Palestine, now approaching its 70th anniversary of usurpation by Israel, has long been recognised as a laboratory for fine-tuning punitive Israeli policies and techniques.
As the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network has extensively documented, the "ongoing colonisation of Palestine and the accompanying atrocities" have enabled Israel to develop "great expertise in repression", while "exporting these tools and methods on an industrial scale has become crucial to Israeli economic political power".
But Palestine has served as another kind of laboratory, one in which certain Western media figures and other upstanding characters work to perfect their talent for exonerating - and even encouraging - Israeli atrocities.
Since 27 December marks the ninth anniversary of the launch of Israel's Operation Cast Lead - a 22-day affair that dispensed with some 1,400 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip - we might as well start with the analysis by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times of that particular operation.
As Friedman saw it at the time, Cast Lead was simply "the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: 'Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn't we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?'"
Of course, seeing as Israel was, as usual, doing most of the "blowing up" - and that Palestinian civilians perished at a rate of approximately 400: 1 vis-a-vis their Israeli counterparts during Cast Lead - some observers might have suggested alternate titles for the bloody spectacle, such as: "Why does Thomas Friedman have a job? And shouldn't we convert the New York Times office into a landfill?"
This became especially true when Friedman went on to advocate for war crimes by recalling Israel's alleged "education of Hezbollah” in its 2006 war on Lebanon and prescribing a similar educational approach to Hamas in Gaza. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.