The three Israelis killed on Thursday were innocent - but the State of Israel is not.   Where is the house that got hit with the rocket, I asked the guy behind the counter of a snack bar in Kiryat Malachi on Thursday. Go to the third traffic circle and make a left, he said.  I got to the street, parked my car and started walking toward the satellite dishes, TV truck and the crowd. It's a poor neighborhood on the edge of a poor town, across the street from open fields. The buildings are old, shabby tenements with dirt…

As if the heartache over the escalation and its appalling predictability isn’t enough, as if the pain of watching whole communities cower under rockets while planning the next decade of psychotherapy for children isn’t enough, as if fresh Israeli and Palestinian deaths isn’t enough, the IDF sent the following message on its Twitter feed: Here’s what this poster says: 1. The IDF promotes extra-judicial killing as punishment for crimes committed with no due process (past terror attacks and kidnapping) 2. The IDF thinks that portraying Israel as the Terminator is a GOOD thing, showing fundamental disconnect with the language of…

Wednesday, November 14: Israeli forces have just killed a four-year-old and a seven-year-old in Gaza. Two children. Jeffrey Goldberg tweets*, correctly, that the fighting won’t solve anything. But his phrasing embodies everything that’s wrong with the mainstream media. It also points at the Israeli attitude towards both the Palestinians and the region: Prediction: Assassination of Hamas terror commander will not even partially solve Israel's Gaza problem. Israel’s Gaza problem? The fatalities suggest it’s the other way around. According to B’Tselem, 6500 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces from the start of the Second Intifada in September 2000 until to September…

Using a multi-pronged strategy, the army spokesperson's office launched a full social media assault via YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, with the latter in English, Hebrew, Arabic, French and Spanish. No word yet on the tumblr blog, though. In what is possibly a social media precedent, the Israeli army spokesperson's office (@idfspokesperson) today announced a military action against Gaza — on Twitter. This came shortly after the IDF announced — again on Twitter — that that the Israeli Air Force had assassinated senior Hamas operative Hamas military chief Ahmed al-Jaabari. The responses came in immediately, from various sources and in…