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Naim Zidane, reported the Telegraph last week, is a 70 year old Palestinian who all his life has worked in a vineyard owned by the Italian priests at the West Bank Salesian monastery of Cremisan, near Beit Jala, not far from Bethlehem. They've been working together as a community for 120 years. But soon, it appears, the Israeli security barrier will drag this last West Bank vineyard into the Israeli side of the wall, just as they have ripped away the livelihoods of thousands of other West Bank Palestinians with the closing off of many olive groves over the past few years.

Meanwhile, last night, they once again attacked civilian infrastructure in another sovereign state, Lebanon, closing Beirut airport with rocket attacks, in reprisals against a geurilla organization, Hezbollah, sponsored and many say, I gather, controlled by a third, Syria, for kidnapping two Israeli military personnel. And in the past few days seventy Palestinians and one Israeli, including, as always, mostly civilians, and with them lots of children, have been killed in Israeli incursions into the largest concentration camp on the planet, the Gaza strip, also, it seems, because some of their fellow "countrymen" if Palestine can be called, yet, a country, kidnapped an Israeli soldier who was, presumably, on his way to maim and kill more Palestinians.

I really hesitate to post about Israel. If I am lucky my visitor numbers will rise. But probably at the expense of abuse that seems to be meted out against anyone who says anything negative about Israel. I'm a pacifist. And I understand that things have been difficult, shall we say, in that part of the world for several decades. I believe, I think, in a two state solution, not because I support Israel - if Israel hadn't carved itself out of the desert in the first half of the twentieth century I certainly wouldn't be creating it now. But it exists, and as a pragmatist, I believe there are a whole load of peace-loving Israelis, who arrived there and brought their families up there, hoping for some kind of peaceful co-existence with those who also viewed that land as part of their history and we should work for that peaceful co-existence.

But can you imagine the uproar there would have been if, say, the US military had gone about searching for those two of their soldiers, Kristian Menchaca and Thomas Tucker, who were kidnapped by allegedly al-Qaeda linked insurgents in Iraq, by killing civilians and bombing civilian infrastructure there? Like the battle of Falluja? Despite all my misgivings about the US government's lack of respect for the rule of law, I cannot for the life of me see why Israel gets away with these things, almost unremarked upon.

Our seeming collective myopia disgusts me - note to any hardcore Zionists about to yell at me - not Israel per se, but us, who seem to let this violence trickle through in the inside pages of newspapers and down in the bottom half of the news hour, with hardly a mention, either to condemn, or to discuss solutions. Maybe this latest attack on the civilian infrastructure of a country that in recent years, despite the upheavals caused by the death of President Rafik Hariri a while back, has been getting itself back on its feet, will refocus attention on what's going on in the area.

Punishment attacks are the weapons of a desperate regime. They are disgusting. Against the rule of law. People who support, as I do, a two state solution (though I have to say with deep, deep misgivings about the carving out of settlements whenever it suits them leaving the West Bank looking like a land strafed with bomb craters like the Somme battlefield) will eventually lose sympathy and wonder what it is we actually support - which ones are the murdering terrorists. Because terrorism is exactly what's been going on in Gaza; state sponsored terrorism, and state sponsored theft as in the case of Naim Zidane's employers' vineyard.

And I for one am losing patience with it. Whatever the hurdles, whatever the attitudes of those they feel are ranged against them, Israel can be the "better man" in its response, respecting the rule of law. When I was young, I just about remember Entebbe - we were I think in Kenya at the time. We thought the surgical precision of Israeli special forces when they wanted to be was second to none in the world. Maybe that was naive (I was only seven I think and soldierly antics were exciting, not threatening), but it seems to me they have become little more than the terrorists they condemn. And if we lose patience with the situation, if we give up hoping for a peaceful, adult, settlement, then I would imagine that Israel's death throes could be as bloody as its birth-pangs. And we will not care, because we'll have grown used to the bloodshed, and really have stopped trying to work out who are the good guys or not.

