Not many outside Israel noticed – but it started on the Tel-Aviv cycle way on July 14th and has only got bigger ever since. The 150,000 strong protest movement that crescendoed last week across every main town and City in Israel has become a major issue for official disquiet.

Anyone I spoke to on the ground during the Arab Spring argued that it would be the Arabs in the Israel/Palestine nexus who would seize the time – changing for ever the peace dynamic. No one said ‘I say, look out for Israel’s squeezed middle – I warn you, they’ll be on the streets’. But they are, and so far they look like staying there.

The sense I have always got when visiting Israel is that many have felt the country cannot afford domestic protest, the ‘threat’ from beyond is too great.  Strangely, what for some has been an economic boom time in Israel, has persuaded many that enough is enough. The disparity between rich and poor as in so many raw capitalist economies (our own included) has grown ever wider, ever deeper. But few can boast what Reuters have reported of Israel – that a mere sixteen families control some 50% of the economy.

The issues of wider discontent are the same that you find in many parts of Western Europe and America. Shortages of affordable housing; rising long term unemployment; and government often out of touch with the basic aspirations of the people.

So far the ‘Israeli Summer’, is relatively leaderless. But dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Netanyahu and many other mainstream politicians is rising. He has just come up with an ‘affordable housing’ programme. The protesters dismiss it as too little too late.

The Arab Spring as so far frightened China; stoked rebellion in Malawi; and generated unprecedented domestic protest in Israel. How many of the world’s political leaders sleep easy in their beds these days, one wonders. This thing, this web/street based informal, un-forecastable ‘thing’ is on the move. Where next?

Follow Jon on Twitter: @JonSnowC4

I think I was 8 years old. I had been taken by my parents to a brand new suburb called Crawley New Town. It was 1956 – and we lived in the depths of the Sussex countryside. But not so deep as to prevent a 45 minute run to what I then found to be a rude awakening to Britain’s suburban future.

But my Dad was not simply anxious to introduce his boy to this endless succession of brick “semis”, but to the leaders of the Soviet empire. Khrushchev and Bulganin were legends in their own somewhat oppressive lunchtimes. I knew the Russians were the new enemy. The Daily Express – the only paper I saw at school – told me so. But for some reason my deeply conservative father wanted me to set eyes upon the communist “enemy”.

When I did so that morning, they looked exceptionally boring. Two old, slightly overweight guys in ill-fitting double breasted suits. They looked like unsuccessful gangsters.

Why do I suddenly conjure this uninteresting memory? More than fifty years on, another communist, another time. Now my “enemy” is my friend. No time for Crawley New Town. This time it’s Longbridge and beyond. China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao lands in Birmingham, not at the once spanking new Gatwick.

Mr Wen is here to buy, not to sell. The old Ruskies thought they were stealing a propaganda march on “Super Mac” Macmillan. Mr Wen needs no such propaganda coup. He’s only here to remind us who is now boss – of much more than Longbridge’s once imperial production line. What greater emblem than that he should control the MG production line – a car once more British that the British.

And yet, it seems we have more influence over Mr Wen’s treatment of his own people, than ever we had on Khrushchev’s. Two hugely prominent, globally renowned, China dissidents, Ai Wei Wei and Hu Jia, have had to be moved from jail to house arrest as if to try to stem potential street protests to the Chinese Premier’s visit. Can these releases really have been “coincidental”? Hu Jia, China‘s most active activist for Aids victims, was bunged inside to prevent embarrassment during the Beijing Olympics.

Read more: China and UK in £1bn trade deals

Is all this mere window dressing? Certainly even as a child I though Wen’s counterparts’ visit was little more. I was assisted by my dad telling me through the rear view mirror, as we rattled along the A23, that communism was a very nasty sport, and that these men might look cuddly but that they wore steel toe caps. These days we don’t discuss Mr Wen’s toe caps. We don’t even discuss his brand of communism. He’s on the up and we are on the down.

Welcome to the new world order! Consolidated this sunny morn, by the intriguing election of the father of Brazil’s food programme to head the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Jose da Silva beat Spain’s former Foreign Minister by 92 votes to 88. The South has finally overwhelmed the North to run one of the UN’s major aid programmes. Will Mexico seize Strauss Kahn’s dented IMF crown against France’s beguiling Finance Minister? Will Mr Wen carry off the curtains from Number Ten?

Follow Jon Snow on Twitter: @jonsnowC4

I have been working in these last few days and weeks on a couple of documentaries. The most important of which is a shocking film showing alleged war crimes in the Sri Lankan civil war.

It will be going out at 11pm on 14th June on Channel 4, and was shown to the UN Human Rights Commission on Friday.

So I wake up this morning ready to focus on another news day and suddenly think what  a strange mix of matter swirls around our world.

