you are) undermining your own credibility. We went through this during the time of Iraq.”

   An outspoken ElBaradei clashed with the former U.S. administration over what he saw as its confrontational policy towards Iraq and Iran. He has said that anyone considering military force against the Islamic Republic would be “bonkers”.

   ElBaradei’s more soft-spoken, reserved successor, Yukiya Amano of Japan, takes over in December.

Senior figures from across Austria’s political spectrum have condemned the head of the far-right Freedom Party, Heinz-Christian Strache, over his party’s European election campaign directed against Israel and Turkey.

In an advertisement in the newspaper Kronen Zeitung, Freedom opposes the accession of Turkey and Israel to the European Union. Although Turkey is in EU accession talks, Israel is not.

Heinz-Christian Strache prepares for a TV discussion in Vienna, Sept. 17, 2008. REUTERS/Heinz-Peter Bader (AUSTRIA)

“What is the most distasteful and despicable is the style,” says Ernst Strasser, the conservatives’ candidate in next month’s elections for the European Parliament, referring to Strache’s campaign. “This style is abusive. He vilifies other religions and ethnicities.”

According to Chancellor Werner Faymann, Strache is “a hate monger, a disgrace”.

“It makes absolutely no sense for Israel to be mentioned. Israel is not a candidate for accession. There isn’t even an accession process. The only reason to mention Israel is to serve anti-Semitic prejudices. It is disgraceful.”

Strache, who denies he is preaching hatred, accuses Faymann of being a “rabble-rouser” and abusing his position as chancellor.

The dispute indicates more than just political opportunism in the run-up to the poll, although that is obviously playing a part.

Freedom, which polled 18 percent in September’s national election, has become a hard-right party since former dental technician Strache took the helm in 2005. It has also focused on religion. A recent rally where Strache waved a crucifix drew condemnation from politicians and religious leaders. Another campaign slogan, “The West in Christian hands”, was not well received, either.

The hard-right rhetoric, an eye-catching campaign aimed at the youth vote and dissatisfaction with the centre parties, appears to have given Freedom a boost. However, Strache’s line has at times been a bonus for the more moderate Alliance for Austria’s Future, the party of late far-right leader Joerg Haider, who used to lead Freedom.

A controversial European Union election campaign poster of Austrian far right Freedom party in Vienna May 11, 2009. Posterreads ” The West in Christian hands - Judgement day”. REUTERS/Dominic Ebenbichler

The parties are often lumped together as “Austria’s far right”, such as when they polled almost a third of the vote last year. Together they could make a serious political force — they outpolled the conservatives and were just behind the Social Democrats in September. the Alliance has tried to use the dispute to portray itself as the more mature. “(Freedom) is using the only way to mobilise votes it has,” Alliance’s EU candidate Ewald Stadler says.

Freedom’s popularity has nevertheless affected mainstream policy, with centre parties loath to open up a flank to the far right. The conservatives and Social Democrats have spoken out against the EU asylum directive and oppose lifting labour market restrictions to the eight ex-communist countries that joined the EU in 2004.

Although the U.N.’s racism conference in Geneva has been dominated by Middle East politics, Palestinian rights groups say Palestinians have effectively been silenced.On the one hand tough rules by the conference organisers prevented Palestinian NGOs from holding “side events”, they say. On the other hand Monday’s controversial speech by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, slamming Israel as a “totally racist government” founded “on the pretext of Jewish suffering”, has distracted attention from the issues that actually affect Palestinians.

  “One thing that we have noticed in this conference is that there has been a concerted effort to silence the voices of the Palestinian presence and raising the Palestinian issue,” said Wisam Ahmad of Al-Haq, a Ramallah-based advocacy group.

 Ahmad says that Ahmadinejad’s speech became the symbol of the conference, as intended by “those that wanted this conference to fail”.

 “We as Palestinians want to be heard and it is unfortunate that the press attributes the statements of the president of Iran to all of the Palestinian people,” he said.

Ingrid Jaradat, director of the Badil Resource Center in Bethlehem, agrees.

 “We all knew he was going to come, we all knew that the European governments were going to wait until they just hear the key word and then they will all stand up and leave the hall and then the press comes in, they all would write about what he said or did not say and everybody would forget what is really written in the documents and what the conference is really about,” she said.

  “From my point of view I do not think that this was helpful for the Palestinian people in general and not for our organisation.”

 Diplomatic manoeuvering in the run-up to the conference, known as Durban II, resulted in references to the Palestinian question being dropped from the draft declaration, in an effort to get all U.N. members to take part.

