"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."

- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

As a follow up to the post below on the cut-and-paste job done by two Israeli newspapers, a friend sent along a link to this new piece in the London Review of Books.

The article, by Yonatan Mendel, castigates the Israeli media for deferring to its military on all things security.

"This phenomenon, in which IDF statements are directly translated into media reports – there are no checkpoints between the army and the media – is the result both of a lack of access to information and of the unwillingness of journalists to prove the army wrong or to portray soldiers as criminals," Mendel writes.

The article is actually a bit convoluted, and Mendel recklessly breezes by complicated issues of language that undercut his thesis. But the piece is still an interesting read.

I still find it remarkable that major Israeli papers, whose Israeli reporters are barred by their government from going to Gaza, don't have solid, trusted, regular Palestinian reporters in Gaza on their staff to cover a place central to the future of both people.

For more than a year, Israel and the network of Qassam-launching Gaza militants have been playing an increasingly volatile game of chicken.

Gaza militants fire daily volleys of crude rockets into southern Israel until they eventually maim or kill an Israeli civilian.

Israeli military air strikes kill rocket launchers and militants driving through Gaza City. The attacks target Hamas bases and empty Palestinian Authority offices.

The two sides hurtle towards a direct confrontation - until one side backs down and things cool off. For a while.

This week, the two sides might have reached a tipping point.

For the first time in nine months, one of the Qassams hit with deadly force.

On Wednesday, a Qassam killed a 47-year-old father and student at Sapir College in southern Israel. The next day, Gaza militants fired a barrage of slightly more advanced rockets that hit Ashkelon, the largest city near the Gaza Strip.

Ashkelon responded by turning on the city's early warning system, which will send residents scrambling for bomb shelters whenever the Israeli military picks up the launch of a rocket from Gaza, even if they are heading for a nearby town.

After the student was killed, Israeli air strikes hit the empty Interior Ministry building and the vacant office of deposed Hamas PM Ismail Haniyeh. The attacks ravaged a medical clinic, killed seven young kids, including a baby and four boys playing soccer.

As they have before, Israeli defense officials said the rocket fire would not be tolerated. But this week they took some new steps to prepare for a possible invasion. The military moved artillery units and a small number of tanks to the Gaza border.

There are still widespread reservations within the Israeli government about a major ground invasion.

And the US is likely to frown upon any major Israeli military operation that comes on the eve, or during, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to the region next week.

But with each successive round of chicken, the stakes get higher, frustration grows on both sides and Israeli restraint erodes.

If Hamas decides to keep its sites on Ashkelon and Israel keeps sending forces to the Gaza border, it may not be too long before the Israeli military concludes that an invasion is the best option.

More than 15 months ago, a pre-dawn Israeli artillery barrage slammed into a quiet Beit Hanoun neighborhood, killing 21 Palestinians, including seven children.

The day and the aftermath were captured by journalist George Azar and later aired on Al Jazeera International's "Witness" program. (Part I is: here. Part II, with the aftermath of the shelling, can be seen here.)

Almost immediately, Israel blamed the artillery barrage on a technological malfunction, called it a mistake and launched a special military investigation to look into what went wrong.

Today, the Israeli military decided that there was nothing more to investigate, took no action and closed the case without assigning any blame.

Word of the military's conclusion was carried on The Jerusalem Post and Ha'aretz web sites.

Both stories bear an uncanny resemblance to the Israeli military press release.

In fact, both papers pretty much just took the military press release and posted it on their web sites as news.

"Following an extensive and thorough investigation, the Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendlblit, decided that the facts regarding the incident, presented by the committee, were detailed and clear, and that consequently there was no need to open a Military Police investigation on the matter," the Israeli military press release stated."It was also decided that no legal action is to be taken against any military official regarding this incident."

"Following an extensive and thorough investigation, the Military Advocate General, Brig. Gen. Avichai Mendlblit, decided that the facts regarding the incident, presented by the committee, were detailed and clear, and that consequently there was no need to open a Military Police investigation on the matter," wrote The Jerusalem Post in its story that carried no name. "It was also decided that no legal action is to be taken against any military official regarding this incident."

"Following an extensive and thorough investigation, Mandelblit decided that the facts regarding the incident, presented by the committee, were detailed and clear, and that consequently there was no need to launch a Military Police investigation into the matter," wrote Ha'aretz reporter Yuval Azoulay, who at least made some effort to change a few of the words. "It was also decided that no legal action was to be taken against any military official in regard to this incident."

