It's a bit like a Hitchock thriller. Nobody knows where he is -- not even the U.S. State Department -- and nobody knows when he will show up in Israel. All we know is, suspense is building and it's time to watch out for surprises.

President Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy Senator George Mitchell is somewhere in transit -- probably -- and expected in Israel and the Palestinian Territories next week --  sometime.

A State Dept. spokesman at Wednesday's regular briefing could not say much at all about Mitchell's movements beyond he has left Washington.  Could he be in London meeting the Syrian foreign minister? Don't know.  Is he going to Turkey as well? We will try to find that out. When is he going to be in Israel? Can't say exactly.

Mitchell is famous for playing his cards very close to his vest and his vest very close to his skin. He gives out very little information when he is engaged in high-stakes mediation.

There is an unmistakable aura of mystery about what is going on at this delicate stage of talks with Israel and the Palestinians to get stalled peace negotiations started again, by resolving what looks like a standoff between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israel's settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and Washington's demand that it cease.

There is intense speculation in "diplomatic circles" over whether the coming visit by Mitchell could lead to a showdown, or pluck some brilliant compromise from the jaws of deadlock, setting the rusting wheels of the peace process back in motion at last. But so far its mostly all heat and no light, pending the arrival of Obama's mediator.

If Mitchell is true to his Hitchcock thriller persona, this may be the moment he chooses to produce "the MacGuffin", the twist element that's pitched into the drama at just the right moment to rivet the attention of the audience and drive the plot forward -- even if it is sometimes completely forgotten by the end of the movie.

Good morning, children.

Today we are going to learn about two common rhetorical tricks that help greatly with the cynical manipulation of arguments.

First, disingenuousness. The Oxford Shorter English Dictionary defines disingenuous as "lacking in frankness, insincere, morally fraudulent", in the sense of pretending not to know what you in fact know very well.

Second, the straw man argument.  Wikipedia defines this as misrepresentation of an opponent's position, to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by substituting a superficially similar proposition (the straw man) and refuting it, without ever having actually refuted the original proposition.

Today, thanks to Mr Netanyahu, we have one handy slice of well-worn rhetoric to illustrate both rhetorical tricks.

Mr Netanyahu, speaking for his government, said on Sunday that he could not give in to a demand by Washington to halt plans to build homes for Jews in disputed East Jerusalem : "We cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and buy (homes) anywhere in Jeruslalem," he said. "I can only imagine what would happen if someone would suggest Jews could not live in certain neighbourhoods of  New York, London, Paris or Rome. There would certainly be a great international outcry."

Yes, there would indeed. Because such discrimination could be nothing other than anti-Semitic, as Mr Netyanyahu knows. Therefore, his argument implies, any barrier to Jews building and buying in East Jerusalem must also be nothing other than anti-Semitic.  So, if critics of his policies do not wish to be accused of anti-Semitism, they had better drop demands not to build in East Jerusalem...

But as Mr Netanyahu really knows very well, though he pretends not to, New York, London, Paris, and Rome are not disputed cities divided by 60-year-old ceasefire lines. Part of New York has not been captured in a war then annexed by one country in a move that is not legally recognised by the rest of the world, which considers that the other party to the dispute, the Palestinian party, also has a claim to the city.

So all Mr Netanyahu has really "refuted" is a straw man, which leaves the original proposition unanswered. Is he the only political leader to employ such dubious rhetorical devices? By no means. Has he advanced the argument? That's very doubtful.   

In fact, this could fairly be called "insulting the intelligence". But that's next week's lesson.

PHOTO: Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem July 19, 2009. Netanyahu, saying he would not take orders over Israeli settlement in East Jerusalem, rejected on Sunday a U.S. demand to halt plans to build more homes for Jews in the disputed area. REUTERS/David Silverman/Pool

This week saw publication in Israel of a report by the activist group Breaking the Silence. Featuring testimony from Israel's own soldiers on the behaviour of troops in January's Gaza offensive, it raised questions about the alleged "moral degeneration" of the armed forces, their alleged preference for risking civilian casualties rather than casualties in their own ranks, through hesitation or over-cautious trigger fingers. The army's response was angry and indignant. Defence Minister Ehud Barak repeated his claim that Israel has "one of the most moral armies in the world".

This is a slippery concept, because as armies move along the sliding scale of conflict -- from robust policing or anti-guerrilla operations to total war for national survival -- the notion of what is moral conduct and what is immoral is progressively lost.

Britain's wartime "Bomber" Harris in Europe and America's Curtis LeMay in the Pacfic were airforce generals who had no trouble with killing as many German and Japanese civilians as possible, in avowedly terroristic incendiary raids by fleets of bombers with the approval of their political leaders.

