Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sept. 28 rejected Western and Arab complaints that the newly announced construction of 1,100 Jewish homes in Gilo on annexed land close to East Jerusalem would hurt efforts to revive the peace process. "Gilo is not a settlement nor an outpost," Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev said. "It is a neighborhood in the very heart of Jerusalem about five minutes from the center of town." He asserted that in every peace plan on the table over the past 18 years Gilo "stays part of Jerusalem and therefore this planning decision in no way contradicts" the Israeli government's stated desire for peace based on a two-state solution.

The right-wing blogosphere is having a field day with this one. The Daily Call started it all with a Sept. 13 piece on comments offered by the Palestinian Authority's ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat at a breakfast briefing hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. The Call entitled its write-up "Palestinian ambassador reiterates call for a Jew-free Palestinian state." Here's the offending quote:

Returning to a prospect first raised after last year's flotilla affair, Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has broached supporting recognition by the US Senate of the Armenian genocide as part of a diplomatic offensive against Turkey, the Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sept. 9. The report came ahead of a meeting of a meeting of Foreign Ministry officials to discuss Israel’s response to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to downgrade Ankara’s diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. Amazingly, the report also claimed Lieberman had suggested that Israel back the PKK Kurdish guerillas (which will doubtless fuel the endless conspiracy theories in Turkish nationalist circles that the Kurds are the pawns of a Zionist conspiracy against the Muslim world). (AFP, Sept. 10; YNet, Sept. 9)

Egyptian authorities declared a state of emergency early Sept. 10 after a group of some 30 protesters broke into the Israeli embassy in Cairo overnight and dumped hundreds of documents out of the windows. The storming of the embassy came after a day of demonstrations outside, where crowds swinging sledgehammers and using their bare hands tore down the building's security wall. For hours, security forces made no attempt to intervene. The embassy's Israeli flag was torn down, and Tweeters on the scene indicate that a giant Palestinian flag was draped from the building's upper stories. The Israeli ambassador to Egypt, Yitzhak Levanon, together with his family and other embassy staff, have reportedly left Egypt. The protest began after a Friday rally at Tahrir Square, which brought out thousands for what was billed as a "Correcting the Path" demonstration (an apparent reference to recent usurpation of the Egyptian movement by Islamists). (The Guardian, RT, Sept. 10; JP, Inagist, Sept. 9)

The UN on Sept. 2 issued its its report on the deadly May 2010 Gaza flotilla raid, criticizing Israel for using "excessive and unreasonable" force but finding that the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip itself is lawful. Prepared by a panel headed by former New Zealand prime minister Geoffrey Palmer for the office of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the report found:

The Palestinian team responsible for preparing the initiative for United Nations recognition in September has been given an independent legal opinion that warns of risks to Palestinian rights in the proposal. The initiative to transfer the Palestinians' representation from the PLO to a state would terminate the legal status held by the PLO in the UN since 1975 as sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, the document states—meaning there would no longer be an institution that can represent the rights of the Palestinian people in the UN and related international institutions. The seven-page opinion, obtained by Ma'an News Agency, was submitted to the Palestinian team by Guy Goodwin-Gill, a professor of public international law at Oxford University and a member of the team that won the 2004 non-binding judgement by the International Court of Justice that the route of Israel's wall was illegal.

Egypt registered a formal complaint with Israel over the killings of three Egyptian officers at the Sinai border and demanded an immediate investigation on Aug. 19, one day after militants carried out deadly attacks near Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat. Egyptian security officials said that the three officers were killed when an Israeli helicopter fired at suspected militants who had fled into a crowd of security personnel on the Egyptian side of the border. Dozens of Egyptians demonstrated outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo, burning the Israeli flag and chanting, "Close the embassy! Expel the ambassador!" (AlJazeera, NYT, Aug. 19)

Israeli air-strikes across the Gaza Strip on Aug. 18 killed at least seven—including Popular Resistance Committees official Khaled Shaath, but also his two-year-old son and a 13-year-old Palestinian boy. The air raids came after coordinated militant attacks left seven Israelis dead—six civilians and one soldier—near the Red Sea tourist town of Eilat. Palestinian gunmen attacked two buses and two cars traveling near the southern resort city just after noon. When Israeli troops arrived, roadside bombs planted by the militants were detonated. Seven militants were killed in subsequent firefights with the soldiers. Israeli officials said they believe that militants crossed from the Gaza Strip into Egypt in order to infiltrate Israel's border near Eilat. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the attacks "demonstrate the weakening of Egypt's control over the Sinai Peninsula and the expansion of terrorist activity there." (JTA, Maan News Agency, Aug. 18)