Neither story carried any comment from the Palestinian survivors of the attack, nor any response from human rights groups like B'Tselem, which questioned the integrity of a military investigation of itself and urged Israel to, at the very least, offer compensation to the families.

"The decision to fire artillery at launching sites in the area near Beit Hanun, from which Qassam rockets were fired at Israel previously, was carried out following credible and specific intelligence information, indicating the intention of the terrorist organizations to fire rockets from this area," the Israeli military wrote in its press release. "The fire, aimed at one of the targets located over 450 meters away from the town's borders, in fact hit two residential buildings and caused the death and injury of the Palestinians. The investigation shows clearly that the injury of the Palestinian civilians was not intentional and was directly due to a rare and severe failure in the artillery fire control system operated at the time of the incident."

"The investigation found that the decision to fire artillery at launching sites in the area near Beit Hanun, from which Kassam rockets were fired at Israel previously, was carried out following credible and specific intelligence information, indicating the intention of the terrorist organizations to fire rockets from this area," wrote The Jerusalem Post. "The fire, aimed at one of the targets located over 450 meters away from the town's borders, in fact hit two residential buildings and caused the death and injury of the Palestinians. The conclusions of the inquiry showed that the civilian deaths and casualties were not intentional and was directly due to a rare and severe failure in the artillery fire control system operated at the time of the incident.

"Immediately following the event, the IDF explained that an artillery battery containing 12 shells, aimed at a site from where Qassam rockets had been fired, had accidentally hit civilian homes some 500 meters from the intended target," wrote Haaretz. "The IDF later maintained that the decision to fire the artillery was based on founded and reliable intelligence indicating that additional rockets were going to be fired from the site. An IDF query revealed that the civilian deaths stemmed from a rare malfunction in the control equipment which caused errors in the data used to aim the artillery fire."

Well at least the papers are making life easy for Israeli military censors...

For the first time since Hamas seized military control of Gaza in June, the threat of kidnapping has returned to the Gaza Strip.

According to the Foreign Press Association and journalists in Gaza, militants with the Army of Islam, the group behind the nearly-four month kidnapping of BBC correspondent Alan Johnston last year, turned up at the main Gaza City hotel used by Western journalists and visiting aid workers last week and asked the staff for a list of journalists staying there.

In parallel, there have been renewed attacks on Christian centers in Gaza. Last week, militants attacked the YMCA in Gaza.

The new threats have prompted Western journalists, aid groups and the UN to all take extra precautions and rethink their operations in Gaza. Some news organizations have directed their staff to leave Gaza while others are not sending staff in at this point.

I have heard, though not confirmed, that some groups are even taking up Hamas on the offer to provide its Executive Force as security when the groups travel around Gaza.

The new kidnap threats mark the first time since Hamas seized control in June that Westerners have seriously had to worry about being abducted.

When Hamas routed Fatah in June, one of the first things they did was force the Army of Islam to release Alan Johnston, an act that won Hamas praise from Alan himself and others around the world.

Hamas hung banners in the streets touting their new safe streets campaign and assured Westerners that they could safely work and live in Gaza under Hamas rule.

But now the Army of Islam, led by an unpredictable Gaza militant who some people believe is trying to establish an international name for himself as a kind of Al Qaeda offshoot, seems to be trying to reassert its power.

Hamas has so far been successful in quashing any attempts by Fatah and other groups to challenge their power. We will see how Hamas responds to this latest challenge...

Last week's assassination of Hezbollah militant Imad Mughniyeh (and various other events around the region) overshadowed an important Jerusalem story: The crowning of Miss Israel Mall 2008.

The highly anticipated event took place on Valentine's Day in a small, two-story mall in the quasi-commercial/industrial area of Jerusalem, and featured 14 finalists, including my friend Orit Arfa, a reporter at The Jerusalem Post.

"Without women no one could do anything," contestant Rinat Awadalla said before Game Day.

Many dozens of folks crowded around the temporary runway set up between various clothes stores on the ground floor of the mall.

Each woman had their own cheering section, though some fan clubs were most larger than others.

Some fans made signs and broke into chants when their favorite contestant hit the stage.

All the women in the contest were at least 30. By night's end, one woman would walk away fulfilling their girlish dreams of one day being Miss Israel Mall 2008.

