To Amnesty International last night for a session with Gideon Levy the iconic columnist (the Twilight Zone) of the widely regarded Haaretz newspaper. He’s an increasingly lone voice in Israeli journalism, urging his fellow countryman to recognise what their illegal occupation of Palestinian lands is doing to their own society, their own country.

An extraordinarily lyrical speaker in a language that is not his own, Levy’s spoken words flow as his written work does. It was an evening of extraordinary insight into present-day Israel and the changes the country has gone through – particularly in the last two decades. He’s here to promote his book ‘The Punishment of Gaza’.

Intriguingly, those present claimed the Israeli Embassy had helped to promote the meeting. Hard to say whether this exposes a dissident breakaway group of diplomats urging their own citizenry to wake up to the effects of the Gaza crisis, or whether they wanted people to turn up to put an alternative view to Mr Levy’s.

If it was the latter, only a handful of ‘alternative voices’ turned up. But they were loud and robust. One damned Mr Levy for calling Gaza a prison. Mr Levy shares the view with David Cameron who called the enclave exactly that on his visit to India last month. The questioner elaborated. He said the Israelis had left Gaza in 2005, how could it therefore be a prison?

Levy observed that you can administer a prison from without or from within. Having tried the former, he said, Israel was now engaged in the latter.

Last night’s event was staged by a coalition of Jewish and Palestinian organisations. I met a number of Jewish members of the audience, as I did recently in America, who are actively organising a flotilla of Jewish boats that hope this autumn to breach the Gaza blockade.

The discussion was informative and stimulating. The hall was packed to over flowing. Levy said that such a meeting in Tel-Aviv would not fill a bus shelter. It seems that civil discussion of Gaza inside Israel itself has dwindled to the level here in Britain. But perhaps I misspeak.

Mr Levy, having originally come to the UK merely to speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival has now played to packed houses at last minute events in both Manchester and London. He’ll make a final appearance at the Frontline Club tonight. I have no word as to whether the Israeli embassy is promoting that event.

A short blog to start the day. I’m just off on the bike to chair an intriguing session for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Don’t often get the call from the military. But two very special guests today: Generals David Petraeus (US) and Peter Wall (UK) are to speak and interact with an audience.
Both have Iraq experience, both are now key players in the deployment of forces in Afghanistan.

But Petraeus is of particular interest in that as Obama’s key military mind he has thought deeply about US policy in the Middle East. He has raised questions about the balance of US interests and the way its relationship with Israel is handled. In the aftermath of the Gaza flotilla debacle he may have interesting things to say.

I shall blog later about what the generals have to say and the experience of sitting amid such military might.

Today’s visit to Gaza by the EU’s foreign affairs chief is as important for the EU as it is for Gaza. So far the appointment of the obscure Baroness Ashton has attracted something between deep scepticism and ridicule.

But the decision to send her into Gaza is seen by many as a deft and right decision. The negotiations to give Israel associate trading status with Europe have long been controversial.

There are strong pure trade reasons for allowing such a status. To trumpet a trade deal with Israel at such a moment is hard, but not impossible to imagine.

Only two other European foreign ministers have been to Gaza since the Israeli invasion two years ago.

Many senior foreign officials attempting the visit have been barred by Israel. In today’s circumstance, Cathy Ashton has proved un-barrable.

At the same time the visit allows her, at last, to assert herself as Europe’s voice. It remains to be seen what kind of voice the Baroness will have.

I asked two days ago in Snowblog “where is Europe? Where indeed is Britain in all this?”

The answer, I did not know then, is that Cathy Ashton clearly intends to raise the profile of the EU diplomatic role in it all.

She will travel on to the ongoing Quartet (EU, UN, US and Russia) discussions in Moscow.

Hilary Clinton, looking both ways on Israel-Palestine – as so many American Secretaries of State before her – is already there.

Someone asks in the Snowblog thread this week where is the Middle East envoy, Tony Blair, at such a moment? Answers on a postcard-sized contribution to the thread please.

