A pragmatic path - Extremists block the way to peace as calls grow for two states

Beware the friend who is only trying to help. Not, perhaps, as a rule for life but certainly when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict and the clashes that battle provokes around the world. Often those who think they're doing their bit serve only to make an impossible situation even worse.

- Jonathan Freedland

Last week began with an instructive example, when Gideon Falter, head of the Campaign Against Antisemitism, released a video clip of himself being steered away from one of London's weekly Gaza demonstrations by a police officer on the grounds that: "You are quite openly Jewish, this is a pro-Palestinian march." Falter argued that he had flushed out proof that the Metropolitan police regard the marches as an unsafe environment for visibly Jewish people, even though the Met allows them to go ahead week after week.

Was Britain's Jewish community grateful for this contribution from Falter? Some were troubled by his insistence that he had merely been out and about on a Saturday, when he happened to stumble across the Gaza demo, rather than admitting that he had deliberately set out to make a point. Falter would say he was only trying to help, but there were plenty for whom the whole episode was a headache they didn't need.

All this was relatively small beer compared with the pro-Palestinian demonstrations now spreading across US campuses, where mass protests and permanent solidarity camps have been broken up by sometimes brutal police action. There, too, debate rages.