On Saturday I had to dash to the Hay Festival – not an easy dash as anyone who has been will know. I did an onstage interview with Mohammed El Baradei on a video link from Cairo – he ran the IAEA nuclear watchdog in Vienna during the build up to the Iraq War – and he talked about endless US interference with his work. I also interviewed Rolf Heuer – an inspirational German particle physicist who runs the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss/French border near Geneva.

He never let on, in our fascinating dialogue, that he would today announce that the collider has scored a huge success in capturing and holding “anti-matter” for some sixteen minutes. I’m not even going to try to begin to talk about it here, but I concluded when I spoke to him, that the work of his team at CERN in unravelling the history of the universe will have a profound impact on the future survival of us all. So today’s breakthrough is positive and significant. So that’s the good news.

The bad news is more or  less everywhere else. Gathering storm clouds over the UK economy. The appalling killing of Syrian demonstrators on the Israeli border on the disputed Golan Heights. The continuing slaughter of protesters inside Syria and the chaos in Yemen.

And the strange manoeuvrings of the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. Actually it may be worse than that. China’s Defence Minister says his country is pursuing “peaceful development”. But protesters in two Vietnamese cities this weekend argued otherwise. They accuse the Chinese of attacking a Vietnamese oil exploration boat. And China and the Philippines are at loggerheads over an atoll upon whose beaches both nations have been trying to unload oil drilling materials.

It won’t be the lead story tonight, but I’m beginning to think that this year in our world is one of the most challenging and potentially unstable in many years. So much happening – so little time to report it!

Follow Jon Snow on Twitter: @jonsnowC4

Britain is expected to send 50 more diplomats to China to boost UK representation there. Foreign Secretary Hague’s announcement comes on a day when the Chinese avant garde artist Ai Weiwei opens his latest show at Somerset House in London. Except that HE doesn’t. He can’t. He’s locked up somewhere in China.

If we have another 50 diplomats in China, is there perhaps a chance we shall be able to track the disappearing dissidents like Weiwei?  Is there not something faintly eerie about the dawning a superpower as it seizes its position as the world’s second biggest economy, that at the same time it cannot face criticism from its foremost artist? I have met Weiwei, talked with him and enjoyed his company. If it is that he has committed some offence regarding tax or some such, tell us where he is and by what process he is being judged?

Why does this burgeoning energetic go-getting state need to behave quite so badly to its own people? What is it about the paintbrush or the sculptor’s chisel that so threatens the Chinese state? So dangerous to the smooth continuance of China is Weiwei seen by the authorities as being, that he had to be ripped off the steps of an aircraft bound for Hong Kong and thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, since when – now over a month ago – his wife has merely been able to establish that he is held by the state.

So frightened is the Chinese state of this larger than life figure – who fashions freedom out of pottery made sunflower seeds, and strips naked to protest the authorities repressive excesses – that no one is allowed to know where they have locked him up.

Anish Kapoor has called for all the world’s art galleries to close for one day on the same day to protest. It would send a brilliant and powerful message to the Chinese leadership. As if to say – we admire your great economic progress, we loath your cowardly abuse of your own people, of whom Weiwei is one.

So Libya burns and we are  left to the most basic devices, denied access, to try to fathom the truth.

In thirty-five years of reporting, I have witnessed two worldwide mass revolutionary movements: The felling of the Berlin Wall, and the protest movement across the Arab world.

Whilst the Berlin Wall consequences were essentially linear and continue to play out to this day. I would argue the Arab protests are more formless and much less predictable. The causes often distil around one word or one name.

Take the current standoff and protest involving tens of thousands of trades Unionists in the US state of Wisconsin – up in arms over the new Governor’s decision to abandon collective bargaining. Anything to do with Egypt?

Trouble in Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain and above all Libya. Anything to do with Egypt? Certainly. So where will it end, and when will it end? And will it threaten the double standards that have enabled Western democratic nations to nurture and sustain these and other corrupt and now endangered leaders?

As China battles to suppress images and news of Egypt and beyond – will this thing overwhelm China too?

Some take it as a given that it will eventually engulf one of the world’s least attractive regimes – that in Saudi Arabia. Can the ailing octogenarian King look forward with confidence to the current plan – in which his equally unwell octogenarian successor will take over?

And if not, then what? What of America’s oil supplies? What effect would social convulsion in China – America’s biggest lender – have on us all?

Returning home from a conference in India – I find myself wondering what if the Internet infection seizes a spark from the current unease there about the latest police investigation into vast corruption in government contracts.

We live in fascinating but highly dangerous times. 2011 may prove a more “interesting” year that perhaps we any of us ready for.

Back in October Ai Weiwei, one of China’s most celebrated artists, handed me nine hand made sunflower seeds from his vast exhibition in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. I’ve kept them in the ticket pocket of my jacket ever since.

