The Battle For Hearts And Minds

"It doesn't bring the two sides closer together. It would not bring the Palestinians any closer to statehood, and we believe that it would be counter-productive to that goal." White House spokesman Jay Carney

And UN chief Ban Ki-moon has been persuaded to be a trifle less receptive to the Palestinian Authority's resolute demand that the General Assembly bless the PA's insistence on statehood-without-conditions-leading-to-peace, and is calling on Palestinians to return to talks with Israel. Picking up the message of the United States, Mr. Ban Ki-moon emphasizes that without a peace agreement unilateral statehood would compromise security.

But, of course, the stand-off between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, the PA and the United States, the PA and the Quartet, the PA and the European Union, is a deliberate ploy to evoke sympathy in the wider world at the sad picture of a beleaguered people so unjustly dealt with. And the Middle East is reacting, brought to action by their growing anger.

"No Zionist embassy on Arab land!" The hundreds of polite shouts denying the usefulness and civility of Jordan's peace agreement with Israel are admittedly in a different category from the thousands-strong mob that attacked, invaded, torched and attempted to secure the persons of Israeli embassy security guards for a swift dispatch to the netherworld.

The sentiments are the same. And those sentiments are being expressed and echoed everywhere in the Middle East and throughout the Arab and the Muslim world. Like the latest popular craze, it echoes also in Africa and Asia and Latin America. Mahmoud Abbas boasts that no fewer than 160 countries of the General Assembly are prepared to vote for Palestinian statehood.

Successful public relations ploys and gentle arm-twisting make for winning popularity contests. And let's face it, reputation is everything, when it's tarnished, what's left? Sly slanders have worked since time immemorial against Jews. Suicide attacks against the Israeli population solved by a very unpopular fence which has its useful counterparts unremarked-upon critically elsewhere, are not welcome in the Middle East.

The invisible, but very concrete wall of hostility that surrounds one small nation, emanating from its neighbours with unstinting regularity and ongoing threats, spurred, funded, trained by Iran, now localized by Hamas and Hezbollah with Islamic Jihad and all the other jihad-happy militias with which the territory bristles is not of too much interest to the international community.

Mind, Israel is also willing to see a sparking new Palestinian state, only it prefers by far that this be achieved after reasonable peace talks and mutual declarations of intentions to pursue peace, once the nasty little details of irresolvable problems have been resolved. Which would, of course, require that each side surrender to the inevitable sacrifices required of each. At which time mutual recognition is a given.

In the interim, The Maccabi Tel Aviv football club is meeting the Turkish football club Besiktas in a Europa League match in Istanbul. And hundreds of anti-Israel protesters are having the time of their lives shrieking "Murderer Israel, get out of Turkey", along with "Destruction of Israel, freedom for Palestine", proudly flying Palestinian flags on Taksim square.