News stories by Analysis by Jerrold Kessel, page 7

Israel does not object to talks between the West and Iran if the intent is to stop Iran's nuclear programme and as long as Iran does not take advantage of these talks, top level Israeli government sources tell IPS. But the sources go on to reiterate that Israel still expects the international community to act firmly to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

How genuine is Israel's new leadership about peace when the Prime Minister says that he will go a long way towards striving for a settlement with the Palestinians, but purposefully omits to endorse an independent Palestinian state; and, when his foreign minister warns, 'If you want peace, prepare for war', a blunt statement on which the prime minister stays studiously silent?

In the Middle East this week it's all change. In fact, it's all diplomatic stasis. Neither Monday's Arab League summit in Doha nor Tuesday's induction of a new Israeli government in Jerusalem is likely to break or even ease the conflict deadlock that grips the region.

Key issues in conflict between Israelis and Palestinians are all coming to a head. But, even if these immediate issues are resolved, in any event, the conflict itself and an overriding diplomatic paralysis threaten to take long-term hold and to stymie all efforts to move the conflict onto a peace track any time soon.

Throw a stone into troubled waters and you won't see concentric circles rippling out. Many stones have recently been thrown into the muddy waters of the Middle East - the Gaza War, Israel's electoral lurch rightwards and the Arab world setting up stall in advance of the Obama Administration preparing new directions for the region.

Last November, on the day marking the assassination of Israel's peace-making leader Yitzhak Rabin, the now outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Israelis something which, for decades, not even Rabin had dared say - we must end the occupation of the Palestinian territories and return to the 1967 borders.

The obvious objective of the first visit to the Middle East by the Obama administration's U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was to contain the still potentially explosive situation in Gaza following January's Israeli offensive against Hamas, and to rescue the two-state solution policy in face of the emergence of a far-right administration in Jerusalem.

'There's no doubt there's been a huge amount of damage done, including whole sectors of private sector buildings which have been razed to the ground and, in any event, given the numbers of people that have died, I find the conversation about proportionality not really a sensible conversation to have. What we've got to do is to find a way of ensuring this doesn't happen again.' The pointed comment came from former British prime minister Tony Blair, special international envoy to the Middle East, during his first visit to Gaza after Israel's offensive against Hamas.

He's yet to be installed as Israel's prime minister, let alone starting to govern through the customary 100 days of grace, and already Benjamin Netanyahu is being allowed no respite: neither by those whom he envisages as his potential coalition partners nor by the international community, most pertinently the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama.

Israel's outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rode roughshod over those who piously argue that sport and politics ought not to play in the same arena.