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?

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Fascinating strains are opening up between the US and two of its bedrock allies in the Middle East – Israel, and Saudi Arabia.

The recent visit of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington was neatly described in White House photos which depicted the unsmiling faces of the President and the Prime Minister looking in opposite directions. Netanyahu’s appearance in front of a rare session of the joint Houses of Congress provided worse. To opposition Republican applause, he rejected almost everything the President had asked of him. Not least, he rejected the internationally agreed factor (UN resolution 242) that any peace settlement returns Israel to its pre-1967 borders.

Mr Obama is now wrestling with ways to deal with Israel in a US election year. But many inside America’s so-called ‘Jewish lobby’, are reportedly frustrated with the Israeli leadership’s failure to respond to the developing new order that is flowing from the ‘Arab Spring’.

As to Saudi Arabia, the New York Times has had rare access to one of the regime’s inaccessible Princes – Prince Waleed bin Talal al-Saud. He has laid out the Kingdom’s annoyance with Mr Obama’s embrace of the ‘Arab Spring’.

The Saudis are in the midst of negotiating a vast $60 billion weapons contract with Washington. The US depends for a third of its oil on Saudi Arabia. Some inside the regime are questioning Riyadh’s long term reliance on the US to protect its interests.

Fresh from ploughing $billions into the Egyptian economy and splashing cash and force across the region and amongst its own population to try to stem the rising pressures on the Arab dictatorships, the Saudis have set up a kind of ‘Club of Kings’ that ranges from Morocco through Jordan, to Bahrain, to try to argue that kings do not suffer from the same defects that the region’s other dictatorships manifest. Given the repression of its own opposition movements and its heavy handed, British-trained intervention in Bahrain, it may be a hard argument to pursue.

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.

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.

Here’s an intriguing statistic: since the introduction of air marshals on US airlines after 9/11, just four people have been arrested on suspicion of terrorism on-board an airliner. That represents a cost of $200m per arrest.

There are 3,000-4,000 air marshals currently employed aboard US airliners. This is but one of a myriad of the massive costs of not achieving peace.

Now I recognise that the causes for which people might wish to blow up an airliner are not all directed against the Middle East issue.

But as I have blogged before, the failure to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict not only costs cash, but also roots despair and discontent right across the globe.

Hence my naive excitement last week that Obama had sent his Vice President, Joe Biden for a six-day sojourn in the region.

I warned that his visit coincided with the tangible bulldozing of some 22 Palestinian homes in Arab East Jerusalem.

For once I under-exaggerated. Israel announced not 22, but 1,600 new Jewish homes on the very day poor old Joe landed.

It was a fantastic and brazen slap across America’s face – in US-Israeli relations, unprecedented.

Prime Minister Netanyahu appears not to have been behind the stunt – right wing factions in his already right wing administration are being blamed.

But, in a speech in the Knesset yesterday, Mr Netanyahu, being the populist he is, has quickly clambered aboard the announcement. Mr Biden is now home, and the White House is reportedly ‘incandescent’.

Even Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has lost patience. Undiplomatic language has been deployed with Israel demanding an explanation.

The crisis has currently detonated any likelihood of a restart on the Middle East talks. It has also stiffened America’s demands of Israel.

They now want the entire status of Jerusalem itself to be right there at the top of the agenda if and when talks restart.

We are now at the crunch point where Obama’s true intentions in the Middle East will at last be tested to the full. Is he serious? Or will he recede into the same supine condition ultimately achieved by his predecessors?

No American administration has ever talked tough, let alone acted tough with Israel. Few even pretend that it is likely this time. And where is Europe in all this? Where is Britain? You have it, absolutely nowhere.

I guess the US airline companies won’t be getting rid of their air marshals any time soon. Nice work if you can get it.

An intriguing PS to my Biden blog.

I mentioned the 22 Palestinian homes in the line of the Israeli bulldozers’ blades in East Jerusalem. Even I could not have predicted that as the wheels of Joe Biden’s vice presidential craft hit the Israeli runway tarmac, Israel would announce a vast planned “illegal” development in East Jerusalem of 1,600 new homes.

