By Nidal al-Mughrabi

Voices get loud and excited over the radio Reuters news crews use in Gaza to call in the latest information. Some people complain there are no “Western reporters” inside. But we all work for Reuters, a global agency that sets the international standard.

After two full weeks of bombardment we are all worried about our families but we work and work the story. We hope it will stop.

“They bombed a car in Beit Lahiyah,” says one colleague working in northern Gaza.

“Three dead arrived in Shifa hospital,” says another in Gaza’s largest hospital.

“Several people were injured when Israeli planes bombed the tunnels,” said a third from southern Gaza Strip near the border with Egypt.

I field these calls in our office where we have put duct tape crosses on every window to limit flying glass if a strike is too close. Still, the largest window in the hall was blown out.

We have a fixed camera on our high-rise building but our cameramen are being cautious not to point their cameras from the windows, in case they are mistaken for weapons. (Such mistakes were given as the reasons why a US tank blasted our Baghdad bureau in 2003, killing and wounding colleagues, and was also the reason given for an Israeli tank killing our colleague here in Gaza, Fadel Shana, nine months ago.)

The camera can show the blue Mediterranean sea a few blocks to the west, or point the other way to where Israeli ground forces are closing in, perhaps little more than a kilometre away. At night it used to show bright lights and traffic.

Now it is empty streets and a few cold electric lights. Nothing much moves after dark these days. And we choose, for safety reasons, not to stay in the bureau overnight. We look after our families and keep in touch with contacts and colleagues by phone, ready to head out and film if necessary.

We all get to the office around 9 a.m - typically about 10 of us, with another dozen colleagues working in other parts of the Gaza Strip. The strikes have usually been going on for a few hours by then. We call that information in to our bureau in Jerusalem where colleagues have been updating our main report around the clock. The updates go on all day long.

I often have no time to write up stories myself. It all moves so fast. I use two land phones, an Israeli mobile phone, and a Palestinian mobile phone that is intermittent.

Inside Gaza, we use text messages to communicate. We have to monitor local television and radio stations because they are often first with developments that we race to check. Those checks are essential, of course. The mixture of confusion and deliberate propaganda that accompanies any war, means that our standards of cross-checking everything and ensuring readers understand the sources of information need to be rigorous.

Every day is a new life written for me and for my family and also for the Reuters team in Gaza. Shelling and air strikes have hardly spared any place in the whole Gaza Strip. The heart of the city of Gaza has been hit several times.

Some areas seem to have been hit simply because a Hamas policeman walked nearby, or some militants were detected at a street corner by the Israeli forces. The high-explosive attack that follows can be devastating, taking out not only targeted people but a house or some passers-by.

The movement of our crews is restricted to hospitals and major strikes at places that are important, or where we think there may have been a high death toll. It is simply too dangerous to do otherwise. We cannot be with Hamas leaders or accompany the fighters to film them since that would be too great a risk.

“Please take care. Do not enter a place right after it is bombed. Wait a bit, it may be hit again.” This is a warning I issue to our crews 30 times a day.

We urge our cameramen and photographers to avoid main roads outside the city, and to look carefully where they drive.

“Try not to pass by a police station even it was already bombed. Do not go by a money exchange shop, or a house of a Hamas leader. Do not pass by a place the Israel army has threatened to bomb. Avoid passing close to a mosque.”

This is also my daily advice to myself — a list I repeat mentally as I drive back and forth.

Inside the office we have breakfast together, lunch too sometimes, and we send meals to people on outside missions. At one stage we did not see our outside crews for almost five days. When they returned to the office there was a big welcome scene. We hugged one another and thanked God we were safe, that all of us were safe.

Four journalists have been killed since the offensive began. One worked for Algerian and Moroccan television, another two for local Gaza broadcasters. The fourth was the special presidential cameraman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

When the main security complex was hit, 200 metres from our office, a piece of shrapnel penetrated the wall of our TV production room and made a hole. Part of the ceiling broke but everybody was safe. Many times we have ducked under the tables when huge blasts from air strikes shook the office. We also hear the whistle of outgoing Gaza rockets fired at Israel from inside the city.

