A block to building peace

Netanyahu insisted that Palestinians "must be prepared to end the conflict with Israel once and for all" and recognise "the Jewish state."

He may choose to ignore reality, but the rest of the world understands that Israel has imposed military occupation on Palestine - not vice versa.

The Palestinian Authority recognises Israel within its 1967 borders while zionist politicians refuse to do so. They do not define their own state's borders, being intent on colonising the West Bank, which the international community views as Palestinian land.

No Palestinian, whether living in Israel, the occupied territories or in exile, could accept the zionist description of Israel as a "Jewish state," because that would automatically designate the one-fifth Arab minority as out of place and raise the danger of "relocation."

Netanyahu's reference to the "4,000-year-old bond between the people of Israel and the land of Israel" is a transparent attempt to portray Palestinian Arabs as interlopers.

They have lived in the region for hundreds of years whereas Israel's Jewish population is overwhelmingly composed of immigrants from the rest of the world.

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Nevertheless, Palestinian representatives have accepted that their independent state will be restricted to the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with east Jerusalem as its capital.

Israel's refusal to accept this obstructs a peaceful solution of the conflict and obliges the rest of the world to stand alongside Palestine, as 138 states have done at the UN against nine.

Less publicised but also crucial was the decision taken on Thursday by the congress in Durban of the Public Services International, the largest public-sector trade union global body representing 20 million workers, which endorsed the boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaign against Israel.

Israeli intransigence, backed primarily by Washington, places an onus on the world's people to act on Palestine's behalf.

The fact that the decision to isolate apartheid Israel was taken in a country still recovering from its own apartheid era is as symbolic as the UN vote coinciding with the 65th anniversary of the general assembly decision that independent Jewish and Arab states should be established on historic Palestine's territory.

Israel exists and, despite Netanyahu's scaremongering, faces no threat to its existence. It's Palestine's time now.

Election results

Labour can be reasonably satisfied with its results in the Rotherham, Middlesbrough and Croydon North by-elections, but there was little joy for the other major parties.

The Liberal Democrats are in free fall as a result of their leadership's betrayal of political principle in return for ministerial splendour while the Tories actually polled less in total than Ukip in the three contests.

It is clear that, in Rotherham where the racist BNP vote dropped by two-thirds and in Middlesbrough where it plummeted by five-sixths, voters obsessed by immigration transferred their support to Ukip.

But neither this nor anti-EU sentiment fully explains Ukip success, which indicates a failure by its opponents to draw attention to its extreme Thatcherite economic policies that mirror those of the conservative coalition government.

The low voter turnout of about a quarter in Croydon and Middlesbrough and a third in Rotherham indicates a marked lack of enthusiasm for anything on offer, which poses a real challenge to opponents of Cameron's government.