With just two days to go before Israel's general election, opinion polls show more than a quarter of the electorate is still undecided.

Call it the yawning gap in an election race that's largely been one big snooze.

Israelis could be forgiven for failing to be energised by a lacklustre campaign waged by familiar faces and interrupted by a 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip. Political positions are well-known and well-entrenched.

Big campaign rallies have become a tiresome thing of the past in a country that has held five national elections in the past 10 years. But the leading candidates have been hitting the campaign trail harder in recent days.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, head of the ruling, centrist Kadima party, played DJ during a visit to a dance club in Tel Aviv.

Front-runner Benjamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud toured Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market, a bastion of support for his party.

The faces are so familiar that even a negative ad about a political rival uses his nickname.

"Only a vote for Tzipi will beat Bibi," read one Kadima advertisement, using Netanyahu's nickname.

Actually, Bibi has been voicing concern that a vote for his former aide, Avigdor "Evet" Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, will siphon off Likud support and enable Kadima to squeak past to a slim victory.

One Likud ad pictures Netanyahu -- prime minister from 1996 to 1999 -- flanked by another familiar name -- Begin. That's Benny Begin, son of the late Israeli leader, Menachem Begin.

It's all been the antithesis of Barack Obama's "change we can believe in" rallying cry.

One Israeli commentator summed it up this way, when he wrote that Israelis simply don't like their leaders .

Not so long ago, as war raged in Iraq, there was much talk about a suggestion that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians deserved less attention from the United States and other world powers than it had enjoyed over the past 60-odd years, that the intractable dispute was distracting policymakers and that the plight of the stateless Palestinians was much less central to the problems in relations between the Arab world and the West than had long been supposed. It is a debate that continues, though as journalists who have chosen to work in Jerusalem perhaps we may be forgiven for occasionally pointing out that many thinkers continue to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to the problems of the region and so to the world at large.

A survey last year by Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution, Does the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict Still Matter?, found that 86 percent of non-Palestinian Arabs, from Morocco to the Emirates, placed the fate of Palestinians among their top three concerns. That was an increase from 69 percent in 2005, when a larval sectarian civil war in Iraq seemed to be dragging Sunni and Shiite Muslims into a broader regional conflict. And it was still higher than the 73 percent who thought the Palestinian question mattered in 2002: "Despite the Iraq war and the increasing focus on a Sunni-Shiite divide, the Palestinian question remains a central prism through which Arabs view the world," Telhami concluded.

At Reuters, we think it matters. We have more than 70 journalists working in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, covering the news and trends across a range of media, in text, in pictures and in video. You can view much of our work at the Reuters News and AlertNet sites linked to in the bar to the right. This blog site complements that work and, we hope, gives readers and chance to debate the topics that matter in the region and the world beyond. You will see an archive of material from recent months, including during the recent war in the Gaza Strip. With Israeli voters going to the polls this coming Tuesday and Egyptian mediators working against the clock to try and solidify the ceasefire in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, now seemed like a good time to draw your attention to it and let you know that we plan to enrich the site with more material.

Why call it AxisMundi, the "axis of the world" in Latin? Well from our bureau in Jerusalem, we do sometimes feel we are at the centre of world news. It's not just us of course. Jerusalem has at times and variously been seen as the Axis Mundi, the centre of the world (indeed sometimes "the world's navel"), by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. All believe Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son to God on a rock at what is now Jerusalem, before God stayed his hand. That rock, seen as a point of contact between earth and heaven, is now covered by the golden dome in the picture above. It is where Jews built the Temple destroyed by Roman troops 2,000 years ago in a conflict that would end with the Jews' exile from Jerusalem.  It is where Muslims believe Mohammad rose to heaven and where the Dome of the Rock, built after Muslims captured the city from Christian rulers,  now stands.

