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James Rainey, the Los Angeles Times' media critic, waded into the month-old controversy over New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner yesterday, concluding that Bronner should be allowed to remain in his post, despite his son volunteering to join Israel's army, the Israel Defense Forces.

In his piece, Rainey argues that Bronner is a skilled reporter who should be judged on the content of his journalism, not on potential biases and internal thought processes that nobody besides Bronner himself can fully understand.

Rainey makes a good case for judging journalists by their work, but he also sidesteps the most powerful arguments against Bronner's remaining.

Nine days after a coalition of human rights groups asked the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government in Gaza to investigate alleged war crimes committed against Israeli civilians during Israel's most recent incursion into the Strip, Hamas has cleared itself of any responsibility.

The speed and result of the Hamas "investigation" is certain not to please Israeli officials or the authors of the Goldstone Report, which recommended that its findings of war crimes on both sides be turned over to the International Criminal Court if Israel and Hamas "failed to carry out credible, independent investigations," according to the AFP.

(Update appended. -Evan 12/22/09)

The Israeli government has acknowledged that it harvested organs from the dead bodies of Palestinians without the permission of their families in the 1980s and '90s.

The official announcement, from the Israeli Defense Forces, came after Dr. Yehuda Hiss -- the former head of Israel's forensic institute -- admitted in a TV documentary that he took corneas, hearts, bones and skin from dead Palestinians. Hiss said the practice ended in 2000.

"This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer," the IDF said in a statement.

Israel's ministry of health also issued a perfunctory statement responding to the documentary. It blamed the unauthorized harvesting on "unclear guidelines," according to The Guardian.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' leader in the Gaza Strip, has canceled his trip to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage, raising hopes that a prisoner swap deal for captured Israel Defense Forces Corporal Gilad Shalit is going to happen soon.

Anticipation that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners might soon be released in a deal with Israel was so high in Gaza that Haniyeh had been asked to remain in the Gaza Strip to greet the prisoners, said a Hamas legislator in Gaza City.

"We have proven to Hamas that we have changed the equation ... [Operation Cast Lead] has restored Israel's deterrence ... Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild - and this is a good thing." - Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Jan. 12, 2009

"I began to see Gaza as, I suspect, many Gazans do: a floating island, a dystopian Atlantis, drifting farther away from contact with any other society." - Lawrence Wright

I finally got around to reading Wright's big New Yorker take out on the situation in the Gaza Strip and highly recommend it. Though Wright's story is subtitled "What really happened during the Israeli attacks?", the piece is more of a tour de misère of what ails Gaza than an investigation into the veracity of the Goldstone report. The unavoidable conclusion one draws is that Israel is building its own worst enemy.

Mitchell Prothero had an article in The Guardian yesterday about Hizballah's alleged preparations for a new war with Israel, which could begin as early as this winter, according to his largely-unnamed sources.

Prothero is a sharp journalist -- he did a great story this summer about the drug war in the Bekaa Valley -- and I usually take him seriously. But Sunday's piece just defies credibility.

Don't like the rules? Change 'em! A press release from Benjamin Netanyahu's office:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed the professional bodies within the relevant government ministries to examine the facilitating of an international initiative to change the laws of war in keeping with the spread of terrorism throughout the world.

The press release doesn't provide any more detail about the changes Netanyahu is seeking, and news accounts of the cabinet meeting just rewrite the press release. But I assume he's talking about the supposed difference between "offensive" and "defensive" operations.