In his speech to the nation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledged yesterday that the war on Gaza is a battle for the existence of the Jewish State. Netanyahu is correct. And Israel cannot win this battle; it cannot even define what a victory might entail. Surely the battle is not about the tunnels or the militants' underground operation, the tunnels are just weapons of resistance rather than the resistance itself. The Hamas and Gaza militants lured Israel into a battle zone in which it could never succeed and Hamas set the conditions, chose the ground and has written the terms required to conclude this cycle of violence.

For ten days Netanyahu did all he could to prevent an IDF ground operation. He was facing the reality that Israel lacks a military answer to Palestinian resistance. Netanyahu knew that a defeat on the ground would eradicate the little that remains of IDF's power of deterrence.

Five days ago, Israel, at least in the eyes of its supporters, held the upper ground. It saw it citizens subject to an endless barrage of rockets, yet it showed relative restraint, killing Palestinian civilians only from afar, which served to convey an imaginary image of strength. But that has changed rapidly since Israel launched its ground operation. Israel is now, once again, involved in colossal war crimes against a civilian population and worse, at least strategically, its elite infantry commandos are being eradicated in a face-to-face street battle in Gaza. In spite of clear Israeli technological superiority and firepower, the Palestinian militants are winning the battle on the ground and they have even managed to move the battle to Israeli territory. In addition, the barrage of rockets on Tel Aviv doesn't seem to stop.

IDF's defeat in Gaza leaves the Jewish State with no hope. The moral is simple. If you insist on living on someone else's land, military might is an essential ingredient to discourage the dispossessed from acting to reclaim their rights. The level of IDF casualties and the number of bodies of Israeli elite soldiers returning home in coffins send a clear message to both Israelis and Palestinians. Israeli military superiority belongs to the past. There is no future for the Jews-only-State in Palestine; they may have to try somewhere else.

The UN Security Council has condemned the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine and called for an international probe into the incident in a unanimously adopted resolution.

All 15-member states voted to pass the Australia-proposed resolution, condemning "in the strongest terms" the crash of Malaysian plane on July 17 in Donetsk region of Ukraine, which resulted in 298 people dead.

The UN also urged a "full, thorough and independent international investigation" into the incident. The resolution also asked local self-defense forces for their cooperation, such as avoiding "from any actions that may compromise the integrity of the crash site."

Russia's UN ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, said he was pleased that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) will have an important role during the investigation and welcomed that fact that the Netherlands will take on the leading role as well.

"We could not simply allow the Security Council to endorse a Ukrainian-led investigation because we have no trust in their intention to conduct a truly objective investigation," Churkin told reporters following the resolution.

Ukraine will have to answer a lot of questions during the international investigation, Churkin said during his speech at the UN Security Council, adding that Kiev spread fake information allegedly connecting the self-defense forces to the downing of the plane.

The Ukrainian militia have handed over to Malaysian experts the black boxes from the Malaysian Boeing-777 airliner that crashed in east Ukraine on July 17.

The Donetsk People's Republic's (DPR) Prime Minister Aleksandr Boroday handed over the black boxes from the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 early on Tuesday.

"Here they are, the black boxes," Boroday told reporters. "According to the memorandum the Malaysian side must pass on the boxes to the experts from the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization]."

Both sides signed a document, finalizing the procedure.

Malaysia delegation rep and Dutch rep now signing to receive #MH17 black boxes from rebels in #Donetsk. pic.twitter.com/RR4oHkcrVf

- Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) July 21, 2014

Colonel Mohamed Sakri of Malaysian National Security Council said that the two black boxes were "in good condition."

Earlier, Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said an agreement had been reached with militiamen at the scene of the crash that the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 black boxes will be handed over to Malaysian authorities in Donetsk at 9pm Ukrainian time.

On 26 November 1947, when it became apparent to Zionists and their supporters that the UN vote on the Partition of Palestine would be short of the required two thirds majority in the General Assembly, they filibustered for a postponement until after Thanksgiving thereby gaining time to threaten the loss of aid to nations such as Greece - which planned on voting against - into changing their votes.

U.S. President Truman - also threatened with loss of Jewish support in the upcoming Presidential election - later noted that:

The facts were that not only were there pressure movements around the United Nations unlike anything that had been seen there before, but that the White House, too, was subjected to a constant barrage. I do not think I ever had as much pressure and propaganda aimed at the White House as I had in this instance. The persistence of a few of the extreme Zionist leaders - actuated by political motives and engaging in political threats - disturbed and annoyed me.

Unnamed US officials are telling Associated Press that their intelligence suggests Malaysia plane shot down by anti-Kiev militia, no link to Russia found.

Officials believe that the passenger aircraft was intercepted by an SA-11 surface-to-air missile, which was fired by Ukrainian militia members. One official said the likeliest explanation was the aircraft was shot down in error, an assertion that seem to be bolstered by the previous downing of 12 Ukrainian military aircraft by militants in the region.

Intelligence suggests that, although the US maintains that Russia "created the conditions" that led to the incident, officials were not aware of the presence of any Russians during the missile launch, and would not confirm that the missile crew was trained in Russia.

The crash of the airliner last week with 298 passengers aboard has only exacerbated the row between the US, European powers and Russia over the developing situation in eastern Ukraine.

