Pathways for Mutual Respect Interactive

Mahmoud Abbas 'not ready to negotiate' after Israel announces 1,600 new homes for East Jerusalem

The Palestinians pulled out of a new round of indirect peace talks last night, even before they had begun, as a protest at Israel's decision to announce approval for hundreds of new homes in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem.

The decision to pull out, announced in Cairo by Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, represents a major setback to months of diplomacy by the US administration and comes after the US vice-president, Joe Biden, delivered an unusually strong rebuke to Israel.

Amr Moussa said he had been told by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that even this low-key process of so-called "proximity talks" could not start unless Israel stopped expanding its settlements.

"The Palestinian side is not ready to negotiate under the present circumstances," Moussa said.

Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not held direct negotiations since Israel's war in Gaza last year. The White House had won agreement on Monday from the two sides to begin the indirect talks, hoping they would lead to face-to-face meetings.

The Palestinians had insisted there would be no direct talks unless Israel halted all settlement expansion, in line with the demands of the US administration and the roadmap, which remains the framework of peace talks.

But Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, leading a rightwing coalition government, offered only a temporary, partial curb to new building.

Then, on Tuesday, hours after Biden met Israeli leaders, the Israeli interior ministry announced approval for 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. All settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.

Israel's opposition Kadima party said it is planning a no-confidence vote in the prime minister in parliament for "destroying" the Biden visit.

Yesterday, Biden emerged from talks with Abbas in Ramallah, on the occupied West Bank, and repeated his criticisms of the timing and substance of Israel's announcement. "It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them," he said.

"The decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust, the trust that we need right now in order to begin … profitable negotiations."

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said the Palestinians appreciated "the strong statement of condemnation" by the US administration.

Eli Yishai, Israel's interior minister, apologised for the timing of the announcement, admitting that it had caused Biden "real embarrassment".

Leading moderate Muslim cleric and an advocate of dialogue between civilisations

Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, who has died aged 81 of a heart attack while in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, used his position as one of Islam's leading spiritual authorities to champion Islamic moderation worldwide. In 1996, the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, had appointed Tantawi grand imam of the Al-Azhar mosque and head of the Al-Azhar University in Cairo, Sunni Islam's pre-eminent centre of learning, a position he held until his death. He shared platforms with the Prince of Wales and, in 2008, spoke at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on the value of dialogue between civilisations.

At the same time, he provoked a fierce backlash from Islamic hardliners, not least for his condemnation of the niqab, or full-face veil, a position he broadcast widely last year during the debate over its prohibition in France. In 2009, he banned women wearing the full veil from entering Al-Azhar's campus.

Crucially, he described the 9/11 attacks as "acts of terror directed against innocent people", and went further. Countries harbouring terrorists, he insisted, should be "punished and held in contempt". He told a conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2003: "Extremism is the enemy of Islam." He condemned suicide bombings, telling the press: "If it is against... women, children and old men, then it is not resistance but infidelity."

In November 2008, there were calls in Egypt for his resignation after he shook hands with Israel's president, Shimon Peres, at a UN-sponsored interfaith conference in New York. He initially astonished reporters by claiming that he was unaware that it was Peres approaching him with outstretched hand. Subsequently, he accused those who published the pictures of the handshake as being a group of lunatics. He then fanned the controversy by saying that if any Israeli officials wanted to visit Al-Azhar, he would welcome them.

The following month a Muslim Brotherhood MP, Hamdi Hassan, complained that "Tantawi acts like a government employee. He wants to please the regime. He does not represent himself, however, but Al-Azhar and Muslims as a whole. Tantawi has a habit of insulting those who disagree with him and he offends Al-Azhar in the process." Tantawi then tried but failed to placate his critics by demanding that Israel end tyrannical practices against the Palestinians.

Tantawi had sparked intense debate in the Islamic world early in 2002 when he chaired a conference in Alexandria alongside Jewish rabbis. The conference was attended by the then archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey. He had provoked similar anger when he met Israel Lau, the chief rabbi of Israel, at Al-Azhar in 1997.

