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Middle East politics is stone-cold serious. Israel’s soldiers and spies and Palestinian militants compete so ruthlessly, it’s more than a little incongruous that Mideast history took a hairpin turn in 1997 with a crazy tale of Israeli assassins saving the life of the man they tried to kill.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.

Fast forward about a decade, and the intended victim is a savvy Hamas mastermind, and the same Israeli prime minister who tried to take him out is back in power.

This hour On Point: The story of the mission to kill Hamas leader Khalid Mishal.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Jacki Lyden, guest host

Tom Ashbrook is on vacation.

Guest:

Paul McGeough joins us from Sydney, Australia.  Chief foreign correspondent and former executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, he has twice been named Australian Journalist of the Year and in 2002 was awarded the SAIS-Novartis Prize for excellence in international journalism by Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. His new book is “Kill Khalid: The Failed Mossad Assassination of Khalid Mishal and the Rise of Hamas.”

Egyptian activists are confronted by police during a protest in Cairo against the Israeli attacks in Gaza, on Dec. 31, 2008. (AP)

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Israel announced today it will pause its attack on Gaza three hours a day for humanitarian relief. The other 21 hours a day, the Israeli action goes on. The pounding. From the air. On the ground.

The whole world is watching — the Arab world, closest of all. Arab television is wall-to-wall images of Gaza death and destruction: women, children, hospitals, morgues soaked in blood, Hamas counterattacks framed as defiance, the United States and Israel linked as one. Arab leaders portrayed as ineffectual.

Where does this go? This hour, On Point: Israel’s neighborhood, the Arab world, watching Gaza.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Roula Khalaf, Middle East editor of The Financial Times.

Labib Kamhawi, Jordanian political analyst.

Tamara Wittes, director of the Middle East Democracy and Development Project at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings Institution.

Smoke rises following an Israeli missile strike in the northern Gaza Strip, Dec. 30, 2008. (AP)

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Nightmare scenes in Gaza, where for five days F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships have rained fire on one of the poorest, most crowded enclaves on Earth.

And nightmares across southern Israel, where rockets out of Gaza have now reached as far as an empty kindergarten classroom in Beersheba. Four Israelis dead since Israel’s assault on Gaza began. Nearly four hundred Palestinians dead. Many more injured.

After grinding seasons of embargo and tunneling and Hamas defiance, Israel’s defense minister now speaks of “war to the bitter end.”

This hour, On Point: Bloody showdown over Gaza.

You can join the conversation. Did Hamas make this inevitable, with its rocket fire and its fury? Did Israel make this inevitable, with its chokehold and its demands? Will this turn Palestinians away from Hamas, or more deeply against Israel? What should the U.S. have done? What should it be doing now? Tell us what you think.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Margaret Coker, Middle East correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.

Aaron David Miller, public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He advised six U.S. secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations, from 1978 to 2003, and is the author of “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.”

Shai Feldman, chair of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies and professor of politics at Brandeis University.

Issam Nassar, professor of history at Illinois State University.