Egyptian protesters firebombed one of the offices of satellite broadcaster Al-Jazeera on Wednesday and attacked a police chief who tried to negotiate an end to three days of violent protests in central Cairo.

The protesters hit the studio overlooking Tahrir Square with Molotov cocktails, engulfing it in flames. In a televised interview from inside the gutted office, reporter Ahmed el-Dassouki said around 300 protesters approached the building before noon, shouting obscenities.

He said they set the place on fire, stormed the building, and looted the studio. "They accuse our network of being biased and not objective," he said. Many protesters had accused the channel of supporting the country's most powerful political force, the Muslim Brotherhood.

One person was killed when Israel struck AFP's Gaza bureau for the second time in two days. The IDF claimed the media buildings, which included the AFP bureau, were being used by Hamas to direct military operations, and were legitimate targets.

The IDF has targeted Gaza media buildings for three consecutive days as part of Israel's ongoing 'Pillar of Defense' operation. On Tuesday, two Israeli strikes killed three Palestinian journalists. The building housing AFP was hit in another attack later, and no casualties were reported. A Wednesday attack on AFP's building killed a two-year-old child.

"The child Abdul Rahman Majdi Naeem was martyred and another citizen was wounded in the targeting of the Naama building," Health Ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra told AFP.

Mahmoud al-Koumi and Husam Salameh, camera operators for local TV station al-Aqsa, were killed in a car marked as a press vehicle near the al-Wihda towers in Gaza. Both journalists were 30 years old and had four children.

Two other al-Aqsa employees were wounded in the first strike. The second attack killed the director of al-Quds Educational Radio, Muhammad Abu Aisha, in his car.

Strangely, even the sight on television of the body of a small boy, the same age as Cameron, being dug by hand from the bomb rubble, is not what has stayed with me strongest from the latest attack on the Palestinians. Instead, I recall most vividly a radio broadcast on the BBC World Service two days before the attack on Gaza began.

It was a banal, everyday story of Palestinian villagers being evicted from their land in the occupied West Bank, to make way for an Israeli "military zone". These pastoralists had lost a thousand hectares to the Israelis in the last few years, and now these ancient villages were being finally, forcibly, evacuated in a vicious act of ethnic cleansing. The shepherds claimed that what this was really about, was the precious springs that watered their livestock. Work was already starting to divert their water to nearby, and illegal, burgeoning Israeli settlements.

Enough is enough. Now we have even "National Infrastructure" Minister Uzi Landau - one of my favourite dogsbodies in the Israeli government - talking about "collateral damage" and the justification for bombing Hamas's broadcasting station. It could be used for transmitting military instructions, he said.

But wasn't that exactly what our own beloved Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - now, I suppose, Lord Blair of the Holy Land - said after Nato bombed the Serb television station in Belgrade, when Nato, too, was blathering on about "collateral damage"?

We Westerners set the precedents in the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq - trains, bridges, TV stations, wedding parties, blocks of civilian apartments, you name it - and now the Israelis can trot along behind and produce, whenever necessary, the same tired list of excuses we invented for Nato.

It's odd, the way they all get away with it. Lord Blair, whose 92 Business Class trips to the Holy Land have produced a peace beyond all peace, is now talking about how it's in everybody's interest to have a truce - is his face getting a bit skeletal, or is that my imagination? - and a truce, I suppose, we shall have, well over 100 Palestinian and three Israeli dead too late. But is it all worth it? Was the murder by Israel of Hamas's military leader Ahmed al-Jabari in fact not staged to provide an excuse to bomb all those new missiles that Hamas has acquired?

A bomb attack on a bus in Tel Aviv has threatened to derail attempts to broker a peace deal between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Israeli rescue services said that at least 10 people were injured in the attack outside the military headquarters. Ofir Gendelman, a spokesman for the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, said: "A bomb exploded on a bus in central Tel Aviv. This was a terrorist attack. Most of the injured suffered only mild injuries."

The bombing comes as Hillary Clinton held meetings with Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, in an effort to bring an end to the bloody conflict after arriving in the region on Tuesday.

An expected ceasefire failed to materialise on Tuesday night, despite predictions by Hamas officials and the Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, who has been acting as a mediator between the two sides, that a truce was imminent.

Israel stepped up its bombardment of Gaza from air and sea overnight with munitions slamming into Gaza at a rate of one every 10 minutes at one point. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said they had hit 100 targets in Gaza since midnight and intercepted 12 out of 29 missiles launched towards Israel from Gaza.

Analysis

For a week, Israel and Hamas have engaged in a war in and around Gaza, one in which thousands of rockets and bombs have been expended, scores have died, and tens of thousands have been forced to take cover. But to the north in Lebanon, Hezbollah, the Islamic militia rained on Israel in a 2006 war, held its fire. Why?