As grand mufti of Egypt from 1986 to 1996, he outraged hardline Muslims by ruling that fixed interest rates on bank deposits are halal (allowed), in the face of a traditional Islamic consensus that all interest rates are haram (forbidden). His critics accused him of acting as a puppet of Mubarak's increasingly oppressive regime. Although Al-Azhar had been founded as a Fatimid seat of learning in 970, and later converted to Sunnism when Saladin expelled the Fatimids in 1171, under President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was in constant conflict with the hardline Muslim Brotherhood, all Al-Azhar appointments were made by the government and continue to be. Tatwani is likely to be replaced by his deputy, Mohammed Wasel, until the president has appointed a new head.

When Prince Charles visited Egypt in March 2006, shortly after the furore involving Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Tantawi quoted the prince telling the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in 1993: "It is odd in many ways that misunderstandings between Islam and the west should exist. For that which binds our worlds together is so much more powerful than that which divides us." Tantawi told the Kuala Lumpur conference: "I do not subscribe to the idea of a clash of civilisations. People of different beliefs should co-operate and not get into senseless conflicts and animosity."

He was born in the village of Selim ash-Sharqiyah in the municipality of Tama, Sohag, before joining a religious institution in Alexandria. After graduating from Al-Azhar's faculty of religious studies in 1958, he went on to teach. In 1966 he was awarded a PhD in Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad, Islam's second source after the Qur'an itself) and Tafsir, exegesis of the Qur'an. By 1980, he was the head of the Tafsir department of the University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia, a position he was to hold until 1984.

In 1986, when he had been dean of the faculty of Arab and religious studies for a year, he became grand mufti of Egypt, a position he held for a decade until appointed grand imam. He is survived by two sons and a daughter.

• Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, cleric, born 28 October 1928; died 10 March 2010

Israeli spymaster with a key role in Africa and the Middle East

Known as "the man with the suitcase" and a master of disguise, the British-born Israeli spy-master and diplomat David Kimche, who has died aged 82 of cancer, was renowned in clandestine circles from Zanzibar to Tehran. He often slipped in and out of countries, leaving profound political changes in his wake, and more recently became active in Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives.

Officially Kimche was deputy head of the Israeli intelligence and counterterrorism agency, the Mossad, until 1980, then director-general of Israel's foreign ministry for seven years. Yet this only hints at his influence. He was largely responsible for Israel's diplomatic and military overtures to Africa from the late 1950s, nurtured the young Idi Amin and secretly visited Arab leaders in Morocco and Egypt. He prepared the groundwork for the Camp David accords (1978) and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of the following year. Other involvements included Israel's ill-fated plan to install a Christian potentate in Beirut in 1982, and the Iran-Contra scandal of 1985.

Kimche was born in London to a Swiss family. After reputedly working for British intelligence during the second world war, he emigrated to Palestine in 1946 and fought in the 1948 war of independence. He then took a PhD in international relations from Jerusalem's Hebrew University.

In 1953 he was invited to join the Mossad. Brilliant and urbane, if somewhat detached, he was posted to Africa and Asia, where he masqueraded as a British businessman.

When Egyptian pressure barred Israel from the conference of non-aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, Kimche and his colleagues responded by cultivating ties with non-Arab states bordering the Middle East. He compared Israel's struggle against imperialism with Africa's yearning for freedom. Yet sentiment and idealism were not his only weapons. He brought Kenyan Mau Mau rebels to Israel for military training, established national security agencies across the continent and helped Ghana spy on its ally, Egypt. He also located Mossad listening stations in the Horn of Africa and allegedly backed coups, including the overthrow of the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1964.

Numbered among Kimche's presidential allies, and often friends, were Ivory Coast's Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Chad's Ngarta Tombalbaye, Nigeria's Ibrahim Babangida and Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Mariam, enabling thousands of Israeli kibbutz workers to initiate medical, agricultural and environmental projects across Africa. Thousands more Africans studied at Israeli educational institutions. Israel in turn won blocking votes in the UN.

Kimche was disappointed when 34 African nations cut relations after the 1967 six-day war and the 1973 Yom Kippur war. He nonetheless maintained unofficial channels that served Israel well when the diplomatic tide turned after 1991.

As the Mossad's chief recruiting officer, Kimche trained agents, and he retained a proactive approach when invited by Yitzhak Shamir, then foreign minister, to become director-general of his department. He armed Maronite clans in Lebanon's escalating civil war in the 1970s, helped engineer Yasser Arafat's departure from Beirut in 1982, and supplied Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala with captured PLO weapons later that year.