Not long after he gave them to me, Ai Weiwei went home and soon found himself placed briefly under house arrest after trying to stage a satirical crab feast in protest against an order from the authorities that a studio he had built in Shanghai was to be torn down due to the “unlawful land” it had been built on. The order had come after the artist had made films about two individual who had run seriously foul of Chinese laws.

Out of sight out of mind, I’d forgotten about charming Ai Weiwei until last night. Indeed I’d been thinking instead about the man due to become China’s Prime Minister.

Li Keqiang has been on a high profile visit to the UK – he’s done at least £2.5bn of business to the joy of David Cameron’s Coalition Government. Li Keqiang’s four day visit ended yesterday.

The great turbines of his jet airliner were already churning as the hammer blows began to rain down on Ai Weiwei’s studio in far away Shanghai. By 9.00pm last night, with Li Keqiang safely airborne Mr Wei’s studio had been smashed into fragments no bigger than the sunflower seeds he’d given me. What a charming juxtaposition. What control. The order to demolish had originally been issued last July, just as the new studio had been poised to open. Ai Weiwei’s exhibition was safely opened at Tate Modern by October. And now, with this high profile Chinese visit over too, so was Ai Weiwei’s studio.

Did David Cameron, William Hague, Alex Salmond, or anyone else who met China’s next Prime Minister ask about Mr Ai Weiwei?

Ahead of the visit we hacks asked what news conferences, press opportunities, and interviews were going to be possible with Li Keqiang. Answer: None. Oh, and did the Government think to guide the great Chinese leader toward Tate Modern’s doors?

UK trade and jobs, or Chinese human rights? Naturally, UK trade and jobs. Should we care?

No one foresaw that the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo in 1914 would trigger the First World War in which more than five million souls died.

Many have foreseen North Korea as a potential flash point, if not for World War Three, certainly for regional conflict involving Superpowers.

A week that began with the North Koreans revealing their ‘highly sophisticated’ nuclear centrifuges to a shocked American scientist, moves on to a full scale North Korean artillery barrage aimed at a South Korean island.

Reportedly 200 shells at least appear to have hit the island, burning buildings and causing significant damage (70 homes – according to one report) one military death, at least, and military and possibly civilian injuries. South Korean F16 Fighter jets have been scrambled.

Mention the mass identikit turned out North Korean military dictatorship and you attract a yawn from most. A regime that lives in the past with a little equipment from the future, shows no sign of change in the most rapidly changing world history has ever known.

But North Korea is not alone. She is to a very large extent dependent upon, and protected by her vast neighbour China. South Korea is not alone either, she is strongly defended by the United States.

It seems that North Korea had earlier registered a complaint against a South Korean military exercise going on in the area. It may be that they have taken direct action against what they regarded as military targets.

Earlier this year North Korea sank a South Korean warship with the loss of 46 lives. North Korea is in the midst of a succession change – anointing the ‘Dear Leader’s’ youngest son as ‘heir’.

We are about to see the colour of China’s money. What power does she have to bring North Korea to the negotiating table?

China needs a few cards ahead of what will be a noisy and embarrassing time for the People’s Republic in the coming days.

The continued detention of this year’s Nobel Peace prize winner together with the ‘disappearance’ and detention of his closest relatives is going tip much opprobrium on China.

The world’s attention will, for the first time in some time, be loudly focused upon China’s woeful human rights record. An important moment then to assist the world and prevent Yeonpyeong from becoming Sarajevo.

So, China has overhauled Europe to become Iran’s major trading partner.

Last year official Iranian government figures showed EU trade at $35bn, and trade with China at $29bn. But according to the Financial Times today, those figures ignored the trade that enters Iran through the United Arab Emirates – some $15bn.

In the meantime China’s dependence upon Iranian energy represents 11 per cent of her total energy consumption.

So, at the very moment when the US, France and the UK edge towards a new sanctions regime against Tehran, realities on the ground ensure that China will not go along with them.

Russia reportedly looks a little more disposed to a new sanctions regime, but in truth, the world community should be looking at other routes to relating to the Islamic republic.

As I discovered at Christmas, when I visited Iran and met with Ahmadinejad, there is division, chaos and uncertainty in the upper echelons of power in the Islamic Republic.

It has become a well worn tradition that amid such tensions, President Ahmadinejad likes to play the “nuclear card“. The UN inspectors are bemused by the under use of centrifuges at Natanza (the enrichment plant near Esfahan).

There is also a suspicion that scientists have managed to enrich uranium to a level of 20 per cent and have enough of it to build one bomb, or not. In other words the UN inspection process doesn’t really know precisely where Iran has got to in its bomb making capacity.

I have always believed that this is exactly how the shambles at the top of Iran wants it.