Shared religious ideas have not, of course, always brought dialogue and understanding between people of the related faiths. A mere visit by hawkish Israeli politician Ariel Sharon in 2000 to the area around the rock, known as al-Haram al-Sharif or Noble Sanctuary by Muslims and the Temple Mount by Jews, sparked violence that compounded a collapse in peace negotiations. Thousands of people have since been killed, including 1,300 during the 22-day Israeli offensive in Gaza that ended on Jan. 18. Both Jews and Arabs, as well as good number of Christians in the powerful states of the West, have a passionate interest in who controls Jerusalem and its holy sites. Thousands of years after the rock was first seen as sacred, Jerusalem remains at the centre of the world's concerns and the conflict that surges for a couple of hundred kilometres around it, in the narrow confines of Israel and the Palestinian territories, defines the future for billions of people very much farther afield. Do please visit this site frequently to find out more and to share ideas on the news from centre of the world...

(PICTURE: The moon is seen during a total lunar eclipse from the Dome of the Rock on the compound known to Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif, and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City February 21, 2008. REUTERS/Eliana Aponte)

Gaza gets 180 minute respite to shop, bury the dead - “For 180 precious minutes, Israeli warplanes and tanks held their fire, giving 1.5 million shell-shocked residents of the coastal enclave a chance to check on family members, shop for essentials and bury their dead.”

Spain’s jobless lose homes, tensions mount - “‘One day this place is going to explode,’ said unemployed waiter Miguel Roa, a Spaniard. Since December, he has lost his job and his home as well as seeing his family split as economic crisis ended 14 years of growth in Spain.

Stoic Gaza claws back to what passes for normal - “For 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza, the westward sea is like the fourth wall of a crumbling prison bounded to the north, east and south by an Israeli-led blockade, and now smashed in key places by a three-week Israeli military assault.”

Morocco tackles painful role in Spain’s past - “Slimane Betmaki smiles at the memory of the terror he inflicted on Spanish villagers on behalf of former dictator Francisco Franco.”

Pakistani newlyweds live in fear of honor killing - “Pervez Chachar and his young wife live in the police headquarters in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Their crime? They fell in love and married without their families’ permission.”

Antarctic sea creatures hypersensitive to warming - “Thriving only in near-freezing waters, creatures such as Antarctic sea spiders, limpets or sea urchins may be among the most vulnerable on the planet to global warming, as the Southern Ocean heats up.”

High-risk riches for Mexico’s “narco wives” - “Each year, dozens compete in beauty pageants in the sun-baked hills of Sinaloa state where their legendary good looks draw wealthy drug traffickers who will sometimes pluck one out and spirit her off to a mountain hide-out.”

Sharks, not humans, most at risk in ocean - “Sharks are the top of the marine food chain, a powerful predator which has no match in its watery realm, until man enters the ocean.”

Sunni anti-Qaeda sheikhs vie for west Iraq in poll - “They rose up against al Qaeda, flushed out suicide bombers and brought relative peace to western Iraq. Now, the Sunni Arab sheikhs of Anbar province want to take charge of it, through the ballot box.”

Ancient Polynesian seafaring renaissance - “A Polynesian voyaging canoe will set sail from Hawaii in March and head into the South Pacific, aiming to reach tiny Palmyra Atoll near Kiribati using only an ancient seafaring skill known as ‘wayfinding.’”

Indian Muslims under pressure in Mumbai aftermath - “The Mumbai attacks have generated a groundswell of public anger across religious and political fault lines against Pakistan for providing refuge for militants on their soil.”

Despite slowdown, polo is big business in Argentina - “Celebrities were on hand to help promote a multimillion dollar project aimed at capitalizing on Argentina’s position as the world’s top destination for polo, a game that could be described as field hockey on horseback.”

I first met Raed al-Athamna when he was driving a journalist friend of mine around Gaza in his yellow, stretch-Mercedes taxi during the tense and violent days after Gaza militants captured Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, in the summer of 2006.

Raed seemed to be a good ‘fixer’ - attentive, sensible and with far-from-perfect but perfectly understandable English.

A few months later, I interviewed him in the rubble of Beit Hanoun - after Israeli tank shells slammed in to a relative’s home killing 18 members of his extended family early one morning as most were still sleeping.

Israel said a technical mishap caused the shells to stray from their intended targets and in to the residential neighbourhood where the Athamnas lived.

Perhaps because his immediate family had escaped the tragedy in their nearby home, and perhaps because loss is so intimately entwined in the lives of Gazans, Raed seemed sanguine and calm in the interview and still confident that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible.