But his masterplan began to go awry in September 1982, with the assassination of the newly elected Maronite president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, and the Sabra and Chatilla massacre that took place shortly afterwards. He negotiated a US-mediated treaty with Lebanon, signed in May 1983, although Beirut abrogated the agreement within a year.

In 1985 he told the US national security adviser Robert McFarlane that moderate elements in Iran might help free Americans captured in Lebanon. To encourage this process, Israel agreed to sell arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. The profits would sponsor CIA-backed Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua.

Initially Iran received hundreds of anti-tank missiles, and one of the hostages, the Rev Benjamin Weir, was freed. Further deliveries were botched, however, and another hostage, the CIA agent William Buckley, was killed. Kimche was blamed and relieved of involvement. He was also implicated in "running" Jonathan Pollard, a US naval officer arrested in 1985 for spying on America.

After leaving the ministry in 1987, Kimche pursued business interests but maintained a public role. In 1997 he co-founded the International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace, known as the Copenhagen group. The following year he protested against the slowing down of the peace process by the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu. He berated Israeli leaders for treating Arab citizens unequally and particularly criticised his former protege Ariel Sharon. In 2003 he co-launched a campaign promoting Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and later that year was revealed as a key architect of the Geneva accords, the unofficial Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative.

Kimche chaired the Glocal Forum, a Zurich-based institute that addresses the challenges of globalisation, and was president of the Israel Council for Foreign Relations. His books include The Six-Day War: Prologue and Aftermath (1971), and The Last Option: The Quest for Peace in the Middle East (1988, updated 1992). To the end, he remained devoted to the belief that Israelis and Palestinians could co-exist peacefully. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and four children.

• David Kimche, intelligence executive and diplomat, born 1928; died 8 March 2010

Leader among Tripoli officials slapped with Europe-wide travel ban as relations with Berne take turn for worse

In the bad old days before Muammar Gaddafi cleaned up his act, international isolation and confrontation with the west were a normal state of affairs for Libya. But now the Jamahiriya – the "state of the masses" – is mired in an embarrassing crisis with Switzerland that has escalated into a Europe-wide travel ban for the country's leaders and top officials.

From Gaddafi downwards, no senior Libyan is allowed to visit the Schengen area, the 25-country passport-free zone that includes most EU member states, as well as non-EU Switzerland.

The trouble began in 2008 over the arrest in Geneva of Gaddafi's son Hannibal on charges, later dropped, of mistreating two domestic employees. Libya retaliated by arresting two Swiss men on visa charges, cutting oil supplies and withdrawing billions of dollars from Swiss banks. A controversial public apology by the Swiss president failed to end the affair.

Switzerland struck another blow by banning 188 named Libyans, in effect the country's entire ruling elite. Other Schengen members were required to follow suit. Italy protested, suggesting it valued its relations with Libya, its main energy supplier, more highly than its Alpine neighbour. In mid-February Libya hit back by stopping issuing visas for Schengen nationals.

Diplomats say a solution would probably involve dropping the Swiss blacklist in exchange for the freedom of Max Goeldi, the remaining Swiss national in prison in Tripoli. But there is no deal in sight.

Britain, ironically, is unaffected because it has an opt-out from Schengen and controls its own borders. Given its past, deeply-troubled relations with Libya, from support for the IRA to the Lockerbie bombing, there is relief in Whitehall that the UK is not involved. No one wants lucrative business opportunities to be lost because of another overreaction by the famously mercurial colonel.

The problem was sufficiently worrying for Libya's man in London, Omar Jelban, to convene a rare press conference at the Knightsbridge offices of the people's bureau (embassy) to "clarify" Tripoli's position. "It is now difficult for any EU citizen to come to Libya," he said on Tuesday, insisting that Libya had been forced to take reciprocal action because of Swiss bad faith. "We are ready to resolve this problem with the Swiss. This is a bilateral issue that has nothing to do with other European countries."

Libya wants arbitration to settle the dispute. Spain, which holds the EU presidency, is doing its bit. So is the European commission, which spent months trying to defuse an earlier crisis over Bulgarian medics convicted of trying to infect Libyan children with HIV.

