You are obviously very intelligent and a very good writer, which is why I find your perverse worldview so appalling: "Likud-Molodet atrocities against the Palestinian people" - spare me. When your indignation at the atrocities committed against Israeli civilians - and with the autocratic, corrupt, murderous PA - matches your concern for the Palestinians, I will take you seriously. You seem to have your criminals and victims astonishingly confused

I do hope you have not been waiting for me to defend Arafat. While as an on-the-ground commander of an active resistance, he did a good job, and has earned his place in history as the Father of Modern Palestine, as a statesman he sucks.

Arafat screwed the Palestinian people royally and played Israel for a fool by letting his infatuation with swimmin pools and movie stars take precedence over his responsibility to be straight about what would and wouldn't fly with the Palestinian people, since he was supposed to be representing them.

But the truth is that Arafat cared more about being the toast of Europe and everybody's favorite new revolutionary and hobnobbing with a succession of US politicians than he did about his job, and so he told people what would get him the next trip, the next perk, and the Nobel Peace Prize.

As any Palestinian will tell you, neither illegal settlements or the right of return are negotiable, and that includes those Palestinians who don't even KNOW it's the law.

All of the various "accords," Oslo, Camp David, whatever, are nothing but eyewash because they are all based on a false premise.

The question is not what Israel will give Palestine.

The land is not Israel's to give. It is the other way around. The question is what Palestine will give Israel.

The Israeli people are victims all right. Right now they are victims of having around a quarter of their children go to bed hungry* to keep the arms industry strong. They have been victims of US business interests in the region since the "nation" of Israel was "established" in 1948.

Israel is essentially a US arms depository with some shiny shopping centers. The people who were transferred there in 1948, for the most part, chose to go, and their reasons had nothing to do with generating additional revenues for US corporations.

It was not the movie "Exodus," it was nothing more than an agreement between some rich western guys who had bought a few Arab dollahos but still needed something more. Another factor: you have to remember that in 1948, it was common practice in the US for country clubs to refuse membership to Jews. Hitler had a singularly ugly way of expressing it, but he did not have an exclusive patent on anti-Jewishness, and it would not have been politically "pragmatic" at the time for either the US or the UK to usher in a multitude of European Jews who did not wish to remain in Europe.

The US screwed Israel from the get-go, but just as Arafat went to what was supposed to be a negotiating table with nothing in his mouth that had anything to do with reality, decisions made in the US do not now and did not in 1948 have anything to do with the reality of what has been going on on the ground in the Levant.

Currently, Israel has the important job of guarding America's oil in the region, and a certain level of conflict provides key revenues and incentives for arms investors, but how the US will choose to dispose of its fat little pitbull once it has solidified its occupation and established permanent bases closer to the energy resources of interest is unknown.

The Israeli people are just as much victims as the Palestinians.

Suggested googles: Naqba (alternative spelling Nakba) Uri Avnery (alternative spelling Yuri), Balfour, Policy of Starvation*

* Palestinian child malnutrition levels long fell to levels found in sub-Saharan Africa, courtesy of the US-funded Policy of Starvation.

many good points, even some I can agree with, although not your underlying assumptions

So, what is the answer? What should be done? What is the solution? Are you Palestinian? Why do you think the Palestinians have more claim to the land than the Israelis?

Indigenous Israelis have every right to be there. If you have the chance, it will be very interesting for you to talk to some elderly Israelis, who chose to leave Israel after the European colonizers arrived.

Many will tell you that they no longer felt at home there. They did not speak Yiddish, they spoke Hebrew only to pray, to buy bread and discuss the weather and their children they spoke Arabic. They did not eat borscht, they are not Europeans, they are Middle Eastern people living in what they had assumed would continue to be a Middle Eastern country, it had been such for so many years and all.

European invasions of ancient lands have never been popular with the invadees, and that is the name of the game here.

Yes, "Israel" was established by an instrument of the then newly-created (by the US) United Nations, without that instrument, it does not exist, and anybody who really puts all that much stock in a New York piece of paper because it is stamped UN, and has Israel's name on it, there are 69 more of them that they might consider granting the same reverence.