The indictment was all the more devastating, coming as it did from America’s staunchest ally. Israel’s mad massacre of the innocents in Gaza sparked a spontaneous outburst of rage from Saudi Arabia’s powerful Prince Turki al-Faisal. The open expression of Saudi anger was new, though America’s loyal decades-long diplomatic support and continued provision of modern offensive weaponry to the only nuclear state in the Middle East, was not. The pent-up fury was as obvious as it was unequivocal:

"America is not innocent in this calamity. Not only has the Bush administration left a sickening legacy in the region – from the death of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to the humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib – but it has also, through an arrogant attitude about the butchery in Gaza, contributed to the slaughter of innocents. If the US wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact – especially its ‘special relationship’ with Saudi Arabia – it will have to drastically revise its policies vis-a-vis Israel and Palestine."

Writing in The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss noted that this unprecedented show of anger by a top Saudi leader was moving in a potentially very dangerous direction: total chaos and bloodshed in the world’s already most unstable region. The Prince had actually mentioned "a possible Saudi alliance with Iran - yes, Iran! - in support of a jihad against Israel."

Prince Turki revealed that President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran had written to King Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over "this obvious atrocity and killing of your own children" in Gaza.

Commented Dreyfuss: "The communiqué is significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom’s primacy from one of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire region, both Shia and Sunni."

Contrary to Israeli claims of having "achieved all intended objectives", Jewish author and peace activist Uri Avnery, writing in CounterPunch magazine, says that Israel’s latest assault on Gaza has backfired spectacularly for the country’s long-term interests. "In this war, as in any modern war, propaganda plays a major role. The disparity between the forces, between the Israeli army - with its airplanes, gunships, drones, warships, artillery and tanks - and the few thousand lightly armed Hamas fighters, is one to a thousand, perhaps one to a million. In the political arena the gap between them is even wider. But in the propaganda war, the gap is almost infinite."

Almost without exception, the Western media initially repeated the official Israeli propaganda line that ‘the state must defend its citizens against rockets’ while entirely ignoring the Palestinian side of the story - that the rockets were, in truth, a retaliation for the inhuman siege that had starved the one and a half million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, was not mentioned at all. Only when the horrible scenes from Gaza started to appear on Western TV screens [thanks to Al Jazeera] did world public opinion gradually begin to change.

"A person without imagination, like Ehud Barak, cannot imagine how decent people around the world react to actions like the killing of whole extended families, the destruction of houses over the heads of their inhabitants, the reports about people bleeding to death over days because ambulances are not allowed to reach them, the killing of doctors and medics on their way to save lives, the killing of UN drivers bringing in food," wrote Avnery. "The pictures of the hospitals, with the dead, the dying and the injured lying together on the floor for lack of space, have shocked the world."

Israeli [and American] propaganda portrays Hamas as a terrorist invader in Gaza. In truth, Hamas won an eminently democratic election that took place in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip. Says Avnery: "It won because the Palestinians had come to the conclusion that Fatah’s peaceful approach had gained precisely nothing from Israel - neither a freeze of the settlements, nor release of the prisoners, nor any significant steps toward ending the occupation and creating the Palestinian state." His conclusion: "In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel."

Tom Engelhardt, Editor of TomDispatch, wrote: "In the Bush era, no country was more eager to follow our president into its own regional version of a ‘global war on terror’ than Israel. In the process, Israel’s leaders have mirrored the Bush administration in bringing destruction to others as well as in the category of self-inflicted wounds, of which the most recent was certainly their offensive in Gaza." It was, in his view, an utterly unnecessary decision prompted in part simply because Israel’s leaders saw the moment before the Obama administration’s arrival as a bizarre window of opportunity. In retrospect, "a rash blunder and an act of cannibalizing the future, for the offensive was all for nothing, or less than nothing."

The leading historian of modern warfare, Gabriel Kolko, author of Age of War: the US Confronts the World, launched his commentary with a series of queries. "How will history describe the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza? Another Holocaust, this time perpetrated by the descendants of the victims? An election ploy by ambitious Israeli politicians to win votes in the February 10 elections? A test range for new American weapons? Or an effort to lock in the new Obama Administration into an anti-Iranian position?"

Before providing the answers, Kolko noted that Israel had killed at least 100 Palestinians for each of its own claimed losses, a vast disproportion that had produced horror in much of the world. It had made itself a pariah nation - save in the United States and a few other countries. Above all, it had enflamed the entire Muslim world.

"Charges of war crimes are now being leveled - and justifiably so - at the Israelis, many of whom themselves come from families that suffered in the hands of the Nazis over 60 years ago and now claim that the Holocaust was the only tragedy," wrote Kolko. United Nations and human rights groups are demanding that Israel be brought to justice for what now amounts to having killed over 1300 Gazans with immense firepower, many of which, like phosphorous bombs, are illegal. Israel has already prepared its senior officers to be ready to defend themselves against war crimes charges." Israeli Attorney General Menahem Mazuz several weeks ago warned his government to expect a "wave of international lawsuits."

Bruce Riedel, a ‘hawk’ [in Kolko’s considered view] who has held senior posts in the CIA for nearly 30 years and is now one of President Obama’s many advisers, wrote recently that "the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central all-consuming issue for al-Qaeda," and that "Muslims feel a profound sense of wrong about the creation of Israel that infuses every aspect of thinking and activities and has become the rallying cry used to convince the ummah of the righteousness of al-Qaeda’s cause." Those words, incidentally, were penned before Gaza.

"When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko noted.