Raed’s business hit a lean patch soon after that interview - when many of the foreign journalists he worked with stopped making the trip in to Gaza as the menace of kidnapping and the unpredictability of the factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas effectively put the Strip off limits.

Despite the dip in business Raed decided it was time to leave Beit Hanoun - whose location near the Israeli border in the northeast corner of Gaza made it a favourite for rocket launchers and thus a regular scene of clashes and airstrikes - so he took his life’s savings, some $70,000, and got to work on a new home.

In the village of Abed Rabbo - a few kilometres south of Beit Hanoun on a plot next to his father’s house - Raed thought he had found refuge from the constant violence.

But he was wrong.

When I interviewed Raed earlier this week next to more rubble, this time the rubble of his own home, he was anything but sanguine, calm and confident that peace would come soon.

He was furious, distraught and very, very scared of what the future held for him and his family.

With his savings spent on a house in rubble, and little hope of seeing it rebuilt soon, and with his taxi lying mangled in a nearby bush it was not hard to understand the rage and confusion.

He said he has already given up on his children’s education.

“How to send them to school? How? My daughter was the first in her class and first for all of north Gaza. But I have told her forget it - she cannot be a doctor now.”

He reached in to his pocket and pulled out a single key on a simple key-ring.

“This is all what we have now, this is all I can give her - our house over there,” he said, waving the key angrily and pointing east in to Israel, towards another home his family had to leave more than 60 years ago, as conflict erupted when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jerry Lampen

Its election time in Israel which, despite the weighty issues at stake, is always something of a let-down for people who like a bit of U.S. style political pageantry.

There are few, if any, stump speeches, rallies, debates. There is, however, blanket campaigning in the traditional media and of course on the internet as well. Here are a few campaign ads from the internet kicking off with Ehud Barak and his Labour Party.

Like all the major candidates Barak has his own website from where you can link to dedicated pages on YouTube, Facebook, Flickr et al.

Tzipi Livni’s Kadima Party are no new-media slouches either and have used every trick in the video editing manual to depict opponent Benjamin Netanyahu as a man prone to panic.

Right-wing party Yisrael Beytenu has seen its standings improve in recent polls and goes with a fairly straight-forward approach on one of its big election themes, demanding something be done about Israeli Arab lawmakers whose loyalty to a Jewish State of Israel is open to question.

Last and by no means least are the campaign ads from front-runner Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu’s Likud Party which all end on a picture of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni with her head buried in her hands. This ad uses a basic visual ploy — non-Likud politicians hiding behind a ‘Bibi’ mask when they espouse his popular policies, although eventually all get unmasked as not being the real deal.

Follow all the Israeli election news on reuters.com. If our extensive coverage is not enough to sate your appetite, Israel’s Haaretz news site has even more coverage on a special elections page as does the website of Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.

Should Israel and/or its allies talk to men like these, the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas, who run the Gaza Strip?

That’s a question that has been revived this week following the end of Israel’s 22-day war in Gaza, which left Hamas rule apparently intact and 1.5 million people in desperate need, and the arrival in the White House of President Barack Obama, who has indicated he might be willing to talk to people his predecessor George W. Bush had shunned.

For now, it looks like talking about talking may be as far as it goes, as we examined in a story earlier in the week. Israel is conducting discussions through Egyptian mediators on prolonging its ceasefire, but is not interested in talking to a movement which rejects the agreements made by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his PLO to accept Israel’s right to exist. Nor are Hamas leaders willing to give Israel the implicit recognition that opening formal negotiations would give - though they do not rule out some contact.

Obama, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and new Middle East envoy George Mitchell, who notably negotiated an end to IRA violence in Northern Ireland, have given no sign they are about to break radically with the Bush administration’s policies in the region for now, as my colleague Jonathan Wright examined today. Obama notably made his first call to regional leaders on Wednesday to Abbas, a sign many saw of a continued determination to support the secular leader in the West Bank against the movement which defeated his Fatah party in a 2006 parliamentary election and seized full control in Gaza the following year. Obama on Thursday repeated three long-standing conditions, agreed upon by the Quartet of mediating powers, for the boycott of Hamas to end.