The fog of war that has been hovering over eastern Ukraine has now spread to the shores of the Potomac, and from there has inundated ever pore of western body politic. The party line is that pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine have shot down Malaysia Airlines flight MH-17, using a surface-to-air missile provided by Russia, with Russia's support and complicity. The response is to push for tougher sanctions against Russian companies and Mr. Putin's entourage.

None of this is based on fact. To start with, it isn't known that MH-17 was brought down by a surface-to-air missile; it could have been an air-to-air missile, a bomb on board, a mechanical failure, or the same (or different) mysterious force that brought down MH-370 earlier this year. Mysteries abound, and yet western media knows it's Mr. Putin's fault.

Step through the looking glass over to Russia, and you hear a completely different story: the plane was shot down by the Ukrainians in order to frame the rebels and Russia in an attempt to pull NATO into the conflict.

Here, we have numerous supporting "facts," at varying levels of truthiness. But I have no way to independently verify any of them, and so instead I will organize what has been known into a pattern, and let you decide for yourself which story (if any) you should believe.

When trying to catch a criminal, a standard method is to look at means, motive and opportunity. Was the criminal physically capable of committing the act? Did the criminal have a good reason for committing it? Did the criminal get a chance to do it? One more criterion is often quite helpful: does the crime fit the perpetrator's known modus operandi? Let's give this method a try.

In December 2002, finishing the introduction to his as-yet-unpublished book The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Jonathan Schell wrote that the twentieth century was the era in which violence outgrew the war system that had once housed it and became "dysfunctional as a political instrument. Increasingly, it destroys the ends for which it is employed, killing the user as well as his victim. It has become the path to hell on earth and the end of the earth. This is the lesson of the Somme and Verdun, of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, of Vorkuta and Kolyma; and it is the lesson, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

More than a decade later, that remains a crucial, if barely noticed, lesson of our moment. Jonathan Schell died this March, but he left behind a legacy of reporting and thinking -- from The Real War and The Fate of the Earth to The Unconquerable World -- about just how, as the power to destroy ratcheted up, war left its traditional boundaries, and what that has meant for us (as well as, potentially, for worlds to come). In The Unconquerable World, published just before the Bush invasion of Iraq, he went in search of other paths of change, including the nonviolent one, and in doing so he essentially imagined the Arab Spring and caught the essence of both the horrors and possibilities available to us in hard-headed ways that were both prophetic and moving.

Today, partly in honor of his memory (and my memory of him) and partly because I believe his sense of how our world worked then and still works was so acute, this website offers a selection from that book. Consider it a grim walk down post-9/11 Memory Lane, a moment when Washington chose force as its path to... well, we now know (as Schell foresaw then) that it was indeed a path to hell. - Tom

The White House last week said the rising number of non-working people in the country reflects an inevitable trend caused by an aging population, an attempt to rebut Republican arguments that the real problems are federal regulations and an oversized government.

The report from President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisers also said little can be done to reverse the trend outside of allowing more immigrants to enter the country, which would help create a younger workforce.

Republicans have argued for years now that the private sector has limped along because of government interference through regulation, and an exploding national debt that companies see as a justification for potential tax hikes down the road. The GOP says these government threats are borne out in data that shows Obama has presided over an economy that failed to create jobs at rates seen in past recovery periods.

Republicans have passed dozens of bills aimed at slowing regulation and cutting spending, most of which have been ignored by the Democratic Senate.

The UK's terrorism laws are so broad they could be applied to journalists and their supporters, as well as crimes that have nothing to do with terrorism, according to a new report from the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation.

David Anderson QC presented his report to Parliament today, and called on ministers to reverse the increasing "creep" of the laws in recent years.

The report focused on the definition of terrorism in the UK, which among other things currently means that someone can be considered a terrorist if they publish material that is considered to endanger life or to pose a health risk to the public. This could have legitimate purposes, perhaps in the case of a radical cleric calling for violence, or someone distributing plans on how to manufacture bombs.

But the problem is that the law isn't specific enough, meaning that it can be applied to cases that do not have anything to do with terrorism. Anderson makes reference to section 1(1)(b) of the Terrorism Act 2000, which states, "In this Act "terrorism" means the use or threat of action where the use or threat is designed to influence the government [or an international governmental organisation] or to intimidate the public or a section of the public."

That may sound reasonable, but upon closer inspection it's quite wide-reaching, and the report highlights that in other countries, a "terrorist" under this section must additionally have the intention of coercing or intimidating the government. There is concern that this broader definition gives police and the legal system much greater powers where they are not necessary or appropriate.

US President Barack Obama called for an "immediate ceasefire" between Israel and Hamas on Sunday, after the bloodiest day of fighting in Gaza raised the number of Palestinians killed to 476.

The UN Security Council expressed concern for the growing number of casualties in Gaza and issued a fresh appeal for an immediate ceasefire as Israel ramped up a major military offensive with fresh strikes Monday in the Palestinian territory.

"The members of the Security Council express serious concern about the growing numbers of casualties," said Rwandan Ambassador Eugene Richard Gasana, whose country chairs the 15-member council.

The Palestinian death toll soared to 476 after the bloodiest single day in Gaza in five years, with a spokesman for the enclave's emergency services saying more than a third of Sunday's 120 victims were women and children.