Our families are our main concern.

I live in the south west side of Gaza City, not far from the sea, and the sounds of explosions in the district in the street have never ceased for 14 days of war. We’ve had almost no electricity for 10 days. For safety, my wife, daughter and son squeeze all day into our little hallway, listening to the news on a transistor radio. When one goes to the toilet, they all go together. One goes into the bathroom, the rest wait just outside.

For 14 days we have been sleeping in the same room, which we thought was away from the street and would be safe. But the whole building shook with every explosion and my wife had to leave our bed and hug the kids, sleeping on mattresses. My kids cover their ears a lot of the time when explosions start. My daily lectures about safety –  that we are far from what is happening — seem pretty useless.

On Thursday the children realised I was just trying to make things easier. An Israeli missile hit a house across the street where we lived and killed a journalist, his wife and his mother-in-law. I was still working and my wife called to tell me and I could hear the children crying in the background. I had to check a colour story bylined in my name by Reuters in Jerusalem. The colleagues there told me to go home and to be with my family, which must be the top priority before anything else.

We have to leave the office before it is too late at night because the streets are empty and scary. Restaurants are closed and bakeries crowded by people in the daytime. One baker helped out with a special delivery, grateful for the work of journalists.

Our Reuters colleagues in Jerusalem are far away but they have some visual contact via our live television monitor, so they can see the smoke, dust and flames caused by Israeli bombing in Gaza. They can get some of the atmosphere. We also have many colleagues on Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip, just a few kilometres from our office here, watching and filming the bombs landing around us and the rockets being fired at Israel.

It is hard to get accurate statistics from independent parties on how many fighters have died. Hamas spokesmen do not answer that question. Our cameramen rarely cover funerals of gunmen of Hamas, it is too dangerous. The Israeli army says it has killed “hundreds” of fighters. From the tolls we are compiling from the hospitals, hundreds of civilians have also died.

On Friday Jan 9, an air strike hit a TV production and transmission facility about 100 metres from our office. At least one person was hurt and there was considerable damage. It was used by several Arab TV stations and Iran’s Press TV. The Israeli army said the building was not a target but may have sustained “collateral damage” - and they assured us they have the coordinates of the Reuters bureau and that we are not a target. It is worrying nonetheless.

We pray this will stop soon.

Gaza was the place where, in Biblical times, the Jewish hero Samson took up with a harlot. That was before he met Delilah and, succumbing at last to her charms and tricks, revealed the secret of his strength. Shorn of his curly locks while he slept, Samson lost his superhuman strength. He was taken to Gaza and blinded by the Philistines with a white-hot poker. But his hair, and his strength, gradually grew back unnoticed, and at last Samson pushed over a pillar in their temple and brought the building down upon them, killing many. Or so the Bible story goes.

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))

Saturday is my day off from being Reuters correspondent in Gaza and I usually sleep until noon.  This Saturday things didn’t go to plan.

My 7-year-old son Abdel-Rahman and his sister Dalia, who is 12, came home early from school, as they have been doing their mid-term exams, to wake me up and ask me to take them for breakfast at a seafront restaurant not far from Gaza’s port.

We got in the car, and for some reason I didn’t take the usual coast road. The decision probably saved our lives.

We had barely taken our table overlooking the sea when we heard one explosion, then another, then a third.

Abdel-Rahman began to cry and Dalia covered her ears with her hands.

I rushed to the front to have a look and saw smoke pouring from the area of the port, and a series of explosions. I figured it was air strikes. Then I heard the roar of Israeli jets.

I radioed my colleagues in television and pictures and told them what I had seen. I tried to phone Reuters’ Jerusalem office — but the mobile phone signal died.