And yet, and yet. There is talk about talks. This is notably in Europe, where governments who rallied behind Israel after it ceased fire in Gaza on Jan. 18 also face disquiet among their electorates about the fate of Gazans blockaded into their tiny enclave and denied access to basic reconstruction supplies, like cement and steel piping, after a war that killed some 1,300 and left tens of thousands homeless.  Israel fears such material will be used by Hamas to rearm, including building the rockets with which it has peppered southern Israel for years. But the embargo is taking a toll on ordinary people too. As regional political analyst Mouin Rabbani put it to me: “”The Europeans and other donors, now have a problem. Are you going to say ‘Let them eat cake?’”

It is perhaps significant that, in a speech declaring “victory” in Gaza, Hamas’s exile leader Khaled Meshaal appeared specifically to address Europeans in urging talks: “I tell European nations,” he said in Damascus, “It is time for you to deal with Hamas.” Hamas officials made clear to Reuters that the offer of talks was one specifically to international powers, not to Israel.

To look in more detail at the arguments of those who say it is time to talk to Hamas, one might listen to a speech in the British parliament last week by Gerald Kaufman, a former minister and prominent Jewish supporter of Israel who has been highly critical of recent Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Likening the offensive in Gaza to Nazi atrocities, he said: “”Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was democratically elected and it is the only game in town. The boycotting of Hamas … has been a culpable error … You make peace by talking to your enemies.”

French analyst Olivier Roy wrote in the Saudi Gazette this week that it is “time to consider that option” of talking to Hamas. He criticised the Bush administration for what he said was an approach that did not distinguish between enemies like al Qaeda, which have irreconcilable global ambitions, and those like Hamas, which he described as “nothing else than the traditional Palestinian nationalism” - a movement with goals that might be susceptible to negotiation. “The concept of a “war on terror” has thwarted any political approach to the conflicts in favor of an elusive military victory,” Roy wrote.

Another Frenchman taking a close interest in the issue is Yves Aubin de la Messuziere, a retired senior diplomat who twice visited Hamas leaders in Gaza last year. He and the French government have been keen to stress these were private, “research” visits. But the former ambassador has been speaking out strongly for what he sees as an inevitable need to negotiate with Hamas, despite Israel’s distaste for a group it sees as a proxy of its foes in Iran and the perpetrator of dozens of suicide bombings in Israeli cities in the early part of this decade. He developed the theme in some detail in a Web chat hosted by Le Monde newspaper this month and in an interview with Nouvel Observateur magazine , which provides its own English translation.  The diplomat argues that Hamas’s political leadership is capable of negotiations. ”Dialogue … will happen, because Hamas is at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” he said. “If Obama truly wants to be the American president who resolved  this conflict, there will have to be a dialogue with Hamas.”

For a rundown on the opposite view, and one generally shared by the Israeli leaders contesting a general election in just over two weeks, take a look at a blog by former Bush aide David Frum for the National Post. Frum notes the way talk about talks with Hamas is bubbling away behind the scenes, especially in the chancelleries of Europe. And that worries him: ”Starting talks with a group that has not first disavowed violence is an invitation to even more violence,” he said, citing among examples the behaviour of the IRA during a peace process that involved, notably, George Mitchell.  ”Advocates of talks with terrorists often present themselves as pragmatists,” said Frum. “Not so. They are guided by unstated biases and pure wishful thinking.”

The calculations down the decades by governments around the world with armed enemies that oppose them have always been complex and fraught with moral arguments, between the hope that “jaw-jaw is better than war-war” and fear of appeasement and “rewarding terrorism”. This is the fine art of diplomacy mostly conducted behind closed doors. What is, perhaps, more striking then, amid all this cautious and rather technical talk of talking about talks, is some passionate talking from a relatively few Israelis, and Palestinians, of a more profound need to talk, without conditions, simply to try to find some common ground between two peoples who seem locked in endless struggle. While Gaza’s rubble was still smouldering, one of Israel’s most celebrated writers, David Grossman, seized the front-page of the left-leaning daily newspaper Haaretz to pen an impassioned entreaty for dialogue.

“We must speak to the Palestinians … We must speak also to those who do not recognise our right to exist here,” wrote Grossman, author of See under: Love and a veteran peace campaigner who lost a soldier son in Israel’s last war, in Lebanon in 2006. “Instead of ignoring Hamas … we would do better to take advantage of the new reality that has been created by beginning a dialogue with them immediately.”