The consensus among U.S. government analysts and academic experts is that Hezbollah, which has controlled the Lebanese government for more than four years, believes discretion is the better part of valor. As it has in the past, as in Israel's Cast Lead Operation against Hamas at the end of 2008, Hezbollah decided against creating a diversion that would have helped its like-minded but only sometime ally.

Roger Cressey, NBC News analyst and former deputy counterterrorism director for the National Security Council, notes that Hezbollah is now essentially the government in Lebanon [as it was democratically elected to be] and has different responsibilities, different agendas. "There has never been a correlation between events in Gaza and Hezbollah's strategic decision-making," says Cressey.

That doesn't mean Hezbollah wants to make peace with Israel, just that it's [allegedly] biding its time, and more importantly that, in the words of more than one analyst, "it has no dog in this fight."

If you have a farm or a small business, would you like to pass it on to your children when you die? Well, unless Congress does something, it is going to become much, much harder to do that starting next year. Right now, there is a 5 million dollar estate tax exemption and anything above that is taxed at 35 percent. But on January 1st, the exemption will go down to 1 million dollars and the tax rate will go up to 55 percent. A lot of liberals are very excited about this, because they believe that the government will be soaking wealthy people like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. But the truth is that a lot of farms, ranches and small businesses will be absolutely devastated by this change in the tax law. There are many farmers and ranchers out there today that do not make much money but are sitting on tracts of land that are worth millions of dollars. According to the American Farm Bureau, approximately 97 percent of all farms and ranches in the United States would be subject to the estate tax if the exemption was reduced to just a million dollars. That means that the children of these farmers and ranchers would be faced with a very cruel choice when it is time to inherit these farms and ranches. Either they come up with enough money to pay the government about half of what the farm or ranch is worth, or they sell the farm or ranch that may have been in their family for generations. Needless to say, most farm and ranch families do not have that kind of cash lying around. Most of them are just barely making it from year to year. So this change in the tax law is going to greatly accelerate the death of the family farm in America. This is also going to devastate many family-owned small businesses. Many small businesses don't make much money, but they have buildings or land or assets worth millions of dollars. Children that may have wanted to continue the family legacy will be forced to sell because of the massive tax bill that they get from Uncle Sam. This is an insidious cruelty, and it shows just how broken our system has become.

A carefully cultivated mythology sustains Israel's territorial claims to Palestine and rationalizes Israel's ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians from the land. Challenges to those myths are typically met with fierce counterattacks.

Soon after my Nov. 4 analysis, "In Defense of Richard Falk" was published by Media with a Conscience (MWC), the site editor forwarded to me an unusual chastising response. Unusual because it came from a relatively well-known scholar and writer by the name of Fred Skolnik.

Mr. Skolnik is the editor in chief of a 22-volume Encyclopedia Judaica (second edition), a work that won the Dartmouth Medal in 2007. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction all concerning life in Israel. It is not rare for Zionists to take me to task, and Skolnik is most certainly a Zionist. Yet it is rare that those who chastise are of Skolnik's stature. And so, a reply is in order.

Mr. Skolnik does not like Dr. Falk who, the reader might remember, is the present United Nations Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories. And, because I defend Falk, he does not like me either. Indeed, as far as Skolnik is concerned I am part of "an army of Israel haters ... churning out endless ... venomous half truths" about the Land of Israel. Nonetheless, Skolnik has taken the time to write a three-page commentary to set me and my readers straight.

He says, "I will state Israel's case in as few words as possible, though you of course may not choose to publish this in order not to lose the effect you are aiming at." Well, that is silly. I have no objection to my readers seeing Mr. Skolnik's response. Here is how you can do so: go to the MWC site; search for Davidson; go to "In Defense of Robert Falk;" and scroll down to Skolnik's comment.

After a second Israeli attack on a media building in two days, this time killing two journalists, the spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister, Mark Regev explains to al-Jazeera English that because the journalists were Palestinian the Israel military considered them legitimate "targets." Regev's remarks were made just a few hours after the November 19, 2012 bombing of al-Shuruq Tower and another building used to house the offices of several media outlets, including both Palestinian and international networks.

Speaking to al-Jazeera, Regev said, "We took out the target that we wanted to take out." When pressed by al-Jazeera over the injuries of eight journalists the previous day, where one lost his leg, Regev continued,

Oh you're talking about... oh first of all maybe we have a discussion about who is a journalist and if you'll allow me I will elaborate on this. There is the al-Aqsa station, which is a station that is a Hamas command and control facility, just as in other totalitarian regimes; the media is used by the regime for command and control and also for security purposes. From our point of view that's not a legitimate journalist.

Al-Jazeera's correspondent then followed-up by asking, "So what are you saying? That a local Arab journalist life is any less than an internationalist journalist?" Apparently for Regev, yes, in Gaza there are no legitimate Palestinian journalists, only targets.