The EU has long had a huge financial input into the Palestinian territories, but much of what was done by Europe in terms of boosting civic society – building police stations, town halls, electoral infrastructure, has been reduced to rubble.

In trading terms, economically vibrant Israel needs Europe, rather more than Europe needs Israel.

Hence Europe can emerge in the region as something of an honest broker. But to do so will take unprecedented skill.

A tough challenge for Ms Ashton. She has to be prepared to say “boo” to the American goose and talk turkey with the Israeli gander.

Was the “medieval siege” – as UN relief boss John Ging called it – of Gaza happening anywhere else on earth (with the possible exception of the Congo) the perpetrator would be the object of a sanctions movement and more.

The occasional threatened arrest of the odd Israeli functionary at Heathrow hardly represents “pressure”.

A region that has had more than its fair share of “dark days”, is in a deep slough of despond. Rumours of a new Israeli move on Lebanon, fears of a strike on Iran, do not improve the prospects.

Maybe it behoves even the most sceptical to wish Cathy Ashton well.

Breaking the Silence is one of the myriad groupings in Israeli civic society that offers a thread of hope in the current impasse in the Middle East.

I say civic because although it is made up of Israeli soldiers, they are all either conscripts or reservists.

Today they have published a report into Israel’s recent military operation in Gaza. describing what they call “fifty-four testimonies of Israeli combat soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead“.

The testimonies, which are attributed to anonymous soldiers, reportedly describe Israeli forces using civilians as human shields to enter buildings ahead of troops; the wanton destruction of homes and buildings; the vandalism of Palestinian property; soldiers firing at water tanks and puncturing them – despite the severe water shortage the motivation was mere boredom, the use of white phosphorous in civilian areas in a way some soldiers describe in the testimonies as “gratuitous” and “reckless”.

It seems from this report that many of the soldiers saw almost no direct engagement with Palestinian militants. The Israeli authorities dismissed the document as “hearsay and word-of-mouth”.

Coming on the heels of the UN’s report which described more than 50,000 homes damaged together with 800 factories, 200 schools, 39 mosques and 2 churches, this is further evidence of something beyond the norm as having taken place and that’s putting it lightly.

In the documentary which I made at the time “Gaza Unseen” on Channel 4, we described elements of what these soldiers are talking about but this is much worse than we knew.

Six months on, there is still very little mainstream coverage of what is happening in Gaza. The Middle East envoy representing the quarter (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), Tony Blair, has finally made his first visit to Gaza some weeks ago but to no obvious effect.

Indeed I have made a formal Freedom of Information request to try to find out just how many days Mr Blair has spent in the region per month since he got the job.

I’ll keep you posted on that but despite the high hopes centred on President Obama’s recent statements, it seems that in practical terms the festering sore of Gaza and significant parts of the West Bank remain largely unaddressed and no-one thus far has been taken to task for the worst of what happened in Gaza in January.

You had to pinch yourself to remember that he IS an American president, I mean a president of the United States of America.

The world view Obama laid out in Cairo today was something it is almost impossible to imagine any other US leader ever attempting. I urge you to read it or watch it if you can possibly find the time.

It is a repositioning of America with the Islamic world, a grand departure from so much of what has gone before.

He lays it on the line to the Israelis – “It is time for these settlements to stop.” But he doesn’t spell out the consequences if it doesn’t happen.

He talks well of democracy but recognises that it is not America’s job to export or impose them.

It’s hard to exaggerate what this speech means. It is a phenomenal tribute to Obama that he can deliver it without bringing the house of Washington down about him – being so steeped in interfering in other people’s countries and processes.

I’d put the speech on a par with Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech delivered in America after the second world war and with Kennedy and Reagan at the Berlin wall. A watershed thus far… and next?

US president Barack Obama heads for the Middle East and Europe this week. Having inaugurated his “opening” to the Muslim world during his inspired stop in Turkey on his first foreign foray, he heads for Egypt to make his keynote speech setting out his Middle East ambitions.