This latest affair shows alarming signs of getting out of hand. The Hannibal problem was compounded when the Swiss voted in a referendum to ban minarets. Last month, Gaddafi used a speech on the birthday of the prophet Muhammad to call for "jihad" against Switzerland and to lambast it as an "infidel and obscene state which destroys mosques". Clarification quickly followed that he didn't mean a real war but rather a "struggle" on many fronts. But more damage had been done by his theatrics.

"The leader's speech reflects the anger of the Muslim people against the Swiss decision to ban minarets," explained Jelban. "This was seen as an insult to their religious beliefs and symbols. There are many ways of jihad." Libya then announced a total trade and economic boycott of Switzerland.

Tripoli then opened a second front, after a US state department spokesman asked about the threat to the Swiss, made a flippant remark about Gaddafi's speeches "not necessarily (making) a lot of sense". On Tuesday, Tripoli got the public apology it had demanded from Washington after bluntly warning US oil companies that billions of dollars worth of investments could be at risk.

"I should have focused solely on our concern about the term 'jihad', which has since been clarified by the Libyan government," said the chastened spokesman, PJ Crowley. "I regret that my comments have become an obstacle to further progress in our bilateral relationship."

Gaddafi-watchers say the key to understanding these rows with the Swiss and the Americans is his acute sense of personal honour – the slight to his son, his family and to himself. In reflective moments, Libya's diplomats must sometimes hark back to simpler times before their leader abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction and came in from the cold.

Openness and transparency exact a price in terms of public confidence in institutions, a price that may eventually lead to a reaction

What caught my eye in today's papers was not ex-M15 head Eliza Manningham-Buller's admission that she was ignorant of the Bush administration's 9/11 torture policy, welcome though that was. No, it was Lizzy Davies's report that light is finally being shown on a far more shameful chapter in French history.

You probably know a little about it, as most French people do – and will now know more because of the acclaimed new film, La Rafle du Vel d'Hiv – The Winter Velodrome Raid. Jacques Chirac apologised for what happened in 1995, but it has always been murky.

The film tells the story of the 1942 round-up by French police of 13,000 French Jews and their dispatch to their deaths, most of them, in German concentration camps. They were held initially at the sports site in the Paris suburbs; hence the film's name.

There's no point in being smug about this. The story of the German occupation of France is complex, full of heroism as well as shades of villainy and complicity – as director Rose Bosch shows in her film.

No, the question is one of transparency, of confronting our own uncomfortable past, collective and personal. It's never easy. France buried the occupation after the liberation of 1944, as Spain did its own civil war horrors – until very recently.

Michael White will be taking part in a live edition of our Politics Weekly podcast in Manchester on 16 March: Click here for tickets

Marcel Ophüls's The Sorrow and the Pity attempted to address crucial issues, including collaboration and antisemitism ("better Hitler than [the French Jewish politician Léon] Blum" was a slogan of the 30s), in 1969. It was banned on French TV until 1981.

Would the British have done any better if occupied? Do we sufficiently confront our own past? Tricky questions, as last night's Manningham-Buller speech to a meeting in the House of Lords underlines.

"We did lodge a protest," she said without further elaboration.

The Americans are our allies and we were facing a terrorist threat whose scope and power we could not easily judge. The Bush White House opted for the doubtful expediency of waterboarding and other practices, many of which must be regarded as torture.

What did we know and when did we know it, are questions the Guardian and others have been asking.

Similar dilemmas were agonised over the western alliance with Stalin in 1941-45. By then enough was known about the Great Terror and other horrors to make the partnership an act of uneasy expediency.

Ah yes, but what about our own crimes? 20th century dictators sometimes claimed only to be taking the racist and imperialist fantasies of the "liberal democracies" to a more robust conclusion because they were in a hurry to catch up. Alas, there is some truth in it.

Did we not learn during the Haiti earthquake that vicious reparations (for the loss of slave property and land) imposed by republican France helped cripple the island state for most of its history? What about British troops' conduct during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya? And in the bloody retreat from Aden, now Yemen, in 1968, about which the Times has been reporting lately?

