Second the sovereign right of every state to determine who has a right of residence

Second, the sovereign right of every state to determine who has a right of residence in that state. This would mean that only only those Israelis acceptable to Palestine would have a right of residence in Palestine and only those Palestinians acceptable to Israel would have a right of residence in Israel.These principles are clear and comprehensible. Any variation from them or effort to “compromise” on them would lead away from a durable peace and back to the swamp of a never-ending “process”. If a constructive and principled General Assembly resolution along the above lines were passed on to the Security Council, the body capable of transforming recommendations into binding international law, for its ratification, the United States would know that a veto would cost it all remaining regional support for its “war against terrorism”.

This just might motivate the United States, if only for the wrong reason, to do the right thing.Further Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are a dead end, not a viable option for peace. The only alternatives are continuing violence and a just peace imposed on the parties to the conflict by the United Nations. The latter alternative is much the better one, and it is urgent.The author is an international lawyer who writes frequently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. THE SNAIL’s progress that was gradually making Britain a fairer place to work seems to be stalling. Last month it was revealed that the number of FTSE 100 firms with at least one woman on the board has fallen for the third year running.

And the pay gap has also stuck; in 2000, women who worked full-time took home just 81 per cent of the male hourly wage – the same proportion as in 1999. Kingsmill commanded headlines earlier this year when she stated that she would like to see the pay gap halved in the next five years.That was a great statement, and she came up with all sorts of worthy ideas to help it along. So should our hearts now lift at the prospect of a new push towards justice at work?Perhaps it’s a little early to start jumping up and down – especially when you look at the reforms that the Government is actually prepared to bring in. As so often with this administration, lip service to social justice is coupled with a truly bewildering timidity in changing the structures that perpetuate injustice. Although Patricia Hewitt made some announcements yesterday that were flagged and leaked as if they were the start of full-scale revolution, they turn out to be little to cheer about.So women are going to be allowed to ask employers whether men who work with them are paid more than they are! And the employers will have to reply! Nobody could quibble with such a reform Such as it is, it must be welcomed. But what will it achieve? It might ease up the first stages of a woman’s challenge to her employer, but it won’t really give women any more legal rights – as Heather Wakefield, the senior national officer at Unison, told me peremptorily, the need for transparency in pay levels is already a well-established principle in employment case law.It will certainly not, as was predicted, lead to a falling away of all secrecy about pay, since employers will not have to disclose precise amounts, but simply whether a man’s pay is greater than a woman’s.And how much good does transparency do, if what you end up with is transparent injustice? Obviously knowing that you are paid less than the men around you is a vital beginning – but it’s only a beginning. Revelations that women are paid less than men appear regularly, in all sectors, from the very highest-paid workers to the very lowest.

One day we’re told that, say, Nicole Kidman’s $5m per film compares badly to Tom Cruise’s $20m. Another day we’re told that women make up more than 70 per cent of those who are on the minimum wage.And the Government knows perfectly well that even transparent injustices can take many years to put right – if they ever are. After all, some of the most transparent injustices in pay scales occur not among secretive private-sector employers, but out there in the public sector where everything is open to scrutiny.No one is hiding the fact that 37 per cent of women who work full time for local authorities earn less than £250 per week, compared to 18 per cent of men. It’s all very well for the Government to point the finger at other employers, but shouldn’t it also put its own house in order?A national job agreement for all local authority workers was devised four years ago, and where it has been implemented, rates of pay for those jobs dominated by women have usually risen. But due to lack of resources, fewer than a tenth of local authorities have yet managed to implement it. Only this week, Unison decided that it was going to take individual equal pay claims to every local authority in the country in a bid to kick-start the process of closing the pay gap for women in the public sector.