Hope your optimism is not misplaced. If it is, and Israel attacks Iran unilaterally, probably within the coming months, then IMHO the entire global paradigm will then be shifted to leave us living in an entirely changed, and very dangerous world.

That's just my opinion and I could be wrong. No one knows, not even AIPAC, what will be the consequences of such an Israeli belligerence. However, one thing is certain - an Israeli attack on Iran will not be the destroying of sitting aircraft on an unarmed Egyptian airfield with no opposition or the bombing of a Syrian research facility or the gung-ho flight to Entebbe to rescue a planeload of civilians from a handful of Ugandan part-time soldiers.

Iran has an army, and an air force, and missiles - although not US supplied F15 / F16 fighter bombers or US bunker busting bombs. The point is that Iran has defensive troops who will fight and this will prove a new challenge for the IAF and IDF.

Who will be the victor is impossible to forecast, but the international community is likely to be the heavy loser. And that includes America.

Death by killing is obscene. Death by radiation is slow and agonizing as each organ fails, one after the other.

Where are you planning to be Mr Nothing, in your TV room with your laptop, looking over to the condo opposite, as you swallow your aspirin and statins?

Certainly, you are VERY brave indeed to allow so many to die to keep you alive! Maybe you are an ex military man, a retired Field Marshal perhaps, or maybe an eminent philosopher out of work for the moment? However, your grasp of world politics is impressive and immense.

In the immediate hours following an Israeli strike, long-range missiles would be targeted upon Tel Aviv, some of which would reach their target. With many dead, Israel would then have no option but to use their nuclear warheads in order to survive. Once Israel deploys their secret nuclear weapons, the world will have changed, and not even the White House will be able to forecast what will be the consequences either in the Middle East or the world.

What we do know is that there is every likelihood of the Strait of Hormuz being a point of conflict between Iranian forces and US warships and that Iranian cells around the world will be activated.

These short-sighted policies that deny most human and civil rights are, astonishingly, endorsed and paid for by a Democratic administration!

There is no other conclusion to be reached other than that AIPAC has ultimate control of both the White House and Congress.

In which case, Professors Mearsheimer and Walt were correct in their conclusions.

It's not complex. When you have just 5m Israeli Jews, sitting in just 20,000 sq km on the eastern Mediterranean, intent on influencing the foreign policy of the entire global population of 6.5 billion people, over one billion of whom are Muslim, in nearly two hundred countries, and in part, succeeding - they you have a VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM.

The state of Israel needs to recognize who and what she really is, and those who support her - in preference to their own countries of residence - need to step back and reflect and what sort of world they are trying to achieve for their children and grandchildren. That future will be a world of nuclear conflict, brought about by unthinking men who mistakenly thought that they were doing good and helping to crystallize a biblical prophecy, and in doing so would ensure their place in heaven.

How extraordinarily naive can otherwise sophisticated, educated people be, to be working towards such a tragic future?

GS people are absolutely not the smartest kids on the block - that's a crap idea that has no legs whatsoever.

GS people have CONTACTS! CONTACTS! & contacts!

I must know twenty medical consultants and engineers who could leave any GSer standing with his/ her mouth open.

But GSers know how to work the system and make money. I guess that is pretty clever but don't be over-awed. Most of those guys are lost when you engage them in any other conversationin any other field.

To assume that they are the masters of the universe indicates a basis misunderstanding of how capitalism works - even if you have had occasion to go out and raise some funding, with success.

To Mr. Jeremy Ben-Ami, Executive Director, J Street

'I would like to congratulate you on your inaugural national conference. I believe most American Jews support Israel and want to see it thrive as a Jewish and democratic state.'

However, in the eyes of many, the reality is that Israel is arguably neither Jewish nor democratic.

The state of Israel was established in 1948 by the UN as a Jewish homeland, in the aftermath of the Holocaust in which the majority of European Jews were liquidated by the Nazis in industrial style murder factories.

In the beginning, it served its true purpose and welcomed all those who had suffered from persecution around the world and who were born of a Jewish mother. But in the years that followed, the vision blurred and Herzl's dream of a Jewish agrarian co-operative, set within a Muslim Middle East and living in harmony with its indigenous neighbours, soon turned into a nightmare.

The indigenous Arabs voted, en bloc, against the UN resolution of 1947 that proposed to divide their land to accommodate a Jewish state in Palestine, and when their voices were ignored they attacked the fledgling state immediately upon its birth, which they saw as illegitimate. But the Arab armies, lost, and with that loss the new Israeli state gained an arrogant maturity. If a small Jewish army could defeat the combined armies of the Arabs, then surely God was with them and they could impose their rule at will.

In fact, they succeeded in imposing their will only with the covert, but subsequent overt, help of the United States - or rather, the American Zionist lobby, later to adopt the more benign name of AIPAC, the American Israel Jewish Affairs Committee, that now exerts such a powerful influence on US foreign policy through its control on the voting behaviour of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Throughout the post-war years, as America's power increased worldwide, the tiny Israeli state hung onto its coat-tails, fed and sustained with billions of tax dollars from unknowing Americans. And so, the state of Israel grew exceedingly arrogant and with that arrogance, came brutality. For the grandchildren of the survivors of the Holocaust grew to forget the horrors of war-time Europe that had so decimated their grandparents in Germany, Austria, Poland, France, Holland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Like an abused child, who in turn abuses his or her own children - Israelis began to oppress and humiliate their neighbours. Then came the killings, which, it was claimed, were in self-defense. But too often it was women and children who died at the hands of the Israeli army. Too often, unarmed civilians.

But the IDF was increasingly composed of young soldiers of Russian or Ethiopian origin, whose parents may, or may not, have been born Jewish.

Israel consistently claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East, but her actions are anything but democratic. She kills, imprisons and tortures many thousands - even up to today. Without trial and without any semblance of justice but with every semblance of inequality.

That the state of Israel is carried on the back of the American tax-payer is common knowledge but it is open to debate whether that small country is entirely Jewish or democratic. Certainly, as a Jewish Democrat, originally from a very old, east European Jewish family, I am exceedingly doubtful.

That involves the forced 'transfer' of all Palestinians from their land to a neighboring country.

The 'low-end jostling' as you put it is a deadly serious game in which the prize is the dispossession of the remaining indigenous people of the Holy Land. LIKUD will never agree to any Palestinian state west of the Jordan river, that is why they make it impossible.

But that is exactly what Oren is doing.

That the Goldstone Report is accurate in its findings is not in question. Israel carried out war crimes and as a member of the United Nations, Israel must give up those alleged responsible to be brought before the ICC to answer these serious charges. When 320 children are killed in three weeks on the excuse that they were a military threat to a heavily armed force, then the allegation of a war crime must be investigated. It is not an option.

Israel's alleged war crimes in Gaza have nothing whatsoever to do with the National Socialist Party of Germany half a century ago - and to try to divert attention away from the key point in the report's finding, is juvenile nonsense - not diplomacy. Grow up, Mr Oren!