In the event the United States, Israel and half a dozen other countries decided to stay away. European states walked out of Ahmadinejad’s speech but most came back for the rest of the conference, which agreed a final declaration on Tuesday.

 That document “reaffirms” the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA) agreed in 2001, which does refer to Israel and the Palestine territories.

 It was that reaffirmation that prompted the United States to stay away this time. The U.S. and Israel walked out of the 2001 meeting following attempts, subsequently dropped, to equate Zionism with racism in the final document.

The 2001 meeting was marred by anti-Semitic demonstrations and activities by some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that led Jewish groups to warn that Durban II – the review meeting in Geneva – could be another “hatefest”.

 This time conference organisers put strict limits on what NGOs could organise on the sidelines of the meeting. Such side events had to deal with “thematic” questions such as the treatment of immigrants, not individual countries.

As a result Palestinian rights groups found their requests to hold events dealing with Palestine issues were rejected.

 (A pro-Israel group did manage to hold an event at the U.N. during the conference, apparently by circumventing the conference organisers and booking a room directly through the U.N. offices.)

Critics of the U.N. human rights process say it spends a disproportionate amount of time on the Israel/Palestine issue.

 For example, since its creation three years ago, the U.N. Human Rights Council has devoted five of its 10 special sessions to Israel and its alleged human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon. (One each examined the financial crisis, Congo, the food crisis, Myanmar and Darfur.)

 “The real victims of the hijacking of the human rights agenda to focus on Israel are not Israel. Israel is a strong country. It can defend itself, it has articulate spokespeople to defend it,” said civil rights activist and Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz.

 “While the people of Rwanda were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel. While the people of Darfur were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel. While the people of Cambodia were being murdered the U.N. was debating Israel,” he said.

And Palestinians acknowledge that they have little to show for all the diplomatic focus on their problems. Even though the 2001 document refers to the plight of the Palestinians under occupation, little has changed.

 “So far the Durban declaration and programme of action has not really succeeded to bring about any major change or improvement in the situation of the Palestinian people but in fact our situation has very much deteriorated since 2001,” said Jaradat.

A United Nations conference on racism is being boycotted by the United States and many of its allies.

They fear the meeting in Geneva will single out Israel for criticism. A previous racism conference in 2001 in Durban, South Africa, was marred by anti-Semitic street protests and attempts to pass a resolution equating Zionism with racism, prompting the United States and Israel to walk out.

The final declaration of that conference omitted that language and was hailed by Israel’s foreign ministry as a triumph.

Canada and Israel had long made it clear that they would not attend the follow-up conference in Geneva, known as Durban II.

Now, despite President Barack Obama’s policy of re-engaging with the rest of the world, the United States has decided to stay away too. So have Australia and Germany among others. Britain and France and current EU-president the Czech Republic are represented only by their ambassadors.

                                   The only head of state to attend is Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad,

who has called for Israel to be wiped from the map and cast doubt on the Nazi Holocaust, which is also commemorated by Jewish communities on Monday.

He used similar language again on Monday, denouncing Israel as a racist regime oppressing the Palestinians and founded “on the pretext of Jewish sufferings”, and accusing “Zionism” of penetrating mass media and financial systems in other countries to impose its domination worldwide.

Several advocacy organizations, such as Human Rights Watch, have said the United States and other Western countries should take part, arguing that their boycott constituted a blow against efforts to promote human rights.

Even in Israel, some people say that a boycott leaves the floor open to critics of the country.

Still, those who object to the conference can draw some paradoxical comfort from Ahmadinejad’s words. According to one conspiracy theory making the round of the Palais des Nations – the U.N.’s European headquarters where it is hosting the conference – the boycott, by allowing the spotlight to fall on Ahmadinejad, simply proves the point of the opponents: that the U.N.’s international diplomacy is flawed and its efforts to discuss human rights always end up in an attack on Israel.

Protesters staged large demonstrations in Western capitals 10 years ago to urge governments to intervene to stop Serb forces killing civilians in Kosovo.

Despite having no United Nations mandate, NATO went to war for the first time and bombed Serbia for 11 weeks to stop what it called the Yugoslav army’s disproportionate use of force in its offensive against separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

“We have a moral duty,” said then NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana as bombers took off on March 24, 1999 to “bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe”.

The intervention helped launch a doctrine of international “Responsibility to Protect” civilians in conflicts. Advocates of “R2P” proposed humanitarian intervention in Myanmar in 2007 and military force in Zimbabwe in 2008.

But it never happened and the likelihood of this doctrine being adopted universally now in a UN declaration is slim, as was shown by the Gaza war that began two months ago.