By coincidence this week has seen two stabs at important revisionism come to my attention. On Radio 4's Today programme an Indian politician and historian called Jaswant Singh discussed his book on Muhammed Ali Jinnah with expat British writer William Dalrymple. The founder of Pakistan has been "horrifyingly caricatured" by history, according to Dalrymple.

I don't know the truth of the matter, but had always gone along with the consensus that made Gandhi and Nehru the heroes of Indian independence in 1947, and the intractable Jinnah the bad guy who insisted on a separate Muslim state, now two, where federalism would have been a better solution.

Singh, who must be a Sikh (millions were forced to flee Pakistani Punjab), says otherwise, that the usual mixture of miscalculation, impatience (not least bankrupt Britain's to quit India), and personalities all played their part. Needless to say his book has been attacked in Hindu India and its author ostracised.

Our version comes from Freedom at Midnight, with which Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy, cooperated, Dalrymple explained. It is also the basis for Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning biopic Gandhi, where General Reginald Dyer (Edward Fox) gets a kicking for his role in the 1919 Amritsar massacre.

There was a lot of trouble at home and in India about that. The official inquiry said 379 demonstrators were shot by British troops, 200 injured. Indians put the figure at 1,000 dead, 500 injured. The issue is unresolved except in the sense that it contributed to the loss of authority which was fast destroying the Raj.

The second controversy worth checking out is far vaster in scale: the Turkish massacres of Armenians within the tottering Ottoman empire in 1915 that Norman Stone, brilliant and provocative as ever, asserts was not genocide. Readers take him to task on the need to confront the past today.

Brilliant he may be, but I suspect that Stone, an ex-Oxford history professor now teaching in Ankara, is overstating his case for the defence for an ethnic cleansing policy in which an alleged 1.5 million people died.

But the issue reverberates today because the US Congress and the EU are threatening a major rift with the key Nato ally in the region by pressing genocidal guilt on the Middle East's only successful, secular Muslim state – just as it totters between east and west, Islam and modernity.

Just so Muhammed Ali Jinnah's reputation. India heads for 10% annual growth and superpower status while Pakistan is – to quote an Anglo-Asian playwright – "sodomised by religion" and other problems. Divided Kashmir, part of the legacy of 1947, remains a focus of profound tensions expressed in 2008's Mumbai bombs.

And little old us? My working assumption is that Britain has confronted its imperial demons better than France, partly because history was kinder, partly because the Anglo-Saxons have a stronger instinct for what we now call openness and transparency.

So it is hard to imagine Pontecorvo's great 1966 film The Battle of Algiers doing as well at the Cannes film festival so close to the Algerian war it brutally depicts (torture and all) as the Oscar-winning Hurt Locker and films like it have done so close to the Iraq war. Indeed, it was banned for five years.

But openness and transparency exact a price in terms of public confidence in institutions, a price that may eventually lead to a reaction. So my other hunch is that in Britain we have reached a stage where we may just be overdoing the masochism strategy, the self-flagellation, in our dissection of this and many aspects of public policy. The destruction of trust is corrosive.

In matters of knowledge, complicity and cover-ups involving sexual abuse of children, popes, past and present, have a great deal more to account for than Manningham-Buller, the current pope's brother too judging by today's reports from that Catholic boarding school in Bavaria.

But the Catholic church knows how to take the long view, keep things in perspective and play hardball when it has to. That must be why it's still standing.

Visiting vice-president seeks to keep peace process on rails after Israel says it will expand East Jerusalem settlement

The US vice-president, Joe Biden, has said the Palestinians deserve a "viable" independent state with contiguous territory, hoping to reassure them of America's support after Israel announced plans to expand a Jewish neighbourhood on occupied Palestinian land in East Jerusalem.

After a day of meetings with Palestinian leaders, Biden repeated his strong condemnation of the plan and said the US was committed to brokering a final peace deal in the Middle East – something that has eluded successive American presidents.

"The United States pledges to play an active as well as a sustainable role in these talks," Biden said. He stressed the Palestinians needed an independent state that is "viable and contiguous", meaning the territory should not be broken up by Israeli settlements and sending a signal that the US expects Israel to withdrawal from the West Bank as part of a deal.

Standing alongside the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Biden urged both sides to not to act in a way "that inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of talks".

"It's incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them," he said.

Abbas said Israel's continued expansion of settlements, especially in Jerusalem, threatened the negotiations before they got off the ground.

