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EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Friday called for an immediate end to Israel’s Gaza blockade, as an aid flotilla prepared to set sail for the enclave despite the embargo.
“The continued policy of closure is unacceptable and politically counterproductive,” she said in a statement.
“We would like to reiterate the EU’s call for an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza.”

In spite of this appeal, the government of Cyprus has taken the extraordinary step of preventing members of the European parliament from joining the Freedom Flotilla.
The Cyprus Mail reported today:

Cypriot authorities prevented pro-Palestinian activists, including 30 MPs from nine European countries, from leaving the island yesterday to join a flotilla in international waters, which is on its way to blockaded Gaza.
In addition to issuing an edict banning ships headed for Gaza to set sail from the island’s ports, or dock on the island on their way back, the authorities yesterday forbade any small vessels from leaving Cyprus in case they were on their way to the flotilla of eight ships carrying around 700 peace activists, and 10,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid.

The government denied it bowed to pressure from Israel to put the ban in place.
The European Union guarantees the right of freedom of movement of its citizens within the territory of its member states. Cyprus has been a member of the EU since 2004.
A Tweet @freegazaorg said at about 11AM Eastern:

Twenty have left from Famaghusta, [Turkish controlled] Northern Cyprus, four German MPs, one Swedish MP, all the passengers from Challenger 1. Hedy [Epstein] not going.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reports:

The Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh said Saturday that if Israel behaved like pirates and attacked the international Freedom Flotilla carrying 10,000 tons of aid meant for Gaza, then the Palestinians will have won.
“The flotilla’s message is clear and it will reach the entire world,” Haniyeh said Saturday morning during a press conference held at the Gaza port where the ships were expected to dock.
“The meaning of the flotilla is that the entire world opposes the siege on the Gaza Strip, and if Israel behaves like pirates and sea-terrorists – we will win,” he added.

This is cross-posted at Woodward’s site, War in Context.

Tensions over the content of the final document after a month of negotiations went down to the wire, with diplomats portraying the last few days as a poker game with the United States and Iran each trying to call the other’s bluff so that one might be blamed for the failure of the conference to reach consensus.
In the end, the United States accepted one reference to Israel in the final document, in the section on the Middle East… 

“…having that language in the Mideast section we think sends a really negative political signal,” Mr. Samore said. “It suggests the conference will be designed to single out Israel.” That would decrease the likelihood of such a conference ever happening, he said, which is why the United States insisted in retaining a role as a sponsor.

So that’s the stakes the U.S. was playing for? Trading watered-down language on North Korea and no mention at all of Iran for Israel’s sake? And just for limiting the number of Israel references to one? (In his statement on the document, Obama mentioned Israel twice and Jones six times! Who’s singling who out again?)
This should raise some questions about aligned interests and the burden that Israel plays on U.S. foreign policy. In an NPT forum it spearheads, the U.S. is sacrificing its own policy goals in order to defend an ostensible ally because that ally refuses to sign on to the Treaty at all. There’s supposed to be ‘no daylight,’ but at the NPT, the cracks seem to be chasms.

Obama’s besetting political fault is his automatic adoption of the tone of command, accompanied by a persistent reluctance to be seen as the source of the policy he commandeers…
The American establishment as a whole, rather than the leaders of a party, became Obama’s tutor in statesmanship. It was not an adequate substitute. Obama when he entered the presidency had seen more of the world than most people but less of America than many Americans. What he knew were the academic, the liberal-political and the corporate milieux, where doors swung open in gratitude and wonder at a man of his qualities. Fellow students at Harvard Law School and colleagues at the University of Chicago Law School knew him as a ‘mediator’ without marked opinions of his own. He left almost no trail of position papers – nothing substantial, quotable or quoted – though he cast votes and made decisions after listening to others make their case. He led a charmed life and aroused few suspicions. Two decades of ambitious but unadventurous apprenticeship on this pattern left him baffled at the first strong signs of resistance in 2009. Until that year, it is only a slight exaggeration to say the Republicans whom Obama had met were judges, lawyers, corporate leaders and academics. He had never encountered a determined man in the black hat quite like John Boehner, the congressional minority leader; as for Fox Radio, it was a distant island, heard of in chuckling rumours at dinner parties, its noises dissipated by the ocean of seminars and think-tanks in between. Obama is still mystified by the idea that there are people who don’t like him.
His sense of personal invincibility was always accompanied by an extreme cautiousness. Many people think this has served him well at a time of crisis. I don’t agree; I wish Obama had acted more boldly, and think he could have done so…
There were opportunities for [foreign policy ]reform of a sort that comes less often than once in a generation. Yet Obama acted on the assumption that the establishment is one and irreplaceable, and must be served in roughly its present form. This assumption he seems to have acquired between the summer of 2008 – the time of his capitulation on domestic surveillance and his Aipac speech affirming support for Israel – and the National Archives Speech on security a year later… If one were to compile an Obama Retreat Checklist – composed of the advisers whom he cut away when under pressure, or persons he nominated to important posts but withdrew from consideration – the names would include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Malley, Rashid Khalidi and the anti-war Republican senator Chuck Hagel, whose leaked note to George W. Bush may have saved the US from a war with Iran in 2007. If one made it a list of incidents as well as persons, one would have to count the snub to Jimmy Carter that denied him a prominent part at the Democratic Convention of 2008 – a graceless as well as a gutless omission.