On Dec. 27, Israeli bombers went into action over Gaza. As reports of civilian deaths grew, protesters staged rallies in Western capitals to demand leaders act to end the offensive against Islamist Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave.

Critics accused Israel of using “disproportionate” force, just as many said Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had done.

But intervention in Gaza was impossible politically and militarily unimaginable. Unlike Serbia, Israel is not seen in the West as a rogue state and widescale ethnic cleansing was not under way in Gaza.

Solana visited the enclave on Friday as foreign policy chief of the European Union, which seeks to foster peace in the Middle East through “soft power” — diplomacy and aid, not intervention of the kind he advocated as head of the NATO alliance.

NATO never embraced the “responsibility to protect” concept, arguing that Kosovo, which most allies have subsequently recognised as an independent state, was a unique case that should not set a precedent.

Soft power may eventually mean encouraging talks with Hamas — which is now shunned by the West. In an open letter published this week, a group of former foreign ministers urged a change in that policy, saying peace depends on talking to the militants.

But with rockets from Gaza again being fired daily into Israel, the prospect of a breakthrough soon seems bleak as right-wing prime minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu tries to form a government.

Viewing war damage in Gaza on Friday, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store spoke of “senseless destruction.” He blamed Hamas for starting the conflict, but said Israel’s response “goes beyond what international law allows.”

Serb forces in the 1998-99 Kosovo war ignored the idea of  “proportionality” on the battlefield. They were sure no army would willingly tie its own hands in the face of insurgency. They mortared, burned and raided “guerrilla” villages to drive
off civilians and deprive the rebels of cover.

On Thursday, the U.N. tribunal in The Hague sentenced two Serbian generals to 22 years in jail for war crimes in Kosovo. Serbia handed them over under Western pressure.

Israel openly assured its soldiers during the Gaza offensive that they would not face such prosecution. Discussing tactics for a future conflict, one senior Israeli general also dismissed “proportionality” as a deterrent.

“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction,” said Northern Command chief Gadi Eisenkot.

“This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has been authorised,” he told daily Yedioth Ahronoth ast October.

Defending Israel’s action in Gaza, President Shimon Peres reminded NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer that NATO’s own bombing of Serbia killed “hundreds of civilians”.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert mocked the idea that he should ask soldiers to fight an evenly-matched battle in which a few hundred might be killed simply to win international approval for a war in which Hamas was fighting in heavily populated areas.

But scholars of international law say proportionality does not mean a “fair fight” or balanced death toll, let alone making sure no civilian dies. It requires belligerents to use weapons that distinguish civilians from military targets and combatants.

According to Gaza figures — which Israel says are suspect– some 600 of 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Of 13 Israelis killed during the 22-day war, 10 were soldiers.

Human Rights Watch, the U.N. Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Israeli rights group B’Tselem have called for investigations.

Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee didn’t attend the latest U.N. Security Council meeting on Iraq. But the moment the 3-hour session was over the Iranian delegation was circulating a strongly worded letter from Khazaee that had a very clear message for the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama: Stop talking like Bush.

He was responding to less than two dozen words on Iran in U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice’s speech to the council during a routine review of U.N. activities in Iraq. Rice said that U.S. policy “will seek an end to Iran’s ambition to acquire an illicit nuclear capacity and its support for terrorism.”

Those words clearly infuriated the Iranians, who have been toning down their anti-U.S. rhetoric since Obama took over from George W. Bush five weeks ago.

“It is unfortunate that, yet again, we are hearing the same tired, unwarranted and groundless allegations that used to be unjustifiably and futilely repeated by the previous administration,” Khazaee said in a letter to the council’s current president, Japanese Ambassador Yukio Takasu.

“Instead of raising allegations against others, the United States had better take concrete and meaningful steps in correcting its past wrong policies and practices vis-a-vis other nations, including the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

Khazaee’s remarks were among the most critical of the new U.S. administration by a senior Iranian official to date.

Is the Obama administration simply repeating the “same tired” language of the Bush administration? The accusations aren’t new, U.N. diplomats say, but the promises of a new approach could herald a radical shift in U.S. policy on Iran.

Obama, Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have said repeatedly that Washington would use all tools, including direct talks, to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, which Tehran says is for peaceful purposes.

Iran has reacted cautiously, saying it’s open to fair talks while demanding fundamental changes in U.S. policy. Western envoys in New York say that not everyone in the Islamic Republic is happy about the outstretched hand of Obama and his promises of change.