The Turkey trip remains a touchstone of his presidency, a completely counter intuitive move.

He did not do what all previous presidents would have done in this regard. He did not include Israel on his itinerary.

He has talked with prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but instead of visiting Israel this time around he will pay tribute – at the concentration camp at Buchenwald in Germany – to the devastating number of Jews who died in Hitler’s gas chambers.

It was their suffering that so pricked the world’s conscience that the state of Israel was brought into being in 1948.

Obama has added Saudi Arabia to his itinerary, calling in on King Abdullah.

Interestingly there will be no public events. The Saudis are essential to a pan-Arab peace with Israel, but hardly a model of Islamic state Obama would naturally want to highlight so early in his presidency.

Saudi or Egypt could have been expected to provide an American President’s first brush with Islam. But instead, as I say, it was secular, majority Islamic Turkey.

Turkey has relations with Israel, even if strained by the war on Gaza.

It is the continued absence of a visit to Israel that provides the fascination, and potentially the hope.

Obama is pursuing a discreet, pragmatic, yet ambitious Middle East peace initiative. Interestingly Hillary Clinton, close to Democrat Jews in her previous senatorial state of New York, has issued the most robust US demand yet that Israel ceases ALL settlement building.

This is an American administration making moves we haven’t seen in generations.

On 19 May no fewer than 76 of America’s 100 senators signed a letter warning Obama of the risks to Israel of pursuing a two sate peace with Palestinians.

It’s a finely tuned counter point to Obama’s initiative and a necessary one if Israel is to feel reassured.

For the first time in generations, the Israelis are a trifle uncertain as to how far the US will really go.

The Israeli government has little interest in a Palestinian state of any shape. History indicates that the rejection of Palestine rights inside and beyond Israeli borders has gathered momentum down the years.

My sense from having been to the region during both the Lebanon and Gaza invasions is that Israeli morale and confidence are battered.

Where once my inbox was filled with invective from hardliners on both sides, it has all gone eerily quiet. It is as if those two conflicts, coupled with the arrival of Obama, have seriously reordered the chess board.

We live in seriously interesting times.

Here’s a mad prediction. That in this decade we will see peace in both the Middle East and Kashmir. Of the latter more anon, of the former watch for this fascinating week.

Getting on for 100 phone calls last night about our interview with Mark Regev, the Israeli Government spokesman.

This after the United Nations had accused Israeli forces of “negligence and recklessness” in their attacks on UN compounds in Gaza during the January assault.

Reasonably evenly balanced between those who thought it was too hard and those who thought it about right.

It’s always difficult interviewing well-trained government voices. Mr Regev is more accomplished than most.

But here it is anyway.

To watch my earlier interview with Mark Regev, from January 23 2009, click here.

Twice in the past week I have attended events focusing on Israel’s assault on Gaza. Last week an organisation called Just Journalism invited me to participate in a debate at Hampstead Town Hall.

Yesterday another organisation called Hoping invited me to a private gathering in Notting Hill to hear the UNRWA director in Gaza, John Ging, give an account of what is happening there.

Just Journalism is an apparently well-heeled organisation, to judge by its glossy literature. It purports to be a media monitoring organisation.

In truth it does a very thorough job of extracting all reports and articles that allow the slightest criticism of Israel. The strong implication is that these reports represent bias and are simply wrong.

The Just Journalism debate produced the charge that I was a “traitor”, to loud applause, but was otherwise good natured. I was shocked to find a widespread belief in the hall that the BBC was an Islamist propaganda machine.

There was no tolerance whatever for any consideration that the invasion of Gaza had been in some way misguided or that there had even been errors in carrying it out.

Rather, the arguments were entered that most media accounts of UN schools hit etc were simply wrong. I would draw your attention to Jonathan Miller (our own correspondent), who entered Gaza from Egypt within hours of the Israelis calling a ceasefire. His blog details exactly what he assessed had happened in some of these specific incidents, including the UN schools.