Spotted an interesting piece on BBC News tonight about Liverpool:

All very interesting. In 1793 there were some banking collapses in London and an important bank in Liverpool went bust as a consequence. There was literally not enough cash about to oil the wheels, or perhaps rather fill the sails, of the burgeoning trade of the city. The council went to ask for a loan from the Bank of England but it was refused. So it took more radical action. They petitioned for a local Act of Parliament "...to enable thee Common Council of the Town of Liverpool in the Coutnty of Lancaster on behalf of and on account of the Corporation of the said Town to issue negotiable notes for a limited time and to a limited amount."

For two years the city issued its own currency on the creditworthiness of the city and its citizens and traders, until the financial storms rocking the global trade of which Liverpool was emerging as the centre calmed down.

On Thursday "The Insider" (a laughable conceit of sniping from behind anonymity mostly at people trying their best to do some good in local politics) in the Oxford Mail complained that a Green councillor had not updated his blog for a few months, describing a blog as a "self important forum to tell people what you have been up to".

Until I got into this I was extremely skeptical myself about it. And I did think blogging was a bit of onanistic self-promotion that probably nobody would ever read. Of course the Insiders gives the lie to that suggestion - since he, or she, obviously does follow them sometimes. We've seen how instant news from ordinary people on the scene - long before the news crews could get there - gave us insights into the July bombings, the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the war in Iraq direct from a chap in Baghdad. How the BBC and other news networks are paying people for their camera phone eye-witness reports and images and so on.

All one can reasonably conclude is that it is in fact the media running scared. Blogging offers an opportunity for people to air their opinions for others to find and read. It threatens the monopoly of the "Fleet Street" scribblers in holding our attention for a few precious minutes every day. And of course they do it for money - whether the journalist or commentator getting paid, to the media giant continuing to attract advertising - if we all got our opinions from each other (and they're no less valid - often it seems more honest and truthful than opinion journalists in my experience) instead of from the self-important scribbler in a newspaper or television office, they have little else of worth to us.

Finally running scared of the power of the web are we, "Insider"?

"We are the only party willing to come into office committed to controlling our own power." These were the words of Alan Beith, now our Deputy Leader, speaking at the Party Conference of 1991. They are the very heart of what Liberalism is all about. They would be recognised, not just by British Liberals, not just by twentieth-century Liberals, but by Liberals in all countries and in all times as what Oliver Cromwell used to call 'the root of the matter'.

One of the reasons why it is so hard for parties to understand each other is that they have their philosophies about different things. Traditional Conservatism was largely about property. Traditional Socialism was largely about class. Liberalism is and remains largely about power.

Chapter 2 - Controlling Power, from "An Intelligent Person's Guide to Liberalism", Conrad Russell, 1999

Looking back on Conrad's words after a further eight years' Labour government and at the personalities that have bubbled to the surface of the modern Conservative party in an attempt to counter Labour's hegemony, I think we would want to change his characterization of those two parties. They have both become about power too.

Not just one Ming, but a whole team of them!

But Conrad means that Liberals are about the careful control of executive power, ensuring that it never oversteps the mark into authoritarianism, that as much as possible it respects the negative liberty of individuals to do as they please in their lives short of harming others. Both the Conservative and Labour parties are now largely obsessed with how to attain power, consolidate it, hold onto it, and wield it. The leaderships of both parties have become presidential and autocratic. Policy formation appears to pay only lip service to ordinary members and has to be vetted, then vetoed or announced personally by the leadership as part of their great guiding "vision".

Nothing makes me more nauseous, frankly, about contemporary British politics than this cult of the "dear leader" - and I'm afraid that the sight of all the blue stockings clapping and singing along to Jimmy Cliff last week was a supreme example! Nothing makes me more worried about the future of our basic freedoms to live as we choose as far as possible than the sight of these great visionaries with a plan for the country, and by extension its people, us, and their adoring crowds of followers. The Nuremberg Rally meets Top of the Pops!

