The elite of the elite.Fredrik recently finished basic training in the 51^st Battalion of the Golani Brigade. Together with thousands of other soldiers he is waiting on a base a few miles from Gaza, ready to be deployed in case the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas collapses. The only difference is that he is not an Israeli citizen, or even Jewish. He is a 29-year-old Swedish Pentecostal Christian.

Fredrik came to Israel for the first time nine years ago as a tourist. "It was love at first sight. I stepped out of the airplane, looked around and felt that this was a country I could die for." He returned to his small Swedish hometown, where his father serves as a pastor in the local Pentecostal church. "I always commit 100% to things that I do and I felt strongly that this is where God wanted me to be," he explains, so he wrapped up his own career as a youth pastor and moved to Israel. The love he felt for the land was uncompromising.

Soon after his arrival, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up along with 21 young Israelis in a discotheque in Tel Aviv. "Suddenly I realized that not everybody is nice," Fredrik says with a touch of irony. "When I was called up to do army service in Sweden, I had refused to carry a gun."

After having experienced terrorism up close he stopped being a pacifist. "I realized that there are situations when one needs to use weapons to defend oneself."

That insight led him to an IDF conscription office in the summer of 2001, where he explained that he wanted to join the IDF. He received a resounding no for an answer, since he was not an Israeli citizen, nor Jewish. He was not even a legal resident, only a tourist.

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The Italian journalist Lorenzo Cremonesi recently claimed that the death toll in Gaza has been inflated (read the original Italian article here and a summary in English here). His estimates, based on a conversations with a Palestinian doctor and Palestinian reporters* (who risked their lives telling him this), puts the number of casualties in Gaza at 500-600, and not 1,500 as the Palestinian Ministry of Health claims. "Most of them [were] youths between the ages of 17 to 23 who were recruited to the ranks of Hamas, who sent them to the slaughter."

Shooting Gaza: A photographer taking pictures of Gaza from a hilltop outside the town of Sderot.

Palestinian reporters drew a parallell between the latest round of fighting in Gaza with what is known as "the Jenin Massacre" in Palestinian mythology. During an IDF operation in April, 2002 against terrorists hiding among civilians in the Jenin refugee camp, Palestinians claimed that close to 1,500 people had been killed. The correct figure ended up being 54, out of which 45 were armed men.

Some suggest that the Palestinians in general and Hamas in particular have everything to gain from the exagerated casualty figures, which might explain why the Palestinian Ministry of Health would try to sex up the toll. Their website does appear less than objective.

The IDF refutes the deflated bodycount, too, curiously enough. Or not so curiously: the 400-mark was passed on New Years Day, so if Mr. Cremonesi's numbers are to be trusted, the IDF kept this war going for another 17 days, dropped more than 1,500 tons of bombs and invaded the Strip with a massive ground force, but still only managed to kill an average of 10 Hamasniks a day. So what were they doing there all that time?

On the other side of this weird equation we have the 10 IDF soldiers that were killed during the war, at least three of them by friendly fire. We know that the Israeli soldiers were better trained and equipped, but still... Two weeks of fighting on the ground and the Hamasniks only managed to take out seven Jews? These numbers are just not consistent with what one would expect from urban warfare. Either the Hamas combatants were major hacks and/or cowards, or the IDF really didn't engage them. Or both. Kind of like Capoeira: looks like they are kicking each other in the head, but they are actually dancing.

What the Hamasniks did find time to do instead of fighting the Zionist enemy was to torture their fellow Palestinians. People in Gaza got their eyes poked out, kneecaps shot, and bones broken, sometimes for the "crime" of smiling in public, which was interpreted as joy over Israel's success in the war (which they simultaneuosly denied, of course).

The fog of war has obviously not cleared yet. All we know for certain is that this operation was named after a dreidel. We can assume that it will continue to spin for another little while.

* The original sentence erroneously stated that this claim was based on conversations with several doctors and tours of several hospitals. Corriere Della Sera relied on multiple sources, but only one was a physician. And while the original Italian article referred to several hospitals in Gaza, it is unclear that the author toured them all.

Waiting: An Israeli tank crew preparing before the assult on the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza.The Homefront Command has outlawed public gatherings in the towns bordering Gaza, which in effect means that people here have been told not to go to shul. Jews, however, take issue with governments telling them that they can't pray. So they pray anyway.

I have always found davening to be more meaningful when things blow up in the background. The thrust of the words hit me again, after having been a rut for months. While it is still dark outside, I find my way to the central Ashkenazi shul in Sderot for morning prayers. Occasional bursts of heavy machine-gun fire are intermingled with explosions as the small minyan silently sways back and forth. Sometimes the ground shakes so violently that I wonder if the Tzeva Adom early warning system is functional this frigid morning.

At around 1 p.m. I find myself taking cover in a shelter together with a terrified woman that asks me and a Swedish colleague to describe her reality to the Swedish people. Like a lot of Israelis, she is convinced that "European media" is biased toward the Palestinians. Well, that is just not true, at least not in Sweden. The Palestinians seem to have decidedly over-milked the cow of their own suffering. Whatever huffing and puffing going on does not translate into action, and calm voices of reason are being heard, both among politicians and among influential journalists. For example: when Nizar Rayan was assassinated on January 1, 2009, along with his four wives and nine of his children, he got a phone call from the IAF in good time. Innocent lives could have been spared in that case, as in so many other cases, but this silly little man decided to stay put, instead cracking jokes with his kids about how he was too fat for the morgue freezer. That might boost morale among suicidal terrorists, but normal people around the world with a healthy sense of right and wrong are slowly realizing that the callousness of Nizar Rayan reveals the true and sick core of the death cult calling itself "Palestinian resistance."