I went to the restaurant’s reception and called the office, but I had to keep running back to my children and wife, were, to calm them down.

“Dad, don’t leave us,” cried Abdel-Rahman. Dalia wept. “Dad, I am afraid. Why? Why did that happen? Do they want to kill us?”

I had no answer as the explosions continued to rock the place that is our home.

I was getting reports by radio about locations that had been hit, including the main police headquarters and another security compound near our house.

What later emerged was that more than 225 people had been killed in dozens of air strikes against the Hamas-ruled strip. Israel said the attacks were in response to daily rocket fire by Gaza militants, which intensified after Hamas ended a six-month ceasefire. On Saturday, one Israeli man was killed by a rocket after the Israeli strikes began.

My wife tried to call her friends in the house, but couldn’t get a signal. Then one of her friends got through to her and told her that there was shattered glass everywhere and the sky overhead was thick with smoke.

So we had to stay put in the restaurant and I had to struggle between coping with the tears of my children and the need to get to my office in Gaza.

Colleagues warned me against driving as my car could be hit if I unwittingly drove near any of the security compounds that the Israelis were attacking.

Then there was a lull in the bombings, and I put my family in the car. I took back roads, and drove as fast as I dared with hundreds of people milling around the streets.

“Dad, be careful,” Dalia said.

We arrived home to see that the adjacent Hamas security compound had indeed been bombed, and there were crowds in the street.

“I saw body parts and some people had their heads cut off,” one man said. “It was a real massacre, Israel has started a war,” said another.

In the compound, ambulance workers were still carrying out the injured as bodies, uniformed and in plain clothes, lay on the ground. Women wept and children huddled in the arms of their mothers and fathers.

By Dan Williams

A Reuters investigation into how the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet is tackling threats from Jewish ultranationalists has raised intriguing parallels with Britain’s handling of the sectarian “troubles” in Northern Ireland.

Radical Jewish settlers who might turn to violence in a bid to wreck Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking are, increasingly, the quarry of the Shin Bet’s shadowy “Jewish Division”, whose operatives draw on a range of spying and interrogation tactics.

But a question remains over whether the Shin Bet, criticised internationally for its treatment of Palestinian suspects whose rights are limited under Israeli martial law, is less likely to get rough with Jews.

Such differential doctrines potentially recall Northern Ireland, where for decades British authorities had to tackle both Catholic republicans seeking a united Ireland and rival Protestants loyal to London.

A former top official with MI5, the British counterpart to Shin Bet, told me recently that when sectarian strife erupted in the province in the late 1960s, republicans were generally seen as the main threat to Britain, with the assumption that it was their violence that provoked loyalist counter-attacks.

Of further concern was the fact that the Provisional Irish Republican Army was targeting British targets abroad, while the loyalist paramilitaries were more localised.

“But when loyalists started, for example, buying weapons on the (British) mainland and abroad, we took that very seriously and certainly didn’t regard them as more ‘friendly’,” the MI5 veteran told me. “They were quite dreadful thugs.”

Once again access to the Gaza Strip is in the news. This time, perhaps a little self-servingly, because foreign journalists are being denied access to Gaza by Israeli authorities.

The Foreign Press Association, which represents the collective interests of the international media covering the news in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, has filed a law suit with the Supreme Court demanding Israel lifts its ban on journalists entering Gaza. It has been in force for nearly three weeks, since violence flared with Israeli army raids and air strikes and Palestinian “Kassam” rocket fire from the coastal enclave.

The ban has raised eyebrows in Israel - where many are fiercely proud of a vocal and boisterous media which operates largely free of government interference save for a rarely-invoked military censorship law in matters of national security.

In an editorial in the leftist daily Haaretz, the paper says that “shutting out foreign journalists is an act of punishment that gives Israel and her democracy a bad name.” An unnamed Israeli official told the mass-selling Maariv newspaper on Monday: “Israel is being portrayed as trying to put a lid on free speech and to restrict the freedom of the press. We are losing because foreign journalists are busy with Israel’s decision to close the crossings in their faces and not with the real story, which is the firing of Kassam rockets.”