I have always believed that relating to Iran through the nuclear non-dialogue is a blind cul-de-sac. The real problem remains – with whom should we try to relate?

Well, it is still possible to talk with Ahmadinejad, but I could not sense when I met him whether he actually runs anything at all. I suspect he has influence upon much and control of almost nothing.

The real power is supposed to reside with the supreme leader – Ayatollah Khamenei. But he’s made some serious mistakes in the course of attempting to deal both with the electoral fraud and the “green revolution“. There is widespread talk of his having to step down or aside – ill health, or some other pretext.

No, the real power, the real control lies in the hands of the Revolutionary Guards and the thuggish gangs that constitute the Basij.

But they are split too – between the old seasoned revolutionaries who deposed the Shah and survived that ghastly war with Iraq in the 1980’s, and the young upstarts who have seized many of the economic leavers, and enriched themselves in the process.

These new groupings don’t travel outside the country, and are very focused on the mosque. They will be particularly hard to hit with targeted sanctions.

Hence the alternative – engagement – but with whom? Anyone and everyone. Trade, commerce, banking, oil, culture – there are problems with every segment of Iranian life.

But beating beneath all these problems reside a vast numbers of hearts in men and woman who want change.

The Islamic revolution has become deeply polluted according Mr Mousavi – the opposition leader and no radical himself.

Starving the discontented with more sanctions will achieve nothing beyond the beating batons of renewed internal repression. I have advocated carpet bombing Iran with laptops before on Snowblog.

But conceptually that is what the world should do, drench the place with supply. There is a rich and ready market.

Exploiting it will empower the people and terrify the agents of repression.

Just occasionally Snowblog is on the button! Yesterday I asked whether the world was just beginning to get tough with China over its systemic abuses to human rights. Yesterday that pressure came from iron ore producers, today it’s Google.

The search engine is considering pulling out of China altogether after discovering a coordinated attack on accounts it hosts for human rights campaigners.

Google’s darkest hour was recorded in 2006 when the company agreed to censor its site in China in return for a permit to run a limited Chinese search engine.

It has blown up in their faces – China’s and Google’s. This has all the stink of the Chinese thought-police hacking into dissidents’ email accounts and into the traffic of multinational corporations.

We must hope the Chinese throw Google out altogether – jam the site and worse.

That in its turn will stir the increasingly savvy Chinese cyber-folk. China’s attempt to limit its people’s access to the web are doomed to failure – the genie is out fo the bottle.

China’s action may be the most tangible infringement of the activities of the masses since the imposition of the “one child per couple policy” – this time round the masses may not prove quite so quiescent.

Meantime I admit, Jim Flavin‘s comparisons of human rights abuses between China and America have set me thinking.

I suspect there is something invidious about trying to set up a league table of human rights abusers. In the end it’s the individual who suffers when his or her rights are abused – who are we to sit in judgement on the parity of pain?

Finally how fitting that Iran – another systemic abuser of its people’s human rights – should be the progenitors of an attack on China’s own search site Baidu.

Some clever-dick hacked into the site on Tuesday and covered it with an Iranian flag and the words “Iranian Cyber Army”.

Is the world just beginning to toughen up on tearaway China?

Her undervalued currency has already come in for heavy criticism from all quarters, but with no effect.

Her intransigence at the climate change conference last month in Copenhagen was roundly condemned but today perhaps a more specific and more intriguing development.

The companies involved in this year’s global iron ore pricing negotiations have decided to ‘sideline’ China.

China which accounts for buying up to 50 per cent of the world’s iron exports has been excluded from the talks which will fix this year’s benchmark price.

During last year’s negotiations in Beijing, Stern Hu, a Rio Tinto executive was arrested on suspicion of industrial espionage, he has been held without trial ever since.

This year the talks have been moved from China to Singapore. Two fingers to China is what it looks like.

According to today’s FT, the steelmakers Vale of Brazil, Rio Tinto itself, and BHP Bilton (the giant ore miners in Australia) have all got together to negotiate pricing with the Japanese.

One executive is quoted as saying that if the Chinese want an iron ore deal they can travel to Australia to talk about it.

But the Chinese, normally so successfully centrally planned, are themselves divided about how to organise any talks or pricing in this coming year.

We in the west so often whinge about the size and influence of these multinational mining corporations but in tightening the noose on iron ore supplies to China, with potentially catastrophic consequences for china’s rapid-fire development, are they doing the world a favour?

Certainly the case of Mr Hu represents a human right disgrace but it’s a case that still represents something of a norm in China.

Is it time then for more of the world to start holding China hostage over her human rights abuses, even if it hurts us in the short term?

For in the long term, if this norm is allowed to prevail, it could well come to haunt us in a form we might find much harder to combat.