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While the UK Fire Brigades Union, long-time experts in matters of foreign policy, as we must all be aware, were busy whipping up their comrades to support a boycott of Israeli goods, the Egyptian Petroleum Ministry was planning to increase Egypt's gas exports to Israel to 120 trillion British thermal units in the coming year, a major increase in supply over the current year. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Egyptian gas is used by Israel in its manufacturing industry. So is the Fire Brigades Union, and its foreign policy savvy TUC allies, now going to extend its boycott to Egypt? Will it become verboten to visit the pyramids or take cruises down the Nile? And will the unions forbid British soldiers the life-saving benefit of a new Israeli discovery of a sort of "glue" which stops bleeding from battlefield wounds? Even firemen may one day be thankful for this new medical technology. Should Israel refuse it to them? Good moral questions for this time of the year. Shanah Tovah!

So, what seems like a lifetime after A-level results, this Jewish girl from Watford is now looking forward to going to university later this month.

Looking forward? No, that’s not the right phrase. Perhaps petrified is more appropriate.

I completed my accommodation form incorrectly and ended up in catered halls instead of self-catered. It will just have to be a repeat of the past seven years at a secular comprehensive: I’ll have to be very careful, always asking twice about canteen food and never eating anything I’m not sure about.

Being a forgetful person, it is wonderful to learn that I am not always a source for frustration and annoyance. There is one possibility that my forgetting is actually a mitzvah and I even get blessed for forgetting! Bizarre but true. Why not read on...http://www.npls.org.uk/Sermons/New/Ki%20Tetze%205769.html

This week must have God writhing in agony for what had been created. If we were in ancient Israel, we would have prophets of God crying out in every gate of every city and the inhabitants of those cities would be in garbed in sackcloth and sat, fasting and wailing lamentations amongst ashes, desperate to avert the expected wrath of God. For this would have been the response to the utter disregard for tzedek, that has been evidenced in amongst the clamouring for blood and the abomination of hero-worship, the result of the release from prison of the so-called ‘Lockerbie bomber,’ Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi.

The shameful release of the Libyan convicted of murdering 270 innocent people over, and in, Lockerbie in 1988 disgraces Scotland, its criminal justice system, and its people.

The freeing, on "compassionate grounds", of Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill – seemingly more intent on making a name for himself than living up to his title – shows no "compassion" whatsoever for the families and friends of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, never mind consideration for the rule of law.

Watching "breaking news" of the Lockerbie mass murder, the biggest in British history, was one of those never-forget-where-you-were experiences – I was sitting on a friend's couch in Finchley – and, as it transpired, a boy I knew, Marc Tager, was on the flight.

Academia does not necessarily (some would say, at all) breed commonsense. But even Bar Ilan's Ephraim Inbar should have known better, on the eve of his Prime Minister's visit to the UK, than to tell the Today programme in essence that Britain was no longer a power that really mattered in the Middle East and was just carried along in the American slipstream. Professor Inbar was introduced as an advisor to Mr Netanyahu. I hope he has not advised him what to say when he meets Gordon Brown this week.

New York's Jewish establishment is panting in anticipation of publication next week of a tell-all memoir of her 20-year affair with fraudster Bernie Madoff by former top Jewish civil servant Sheryl Weinstein. One astonishing fact which emerged pre-publication from inside the covers is that, during her association with Madoff, the unsuspecting Weinstein was chief financial officer of Hadassah, the American arm of the Women's International Zionist organisation, Wizo. As such, she was party to investment decisions by the Wizo board which poured many millions into Madoff's schemes. Her own husband (who did not know of her affair) is also said to have invested with Madoff. Weinstein's book, "Madoff's Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie and Me," is reported by New York newspapers to disclose rather more than most readers might want to know about Madoff's phsyical attributes, or lack of them. Weinstein was one of those who gave evidence at Madoff's trial. She said the day she met him was "the unluckiest day of my life." There are no comments from her husband.

The most frequent question I get asked, by Israelis and non-Israelis alike, is why I moved to Israel.

The non-Israelis – English primarily – can’t understand why I would have wanted to leave the country of my birth (and first 28 years). Whenever there is any kind of sporting contest between their (our?) country and my adopted one, the English cannot fathom why I support Israel. And, when we get inebriated on the Friday evening of my annual visit to Harrogate, my mate John, a good, solid Yorkshireman, always sets me his own version of the Tebbit Test: “If there was a war between England and Israel, who would you fight for?” Suffice it to say, my answer – like John’s question, the same every year – always leaves him shaking his head, lips clenched.

Many – perhaps even most – Israelis I meet, too, can’t understand why I chose what they consider a far harder life. Following a brief discourse on Israel’s (in my opinion) vastly superior quality of life (cf. standard of living), the positive half of my (now somewhat rote) explanation is that I am a Jew and a Zionist, and believe in the State of Israel (though, of course, that is not enough . . . one has to like it here too).