The integration of journalists into Washington’s policy apparatus, with its luxuriant jungle of lobby shops thinly disguised as nonprofits, with their seminars, “scholars in residence,” and fellowships, has led to a decorous tendency to ignore the grime of politics at the level of corruption, blackmail, and bribery—mostly inaccessible anyway without the power of subpoena. There’s an interesting genre of books, some written by political fixers in the aftermath of exposure or incarceration—Bobby Baker’s Wheeling and Dealing is a good example—that usefully describe the grime, but these are rarely reviewed in respectable journals.
Sometimes a cover-up does surface, propelled into the light of day by a tenacious journalist. Then there’s the outraged counterattack. Are you suggesting, sir, that the CIA connived to smuggle cocaine into America’s inner cities? Gary Webb’s career at the San Jose Mercury News was efficiently destroyed. Those who took the trouble to read the subsequent full report of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz found corroboration of Webb’s charges. But by then the caravan had moved on. A jury issued its verdict, but the press box was empty.
Maybe now the decline in power of the established corporate press, the greater availability of dissenting versions of politics and history, and the exposure of the methods used to coerce public support for the attack on Iraq have engendered a greater sense of realism on the part of Americans about what their government can do. Perhaps the press will be more receptive to discomfiting stories about what Washington is capable of in the pursuit of what it deems to be the national interest. Hopefully, in this more fertile soil, Syd Schanberg’s pertinacity will be vindicated at last, and those still active in politics who connived at this abandonment will be forced to give an account.

[Sternhell’s] charge that my views are tantamount to a wish for Israel’s disappearance requires rebuttal. I am vehemently opposed to any position that seeks the violent destruction of Israel which, in terms of its foundation, is neither more nor less legitimate than other settler states like the us, Canada, Argentina or Australia. What I would argue for is the de-Zionization of the single state that has now de facto existed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean for 43 years—more than twice the duration of Israel within the Green Line—so that it may become a modern state based on something resembling universal suffrage, rather than one predicated upon Judaeo-supremacy.
Sternhell belongs to a socio-political formation that is now on the verge of extinction, namely, the Zionist-Israeli liberal left…
Given the ‘realities on the ground’, Sternhell’s hope that Israel, as a Zionist state, may one day roll itself back—or be rolled back—to its pre-67 existence is completely untenable. Indeed, the reason Sternhell is so incensed by The Returns of Zionism lies in his basic decency and honesty. He knows that his dream of a social-democratic Israel within the Green Line borders has been all but shattered and that the Occupation is there to stay for the foreseeable future. More fundamentally, he knows that Zionist Israel is simply irreconcilable with the notion of any remotely equal citizenship for all who are included within it, regardless of whether this is the inevitable culmination of the Zionist project or the nightmarish result of a decent hope gone terribly astray. He knows that with every day that passes, Israel—within and without the Green Line—is becoming more aggressive, more oppressive, more hell-bent on pushing Judaeo-supremacy to unprecedented levels. Sternhell, most crucially, is as familiar as I am with S. Yizhar’s memorable line in his 1948 novella Khirbet Khizeh: ‘We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.’ It is painful enough for an individual as decent as Sternhell to confine the absorption of this line to 1948; the realization of its prophetic extent, as a synecdoche for what Israel would become, is surely intolerable.

The United States welcomes the agreements reached at the 2010 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference to strengthen the global non-proliferation regime.
 
…The document includes an agreement to hold a regional conference in 2012 to discuss issues relevant to a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems.  The United States has long supported such a zone, although our view is that a comprehensive and durable peace in the region and full compliance by all regional states with their arms control and nonproliferation obligations are essential precursors for its establishment.  We strongly oppose efforts to single out Israel, and will oppose actions that jeopardize Israel’s national security. 
The greatest threat to proliferation in the Middle East, and to the NPT, is Iran’s failure to live up to its NPT obligations….

That wasn’t good enough. Within an hour, the White House issued a second statement, this one from National Security Advisor, General James L. Jones. It goes a lot further than Obama, and as Ali Gharib has pointed out, mentions Israel six times. Who writes this stuff? And is this all about donors for the 2010 election cycle?
Despite our agreement to the final document, we have serious reservations about one aspect of the Middle East resolution it contains.  The final document includes an agreement to hold a regional conference in 2012 to discuss issues relevant to a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their delivery systems.  The United States has long supported such a zone, although our view is that a comprehensive and durable peace in the region and full compliance by all regional states with their arms control and nonproliferation obligations are essential precursors for its establishment.  Just as our commitment to seek peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons will not be reached quickly, the U.S. understands that a WMD free zone in the Middle East is a long-term goal.
…The United States will not permit a conference or actions that could jeopardize Israel’s national security.  We will not accept any approach that singles out Israel or sets unrealistic expectations.  The United States’ long-standing position on Middle East peace and security remains unchanged, including its unshakeable commitment to Israel’s security.  
In this respect, the United States deplores the decision to single out Israel in the Middle East section of the NPT document.
The failure of the resolution to mention Iran, a nation in longstanding violation of the NPT and UN Security Council Resolutions which poses the greatest threat of nuclear proliferation in the region and to the integrity of the NPT, is also deplorable.
 
As a cosponsor charged with enabling this conference, the United States will ensure that a conference will only take place if and when all countries feel confident that they can attend.  Because of gratuitous way that Israel has been singled out, the prospect for a conference in 2012 that involves all key states in the region is now in doubt and will remain so until all are assured that it can operate in a unbiased and constructive way.

But let’s end with some positive points. In Jones’s statement, full inclusion is highlighted as an essential component to the meetings two years from now:

The proposed regional conference, to be effective, must include all countries of the Middle East and other relevant countries.