"We call on Israel to cancel these decisions," Abbas said. "I call on the Israeli government not to lose a chance to make peace. I call on them to halt settlement building and to stop imposing facts on the ground, and to give the efforts of the Obama administration and Senator Mitchell the chance to succeed."

Earlier an Israeli cabinet minister apologised for the timing of the settlement announcement but not for its substance. "This should not have happened during a visit by the US vice-president," the welfare minister, Isaac Herzog, told Army Radio. "This is a real embarrassment and now we have to express our apologies for this serious blunder."

Aides to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu said he had been blindsided by the project's announcement by the interior ministry, run by Shas, an ultra-orthodox nationalist party that is a key member of his governing coalition.

The approval of the plan cast a cloud over Biden's visit, just hours after he pledged strong support for the Israeli government.

It was announced a day after the Israeli defence ministry confirmed 112 apartments would be built in Beitar Illit, a settlement on the occupied West Bank.

Ramat Shlomo, built 15 years ago, is on land captured in the West Bank in 1967 and annexed to Israel in a move not recognised by the international community.

Israel's interior minister, Eli Yishai, who heads the Shas, said the timing was coincidental. "There was certainly no intention to provoke anyone and certainly not to come along and hurt the vice-president of the United States," Yishai told Israel's Channel One television.

"Final approval [for the project] will take another few months. I agree that the timing [of the announcement] should have been in another two or three weeks."

Richard Purssell describes 'shocking event' in Haifa court on first day of civil suit brought by Corrie family against Israel

A British witness told a court today about how he had watched an Israeli military bulldozer run over and kill the American activist Rachel Corrie while she was trying to stop Palestinians' homes being demolished in Gaza.

Richard Purssell, who was also a volunteer activist in Rafah at the time, seven years ago, described the "shocking and dramatic event" in an Israeli court in Haifa on the first day of a civil suit brought by Corrie's family against the Israeli state.

Twenty-three-year-old Corrie, from Olympia, Washington, in the US, went to Gaza for peace activism reasons at a time when there was intense conflict between the Israeli military and the Palestinians.

The Corrie family lawyer, Hussein Abu Hussein, said he would argue that her death was due either to gross negligence by the Israeli military or that it was intended. If the Israeli state were found responsible, the family would press for damages.

Purssell, a Briton, now working as a landscape gardener, said he volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to witness events in the occupied Palestinian territories for himself. In Rafah he had been hoping to prevent the Israeli military from demolishing Palestinian homes. The organisation was strictly non violent, he said. "Our role was to support Palestinian non-violent resistance."

On the day of her death, 16 March 2003, Corrie was with seven other activists, including Purssell, in Rafah, close to the Israeli-guarded border with Egypt. They saw an Israeli military armoured Caterpillar D9 bulldozer approaching the house of a Palestinian doctor.

Purssell described how the bulldozer approached at a fast walking pace, its blade down and gathering a pile of soil in its path. When the bulldozer was 20 metres from the house Corrie, who like the others was wearing an orange fluorescent jacket, climbed on to the soil in front of it and stood "looking into the cab of the bulldozer".

"The bulldozer continued to move forward," Purssell said. "Rachel turned to come back down the slope. The earth is still moving and as she nears the bottom of the pile something happened which causes her to fall forward. The bulldozer continued to move forward and Rachel disappeared from view under the moving earth."

The bulldozer continued forward four metres as the activists began to run forward and shout at the driver.

"It passed the point where Rachel fell, it stopped and reversed back along the track it first made. Rachel was lying on the earth," Purssell said. "She was still breathing." Corrie was severely injured and died shortly afterwards.

The Israeli military says it bears no responsibility for Corrie's death. A month after her death the military said an investigation had determined its troops were not to blame; the driver of the bulldozer had not seen her and had not intentionally run her over. It accused Corrie and the ISM of behaviour that was "illegal, irresponsible and dangerous".

Hussein will argue at the Haifa district court that witness evidence shows that the soldiers did see Corrie at the scene, with other activists well before the incident, and that they could have arrested her or removed her from the area before there was any risk of injury.