This historic event was not televised live (OK, it wasn't televised at all), but Orit did produce a short, behind-the-scenes look at the contest ups and downs, which you can see below.

(I won't spoil the suspense for those who want to find out who walked away with the crown...)

A Palestinian gum seller at Qalandiya checkpoint, near Ramallah on Feb. 21, 2008.

Behind him is graffiti depicting Leila Khaled, an iconic Palestinian figure who took part in the hijacking of a TWA flight in 1969.

No one was injured in the takeover and Khaled was quickly released as part of a prisoner exchange. She later renounced hijackings as a tool to fight for a Palestinian state.

(Next to her image it reads: I am not a terrorist.)

The Middle East was rocked by another small earthquake over the weekend that set off another round of speculation about why exactly God is so angry with people in this part of the world.

The last time there was a series of jolts last fall, no one could agree on what exactly God was trying to say.

Some people thought God was angry because Israeli PM Ehud Olmert was talking about giving up control over parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem so they could become the foundations for a new Palestinian state.

Others thought God was angry because Israel hasn't given up parts of the West Bank and Jerusalem so they can become the foundations for a new Palestinian state.

There were even a few people who thought it might just be an act of nature.

Well now we have the answer: God is angry with Israel for being a gay-friendly nation.

"A cost-effective way of averting earthquake damage would be to stop passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyways causes earthquakes," said Shlomo Benziri, an Israeli lawmaker from the conservative religious Shas party.

This unique new Shas theory would certainly explain earthquakes in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but what about Iran (26,000 killed in 2003), Afghanistan (thousands killed in 2005) and Pakistan (thousands killed in 2005)?

One doesn't usually think of these places as being gay-friendly (Iran, its president has told the world, has no gay people whatsoever...) and yet God is apparently much more angry with these countries than Israel, where the quakes haven't even caused any significant damage...

While the questions are still swirling around the assassination of Hezbollah leader Imad Mughniyeh (America's intelligence chief, Mike McConnell, suggested over the weekend that Hezbollah or Syria might have been behind the attack, while The Sunday Times in London ran a questionable story with the unsupported headline "Israel kills terror chief with headrest bomb."), there is no question that Israel did assassinate another major Hezbollah figure 16 years ago.

On Feb. 16, 1992, Israel staged an air strike in southern Lebanon that killed Hezbollah leader Sheik Abbas Musawi, his wife and their young daughter.

The air strike was apparently the first time Israel used Apache helicopters for a targeted assassination.

As Israeli journalist Ronen Bergmen noted in a piece over the weekend, that strike led to a five-day volley of Hezbollah rocket fire from southern Lebanon, the assassination of Israel's security chief at its embassy in Turkey and a deadly attack on Israel's embassy in Argentina.

The 1992 attack also led to the rise of Hassan Nasrallah.

By coincidence, Israel's Ma'ariv newspaper ran a story over the weekend with interviews with the pilots who took part in the 1992 assassination. Below are selections translated by McClatchy.

"We identified the convoy," the lead pilot, identified as A., told the paper. "There were several vehicles: a very nice looking black Mercedes, and a Land Rover carrying the guards. You could immediately see that it was (the convoy) of an important person. The vehicles were traveling in a disciplined fashion at a high speed. We identified the target vehicle and began to track it. During the journey it changed place (in the convoy) a number of times. Just to be sure, they told us to destroy all the vehicles in the convoy. We fired the first missile from a range of 5 kilometers (three miles). A good range. It hit the correct vehicle, Musawi's vehicle. The vehicle was blown to bits. I'm sure he didn't know what was happening, he didn't see the missile coming, he didn't hear the missile explode. The first missile killed him."

"You know, at first, few took this mission seriously," said A. "To fly with combat helicopters to a specific place and find a convoy of similar looking cars and identify the correct car and also to destroy it? No, such a mission was thought of as a joke, even by senior officers in the Air Force... But more importantly it was this mission - considered a success in purely military terms - that brought bad news to the citizens of Israel: with the death of Abbas Musawi the career of his successor, Hassan Nasrallah, began."

The article actually describes the decision to kill Musawi as haphazard.

It apparently started with an idea to kidnap Musawi as a bargaining chip. But he was too well guarded for that, so they decided to simply kill him.

There were reportedly those who thought it wasn't worth the cost, but the concerns were overruled by Israel's intelligence director, then-Chief-of-Staff Ehud Barak (now Israel's Labor Party leader) and Defense Minster Moshe Arens.