“We must speak, even if dialogue seems hopeless from the start,” he wrote. “We must speak out of understanding, born as we look out at the horrible devastation, as we grasp that the harm we are capable of inflicting on each other … is so enormous and so destructive and so utterly senseless, that if we surrender to it and accept its logic, it will end up destroying us all.”

It was really only a matter of time.

Within days of the end of Israel’s offensive in Gaza - which included the dropping of massive ‘bunker-buster’ bombs to destroy the vast network of tunnels that run under Gaza’s border with Egypt - the tunnels are up and running again.

The tunnelers say they are not interested in smuggling weapons - the food and fuel that Gazans so desperately need are far more profitable contraband anyway.

To see the tunnels open again - so soon after the end of 22 days of military operations - has riled Israel and led to warnings that further military force could be used against the tunnels.

The warnings are of little concern to those doing the digging and the smuggling - if Israel wants to stop the smuggling, they say, open Gaza’s borders.

Stopping the smuggling was one of the stated aims of Israel’s offensive. Although Israel has been bolstered by US and European support in its bid to cut off the smuggling of rockets - the facts on, and under, the ground suggest the aim was not achieved.

Stopping militants firing rockets at Israel was another stated aim. That has been achieved by a ceasefire - but Israeli intelligence estimates Hamas and other militant factions still have plenty of rockets in stock which could be unleashed if this ceasefire crumbles like so many before it.

Dealing Hamas a ‘crushing blow’ was another stated aim. That one is hard to gauge - Hamas, despite losing some of its top leaders in the campaign, has claimed ‘victory’ and still seems to be standing in Gaza.

‘Changing the reality in the south’ was another stated aim.  Again hard to gauge although much of the pre-war reality has not changed - Israelis are still living under the threat of a rain of rockets, Palestinians are still living in destitution behind a crippling blockade.

All of which, inevitably, has led to questions about what exactly has been achieved by the devastating offensive - apart from massive damage to Gaza’s infrastructure, a shocking casualty toll, a battering of Israel’s international reputation in some quarters and an impoverished and embattled population in Gaza which - on the face of it - is not blaming its Hamas leaders for the onslaught but is pointing the finger squarely at Israel.

Some commentators have said Israel achieved one important goal by reestablishing its ‘deterrence’ - its ability to make its enemies think twice before attacking - that was badly dented by an inconclusive outcome to the 2006 war against Hezbollah guerrillas in south Lebanon.

Other commentators are questioning whether the means justify that end.

‘Ah - the usual suspects,’ an Israeli colleague told me when I pointed out this commentary from left-wing columnist Gideon Levy in Haaretz which raises questions about what was achieved.

Its worth noting that even the ‘usual suspects’ were far more circumspect in their criticism in the early stages of the war - indeed some were even supportive in line with the vast majority of Israeli public opinion and the mainstream media.

Reading the comments on Levy’s essay- or on this one by Gadi Baltiansky on the website of Israel’s leading newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth - still gives a fair, if non-scientific, reflection on popular opinion in Israel which is still firmly behind the war.

More scientific is the poll published today by Israel Hayom/New Wave - which shows hawkish former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gaining steadily in popularity ahead of elections in just under three weeks.

Netanyahu - according to his adviser Ron Dermer - would have added another aim to the Gaza offensive: “Ultimately Hamas must be toppled because it is a threat to Israel,” he told Reuters here.

With the election fast turning in to a referendum on the war and its outcome - one last aim could still be achieved.

As my colleague Dan Williams reported here the fate of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit held by Palestinian militants in Gaza could be in play again - with Israel appearing more flexible on Hamas demands for the release of 1,400 inmates held in Israeli jails in return for the release of Shalit.

If that happens before election day the polls could still have some surprises in store.

Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza has made headlines around the world.

But beyond the raw realities of war — more than 1,100 Palestinians and 13 Israelis dead — the three-week conflict has also created a peculiar intersection with music, literature and cinema, in the surreal way that wars sometimes do.

The latest away-from-the-headlines development is that Israel’s entry for the Eurovision song contest, the annual pan-European song-fest that pits some 40 nations against one another, is suddenly under pressure because of the war.