Tehran had often criticized the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, which labeled Iran a member of an “axis of evil” with North Korea and pre-war Iraq. It’s harder to criticize Obama at the moment, diplomats say. That could be one of the reasons Khazaee seized the opportunity to attack Rice’s speech to the council.

“The hardliners in Tehran find it easier to have a U.S. administration that turns its back on them,” said a European diplomat. “It’s easier to deal with a ‘Great Satan’. It gives them someone to blame their troubles on.”

It’s nearly three decades since Washington severed diplomatic relations with Iran in 1980 after militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took a group of U.S. diplomats and officials hostage.

Present-day Iran, whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said that Israel should be “wiped off the map”, has repeatedly ruled out a suspension of the country’s uranium enrichment program, prompting the Security Council to impose three rounds of sanctions.

U.N. diplomats say that Obama administration officials have signaled that they do not believe the Iranian nuclear program can be stopped with U.S. or Israeli air strikes. Instead, Obama wants to use a combination of pressure – possibly by imposing further U.N. sanctions – and inducements to persuade the Iranians to halt their enrichment program. The details of the new approach are being worked out in a thorough review of the U.S. policy on Iran, U.S. officials say.

“Will a kindler, gentler U.S. approach work?” asked the European diplomat. “We’ll have to wait and see. Iran’s one of the countries that invented chess and it’s a very good player.”

Sex has rarely been far from centre-stage in an otherwise low-key campaign for Israel's election on Tuesday. The fact that the ruling Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni is a woman has, however, been largely debated by allusion and suggestion, often in a  far from gentlemanly way in the still macho world of Israeli politics. So it's striking then, in the campaign's final days, to see Livni herself, bidding to become the country's first woman leader since Golda Meir in the 1970s, putting the issue front and centre. Take a look at this poster, photographed in Jerusalem by my colleague Jerry Lampen.  It reads, in French, "Tzipi Livni - Man of the Moment", or perhaps "The Right Man for the Job". It looks like a direct response to repeated attacks from right-wing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu especially that "she" is not ready to lead a country facing threats on numerous fronts. "She's not up to the job," runs one ad from Netanyahu's Likud party. It shows Livni, slumped, with her head in her hands.

On Tuesday at 10 p.m.  (2000 GMT) we should know if Livni has been able to turn around Netanyahu's opinion poll lead. Even if she does, it is not guaranteed that she can form a coalition government. The reason this election is being held over a year early is because Livni, taking over from the corruption-hit Ehud Olmert, was unable to cobble together a workable coalition. As my colleague Jeffrey Heller had predicted when she took over her party's leadership, many believed the former soldiers running the other leading parties found it hard to accept her. Some saw the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party to join her cabinet as a reflection of religious sexism. That wasn't the official reason. But Livni, a secular denizen of liberal Tel Aviv, did go out of her way, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to appeal to religious tradition. She donned monochrome clothing and swapped her favoured pant suits for long skirts when meeting Shas leaders. Even so, the Orthodox press would not even print her picture. They would airbrush her out of group photos. Or, as for other women, they might photoshop her into "a tree, or something", one journalist at an ultra-Orthodox paper told my colleague Dan Williams.

Livni seems to have been reluctant to "play the woman card" early in the campaign, focusing on her record. But observers have detected a clear strategy to play the men at their own game. Both Netanyahu and Labour party leader Ehud Barak were commandos, Barak indeed is Israel's most decorated soldier. Livni has pushed her family credentials - her parents were famed guerrilla fighters against the British and Arabs in the 1940s - and her own shadowy past in the Mossad intelligence agency.

This TV ad showing a pixellated figure intones a list of career highlights down the years: "... he served in the Mossad ... he served as foreign minister..." and so on. "No one would doubt he could lead the government." Then the figure is revealed as Livni and the narrator says, "If only he wasn't... a woman." Hitting back at snide chauvinistic comments that, as a Mossad agent in Paris in the early 1980s she did only menial chores, Livni told an audience in Tel Aviv last week: "I make decisions, not coffee."

With the poll gap narrowing sharply in the final days, the gender issue could be crucial.  Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman of the Israel Women's Network,  told my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan that Likud's poster jibe at Livni that "the job is too big for her" - with clear emphasis on the final pronoun - could backfire on Netanyahu. Bar-Tal said: "There are women who pass by these posters and say, 'I wasn't going to vote for her but I certainly will now.'"

So is Tzipi Livni the man of the hour? If she makes it through, she can always recall what Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion said of Golda Meir: "She's the only man in the cabinet."

http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/09/21/tzipi-livni-as-israels-next-golda-meir-well-not-so-fast/