Henry Kissinger writes in his memoirs that when, upon entering the Nixon administration as national security adviser in 1969, he first heard the phrase "a just and lasting peace within secure and recognized borders", he thought the incantation so platitudinous that he accused the speaker of pulling his leg. But Kissinger quickly learned that this central tenet of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which calls for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during the 1967 war in return for an Arab pledge of full peace and recognition, was deadly serious. The resolution had been adopted more than a year before Kissinger arrived on the scene, but he played a key role in setting it, and the land-for-peace doctrine that is its centerpiece, into concrete as the basis for U.S. policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For 25 years, the resolution remained the bedrock of all efforts to forge a peace agreement through every subsequent U.S. administration--until President Bill Clinton arrived on the scene and until, ironically, the peace process revved up in earnest.

Although Clinton and his team of negotiators paid lip service to Resolution 242, in fact they consistently, throughout seven years of peacemaking, undermined it by abandoning the land-for-peace concept that was fundamental to it. President George W. Bush and his policymakers also occasionally mention the resolution, but the Bush administration is demonstrably ignorant of the history and background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it can fairly be said that, by now, Resolution 242 and the approach to peace that it outlined have basically been forgotten, consigned to the filing cabinets of history and remembered only by Palestinians for whom the U.S. memory loss constitutes a grave breach of contract.

This is a story of remarkable foreign policy duplicity. When Resolution 242 was negotiated and finally adopted in November 1967, a few months after Israel captured territory from Egypt, Syria, and Jordan in the 1967 war, President Lyndon Johnson and his policymakers were anxious primarily to ensure that Israel not be required to withdraw from captured territory, as had happened in 1956 following the Sinai campaign, without an explicit, guaranteed promise from the Arabs of peace and an end of belligerency. The resolution stipulated this exchange, calling unequivocally for "termination of all claims or states of belligerency" and explicit acknowledgement of all states' (meaning in particular Israel's) territorial integrity and "right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force"--all in return for Israel's withdrawal "from territories occupied in the recent conflict".

The extent of Israel's required withdrawal was deliberately not specified in the resolution--an example of "creative ambiguity" made possible by omitting the definite article in front of the phrase "territories occupied in the recent conflict". Internal documents and the rare public pronouncement, however, make it clear that, although U.S. policymakers never definitively spelled out the exact boundary envisioned between Israel and any Arab entity, the basic assumption of successive administrations was that Israel would not keep the occupied territories. Johnson said publicly in 1968 that whatever borders were finally agreed to "should not reflect the weight of conquest". The U.S. envisioned a virtually full withdrawal on all fronts, excepting only some possible "minor border adjustments" in the 1967 lines to straighten and rationalize boundaries. In fact, on the Egyptian front, under the 1979 peace treaty, Israel withdrew totally from the occupied Sinai Peninsula--a point not lost on other Arabs still negotiating their own agreements.

With respect specifically to the occupied West Bank, U.S. policymakers gained Jordan's acceptance of Resolution 242 on the promise that the U.S. would seek an Israeli withdrawal from the entire territory except for minor border changes. When in 1988 Jordan formally relinquished its claim to the West Bank in favor of the Palestinians (Egypt had previously relinquished any claim to Gaza), Palestinians assumed that the promise reverted to them and that the U.S. remained pledged to work for a virtually total Israeli withdrawal. This is in fact the basis on which the U.S. proceeded.

For years, a succession of U.S. administrations demanded, as a precondition for Palestinian entry into the peace process, that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) formally accept the UN resolution and recognize not only Israel's existence but its "right to exist". In negotiating the 1975 Sinai II accord, the agreement for a second partial Israeli withdrawal in the Sinai Peninsula, Henry Kissinger, responding to Israel's fear that it would be forced to deal with the PLO as the next step in the negotiating process, added a codicil promising that the United States would not negotiate with the PLO unless it met these conditions. Two years later, President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance made a serious attempt to gain PLO acquiescence to the conditions in order be able to bring the Palestinians into negotiations, but the effort ultimately failed, largely because the PLO felt unable at the time to make these major concessions without any expectation of concessions from Israel. Palestinians specifically objected to 242 because it did not address them in national terms, referring to them only as "the refugee problem".

It would be another decade before the PLO, buoyed by the political successes of the first intifada, made what it considered to be a major compromise and finally accepted Resolution 242. In November 1988, the PLO formally relinquished all Palestinian claim to territory inside Israel's 1967 borders and, in the belief that the resolution required Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories and that the United States supported such a withdrawal, declared its goal to be the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, existing alongside Israel, with a shared capital in Jerusalem. In a formal public statement, PLO leader Yasir Arafat recognized Israel's "right to exist" at the same time. The Palestinians thus relinquished claim to 78 percent of Palestine, demanding independent statehood only in the remaining 22 percent. Three years after this, and only because of their acceptance of 242, Palestinians were included for the first time in peace negotiations, participating as part of the Jordanian delegation to the Madrid peace conference in October 1991.