Reuters, along with other international news agencies, is less affected by the ban because we maintain a fully-staffed bureau in Gaza covering events as they unfold. But for the scores of foreign journalists who rely on travelling in day by day from Israel to be on the spot themselves to cover the story – the ban is especially difficult.

Even for the large media organisations based in the region, access to and from Gaza is a perpetual headache.

Trying to get equipment and supplies in to keep our bureau running, or trying to get colleagues out for medical treatment, overseas assignments or training can often seem like a lottery – sometimes easy, other times impossible.

“Putting the ‘porter’ back in ‘reporter” is the wry joke that does the rounds when a group of journalists sets off across the several hundred metres of rubble-strewn no man’s land that lies between Israel and Gaza as we hand-carry diesel fuel or computer equipment for our bureaux, or school shoes for our colleagues’ children.

Getting in to Gaza wasn’t always like this – and the changes at Erez crossing are a sign of how far the situation in the region has deteriorated in the last decade and how far away the combatants still are from a lasting solution.

A fragile truce agreed in June between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that controls Gaza, has brought a degree of peace over the last few months – but access to Gaza has not been eased by Egypt or Israel, who control the border crossings.

In the absence of a resolution Gaza remains blocked and Gaza’s civilians have to endure life in what they call the world’s biggest prison.

Faced with these hardships - Gazans have shown typical human ingenuity to have some access to the outside world - as evidenced by the smugglers who use tunnels under the Egyptian border to bring in weapons, people and even cows.

Also refusing to take a closed land border as an impediment - these activists who wanted to highlight the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and recently took to the high seas to get their point across

And who can forget these images of the flood of people who rushed across the Egyptian border at Rafah after Hamas militants blew down the fence to enjoy a rare and fleeting taste of freedom outside the Gaza Strip.

 The last time I stayed up all night was in Baghdad when U.S. warplanes bombed the city in an overnight raid that announced the start of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Last night I was up all night by choice.  I wasn’t covering the U.S. presidential elections but I joined the millions of people across the world who were anxious to know who will be taking charge of America — and whether they really would presage change. For anyone from and involved in the Middle East this is no small question.

The Americans have cast their vote for change all right; they have voted clearly for a new America, for a change of direction. People across the Middle East have been eager to see change in America, not just a change of personality but a real change of policy and vision.

Many countries, particularly emerging countries, have many misgivings about the United States. They have been longing for a new U.S. administration that reaches out to them through dialogue and engagement, understanding and the pursuit of common interests rather than the exercise of supremacy and hegemony.

The policies of outgoing President George W. Bush had a depressing and often violent impact on the Middle East, especially in Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, where antagonism toward Washington is widespread and deeply felt.

People across the region are particularly hopeful that the new administration will deliver on peace and democracy rather than courting dictators and authoritarian regimes that suppress any opposing voice or opinion.

Will Obama deliver? The list of issues that awaits him is long and old – from pulling out troops from Iraq, to engaging Iran on its nuclear ambitions and security concerns, to finding a peaceful settlement to the 60-year-old Arab-Israeli conflict.

And all that without mentioning what will surely be his first priority –  the global financial crisis.

He might not have any magic wand but a new approach, a new  policy and a new language  is not a bad start.  Tone is a very important part of foreign policy.

Could a new U.S. approach erode a built up hostility?

This is a common phrase used by both Israelis and Palestinians when asked about the negotiations process that was launched by U.S. President George W. Bush at Annapolis last year and which, according to Bush’s timeline, should have produced a Palestinian state by the end of his presidency in January.

Since the signing of the Oslo provisional peace deal 15 years ago, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals, professionals, and politicians have held hundreds of meetings in Israel and in most European cities to promote dialogue and coexistence, in the hope that eventually Palestinians will have the state the accords outlined for them, living in peace alongside Israel.