Strangely, one of the elements we discussed at a high level India/UK conference I attended in Oxfordshire two weeks ago was the intriguing and largely discrete military alliance between India and Israel.

It was a conference that dwelt extensively upon the thrusting Indian economy – growing at 8.5 per cent with robust prospects for the future. We talked about her high-tech industries, her call centres, and her plans for major infra-structural development.

Yesterday, my youngest daughter emails me from Darjeeling.

She recounts the filthy hotel she had been staying in over her birthday in Varanasi. The strange smells, the street poverty, and the burial traditions by fire and water on the polluted banks of the Ganges.

Then she describes her timetabled 16-hour train journey – third class sleeper up to Darjeeling. By the time she reaches the railhead in the valley far below her hilly destination, the train is five hours late. The night is pitch dark and there are none of the jeeps about that normally ferry the traveller up to Darjeeling.

She and her friend take the risk of one of the battered old taxis in the station forecourt.

At 2.00am in the morning on a remote stretch of winding road one of the tyres gives way. The driver changes it in the middle of the road. Fifteen minutes later a second tyre gives up the ghost. No more spares.

To my horror, these two blondes stand, at 2.30am, on the dark roadside and start hitching. A five ton truck laden with sand hails into view. It stops, they scramble in. The driver and his mate prove to be the sweetest most caring individuals.

By 4.00am they have stopped at a tea stall and are buying the girls, tea and delicious pastries.

At 5.00am the sand truck draws up at the very doors of the hostel in which the travellers are to stay.

Their 28-hour journey from Varanasi was a far cry from my cushy conference table and 8.5 per cent Indian growth discussions. But my daughter’s journey had deepened her respect for the milk, even the tea, of human kindness – if not for Indian infrastructure.

Put simply, he’s in Israel to try to dissuade the Israelis from bombing Iran.

There remains a strong thread of opinion inside the Israeli cabinet that argues that Iran is building a nuclear bomb and needs to be stopped in its tracks. Reportedly, Israel does not have a supply of the American developed deep bunker busting bomb required to penetrate the storage chambers in Natanz where, beneath some 55ft of reinforced concrete, Iran keeps her enriched uranium.

But the US Vice President, Joe Biden is not alone in his mission.

It is rare for so senior a US official to commit himself to six days in the region. He’s there with President Obama’s chief Middle East negotiator George Mitchell. In truth, Mitchell, the abidingly decent, patient and ultimately successful negotiator of the Northern Ireland pace has got effectively nowhere thus far in his attempts to negotiate a breakthrough in the Middle East.

Many who study the region are saying now that the option for what George Bush became the first president to enunciate – a two state solution – has passed.

Despite America’s very public support of the UN call for a cessation of work on new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the building work continues apace. The Obama administration has discovered what the world already knew, no one is prepared to do anything about it.

As one former UK envoy to the UN put it to me the other day, “Were Israel any other state, it is hard to imagine that her actions in the occupied territories would by now have secured a UN sanctions regime”.

Despite the reality that the 2009 presidential victory secured by Barack Obama was less dependent upon donations from the pro-Israel lobby than any in recent history – owing to the sheer mass and diversity of the small donations that swelled his electoral war chest – Obama does not appear to observers to be running an administration that is going to get tough with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government any time soon.

The strangling of Gaza, the settlement building programme, and the flouting of years of UN resolutions have never secured anything more than the occasional American finger wag.

So, does Joe Biden’s arrival in the region signal change? Don’t hold your breath – and yet could there be something afoot?

Obama has in his first year made no serious personal investment in the peace process. Is Biden perhaps his ‘John the Baptist’ in this regard? Many will hope so. The conflict remains the greatest single fuel source for Muslim discontent from Indonesia to the East End of London.

Incidentally, it wasn’t until I saw that Mr Biden would not be seeing Egypt’s President Mubarak, that I discovered that the octogenarian leader is in a hospital bed in Germany after a gallbladder op last Saturday.

But then peace in the Middle East has, of late, rarely depended upon Egypt. She operates at least as draconian a border operation against the Palestinians as Israel administers.

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.

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.