The principal point that should be emphasized throughout these two decades of fitful negotiations is that the United States, through six administrations from Johnson to George H. W. Bush, consistently adhered to Resolution 242, explicitly endorsed its central land-for-peace thesis, and therefore explicitly led the PLO to believe that Palestinian adherence to the resolution and an expressed willingness to live in peace with Israel would bring U.S. support for the other half of the deal--land for the Palestinians, in the form of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital in Jerusalem, following a virtually complete Israeli withdrawal.

This is not to say that all U.S. administrations supported the idea of trading land for peace to the same degree. The Reagan administration, for instance, was notably unenthusiastic about working for an end to the Israeli occupation and missed several opportunities to move forward on the basis of Resolution 242. Most notably, the Reagan team rejected as a non-starter the Fez Plan of September 1982, an initiative originated by Saudi Arabia and based on land for peace that was adopted at an Arab summit by all heads of state except one, as well as the PLO. Nonetheless, even the Reagan administration insisted on PLO adherence to Resolution 242 and agreed to open a formal U.S. dialogue with the PLO when the organization accepted the resolution in 1988.

As late as the first Bush administration, policymakers regularly reaffirmed Resolution 242 as the basis for a peace settlement and specified U.S. support for an end to Israel's occupation. In an official letter of assurance given to the Palestinians in advance of the 1991 Madrid peace conference, Secretary of State James Baker asserted the U.S. belief that "a comprehensive peace must be grounded in" Resolution 242 and "the principle of territory for peace". Baker further pledged that "the United States believes that there should be an end to the Israeli occupation". Bush senior himself, in a rare instance of a president venturing publicly into the political minefield of the occupied territories, affirmed in 1990 that the U.S. did not support the establishment of Israeli settlements in either the West Bank or East Jerusalem.

The long and the short of this extended chapter in U.S. diplomacy is that, after being beaten about the head and shoulders for years about the need to accept the UN resolution and recognize Israel's right to exist, Palestinians had every reason to expect that the U.S. would follow through with its part of the bargain when they did finally accede to these demands--first in 1988, then again in 1991 when they accepted the terms for entering peace talks at Madrid, and yet again in 1993 when they negotiated and signed on to the Oslo accords. In fact, the terms of the Oslo agreement, signed on the White House lawn with much pomp and ceremony under the complacent eye of President Bill Clinton (who in reality had had nothing to do with negotiating the agreement), specified that negotiations would "lead to the implementation of" Resolution 242.

It soon became clear, however, that Clinton and his team of negotiators- -led by Special Middle East Coordinator Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, who served at different times during Clinton's terms on the National Security Council staff, as ambassador to Israel, and as deputy assistant secretary of state--had dramatically altered the game plan. Having obtained a Palestinian commitment to full peace, including not simply recognition of Israel's existence inside its 1967 borders, but recognition of its "right" to exist, the U.S. dropped any requirement for full or nearly full Israeli withdrawal. The decades-long U.S. commitment to the concept of land for peace changed from a promise made to both sides to work for what each most wanted--for the Palestinians, the return of all occupied territory with the exception of minor border adjustments; for Israel, full peace and the right to live within secure borders--to a promise instead to Israel that, now that the Palestinians had already committed to full peace, Israel's virtually full withdrawal would no longer be necessary.

The backgrounds of Ross and Indyk are relevant to the policy they developed during the Clinton years. Before entering government, both had been connected with the pro-Israeli think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a spin-off from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the principal pro-Israel lobby organization. Ross was a senior fellow at the institute in the mid- 1980s, was an adviser to the Bush presidential campaign in 1988, and served as James Baker's senior State Department adviser on both Soviet and Middle East affairs. He stayed on as principal Middle East negotiator throughout Clinton's years in office and since then has returned to the Washington Institute as a senior counselor. Indyk, an Australian citizen who came to the U.S. in the 1970s and had worked for AIPAC, was the Washington Institute's director from its creation in 1984 until he moved into the Clinton administration in 1993, an appointment that necessitated his rapid acquisition of U.S. citizenship.

Both men had lived in Israel in the 1970s, and Indyk has told interviewers that he moved to the United States after the 1973 war because he came to believe during that war that the U.S. was the key to Israel's defense, an objective clearly of surpassing importance to him personally. Although both men prided themselves on being able as Jews to understand Palestinians better than most, it was clear that they approached Middle East policymaking from an Israel-centered focus that did not in fact permit as clear an understanding of Palestinian concerns as of Israeli interests. One can get an idea of the perhaps unconsciously skewed perspective from which they operated by imagining the policy approach of a chief mediator who was of Palestinian descent, had lived in the West Bank, and unabashedly proclaimed that his primary aim in life was to ensure the defense of Palestine.

The Clinton policy approach, formulated largely by Ross, quickly became clear when the United States drafted a proposed Israeli-Palestinian declaration of principles in mid-1993, before the Oslo agreement was adopted. The draft U.S. declaration essentially abandoned the principles behind Resolution 242. It stated as one of its fundamental points that "the two sides concur that the agreement reached between them on permanent status will constitute the implementation" of Resolution 242 in all its aspects.

