A U.S. diplomatic cable from February, 2010 released back in September by WikiLeaks revealed that the Israelis had said that at the time that they were having trouble dealing with unarmed demonstrations in the West Bank against the Israeli occupation. According to the cable, one Israeli military official warned that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) “will start to be more assertive in how it deals with these demonstrations.” The February, 2010 cable also said that “[l]ess violent demonstrations are likely to stymie the IDF,” and included a quote from Defense Ministry Director of Policy and Political-Military Affairs Amos Gilad: “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”

That sentiment was on full display last Friday in the small Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh. Every Friday for nearly three years, village residents and other activists demonstrate against nearby religious Israeli settlers who claimed a fresh water spring belonging to a Palestinian family.

During Friday’s demonstration, an IDF solider shot a tear gas canister from close range that hit 28 year-old Palestinian Mustafa Tamimi. He died Saturday morning of the wounds suffered from the incident. Video was captured of the protest and the incident’s aftermath. Tamini’s run in with IDF soldiers occurs at around the 6 minute mark. Warning, images are graphic:

IDF officials called the event “exceptional” (+972′s Noam Sheizaf notes that this kind of thing has happened before) and the Israeli military has launched an investigation into Tamini’s death. Army officials seemed to try to justify the incident by tweeting photos of a slingshot (the implication being that Tamini threw stones at the Israeli soldiers). The New York Times reports that those present “did not dispute that Mr. Tamimi had thrown rocks at the armored vehicle before the shooting, but witnesses claimed that the Israeli officer had fired the shell directly at him in violation of Israel Defense Forces regulations.” Sheizaf circles in red the weapon and the tear gas canister. Tamini is on the left in white:

Haaretz reports that the Israeli army said the soldier “didn’t see” Tamimi. But Haim Schwarczenberg, the photographer of the above photo, said, “From what I saw, there is no chance that the soldier had not seen him.”

Speaking on the CNN Sunday show GPS with Fareed Zakaria, GOP presidential hopeful and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman was asked about Iran’s nuclear program. In response to a direct question about using an attack to impede Iran’s progress — something he’s raised before as an example of when to use military force — Huntsman dodged and instead gave his assessment of Iranian nuclear ambitions:

HUNTSMAN: I think the regime in Tehran, I think they’ve already decided for themselves that they want nuclear status. I think they’ve looked at North Korea — you mentioned North Korea — and they have said, North Korea, nobody’s touching North Korea. They have, you know, a few crude devices. And compare and contrast it with Libya, and say Libya had a program. They gave it up for friendship internationally.

And I think they’ve decided they want whatever credibility comes with — with nuclear status.

Watch the video:

Huntsman did discuss real issues that could be informing an Iranian decision on building weapons of mass destruction, such as the “credibility” issue to deter attacks. And he, declaring himself “not optimistic,” raised important considerations and policy questions about the fallout were Iran to produce a usable nuke, such as potential regional proliferation and whether a containment strategy could work against a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic.

But his assertion that Iran has “already decided” to build a bomb — and that seems to be, with the subsequent comparison to North Korea, what he means by “nuclear status” — is out of step with the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and U.S. intelligence estimates.

The latest still-classified National Intelligence Estimate, a consensus opinion of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, reportedly concludes that there is no unified Iranian nuclear weapons program. The Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, in testimony on Capitol HIll this year, responded affirmatively when asked if his assessment was that “Iran has not made a decision as of this point to restart its nuclear weapons program.”

That said, a recent IAEA report raised “serious concerns regarding possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear programme.” But both a White House official speaking after the IAEA report was released (“The IAEA does not assert that Iran has resumed a full scale nuclear weapons program.”) and, over this past weekend, the newsroom and ombudsman of the Washington Post decided that this wasn’t enough to declare, as Huntsman believes, that Iran had resumed a full-scale weapons program.

Former AIPAC spokesman Josh Block, now affiliated with the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and the Truman National Security Project, was quoted in a Politico article last week accusing bloggers here at the Center for American Progress of writing “borderline anti-Semitic stuff.” One day later, Salon reported that in an opposition research document Block pushed to neoconservative journalists shortly before the Politico article was published, Block said CAP bloggers engage in the “vilification…of Jews” and that ThinkProgress’s work constitutes “the words of anti-Semites.” Block subsequently denied that he had made these charges and has yet to issue an apology (we have categorically rejected these accusations).

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports today that PPI and the Truman Project “are privately considering a formal break with Block”:

PPI head Will Marshall privately told Block that the think tank would sever ties with Block if he didn’t retract the charges detailed in Salon, according to a source familiar with the discussions. Block subsequently offered Politico a statement on the charges, claiming he had never accused people at CAP in particular of anti-Semitism, but not walking back or apologizing for the gist of what was reported in the Salon piece. It’s still unclear how PPI — which declined to comment — will proceed at this point.