This week, the Peres Center for Peace, established after the Oslo peace accords, drew hundreds of Israelis, Arabs, and international leaders and professionals to discuss peace during its 10th anniversary event in Tel Aviv, under the aegis of former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, now Israel’s largely ceremonial president.

I attended sessions of the 3-day event and also took part, as a journalist covering the conflict for the past 14 years, in a meeting a week earlier between Israeli and Palestinian representatives of the media and academics in Seville, Spain, hosted by the Three Cultures Foundation , a non-profit organization founded under the aegis of the Andalusian Regional Government and Morocco, and organized by the Israeli and Palestinian branches of the Geneva Initiative Peace Coalition.

The mood at both meetings among activists committed to a peaceful solution to the 60-year-old conflict was sombre.

In between the two meetings, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians who won her party’s elections to replace Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, announced she had failed in forming a government and called for early elections scheduled for February.

A key sticking point was the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious Shas party to join her in a coalition because of its opposition to her negotiating with Palestinians on dividing Jerusalem between Israel and a new Palestinian state.

Divisions in Israeli society over the Oslo accords, divisions that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – coincidentally on Nov. 4, the date of this week’s U.S. presidential election — continue to pose obstacles to peacemaking.

In Seville, a historic place of meeting, and conflict, among Jews, Muslims and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians sat in cafes and in formal sessions to discuss coexistence, and chances for an elusive peace that has weakened the peace camps in both neighbouring societies.

During the two-day seminar, professor Tamar Hermann, Dean of Academic Studies at the Open University in Israel, who conducts monthly opinion polls on Israeli positions regarding the peace process, presented figures that show that in 10 or 20 years, there won’t be a population in Israel receptive of peace ideas. She said some 70 percent of Orthdox Jews in Israel identified themselves as right-wing, and noted that the Orthodox community is growing fast as a proportion of the population.

The poll also showed that only 12 percent perceived an escalation of the Palestinian resistence as a threat. Hermann, a political scientist, said that “making peace with their Palestinian neighbours was not the prime goal of the Jews in Israel.”

Palestinian writer Hassan Khader, another participant in the Seville conference said the Israeli state of denial was harming the Jews. “Does it really serve the Israeli interests to defeat the Palestinians? In the 1967 war, they won the war, but forty years later it showed it was one of their worst traps.”

Palestinians have been increasingly disillusioned with peace as Palestinian negotiators conduct frequent sessions of negotiations with their Israeli counterparts without progress. The Palestinians have seen their lands confiscated for more settlements and walls and fences constructed around the Gaza Strip and West Bank that have isolated them from the rest of the world.

The only Israelis many Palestinians know are the soldiers at checkpoints or armed settlers attacking farmers harvesting their land in the West Bank. One secular Israeli politician said: “The extreme settlers are forming militias. They’re armed and claim they represent God, yet we don’t confront them. We say they’re a small group.But they will turn into a Hezbollah and eventually they will turn against us. We still can’t see this.”

The younger generation in Israel, which has come to adulthood since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995, is less supportive of peace since the images they have seen were of exploding buses and have never visited the Palestinian areas, Hermann said.
Gadi Baltiansky, director of the Israeli branch of the Geneva Initiative said time was running out and people must feel a sense of urgency to make dramatic decisions about peace.But as time is running out, there is a state of limbo. The Palestinians are divided as never before and may go to elections next year when President Mahmoud Abbas’ term ends. Israel too is heading for elections in February.

The mood among the activists is one of alarm.

“If two governments will be elected in both sides which are anti-peace … then unfortunately we are heading towards a tragedy. I can hope rationalism will win,” said Ron Pundak, one of the Israelis closely involved in the Oslo peace process.

