Shimon Peres was a gifted leader, an eloquent speaker, and a source of ideas. But most important, he was a leader who had a vision and a message, writes Itamar Rabinovich

Your letters, your views...

Zoe Lawlor of Gaza Action Ireland uses the isolated killing of Abed al-Fattah Yusri al-Sharif, 21, by an Israeli soldier to support a universal claim that Israel engages in a campaign “of extrajudicial executions” in its confrontation with Palestinian terrorists (Letters, April 5).

USA: A man who authorities say was growing marijuana in a central Florida storage unit panicked when he heard a police helicopter hovering nearby and called 911 to surrender.

Dr O’Brien (Irish Examiner, Letters May 27) distorts the reality of Israel and its minority Arab population whom he falsely calls “Palestinians” when in fact they are Israeli Arabs, citizens equal in law to Israeli Jews.

May I throw some light on the Israeli general election, the results of which worried Dr Kevin McCarthy [Letters, 19 March]. 

Boycotts, divestments, and sanctions are needed until all Palestinians are allowed to live freely in a truly independent state alongside Israel, writes Daoud Kuttab.

When Commandant (retired) Greenway criticises me for being ‘misleading and incorrect’ in my analysis of the terrorist attacks in Jerusalem (Letters, December 2), it is on the basis that Yoram Cohen, head of Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, told the Knesset these were individual acts ‘and Abbas and the PA were opposed’.

Dr. Kevin McCarthy’s letter (Irish Examiner, November 24) makes for sad reading. 

The members of any representative political institution, elected or merely nominated, are entrusted with that body’s integrity and reputation, its sense of purpose and its sense of possibility.

An Israeli draft law that would make the use of the word "Nazi" illegal in most cases has sparked a debate on freedom of speech in a state that was founded out of the ashes of the Holocaust.

While he was vice-president in the previous US administration, Dick Cheney repeatedly insisted the US needed to bomb the Iranians to snuff out their nuclear ambitions; so did senator John McCain and innumerable other politicians — Republican and Democrat, domestic and foreign.

WHEN Barack Obama made history in Nov 2008, Nitzan Horowitz, then covering the campaign for Israel’s Channel 10, had a front-row seat.

Dr Laurence Davis of the Department of Government in UCC is well known for his unquestioning anti-Israel stance and it never fails to amaze me how one person could be so totally one sided and blind in his approach to this very complex question.

Anthony Spencer (Letters, Aug 15) asserts in an indignant letter that there is ‘no discrimination of Israeli Arabs’.

The first Palestinian woman to represent a Palestinian party in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, will speak at a public meeting in Cork tomorrow night.

Dervla Murphy’s call for a boycott of Israel is one-sided and shows a misunderstanding of the facts, writes Boaz Modai

THE column by Steven King (March 3) was a master class in the art of airbrushing Israel’s role in the Middle East conflict. His one-eyed analysis omitted several important points.

FOREIGN Minister Micheál Martin will tackle his Israeli counterpart in Brussels this morning over the fake Irish passports used by the hit squad who killed a senior Hamas commander in Dubai – but is unlikely to get any answers.

Protests will greet Colonel Muammar Gaddafi as he heads to the United Nations in New York today.

Two Irish MEPs are travelling on a fact-finding mission to Israel and Palestine to discuss humanitarian concerns following the four-week Israeli offensive in Gaza.

ISRAEL’S national election is likely to be a cliffhanger, pollsters said yesterday, on the eve of a vote in which right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party had been forecast to emerge victorious.

BRITISH Prime Minister Gordon Brown yesterday warned Iran it must freeze sensitive nuclear work or face more sanctions, in the first address by a British premier to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

NADAV COHEN (Letters, June 2) must be aware that Zionism began as a secular movement and is in fact strenuously resisted on religious grounds by increasingly vocal Orthodox Jewish scholars, such as Yakov Rabkin, whose book, A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, is most enlightening.

US president George Bush marked the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding today with an attack on anti-Semitism, especially by those who want to wipe the nation “off the map.”

US president George Bush is going to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt next month to try to speed up the Middle East peace process and celebrate the Jewish state’s 60th anniversary.

Gala celebrations will mark the 40th anniversary of the moment many Israelis see as their most glorious – the dramatic unification of Jerusalem under their control in the 1967 Middle East war.

Israeli president Moshe Katsav today decided to skip the opening of the autumn session of parliament after police recommended he be indicted on rape charges.

Israel’s parliament today granted Israeli president Moshe Katsav’s request to temporarily step down in light of a police investigation into accusations he sexually harassed former employees.

Ehud Olmert today said he took sole responsibility, as Israel’s prime minister, for the offensive against Lebanon.

ISRAELI leader Ehud Olmert presented his government to parliament yesterday, pledging to remove isolated Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank but to hold on forever to major enclaves and East Jerusalem.

ISRAELI border police briefly detained a Hamas Cabinet minister yesterday, the first time Israel took into custody a member of the Hamas government since the Islamic militants took power last week.

Israeli President Moshe Katsav today formally chose Ehud Olmert to form Israel’s next government, and Olmert said he would work to quickly put together a coalition that was committed to carrying out his West Bank withdrawal plan.

Ariel Sharon’s main allies launched their election campaign today, saying the prime minister’s new centrist party would push for a final agreement with the Palestinians and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Polls published today, a day after Ariel Sharon broke away from his hardline Likud party, showed him mustering enough support to return to the prime minister’s seat at the head of a moderate coalition.

Israel’s parliament is tomorrow expected to pass a bill dissolving itself and setting a date for new elections in March, parliamentary officials said today.

ISRAELI Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday demanded the Palestinian Authority “wage a real war on terror” before peace talks can resume.

ISRAELI Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resigned in protest over next week's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank.

The Jerusalem municipality will push ahead with plans to demolish 88 homes in an Arab neighbourhood in the disputed city to make room for a national park, the city engineer overseeing the project said today.

Militant settlers warned of violence and civil war after Israel’s parliament cleared away a major obstacle in front of a planned pullout from all 21 Gaza settlements and four in the West Bank this summer, handily defeating a call for a referendum.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon weathered another storm today when Israel’s attorney general declined to charge him in a party finance scandal while indicting his son.