The head of the flight group, Moshe, told Ma'ariv that he had no regrets about the operation.

"Hezbollah people, even the senior among them, need to be killed," Moshe told the paper. "I know that sounds inhumane, not nice, and also personally it's not a nice feeling. But this is a war, and in war you kill your enemy."

"No one had ever fired at a car from an Apache," A. told the paper. "You need to connect to the vehicle, the intelligence people have to make sure who is in the vehicle. The pilots have to catch the vehicle at a high speed, between houses and not hit bystanders. Today these things seem simple, but back then we had to develop them (and) it was very complicated."

The Intelligence behind the attack was relatively simple, the paper reported.

Musawi was scheduled to speak in memory of a Hezbollah leader who had been assassinated and when he left the town a special forces group marked the car (though the paper doesn't say how they did this) that Musawi rode in.

After the attack other pilots at the base rushed to congratulate their colleagues and review films of the attack. After a couple days they were ordered to stop out of concern for the safety of the pilots.

"After the attack in Buenos Ares we realized it was indirectly connected to us. We had informal discussions about this and I think about it to this day," said one of the pilots. "I still believe this was a legitimate operation and correct operationally."

A young Gaza refugee at a Ramallah safe house sits in his wheelchair with a sticker reading "Gaza is on my mind." (Photo/Anna Blackshaw)

They emerge from every corner of the house on crutches, limping, in a wheelchair. They hobble out of the kitchen on artificial legs and labor to pull themselves from their beds.

The youngest ones are sixteen. All of them bear the scars of Hamas bullets, bombs and hand grenades.

These are the Fatah Forgotten, the scores of Palestinian refugees injured last June when Hamas seized control of Gaza.

They are Fatah loyalists who have spent the last eight months living in limbo. Most had to leave their families behind in Gaza when they fled to safety in the West Bank.

They spend their days sleeping and smoking, drinking sweet tea and sipping bitter coffee, waiting and wondering if they will ever be able to go home.

"The Palestinian Authority has treated us worse than Hamas ever did," says Abu Abed, a 40-year-old former Gaza policeman who was shot twice in the leg by Hamas militants at a checkpoint during the first days of the Fall of Fatah in Gaza.

The Fatah men sequestered in this sparse, dark apartment  are adrift. The Gaza refugees here in the West Bank have been more often treated as foreigners than fellow Palestinians.

If they haven't been viewed as cowards who fled the fight, they have been treated as unwanted relatives who crawled in from some backwater countryside.

They are getting barely enough support from the PA to get by.

Their limbo is a reflection both of the way the PA has treated its Gaza refugees and the cultural divisions separating Palestinians from Gaza and Palestinians from the West Bank.

Gaza residents tend to be more conservative and more religious than those from the West Bank. 

While it might be something akin to the differences between Americans from Mobile and Americans from Manhattan, the divide is more significant for Palestinians trying to build the foundations for a future state...

Who killed Imad Mughnieyh?

That's the question everyone is asking today in the wake of Mughnieyh's assassination in Damascus.

There are theories, counter-theories, crazy theories and theories so crazy they could be true.

Israeli officials have quietly suggested that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah might have tried to bump off a potential rival, even though Nasrallah doesn't have that MO.

The most obvious suspects are Israel and the United States, which had the most incentive to kill off this major terrorist leader.

At first, as is its MO, Israel kept quiet when Hezbollah directly accused the Mossad of killing Mughniyeh.

Then, a few hours later, Israeli PM Ehud Olmert's office put out this statement:

"Israel is looking into the reports from Lebanon and Syria regarding the death of a senior Hezbollah figure and is studying the details arising therefrom, as they have been reported in the media in recent hours.  Israel rejects the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement whatsoever in this incident."

The statement was widely reported as a blanket denial of responsibility. But, if you read it closely, it isn't.

What Israel is rejecting is "the attempt by terrorist elements to ascribe to it any involvement" in the car bombing.

To parse the statement, that is not the same as rejecting any responsibility.

Think of it this way: If you stole my car and I accused you of stealing my car, saying "How dare you accuse me of stealing your car" is not the same thing as saying "I didn't steal your car."

This might seem like I'm reading too much into the statement, but in conversations with Israeli leaders, including those involved in crafting the statement, they made it clear that it was a carefully worded non-denial denial.

Of course, that doesn't mean that Israel is responsible for the bombing, but it remains the most likely suspect.