Meanwhile, at Truman, top officials privately debated via email whether to cut ties with Block after the Salon story broke, a source says. They had already been unhappy with Block’s attacks on critics of Israel, and the Salon piece exacerbated tensions, I’m told.

“Personal attacks have no place in our community,” Truman spokesman Dave Solimini tells me. “That agreement is unbreakable. The trust built among members of the truman community is the issue here. Personal attacks on members of our community, like calling them anti-Semitic, would cross that line.”

As Sargent notes, ThinkProgress reported last week that Block’s third professional association had already criticized Block’s smears of CAP. “Impugning motives of people at the Center [for American Progress] and impugning [that] those motives are driven by anti-Semitism is, in my opinion, wrong,” Block’s business partner and former special counsel to President Bill Clinton Lanny Davis said.

Last month, ThinkProgress pointed to misleading polling questions in a Quinnipiac University poll. The questions referred to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” when neither the UN’s nuclear agency nor conseus U.S. intelligence estimates have asserted concretely that Iran has made the decision to produce a nuclear weapon.

The important distinction between a “nuclear program” and a “nuclear weapons program” was made again, on Friday by the Washington Post’s ombudsman, Patrick B. Pexton. Pexton criticized the newspaper’s headline “Iran’s quest to possess nuclear weapons” and the subhead “Intelligence shows that Iran received foreign assistance to overcome key hurdles in acquiring a nuclear weapon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”

Pexton writes:

But the IAEA report does not say Iran has a bomb, nor does it say it is building one, only that its multiyear effort pursuing nuclear technology is sophisticated and broad enough that it could be consistent with building a bomb.

Iran steadfastly denies it is aiming for a nuclear bomb and says its program is aimed at civilian nuclear energy and research. Of course, Tehran could be lying. But no one knows for sure.

Pexton’s response, titled “Getting ahead of the facts on Iran,” concludes that:

In a Web-driven world, one bad headline can circle the globe in minutes and undermine The Post’s credibility. It can also play into the hands of those who are seeking further confrontation with Iran.

The campaign calling attention to the misleading headline was led by Just Foreign Policy, and Pexton gives them credit for being on the right side of an important issue. Pexton’s column on the dangers of rushing to judgement on Iran’s nuclear program is a valuable contribution to the debate over how best to confront the IAEA’s legitimate concerns.

Pexton is right: While Iran hawks speak in cocksure terms about the Iranian nuclear program, the newsroom of a major national newspaper has a responsibility to limit reporting on it to available facts.

Former House speaker and GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich said during Saturday’s ABC News/Yahoo News Republican debate that Palestinians are “terrorists.” The comment came after Gingrich was asked about his statement in the days leading up to the debate that Palestinians are an “invented” people. The comment set off a firestorm of criticism, including by establishment Middle East figures, and Gingrich’s campaign told the New York Times on Saturday that the candidate supported the two-state solution to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But asked about the comments by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos before a debate crowd later that night, Gingrich didn’t back away from the comment and doubled down on his Palestinian-bashing:

GINGRICH: Is what I said factually correct? Yes. Is it historically true? Yes. Are we in a situation where every day rockets are fired into Israel while the United States — the current administration tries to pressure the Israeli’s into a peace process? [...]

Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools. They have textbooks that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left? We pay for those textbooks through our aid money. It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, enough lying about the Middle East.

After Gingrich’s remarks were greeted by a round of applause, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney commented, “I happen to agree with most of the Speaker said, except by going out and saying the Palestinians are an invented people.” Romney then said that Gingrich might feel the same, that it was a “mistake” to say Palestinians are “invented.” Gingrich then shook his head in disagreement. Watch the video of the full exchange:

As the New Yorker’s David Remnick points out, Gingrich’s claim that Palestinians are “invented” is not historically accurate, but rather was borne out of a long-since debunked piece of “propaganda.”

And while the Hamas organization and political party that seized the Gaza Strip by force in 2007 in a pre-emptive counter-coup is listed by the U.S. State Department as a foreign terror organization, the Palestinian Liberation Organization and its constituent Fatah party that rules the Palestinian authority are not considered terrorists by the U.S.

Romney could have been reflecting on the breadth of Gingrich’s comments when he said he agrees with the former Speaker. While he should be given credit for repudiating the line about “invented” people, enterprising reporters should nonetheless ask for a clarification from Romney and his campaign as to whether he agrees with Gingrich’s statement that “These people [Palestinians] are terrorists.”