 Sometimes we journalists speak of stories that are so compelling, so important to tell that they “hit you in the face”. In the West Bank these days, we’ve begun to take that literally. In the past couple of weeks, Palestinian journalists working for international media, including Reuters, have become the targets of Jewish settlers in a way that has highlighted what many see as a violent trend among that community which has caused alarm not only among ordinary Palestinians but among Israeli leaders and their international allies, most recently the European Union . The EU noted an upsurge in violence during the annual harvest of olives, a key crop in the hills of the West Bank. The statement came out just hours after settlers had again attacked journalists, as well as Israeli police.  

A couple of weeks ago, one of my colleagues, photographer Nayef Hashlamoun, was among journalists hurt when young Jewish religious settlers set about them in Hebron as they tried to cover efforts by local Palestinians and Israeli and foreign activists to pick olives. Israeli troops stepped in disperse the attackers and to offer medical aid to the journalists. But the soldiers’ actions were not enough to spare them criticism from fellow Israelis in the media. The incident led major television news bulletins in Israel that evening, with the channels questioning why the soldiers, part of the conscript army Israel deploys across the West Bank to protect some 300,000 settlers, had not arrested the assailants. 

The incident and its coverage in Israeli media highlighted the extent to which the settlements, undertaken following Israel’s seizure of the West Bank in the war of 1967, remain not just, in the words of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an “obstacle to peace” with the Palestinians, but also an focus of discord within Israeli society. On Tuesday, the day Americans choose  the president who may try to succeed where Rice and George W. Bush have failed in bringing peace to the Middle East, Israelis will mark 13 years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. His Jewish killer remains unrepentant and a hero to some Israelis for his attempt to stop Rabin and his government from handing the West Bank and Gaza Strip to Yasser Arafat’s PLO after the Oslo peace accords. The assassin, Yigal Amir, sparked a furore last week by giving secretly taped television interviews in prison. It provided a reminder of the continued divisions over Rabin’s ‘land-for-peace’ strategy and revived painful memories of internal violence. 

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who will finally step down after a February election after formally resigning over a corruption scandal, warned of the emergence of radical underground Jewish groups  after a bomb damaged the home of an Israeli academic in Jerusalem who has spoken out strongly against the settlers, who choose to live in the occupied West Bank in defiance of international law. Olmert has also lambasted “pogroms” against Palestinian villagers. Palestinians and their international allies complain, however, that Olmert has failed to remove settlers, despite Israel’s international commitments to do so. Indeed, his government has overseen an expansion of settlements.

This past week, the American Jewish Committee, which was set up over a century ago in response to pogroms against Jews in Russia, issued a statement sharing Olmert’s alarm at the rise in settler violence.

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported a total of 222 incidents in the first half of 2008 versus 291 incidents in all of 2007. It said that 23 incidents of the cases recorded this year led to Palestinian casualties. Later OCHA reports document further difficulties during the olive harvest.

“There has been a rise in Jewish violence in Judea and Samaria,” Gadi Shamni, Israeli army commander of the central region, referring to the West Bank, recently said.  ”In the past, only a few dozen individuals took part in such activity, but today that number has grown into the hundreds.”

In the Israeli press, the op-ed pages of Haaretz  have seen an exchange of opinions, including mutual accusations of propagating nothing less than “hatred” for fellow Jews, that has in turn generated wider  coverage in the national media.

In an unsigned leader article  last week entitled “Defeat Settler Terror”, the left-leaning broadsheet put its cards on the table, concluding: “Any attempt at compromise, and any negotiations with representatives of the settler “moderates,” would constitute a capitulation to terror and the abandonment of the state to a dangerous group of lunatics who are liable to bring about its destruction. “

A few days earlier, prominent pro-settler spokesman Israel Harel had defended the movement, distancing it from violent extremists and accusing anti-settlement activists and Palestinians of creating fear on settlements by not observing arranged times for picking olives: “When the truth is distorted so radically, and when all the ills of the state and the people are imputed to the settlers, the only possible conclusion is that aside from the political motive, the deeper reason for this destructive criticism is hatred - pure, baseless hatred.”