Gaza, day 11: Smoke rising from Gaza, as seen from a hilltop on the outskirts of Sderot.From where I am sitting right now, I can see two Apache helicopters hovering in the air. Every once in a while there is a loud flushing sound when they fire missiles at targets in Gaza. The subsequent explosions are so powerful that the windows in the coffee shop shake: it sounds like kassam rockets striking two blocks away. The IAF has bombed and shelled thousands of targets in one of the most densely populated areas on the face of the planet non-stop for 12 days now, but even if we believe in the most generous figures from Gaza, only about 150 civilians have been killed (out of the 660 total). If the secret Israeli objective were to kill as many innocent Palestinians as possible, the IDF is obviously not doing a very good job. At last we might actually have found something that the Jews are not good at: genocide.

It is a rainy Monday night in Jerusalem, day three of the Hanukkah war against the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. I just met a family from Ein Tzurim that spent the day in Jerusalem. Ein Tzurim is a religious kibbutz located about 23 kilometers northeast of Gaza, by now well within range of the Grad rockets being fired at Israeli towns. The family, along with all the other people living in their part of the kibbutz, was expelled from the Gush Katif settlements in the summer of 2005. They still live in temporary structures with thin plywood walls, waiting for the houses that have been promised them for three and a half years now. There is not a single bomb shelter in the entire neighborhood, so this family of seven decided to take the day off in Jerusalem. They are so used to being screwed over by the Israeli government that they don't even have the energy to be cynical about it. On the way to Jerusalem they were pulled over by the cops because there were more kids than seat belts in the car. "We are from Gush Katif," they said to the police officer. Gush Katif. This nonsensical name of a place that does not even exist anymore, a name that has come to signify defiance. The officer let them go without a word.

Am Yisrael Chai: Soldiers by a bus stop/bomb shelter in Sderot.

As I write this, thousands of Israeli troops are waiting from the green light along the Gaza border. The Israeli Air Force has just about exhausted its target bank in Gaza after three days of intense bombing, unequaled since the Six Day War in 1967. Rumors have been circulating since mid-afternoon that the ground invasion has already started, but so far nothing has been confirmed. What can be said for sure is that morale is high, to the point where media has been forbidden access to the soldiers. Israel obviously does not want the polished rhetorical efforts of Peres, Livni, and Barak to be undone by gun-wielding 18-year-olds expressing their excitement about the prospects of killing people.

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The Palestinian Authority decided to spend $50,000 on Christmas decorations in Bethlehem this year. The decoration committee is headed by city council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, who is excited about the prospect of lighting up this small city just south of Jerusalem. However, apart from Mr. Zoughbi, seven other council members, and the mayor, very few Christians remain here: over 80% of the population today is Muslim. 60 years ago, the Muslim-Christian ratio was the exact opposite.

When I discuss this with Mr. Zoughbi, he blames Israel. It's the occupation, the checkpoints, the wall (a.k.a. the West Bank security barrier), and the settlements that make life in Bethlehem unbearable for Christians. As he utters every cliche about the suffering of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Jews, I gaze through his window at the settlement of Har Homa that towers on a neighboring hilltop. Yep, it must really suck to lose. 

Mr. Zoughbi scoffs when I try to interject with a question about Muslim persecution of Christians. "Such talk just plays into the hands of the Zionists." Obviously. "The occupation is like a cancer, while any tension between Muslims and Christians is comparable to a small cut in the finger," he says.

Let's take a peek at that small cut: intimidation, beatings, land theft, firebombing of churches and other Christian institutions, denial of employment, economic boycotts, torture, kidnapping, forced marriage, sexual harassment, and extortion. In confidence Palestinian Christians tell me that they are not running away from an economy ruined by the Jews, but from the Palestinian Authority and the increasingly intolerant Muslim society that surrounds them. "You are not seeing any Muslims running away, are you?" one Christian man asks me with a bitter grin. Off the record, of course. One would imagine that Muslims would make up a considerable part of the Palestinians leaving Bethlehem if the economic situation were indeed so bad as everybody willing to go on record claims, but they are not. Even the Palestinian propagandists can't get their head around this glaring fact, they start mumbling about Christians being more sensitive to economic pressure before changing the subject back to the occupation. 

If anything, the economy in Bethlehem is booming. This year has seen a 96.5% increase in tourism compared to last year, surpassing even the number of tourists that came before the Second Intifada. The average day wage among West Bank Palestinians has increased with 24% this year, and all the hotels in Bethlehem are fully booked over Christmas, allegedly a common problem in this shoddy little town.

After having spent three days in Bethlehem talking to Christians about the situation, any semblance of a Christmas spirit that I have tried to work up is gone. The people I talk to are either too terrified to go on record, or they lie to protect themselves and their families. As I approach the border terminal where Israeli soldiers routinely humiliate Palestinians for fun, I come across a black Hummer outside of a store selling Christmas ornaments. The owner brags that he payed 600,000 shekels for it. That equals $125,000. What a ripoff, I bet it was a Jew that made him pay twice of what it is worth.