Harris, most notoriously, bombed Dresden. But it was only one of many German cities fire-bombed to hasten the collapse of the Third Reich. LeMay on 9 March 1945 sent 330 B-29s  to Toyko where in the space of a few hours their napalm incendiaries roasted to death 100,000 Japanese civilians, to the extent that pilots said they could smell burning flesh in the rising columns of smoke.  You can read about this in "Nemesis" by British military historian Max Hastings, who quotes LeMay as saying his policy was to "bomb and burn 'em till they quit".

Hastings quotes the official U.S. Army Airforce history of LeMay's command, the Twentieth Airforce, calling its blitz on Japan "this fiery perfection, which literally burnt Japan out of the war". "In its climactic five months of jellied fire attacks, the vaunted Twentieth killed outright 310,000 Japanese, injured 412,000 more and rendered 9,200,000 homeless. Never in the history of war had such colossal devastation been visited on an enemy at so slight a cost to the conqueror ... The 1945 application of American Air Power, so destructive and concentrated as to cremate 65 Japanese cities in five months, forced an enemy's surrender without land invasion for the first time in military history ..."

Hasting quotes LeMay, who like Harris, he says, remained impenitent to the end: "Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night 9-10 March than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined," he said.

LeMay, clearly, had no problem with "breaking the silence".

This is not intended as a comparison of Gaza with WWII, or to  exonerate Israel's allegedly "disproportionate" conduct of the operation, or to diminish the Palestinian loss of 1,417 lives in 22 days, or to gloss over the Palestinian militants' pursuit of "asymmetric" fighting methods including the use of rockets fired deliberately into towns. Perhaps all it says is that it is better to have conflict in which armies are very sensitive to charges of savagery and barbarism than to have total, all-out war, in which all considerations of morality are swept aside.

PHOTO: Bombing of Tokyo, 1945

So I talked to them a while.

The girls wore a modest touch of makeup, the boys had white shirts with ties askew. They all wore school blazers. They had mobile phones and little digital cameras, and, apart from the language, it might have been a school outing in Europe.

They were obviously excited about the future.

(Photo: Hadil Hussein Ibrahim, standing outside her school in Abu Ghosh, Israel . June 30, 2009. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside)

It brought to mind the very different atmosphere I encountered in late January when visiting the return to school of Palestinian teenagers after a ceasefire ended the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Those girls, all in headscarves, were excited too, but the talk was all about how they survived the three weeks of bombing and invasion, about who lost relatives, about the girl who was absent that day from the first English class of the year--killed in some war incident.

The contrast got me wondering how the rising Palestinian generation looks at its prospects in a very uncertain part of the world, and if there were major differences depending on where the students live. So this week, along with Reuters correspondents in various cities, we tried to gain some insight into how they think. Some of the comments below are plainly heartfelt, and some may have been made out of peer pressure. There are plenty of contradictions and no clear lines.

Below are segments of our original feature story. To read the whole story, with student reactions from Hebron, Ramallah, and Jerusalem click here.

ABU GHOSH, Israel -- by Joseph Nasr

Arab Israeli students at the Abu Ghosh High School near
Jerusalem, in one of the most integrated towns in Israel, were
divided on the viability of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Neama Ibrahim, 18, said: "I am hopeful there will be peace
because people have a basic right to live in peace. Inshallah
(God willing). I am optimistic for a Palestinian state...

"I have a conflict about who I am, where I am and who is my
people ... I don't feel my situation is stable as an Arab living
in Israel. The way Israel defines itself (as a Jewish state) is
perhaps racist. But I don't want Jews to leave and I don't want
Palestinians to leave. I want them to have their own states."

(Naema Ibrahim, right, at her school in Abu Gosh. June 30,2009. REUTERS/Darren Whiteside.)

Yousef Jamal, 18, said: "The two sides have conflicting
demands that makes any solution almost impossible. But in the
end there will be peace."

All feared war in the region. Almost all planned to stay
except Zed Abou Kuraish, 17.

"Peace between Jews and Arabs is hard to achieve because
there is a struggle between two nations. There will not be a
Palestinian state," he said. "And there are difficult problems
in Palestine itself, in the West Bank and Gaza."

....

Hadil Hussein Ibrahim, 18, said: "I introduce myself as a
Palestinian citizen living in the state of Israel ... And I can
tell you that in Israel we have good living standards.

"I don't think success has anything to do with the country
you're living in. It's to do with people. Because people who
succeed in this country succeed because of their hard work ---
be it Arabs or Jews..."

GAZA STRIP, under Hamas control -- by Saleh Salem

Somay Abu Eyta, female student at Basheer Al-Rayes school,
saw no peace with Israel in the next 10 years.

"We are Muslims and the Islamic religion calls on us to
liberate our holy places and mosques. There will be no peace if
the Israelis do not give us our sacred rights ...the right of
return for every refugee and Al-Aqsa mosque (Jerusalem)."

Mousa Hasan, a male student at Jolis School, differed.

"Yes there will be peace with Israel. Every day there is
bloodshed and the killing of innocent people and at the end both
sides, we the Palestinians and the Israelis, will believe in
peace as the best solution," he said.

"I do not expect more wars or hostilities. The international
community will not allow Israel to launch another war against
us. The last war was (Dec 27-Jan 18 2009) very catastrophic and
people need several years in order restore their normal life."

(PHOTO: Mousa Hasan, at home in Gaza City. June 29, 2009. REUTERS/Suheib Salem)

Sayed Ashkokany, male student at Sohda Al-Shati school, also
foresaw peace "in the future under international pressure".

"Hamas will be forced to recognize Israel and that will
create a positive atmosphere for a comprehensive peace. On the
other hand, Israel will seek to sign a peace treaty with the
entire Arabic world because it has a big enemy, which is the
Islamic Republic, Iran," he said.

Mousa said he was thinking of leaving Gaza. "I would like to
stay here but we cannot in these bad circumstances. If I leave,
I will return when life improves here. No one likes to leave his
home but we are forced to. I need to build my future."

Yosra Al-Aklok, female, at Basheer Al-Rayes school, saw no
peace. "Our Jihad against the Jews will last for ... centuries,
so we should be anticipate fighting at any time," she said.

....

    International law governing the conduct of war is based on the traditional model of two armies on a battlefield. It fails to apply effectively to 'terrorist conflicts' and provides insufficient response to the ethical dilemmas that arise.

    Until effective international law is developed to regulate the 'war on terror', no decisive ethical code will exist. This is not only a challenge for the Israeli military. It is shared by all Western armies fighting to preserve core democratic values.

    The above is the thesis of an Israeli foreign ministry briefing published March 25 in response to allegations that Israel flouted the rules of war in its Gaza offensive Dec 27-Jan 18 against Islamist militants led by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

     Here are a few excerpts. It may be noted that the docmuent does not define "terrorist" or allude in any way to the political, religious, national or other causes underlying "terrorist" activities. You can read the full document (one and a half pages only) here.

"Terrorists have developed a number of strategies ... to offset their military inferiority ... at the same time they place the value of propaganda above the value of human life."

"Terrorists attempty to deligitimize the actions of their state targets: by protraying themselves as victims, by accusing the state of unfair play, and by waging war in densely populated areas and causing panic among the populace with the ultimate goal of obtaining media coverage."

"To confront ethical dilemmas arising during counter-terrorist operations, the IDF (Israel Defence Force) developed a moral code, The Spirit of the IDF .

The code is composed of Israeli values, democratic Western values and commitment to international laws. It is deeply integrated  throughout each IDF soldier's education.

Spirit places a high standard of personal judgement when targetting terrorists who seek shelter among civilians.

Until an effective international deterrent exists, terrorists will continue to use civilians as human shields. The advantages to amoral forces of operating from densely-populated urban areas are clear, as are the media advtanges arising from international condemnation of counter-terrorist operations in these areas. As a result, international legal attention to this issue is vital."

(PHOTO: An Israeli soldier covers his ears as a mobile artillery unit fires a shell towards northern Gaza from its position outside the Gaza Strip January 16, 2009. Israel said its Gaza offensive could be "in the final act" on Friday and sent envoys to discuss truce terms after Hamas made a ceasefire offer to end three weeks of fighting that has killed more than 1,100 Palestinians. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis (ISRAEL))

Despite having no United Nations mandate, NATO went to war for the first time and bombed Serbia for 11 weeks to stop what it called the Yugoslav army's disproportionate use of force in its offensive against separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

"We have a moral duty," said then NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana as bombers took off on March 24, 1999 to "bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe".

The intervention helped launch a doctrine of international "Responsibility to Protect" civilians in conflicts. Advocates of "R2P" proposed humanitarian intervention in Myanmar in 2007 and military force in Zimbabwe in 2008.

But it never happened and the likelihood of this doctrine being adopted universally now in a UN declaration is slim, as was shown by the Gaza war that began two months ago.

On Dec. 27, Israeli bombers went into action over Gaza. As reports of civilian deaths grew, protesters staged rallies in Western capitals to demand leaders act to end the offensive against Islamist Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave.

Critics accused Israel of using "disproportionate" force, just as many said Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had done.

But intervention in Gaza was impossible politically and militarily unimaginable. Unlike Serbia, Israel is not seen in the West as a rogue state and widescale ethnic cleansing was not under way in Gaza.

Solana visited the enclave on Friday as foreign policy chief of the European Union, which seeks to foster peace in the Middle East through "soft power" -- diplomacy and aid, not intervention of the kind he advocated as head of the NATO alliance.

NATO never embraced the "responsibility to protect" concept, arguing that Kosovo, which most allies have subsequently recognised as an independent state, was a unique case that should not set a precedent.

Soft power may eventually mean encouraging talks with Hamas -- which is now shunned by the West. In an open letter published this week, a group of former foreign ministers urged a change in that policy, saying peace depends on talking to the militants.

But with rockets from Gaza again being fired daily into Israel, the prospect of a breakthrough soon seems bleak as right-wing prime minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu tries to form a government.

Viewing war damage in Gaza on Friday, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store spoke of "senseless destruction." He blamed Hamas for starting the conflict, but said Israel's response "goes beyond what international law allows."

Serb forces in the 1998-99 Kosovo war ignored the idea of  "proportionality" on the battlefield. They were sure no army would willingly tie its own hands in the face of insurgency. They mortared, burned and raided "guerrilla" villages to drive
off civilians and deprive the rebels of cover.

On Thursday, the U.N. tribunal in The Hague sentenced two Serbian generals to 22 years in jail for war crimes in Kosovo. Serbia handed them over under Western pressure.

Israel openly assured its soldiers during the Gaza offensive that they would not face such prosecution. Discussing tactics for a future conflict, one senior Israeli general also dismissed "proportionality" as a deterrent.

"We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," said Northern Command chief Gadi Eisenkot.

"This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has been authorised," he told daily Yedioth Ahronoth ast October.

Defending Israel's action in Gaza, President Shimon Peres reminded NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer that NATO's own bombing of Serbia killed "hundreds of civilians".

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert mocked the idea that he should ask soldiers to fight an evenly-matched battle in which a few hundred might be killed simply to win international approval for a war in which Hamas was fighting in heavily populated areas.

But scholars of international law say proportionality does not mean a "fair fight" or balanced death toll, let alone making sure no civilian dies. It requires belligerents to use weapons that distinguish civilians from military targets and combatants.

According to Gaza figures -- which Israel says are suspect-- some 600 of 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Of 13 Israelis killed during the 22-day war, 10 were soldiers.

Human Rights Watch, the U.N. Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Israeli rights group B'Tselem have called for investigations.

After 38 years of military occupation, Israel handed Gaza back to the Palestinians in 2005. But it has not led to peace. Hamas Islamist militants opposed to the Jewish state in 2007 ousted those Palestinians disposed to make peace with Israel, and have fired crude but potentially lethal rockets into the land lying to the east for months, in a constant skirmish with the Israelis. Israel struck hard with an aerial offensive a week ago.

Now, as the battle unfolds on 24-hour satellite television, you can check out the Gaza Strip on Google Earth, an impressive view from space of this cramped slice of land, shaped like a dog-bone along the southeast Mediterrean Coast. It’s small, it’s tightly built-up. It is bordered by fertile sleepy Israeli kibbutz villages of citrus groves and roads lined with eucalyptus trees. And fields now churned up by Israeli armour.

On Saturday, an Israeli pilot in an aircraft too high to identify inscribed enormous contrail circles in the blue sky over the Strip -- one, two, three, four, until it looked like the Olympic rings or an Audi badge. They were visible even from Jerusalem. They were still hanging there, losing definition and dissipating slowly in the evening as the sun went down, turning the sky markers a warm pink.

Was this was some enigmatic sign? Who knows? But Saturday saw the heaviest bombardment of the Israeli offensive, by air, land and sea, from dawn till after dark. And before midnight everyone had the answer to the question of the hour. Israel launched a long-anticipated ground offensive.

Israel has not permitted foreign journalists to enter Gaza via the crossings it controls. Reuters’ team of television cameramen and photographers, and the agency’s lone text correspondent Nidal al-Mughrabi, have had little rest and no reinforcement from outside. That has so far proved impossible. Israel’s Route 232 running north-south a few kilometres east of Gaza’s 40 km border – you can see it clearly on Google Earth -- is a closed military operations zone, access barred by many police roadblocks and patrols, and, deeper in, by military police. Most TV crews must film the bomb blasts from a distance, talking on their mobile phones between air strikes and fiery blasts.