To that, the newspapers’s commentator, Gideon Levy hit back with a piece conceding his antipathy toward the settlers. His piece was entitled simply “Yes, Hate”.

With emotions running high, and with journalists ourselves feeling the story of the settlers is “hitting us in the face” at times, my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan took time to investigate the view from inside one of the fortified hilltop settlements that dot the West Bank landscape. There she met a 25-year-old woman called Renana Cohen who insisted that, whatever Olmert’s successor and Bush’s successor might think of following through on Rabin’s willingness to consider removing at least some of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, she had no intention of complying. She and her friends would “do everything to prevent” an evacuation, she said. ” I cannot even imagine it happening,” she added from the settlement which overlooks the major Palestinian city of Nablus. “If we don’t live here, then the Arabs would.”

 (Sami Aboudi contributed to this blog)

In downtown Beirut, resurrected from the rubble of the 1975-90 civil war, one is spoilt for choice of smart restaurants, trendy bars and lively clubs. Performances by sexy Lebanese divas and belly dancers contribute generously to Lebanon’s gross domestic product by attracting Gulf Arab tourists enchanted with Lebanese talent and beauty — not necessarily in that order.

There is isn’t a single international designer who has not found his or her way to Beirut’s elegant boutiques and jewellery shops. On the other hand, Lebanese designers such as Elie Saab are dressing Hollywood stars these days.

On the streets of Beirut one can see the latest Mercedes, Jaguars and BMWs jostling with Maseratis and Ferraris, even before they appear in Europe. Appearances aside, Lebanon has one of the best-educated peoples in the Middle East, with its young men and women having a global reach into the worlds of business, banking and academia.

It was comforting to see downtown Beirut teeming again with tourists enjoying the delights the city can offer. Beaches were packed with Beirutis in bikinis and hotels were overbooked with returning visitors who left during the crisis that erupted between the pro-Iranian opposition led by Lebanon’s influential Shi’ite Hezbollah and the U.S.-backed Sunni-led Lebanese government after the assassination in 2005 of former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri. This crisis has been put on hold following a Qatari-brokered agreement in May.

Yet underneath the glitzy facade is a country mirroring the real currents of militancy and Sunni-Shi’ite sectarianism unleashed by the Iraq war.

The conflict in Iraq has brought back to the surface the historical Sunni-Shi’ite feud throughout the Middle East. It overthrew a Sunni dictator, brought Iraq’s Shi’ites to power and tipped the balance of power in favour of Shi’ite Iran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.

This, in turn, has incensed Sunni Arab countries and left a bitter legacy across the Arab world, Lebanon in particular which is traditionally a proxy battleground where regional forces settle their disputes.

In Lebanon, the Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry is in danger of taking a vicious turn. Fundamentalist Sunni Salafi groups have established a foothold in the northern city of Tripoli, which admittedly had been a hotbed for Sunni Islamist groups in the 1980s before they were crushed by Syria, then the dominant power in Lebanon.

Now these forces have found their way to the southern city of Sidon and to eastern Lebanon and some Palestinian refugee camps.

Added to the Iraq war factor is the humiliation inflicted on Sunni prestige in May by Hezbollah when it overran West Beirut, traditionally a Sunni bastion, after a row with the government. That proved without a doubt that they called the shots in the country.

As a result, Sunni groups are seething, with some tilting towards radical Islamism.

The growing influence of these groups is no longer just in the poor neighbourhoods of Tripoli but it has reached the more affluent parts of the southern port city of Sidon — through mosques and preachers setting out to indoctrinate young Sunnis.

A friend recently recounted how her nephew and some of his friends, all American-educated and from affluent Sunni conservative families, were victims of this indoctrination and turned into zealots after attending prayers at a mosque near Sidon.