Israel, which has won the competition before and takes it very seriously, is hoping to enter a singing duo — Mira Awad, a Christian Arab Israeli, and Achinoam Nini, better known as Noa, a Jewish Israeli of Yemenite descent — for the event to be held in Moscow in May.

But some Arab and Jewish artists and intellectuals are calling on Awad to pull out of the competition, saying her participation would play into the “Israeli propaganda machine” that seeks to convey an image of national coexistence — Jews and Arabs living happily under one banner.

“What allows the international community to provide support is Israel’s image as a ‘democratic’, ‘enlightened’, ‘peace-seeking’ country,” a string of signatories wrote in an open letter to Awad, posted on the website of ynetnews.com.

“Your participation in Eurovision is taking part in the activity of the Israel propaganda machine,” they said, with one describing Awad’s role as that of a “fig leaf” for Israel.

Neither Awad nor Nini has commented on the letter but Israel’s broadcasting authority defended their participation, saying it “expresses the aspiration for coexistence which transcends politics.”

Another quirky overlap between the current conflict and art has been created by the successful Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir”, an animated documentary that examines the futility of Israel’s war in Lebanon in the early 1980s.

The film, which takes a critical look at the role Israel played during the massacre of Palestinians by Christian militias in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, won a Golden Globe last week and is tipped for best foreign film at the Oscars.

Playing on those hopes, a cartoon in Haaretz newspaper on Thursday depicted a group of Israeli soldiers hanging around a tank outside Gaza as the city burns behind them. One of the soldiers says to the others: “I have an idea for a movie that could win an Oscar.”

The 24/7 coverage of the war in the Israeli media has also given publishing houses a good reason to crank up their war-book promotions.

Gefen, an Israeli publisher, took out advertisements in the Israeli press this week to tout new and re-issued titles including: “Shackled Warrior”, “Mossad Exodus”, and “The Letters of Jonathan Netanyahu”, the military commander brother of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is tipped to win Israel’s next election on Feb. 10th.

It may not be art imitating life, but it is certainly life re-lived through pop culture.

It’s not easy being the secretary-general of the United Nations.

For three weeks, the South Korean U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon has been urging Israel and Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza Strip to stop their fighting.  He has described himself as “deeply alarmed” and said he “deplores” the latest war to erupt in the Middle East. Ban said it has caused an “unbearable” number of casualties – over 1,000 Palestinians and 13 Israelis have died since the war began on Dec. 27.

But his appeals – backed by a legally binding U.N. Security Council resolution urging an immediate ceasefire – have fallen on deaf ears.  The Israeli offensive has intensified and Hamas militants have continued to fire rockets at southern Israel.

That is not the only problem dogging Ban on his week-long tour of the Middle East, which he described as “a mission of peace”.  The U.N. plane assigned to carry Ban, his aides, and a throng of reporters and their gear is too small.

It was clear that the group needed a bigger plane when we left Cairo for the Jordanian capital Amman on Wednesday.  The luggage hold was so overwhelmed by suitcases and television gear that the flight crew had to cram luggage under nearly every seat in the narrow aircraft, which seats just over 50 passengers.

Journalists and U.N. officials complained about the lack of leg room, but we survived the flight and landed safely in Jordan.

The situation worsened overnight with the arrival of yet another television crew with all their gear (but minus their personal luggage which ended up somewhere else on the Eurasian continent). While we were waiting to board the plane for the brief flight to Israel, U.N. officials warned reporters that there were safety concerns.  There may be too much luggage and too many people for the tiny plane, they said.  Sitting in the VIP lounge at Amman airport, we wondered if the secretary-general’s hopes of bringing his peace mission to the leaders of Israel might be dashed from the start – or at least seriously delayed.

But the fears of those in doubt were misplaced – for this was the little plane that could.

After a brief delay during which the Canadian crew stuffed baggage into every nook and cranny of the little aircraft, Ban’s entourage was marched onto the tarmac and seated on the plane.  We were pleasantly surprised that the resourceful Canadians had managed to restore most of the legroom throughout the plane.

Soon we were in the air, headed for Ben Gurion airport.  Some 45 minutes later we landed in Israel, where we said goodbye to the little plane and Ban Ki-moon told Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence Minister Ehud Barak once again that it was time to end their offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa