Amos Oz, Israel's best known novelist, is also one of the best known public faces of the secular, semi-socialist Zionist ideals that were prominent in his country's early years. Born in Jerusalem in 1939, he grew up in a right-wing Jewish nationalist environment, imbibing dreams of redemptive violen...

The UN's nuclear watchdog has said traces of uranium taken from the site of an alleged nuclear reactor in Syria were manmade and rejected the Syrian government's claim that it came from an Israeli air strike that destroyed the site in 2007. The report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)...

The denial of a visa to Shahar Peer to enable her to play tennis in Dubai is causing uproar in many quarters, though why it should come as a surprise is hard to fathom. The United Arab Emirates has had an all-encompassing ban on Israelis entering its territory for years, and even goes so far as to p...

The question - from Gaza to Pristina - is whether peace arrives top down or bottom up, whether it's ordinary folk or diplomatic men in suits who do the business. And from an island of strife 45 long years ago is the beginning of a surprising answer. Can we find friendship and understanding between w...

As Israeli leaders tried to break out of their political deadlock yesterday, a senior figure in Tzipi Livni's Kadima party said they would not join an extreme rightwing government led by their rival Binyamin Netanyahu. Kadima won Tuesday's elections by a single seat but is struggling to form a major...

Final results in Israel's general elections were announced today, confirming that the centrist Kadima party of the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, won only one seat more than Binyamin Netanyahu's Likud party. With military and overseas ballots counted, Kadima had 28 seats – far short of the 61 need...

The search for silver linings in the murky cloud of yesterday's Israeli election requires a great effort of the will. There is not much to go on. You could draw comfort from the fact that Likud's Bibi Netanyahu, who thought he was such a dead cert to win a matter of weeks ago, was rejected, albeit n...

This morning my friend Shai, a politics junkie, changed his Facebook status to "It's complicated". He was referring not to his relationship with his wife, but rather to the inconclusive results of the Israeli elections. Right now, no one knows who will lead the next government. Tzipi Livni's Kadima ...

You'd be hard-pressed to find an Israeli who is genuinely enthusiastic about today's national elections. For many, the two frontrunners for prime minister represent a choice between bad and terrible. Tzipi Livni, the Kadima leader, is widely viewed as a decent but untested candidate with a very unim...

Barely a few paces from the Egyptian border stands a large white tent, fashioned from plastic sheeting and pockmarked with jagged shrapnel holes. Inside, as in the hundreds of identical tents dotted to the left and right, is a scene of energy and illicit industriousness: a dozen Palestinian smuggler...