John Ging gave a very dispassionate view of where we are now in Gaza. He says the rule of law is the only hope, that confidence on both sides has to be rebuilt from the bottom up, and that there is little point attempting to sway minds at the top – they are rigidly fixed on both sides. He sees adherence to the rule of law offering hope on both sides.

He described war crimes by both sides – Hamas rockets on Sderot, Israeli assaults on unarmed civilians in Gaza. He expressed the hope that the new evidence now coming out of the Israeli forces themselves is proving vital in this regard. He held out the hope that there will be prosecutions on both sides and that “justice and truth” will flow from both sides.

Hoping, by the way, is a small children’s charity operating in the occupied territories.

I said in the Hampstead debate that as an optimist, I had never been so depressed by the prospects for a solution in the Middle East as now. John Ging’s testimony and relative optimism is a beacon.

People are incredibly generous. Last night I attended a concert to raise money for the children of Gaza. Sir Colin Davis, the 81-year-old conductor, and the English Chamber Orchestra gave their services free, and the Barbican in London provided the venue.

The redoubtable Syrian ambassador provided the support for getting it staged, with what seems a vast Syrian diaspora in attendance.

I found myself thinking about Syria – dismissed as a state sponsor of terror, yet to visit, a hidden jewel in a Middle East ravaged by war. I thought of the more than 1 million Iraqi refugees she hosts – not in camps but in homes belonging to Syrian families (in this connection I have included below my interview last year with the Syrian foreign minister, Walid Moallem).

There are many dimensions to the place: police state, Israeli foe, Hezbollah supporter. But fundamentally, on the ground, amazing people with an incredible history.

Damascus is the best preserved of Arab capitals, Aleppo host to a myriad Christian churches, Palmyra the best preserved Roman remains in the region (see image). The mysterious “dead cities” and the crusader fort Crac des Chevaliers. We are entering the season of wild flowers in Syria that lasts until the early summer heat.

These are the thoughts that wash over you as you listen to Mozart and Haydn. Ugh, I find Haydn far from uplifting. By far the best piece last night was an incredible fusion of English plainsong chant and three gifted Arab soloists singing in their musical vernacular.

The English element was performed by The Clerks. The piece was called Qudduson and will be performed somewhere again tonight, and then in June. Look out for it.

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Given that Israel voted yesterday on the heels of the recent Gaza conflict, I thought I would return to a blog I did during my visit to shoot a Dispatches programme, Unseen Gaza, last month. Here it is.

There is nothing quite so instructive as the 5.00am start from Jerusalem down the highway to Ben Gurion airport outside Tel Aviv – because, of course, the road traverses parts of the West Bank. The high walls from time to time remind you of that.

The cars are sparse, the taxi driver still to this day an Arab Israeli from Arab east Jerusalem. But you are never quite sure until you open the conversation.

It continues to amaze me how, even in the face of what is happening in Gaza, they remain so placid and mild mannered. But my driver allows his voice to rise a little as he speaks of the dead children and “ladies” before his voice trails off.

And then I see them at a checkpoint in the dual carriageway, in a shadowy passage to the left: a long, long single file of cold men in scarves. Yes, it’s three degrees here this morning. These are the rare handfuls of West Bank workers still allowed to come into Israel to work. There are very, very few these days.

When I first came to Ben Gurion my bags were checked by Palestinians from the West Bank or Arab Israelis from within Israel. Today they are Sri Lankans. And when yesterday I sat on a mound of earth overlooking Gaza, the people in the fields, apparently oblivious to the bombardment, were no longer Palestinians but Thais.

The lack of labour for the people of the Palestinian territories is generating its own despair and hatred. How much longer will my old taxi man keep his calm demeanour? What a challenge for Obama, for whom there are unreal quantities of hope among Palestinians.

Watch the Gaza slideshow by Channel 4 News foreign reporter Jonathan Miller.