Before the hearing began, Craig Corrie, Rachel's father, said the family had been on a "seven-year search for justice in Rachel's name". He added: "I think when the truth comes out about Rachel the truth will not wound Israel, the truth is the start of making us heal."

Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, said the family was still waiting for the credible, transparent investigation Israel first promised regarding her daughter's death. "I just want to say to Rachel that our family is here today trying to just do right by her and I hope that she will be very proud of the effort we are making," she said. She said the family had met the staff of US vice-president Joe Biden on Tuesday to talk about the case.

Three other witnesses, two more Britons and an American, who were all at the scene in Rafah when Corrie was killed will give evidence at the Israeli court. It is not clear if any Israeli military officials will speak.

The hearing is scheduled to run for at least two weeks.

Parallels between the Na'vi and oppressed people in the Arab world are flimsy – and imply the need for a foreign saviour

The gigantic blue Na'vi of Pandora have captured Egyptianand Arab minds over the past few months. When they were snubbed at Sunday's Oscar ceremony in favour of The Hurt Locker, the Twittersphere and blogs were ablaze with people crying foul. How, they cried, could a politicised movie glorifying war in Iraq win over a film, Avatar, which "so resembles the causes of struggling people"?

The battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker has revealed a great divide in the culture of Egypt and the Arab world, where films that show brutal reality are often shunned in favour of the otherworldly tale of the Na'vi, which had made more than 8m Egyptian pounds (£1m) by mid-February. It is still number four in the Egyptian box office chart.

Egyptians usually dislike films that look into political situations in the region unless there is a direct anti-American angle. Body of Lies is the model for success in winning Egyptian and Arab support. Ridley Scott's film is weak and barely scrapes the surface of the harsh realities in the region, but many Egyptians thought it spoke to the wrongs of the American government's war on terror.

Consequently, there was little that Egyptians liked about The Hurt Locker. To their mind, it was an American pro-war film that did little more than show the greatness of the American soldier. Eman Hashem, an Egyptian women's activist, told me The Hurt Locker is a story that glorifies war and the "struggle" of the United States in the region against the "angry Arab". She was more partial to Avatar.

Others gave similar arguments. On Twitter, dozens of Avatar supporters claimed The Hurt Locker was only getting mentioned in the lead-up to the Oscars because it was about Iraq and "makes Arabs look like terrorists". Sure, there is the opening scene that shows an Iraqi man use his mobile phone to detonate an IED, but this happens in real life. What needs to be understood and what the anti-Hurt Locker camp seems unable to realise is that this is not a film about Iraq but a film that reveals the tragic side of soldierhood.

The Hurt Locker does not glorify war. It is a film about soldiers and the neurotic addiction that war can produce in them. It is essentially an anti-political movie about the hardships war brings on the individual and the family inside and outside the war theatre. Egyptians and Arabs should be commending the ugly truth portrayed by the writer Mark Boal and the director Kathryn Bigelow in their gutsy attempt to show the truth about war.

"Egyptians don't like to see reality on the big screen, this is why films such as Syriana and The Hurt Locker are not popular. Egyptians want an escape," said Mohsen Goma'a, an aspiring filmmaker. But their support for Avatar also misses the mark. They have escaped from reality only to enter a new imaginary world where a film speaks directly to their struggle. "Through Avatar I lived the story of the Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan and Lebanese peoples and the wars waged against them; where the west treats these peoples as if they were the children of the Na'vi" wrote the blogger South Lebanon.

There are numerous short films on YouTube paralleling the stories of the Na'vi and the Palestinians. One Arabic blog argues that Avatar is delivering a message to Americans that is "optimistic and hopeful despite the current situation". What are Americans supposed to be optimistic about? That they are the holders of the world's destiny, much in the same manner that Jake Sully is with the Na'vi? Sully, not the Na'vi, is the hero of the film. He becomes their leader in order for the Na'vi to defend themselves from the vastly superior technology of his former brethren.

Egyptians want something to believe in and Avatar offers a vague picture that is being co-opted into something it isn't. These arguments that Pandora represents the modern Middle East are essentially people pulling an idea out of the sand in order to connect with a very entertaining film. One could see the struggle of the Palestinians and other occupied societies as akin to that of the Na'vi in Avatar, but why would we want to? If Palestinians are dressing in blue and going to the streets in protest to show how connected they are to the fictional people of Pandora, does it not also reveal a stark reality that they would deny: a foreign saviour is needed if they are realise their goal of throwing off the yoke of Israeli occupation?

Intentional or not, the announcement of new settlements in East Jerusalem may push the US into a tougher stance towards Israel

It's not the first time that Israel has stiffed Barack Obama over his attempts to kick-start Middle East peace negotiations. But the sudden, highly inflammatory announcement of plans to build an additional 1,600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem, in the midst of a visit to Israel of US vice-president Joe Biden, was certainly the most brutally contemptuous rebuff so far to American peacemaking.

It may be that Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's rightwing prime minister, was unaware in advance of the provisional decision by a Jerusalem district planning committee, as he claims. But the announcement was promulgated by his interior ministry, which thereby gave it an official stamp of approval. If Netanyahu did not know, then why not?

Despite the evident embarrassment and considerable political damage caused by the decision, Netanyahu has so far made no move to repudiate it. Lesser figures, such as welfare minister Isaac Herzog and Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev were deployed on firefighting duties on Wednesday, dutifully uttering conditional words of contrition. "We have to express our apologies for this serious blunder," Herzog said.

But protestations of innocence by interior minister Eli Yishai, head of the Shas religious party in Netanyahu's coalition and no great advocate of American attempts to forge a two-state peace settlement with the Palestinians, are hard to credit.

"There was certainly no intention to provoke anyone, and certainly not to come along and hurt the vice-president of the United States," Yishai said.

These are weasel words. Is it to be believed that Yishai, like Netanyahu, was unaware of what his own ministry was doing? Did he have no idea the planning decision was pending? Did he, as an experienced politician, not foresee the destructive political implications of this ambush? Like Netanyahu, Yishai presumably regards Jerusalem as Israel's eternal and indivisible capital. Another day on, it seems he was determined to rub Biden's nose in that insupportable idea.

The Americans, until now, have been too polite, or too weak, to say it, but Netanyahu spent most last year deliberately frustrating Obama's pledge to mediate a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict and with it, an end to the Israel-Arab confrontation that has scarred the region for generations. Netanyahu resisted direct talks, rejected a full settlement freeze, flaunted his uncompromising views on Jerusalem, pooh-poohed a Syria opening, and, at the same time, endlessly reiterated his supposed willingness to talk to the Palestinians "without conditions".

Simultaneously, Israel's leader tried, with some success, to shift the US conversation on to Iran, which he says poses an existential threat to his country and the region. All in all, it was an Oscar-standard performance in obfuscation, prevarication and disingenuousness. To the achingly smart, but politically less pugnacious Obama, Netanyahu's behaviour was intellectually insulting. The fact he has put up with it until now may be a measure of Israel's clout in Washington, especially on Capitol Hill.

This could change. Obama's problem, and not just in the Middle East, is that he is liked but not feared. After a first year in office devoid of substantive achievement, Washington insiders say the president must show he is ready to fight, to get down and dirty, to drop his professorial aloofness and get publicly passionate and angry about the things he believes in. At home, this could apply to healthcare reform. Abroad, the new approach may single out Israel-Palestine.

Biden's visit, though reassuring and conciliatory on the surface until the east Jerusalem bombshell dropped, may mark the start of this tougher approach. Many Obama supporters in the US and Europe, and in the post-Cairo Muslim world, will wish it so. The vice-president, whose attack dog qualities were unleashed on the subjects of Russia and Ukraine last year, certainly did not mince his words, once he realised the extent of the insult.

"I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in east Jerusalem," Biden said. "The announcement ... is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel." In the last part of this sentence Biden seems to be suggesting that Netanyahu told him one thing to his face and did another behind his back. Little wonder he kept Israel's first couple waiting for dinner.

It doesn't seem to realise it, but Israel cannot afford to keep on behaving in this disobliging manner towards its friends. Whether it is blatant disregard for international rules concerning the protection of civilian life, as in Gaza; whether it is calculated insults aimed at neighbours, as with Turkey; or whether it is the theft of passports and identities from friendly countries and the lawless assassination of its enemies, as in Dubai, it goes too far.

Now, Netanyahu has deeply angered his country's best and most powerful friend – again. The coming message to Bibi: don't over-reach.

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