There Goes the Quiet Sunday.

Amid a plane crash, a saga over IVF treatment and the UK's first swine flu death there was one news event that stood out. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech outlining his vision for the middle eastern peace process. I have to confess that I only got to see part of the speech because the BBC didn't cover it in it's entirety but I don't think I missed much. This is because Israeli peace talks tend to run in seven year cycles and we are only in the first year of the current cycle. Plus Netanyahu is in the precarious position of having to balance the interests of an incredibly pro-Zionist coalition government against an American President who seems set to take up the Palestinian cause like no other so Netanyahu is unlikely to rock the boat in either direction.

The most important part of the speech was the recognition that the Palestinians will need a state of their own alongside the state of Israel, the so called two state solution. At first this seems like and important step forward because Netanyahu and his coalition partners have previously seemed dead set against the idea of Palestinians let alone a Palestinian state. However his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, had long accepted the idea of a two state solution so yesterday's speech only really represents Netanyahu beginning to accept a position that Olmert was already firmly committed to furthering. So while it is a step forward it still leaves everybody a few steps behind where they were twelve months ago.

The other interesting part of the speech was Netanyahu's insistence that the Palesitinians must occupy a demilitarized state. Although no specific details have been outlined this is bound to be contentious because every state has to have some capacity for violence even if that violence is only used against it's own people. Therefore the idea of a demilitarised state is almost unheard of. In fact the only examples I can think of are Nazi Germany before the second world war and liberated Germany after the second world war. On both occasions the state relied upon a large and para-military police force to compensate for the lack of an army. I suspect that discussing the details of either of these case studies with a group of Holocaust survivors will be no easy task. This is pretty much a standard Israeli negotiating position where they agree to an idea in principle yet attach some many complicated caveats to the idea it becomes impossible to put it into practice.

Meanwhile the protests over Iran's election results have continued but seem to be fading away. Right on cue the calls have begun for the British left to support what is being called the Iranian uprising. Apparently it is an anti-religious issue, a gay rights issue, a feminist issue and a class issue all rolled up into one neat little package. Considering that Ahmadinejad is the working class candidate and Mousavi is mainly supported by middle-class voters I'm not sure how that last point is expected to play out exactly.

Iran's supreme leader has opened an enquiry into claims that the election was rigged so hopefully any evidence to support the claim will emerge or at least Mousavi's supporters will be forced to detail why they think the election was rigged because just repeating the claim parrot fashion does little to convince me that they have a case.