“Now he spends his days in his room reading the Koran and listening to militant chants. In his eyes we are non-Muslims and following the infidel way of life. Nobody is able to communicate with him or get through to him,” the friend told me.

Lebanon, it seems, is being used once again by its politicians and their regional patrons as a laboratory.

Anti-Syrian Sunni Lebanese politicians, backed by Sunni heavyweight Saudi Arabia, have not only ignored the growing influence of Salafi groups but have courted them in some instances in their attempt to roll back the rising tide of Shi’ite influence embodied by Hezbollah.

Syria, which after the 2003 U.S.-led war encouraged and facilitated the flow of jihadists to Iraq and into Lebanon, has warned of growing Islamist militancy in north Lebanon and said a vehicle used in a suicide attack in Damascus last week had crossed into Syria from a neighbouring country, implying it could have been Lebanon, Jordan or Iraq.

With these local and regional actors playing with fire, how long before their policies backfire

 Four years ago this week, on July 9, 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, known as the World Court, ruled in an advisory opinion that the wall and fence barrier which Israel was building in the West Bank was illegal under international law and that Palestinians affected by it should be compensated. Israel responded  by dismissing the decision as politically motivated and defended the barrier, which it calls the “security fence”, as an effective response to “Palestinian terrorism”. Israel says the barrier, whose projected route of fences and walls snakes through the West Bank for over 700 km, has saved Israeli lives by preventing a continuation of attacks, notably suicide bombings.

 The United Nations General Assembly voted  later in July 2004 to demand that Israel comply with the decision of the World Court. Following the court ruling, the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators - the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia - also reaffirmed an earlier statement which said “We note the Government of Israel’s pledge that the barrier is a security rather than political barrier and should be temporary rather than permanent. We continue to note with great concern the actual and proposed route of the barrier, particularly as it results in confiscation of Palestinian land, cuts off the movement of people and groups, and undermines Palestinians’ trust in the roadmap (peace) process by appearing to prejudge the final borders of the future Palestinian state.”

 There is continued international pressure from otherwise friendly governments who say Israel should build on its own land, not occupied Palestinian territory, and should evacuate Jewish settlements in the West Bank. There have also been repeated complaints from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during peace negotiations resumed under U.S. sponsorship last year.

 But Israel has continued to work on the barrier. The Israeli Supreme Court ordered part of the route to be change last year in a judgment which found in favour of Palestinians in the town of Bilin who had complained the barrier would cut their farmland off from their homes. Critics like the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem say that little has changed on the ground, however. It has gathered testimonies of Palestinians recounting hardships, including loss of land and access to facilities, as a result of the construction.

 As the fourth anniversary of the World Court decision approaches, Israeli troops have responded to anti-barrier protests near Nilin, 20 km west of Tel Aviv, by sealing off  the West Bank town since Friday. Days after a Palestinian construction worker killed three Israelis with a bulldozer  on one of Jewish west Jerusalem’s busiest streets, the arguments about land and security show no sign of abating. The killer, Hosam Dwayyat, was a resident of a West Bank village that Israel annexed to its Jerusalem Municipality after it occupied the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem in 1967. As a result, like another Palestinian who killed Israelis in Jerusalem this year, he lived on the Israeli side of the barrier.

 Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government is considering demolishing Dwayyat’s family home as a deterrent. One of his closest allies suggested the time had come to separate Arab areas from Jewish parts of Jerusalem - though Israel hopes to maintain control of Jerusalem as its ‘united’ capital, a status that has not been recognised internationally. Many Israelis accused the government and police of failures in allowing Dwayyat to mount his attack - including columnist Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post. But some Israelis question the long-term practicality of sealing their state off from their Palestinian neighbours, as columnist Akiva Eldar, writing in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper notes. As another anniversary passes in the Middle East, there is no sign of an end to complex questions involving competing demands for resources and security among the various communities.