It would be fair to say, of course, that we have always had big personalities in Number 10. But just as growing wealth, technology, travel and so on have given people more freedoms and more choices, it is easy to forget just how difficult communication was only a generation ago compared with today. Mobile phones were barely around during Mrs Thatcher's rule, the internet merely a military-academic project, indeed computers themselves a millionth fraction of what they are today. Yet the more connected we are, the greater our choices of with whom we might associate, learn and collaborate, the more our political leaders are there, in our face, every day, announcing what they think is good for us. And somehow we are all the more apathetic, all the more dependent on them for it. This cannot be progress.

And so I for one do not want a Liberal leadership to be a facsimile of these statist behemoths. Sure, we need an individual whom people can identify as the person most likely to be taking the taxi to the palace in the event of a Lib Dem election victory, but he or she should be no more than a primus inter pares, chairman of the cabinet rather than president for life (even if that life has been short in Tory circles lately), and should be the embodiment of what we would want a Liberal leader to be, which to my mind is quite the opposite of the sort of Labour and Tory leaders we have seen in the last decade. And we have to sell that idea, not try to make our leader pretend to be otherwise just to compete with what we don't want him or her to be!

We should have a publicly visible leadership team. And I don't just mean Ming and his chosen team, such as Ed Davey and Chris Rennard or whoever. But I mean a team put in place by and accountable to different constituencies in the party. One from the parliamentary group, one from our councillors or our LGA group to reflect that we are about localism and devolution, one from each of our devolved assembly groups (though not necessarily the relevant assembly group leader), and one or more put there directly by the membership, or by different groups from the membership even - one GLD, one LDYS, one WLD, one EMLD and so on and one, preferably no more than that, from the party administration. And we should strive to give them all pretty well equal public exposure on the notion that they will be the core of a Lib Dem executive in government dedicated to dispersing power and not centralizing it.

If this sounds an awful lot like the existing Federal Executive, you'd be wrong. The latter would retain responsibility for running the party machinery which would in turn still be responsible for the management of policy formulation and so on. What I am talking about is a group of spokespeople, not necessarily in or from parliament, who represent the core areas of our "narrative" and who would be expected to take on significant jobs in that first Liberal government. This would be more like the Swiss Federal Executive, with everyone having their own brief, and with one of their number elected as chair and prospective head of the government periodically.

Gordon Brown has no real idea what a "government of all the talents" is whilst he himself remains, Shelob like, controlling everything from the centre. Let's show him what it could look like, from a Liberal perspective.

...the Standards Board and the Adjudication Panel for England.

I have few doubts that much of what Mr Morshead says about Ken is true...Ken's jibes 'endanger' democracy.

He is abrasive, has a habit of opening mouth before engaging his brain, and as a result upsets people. But for God's sake who created a system in which a quango could set aside the electorate's democratic decision? And it's worth remembering that in Ken's case at least, his is the most democratic system of election for a single position we have in this country so far.

But Ken's is just one of hundreds of cases every year where this body of unelected gamekeeper, judge, juror and executioner rolled into one hold in the balance peoples' political fortunes.

Surcharging, which the system was intended to replace, was indeed iniquitous. To suffer potentially the loss of everything for what might have been a horrible mistake seemed harsh. But in practice, was anyone ever surcharged if a hearing found they had made an honest mistake as opposed to having been genuinely corrupt or recklessly negligent? I doubt it.

What has replaced it is a system based on tittle-tattle where vexatious claims can be used to put local politicians effectively in suspense for months, often thus far at least with no prospect of even the basic right to expect your costs covered when the claim is disproven - and in some cases this must have come perilously close to the bankruptcy of surcharging anyway...despite having WON your case!

We have a system for getting rid of politicians if we don't like the way they behave, for example if we think their boorishness outweighs their effectiveness in doing the job they were elected to. It may not be perfect. But it does not rely on a kangaroo court of appointed placepeople that has little respect for natural justice. It is in the gift of us all. It's called the next election. If you don't like him, don't vote for him. It's that simple.

If anything threatens to endanger public confidence in local democracy it is that the Adjudication Panel can stick two fingers up at the electorate.