Probing too far in the direction of the Gaza border is pointless. The army has barred the road with concrete blocks and heavy steel barriers in places where civilians are not supposed to go. A Humvee full of soldiers is in no mood for conversation and wants to see papers. “Do you have a camera?” is the first question. The .50 calibre machine-gun on the roof swivels automatically, its field of fire displayed on a video-screen inside the armoured vehicle. “Do not come back here,” says the young officer. “It is dangerous.” The gun points at the little car.

But the real danger is a couple of kilometres to the west, in Gaza, where yet another column of black smoke mushrooms upwards, Saturday’s umpteenth. The death toll in Gaza is over 500. On Route 232, the odd banality of war is on show. A migrating flock of impressive geese lands in a luscious green field to feed, honking contentedly as another distant bomb thumps the air. Further south, black-winged buzzards wheel over the livestock pens of a remote kibbutz, spying something there to eat.

(An Israeli Apache gunship flies over the northern Gaza Strip after firing a weapons system January 4, 2009. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants battled in Gaza on Sunday after Israeli troops and tanks invaded the coastal enclave in the most serious fighting in the conflict in decades. REUTERS/Nikola Solic (GAZA))

(Smoke rises after an explosion in the northern Gaza Strip January 4, 2009. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants battled on Gaza City's outskirts on Sunday after Israeli troops and tanks invaded the coastal enclave in the worst fighting in the conflict in decades. REUTERS/Yannis Behrakis (GAZA))

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” -- the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” -- the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)

But the wild-haired hero-general William Wallace (actor-director Mel Gibson) rode his pony up and down the front ranks shouting: “We don’t have to beat them. We just have to fight them!”

That was in the 14th century. But 700 years later it seems to be the same cry  from the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian fighters allied to the Islamic fundamentalist cause led by Hamas pursue a lopsided battle against Israel, pitching erratic, homemade rockets into nearby Israeli lands, until they trigger a major offensive and start taking the heaviest casualties in 60 years of conflict, from Israel F-16s and Apache helicopters.

The warplane is today’s ‘heavy horse’, of course, but it can represent a far, far superior advantage. The Israelis fly with virtual impunity over the crowded Gaza enclave, picking out designated targets in their own good time, capable of selecting individual apartments in a block if they need to. Should it come to ground fighting, Israel has equally advanced tanks with state-of-the-art optics and sensors, plus plenty of modern armoured personnel carriers and artillery that the Islamists do not possess.

The score in Gaza, to state the facts in the crudest terms, was 300 to 1 dead in the first 48 hours.

Monday was day three of the air campaign. In 1999 NATO found itself in its first war, against Serbia over the conflict in Kosovo. The air campaign was conducted at the safety altitude of 22,000 feet because the Serbs, unlike Hamas, did indeed possess anti-aircraft missiles and cannon. A committee of 19 states, the 45-year-old alliance was a nervous newcomer to actual fighting. It gambled that air power would inflict just enough pain to persuade the Serbs to capitulate. But when that did not happen in the first five days, NATO was in a panic, and facing the unthinkable – an invasion.

Some generals had warned the allies that, if you start a war, you must be ready to go all the way and ‘put boots on the ground’. But they had preferred wishful thinking.

Israel, of course, is no newcomer to war, does not need lessons in the limits of air power, and knows that a ground offensive in Gaza cannot be ruled out. Even if Gaza’s Islamist militants number 35,000 as estimates say, there is little doubt who would be likely to come out on top. But it would probably be on top of a land of rubble, with a storm of Arab and Muslim defiance gathering above the entire region.

As the smoke rises from Gaza, anger and defiance seems to be spreading across the Arab world, fuelling protests and violence in the occupied West Bank, stoking anti-Israel sentiment in the wider Arab world, where the young, especially, despise seemingly weak, or complacent regimes unwilling or unable to do something. Islam is their “rock n roll” now, as one writer recently put it, and the militants of Islam have no moral problem with “asymmetric warfare” -- the return of the suicide bomber to Israeli cities, the weapon no Apache or F-16 can stop.

If this is what the defiance of Gaza’s puny rockets begets, then Braveheart’s romantic injunction that “you just have to fight them” could prove to be correct.

(Smoke rises after an Israeli air strike in the northern Gaza Strip December 28, 2008. Israel launched air strikes on Gaza for a second day on Sunday, piling pressure on Hamas after killing more than 270 people in one of the bloodiest days in 60 years of conflict between the Palestinians and the Jewish state. REUTERS/Baz Ratner)