Although written in the legalistic language of a diplomatic brief, the meaning of the Ross draft was clear: whatever Israel as the overwhelmingly stronger power could force the Palestinians to accept would constitute the "implementation of Resolution 242" as far as the United States was concerned. In other words, the Clinton administration now intended to treat the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem not as occupied territories but only as territories under dispute. The United States no longer regarded these areas as occupied territories from which Israel was required to withdraw, but now regarded the territories as disputed lands whose almost full retention Israel had the right to negotiate if it could get away with it. The United States, for its part, would leave the two sides--one overwhelmingly stronger militarily and in total possession of the land in question--to negotiate a disposition of the land without any intervention by an honest broker or mediator.

The quarter-century-old bedrock U.S. policy of supporting the exchange of full peace for full withdrawal had thus been reshaped by Clinton administration policymakers to supporting the exchange of full peace for a mere partial withdrawal. The promise to the Palestinians that had always been part of the demands on them to accept Resolution 242 was abandoned without a by-your-leave by a team of U.S. negotiators whose main interest lay in guaranteeing Israel's security and seeing to the furtherance of Israel's interests, and by a president who may not have understood and apparently did not care about the nuances of decades of U.S. policymaking.

This failure of understanding is the primary reason the peace process collapsed at the Camp David summit in July 2000. The myth of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's "generous offer" has created the widespread misapprehension that Yasir Arafat rejected out of hand, without even offering a counterproposal, an extremely good deal that he should clearly have accepted. Arafat's rejection supposedly proved, according to the prevailing wisdom, that the Palestinians were unwilling to conclude any deal that would allow Israel to live in peace and that they were still irreconcilably opposed to Israel existence.

According to the myth, Barak's proposal would have given the Palestinians, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is fond of repeating, "95 percent of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, with all the settlements gone". In fact, what Barak actually offered at Camp David was to withdraw from 89-90 percent of the West Bank, not 95 percent; to give the Palestinians sovereignty in a few non-contiguous neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, not half of Jerusalem; and, far from assuring that all the settlements would be gone, to annex to Israel settlements housing fully 80 percent of the 200,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank and 100 percent of the 170,000 settlers in East Jerusalem.

The resulting Palestinian "state" would have been broken up in the West Bank into three almost completely non-contiguous sections, each connected only by a narrow thread of land and each surrounded by Israeli territory, plus Gaza. This so-called state would have been a colony, not a state--with no real independence, no ability to defend itself, no control over its borders, no control over its water resources, no easy way even for its citizens to reach one section from another, and a capital made up of separate neighborhoods not contiguous to each other or to the rest of the state. Israel would never have agreed to live in a disjointed, indefensible state like this, but Israel and the United States thought it fine to offer this to the Palestinians. This Israeli offer, made with U.S. support and participation, turned the promise of Resolution 242 on its head.

The myth of Camp David has been almost impossible to overturn, largely because Clinton spawned it himself, blaming Arafat, and Arafat alone, for the summit's breakdown. The U.S. media and particularly leading media commentators quickly took a cue from Clinton, stridently piling on Arafat, and it has now become an automatic, almost casual part of the media's mantra to observe that Arafat rejected a remarkably forthcoming Israeli offer at Camp David. Clinton and his negotiators, no doubt unwilling to assume any of the responsibility themselves for years of misguided policymaking, have continued to put out the line that everything was Arafat's fault.

Should Arafat and Palestinian negotiators have seen this betrayal coming and better prepared themselves to counter it? Should Arafat have made it clear at Camp David that Resolution 242, along with a quarter century of U.S. policy supporting land for peace, constituted his counterproposal and that, although Palestinians were prepared to negotiate minor border adjustments in the 1967 lines, they were not prepared to concede Israel's right to trisect the West Bank and render it indefensible? When U.S. officials began to say, in the run-up to Camp David, that neither side could expect to get 100 percent of its demands, should Arafat have reminded those officials, and Israel, that the Palestinians had already formally compromised 78 percent of their demands by repeatedly recognizing Israel's right to exist and that compromise on the remaining 22 percent would necessarily be minimal? Should Arafat have been a better negotiator?

The answer is yes to all of these questions. But the fact that Arafat is not a skilled negotiator, or an adequate communicator, or even a decent leader cannot negate the right of a Palestinian nation, as laid out in Resolution 242, to "live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force".

The word "occupation"--and the concept that lay behind it, that Israel is a foreign military conqueror in temporary possession of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem--disappeared entirely from the diplomatic lexicon of the Clinton administration. President Bush has reintroduced the word and made occasional references to Resolution 242-- most notably in his June 24 speech calling for a truncated, ill- defined, "provisional" Palestinian state--but neither in this speech nor in previous iterations of his so-called vision of a Palestinian state has Bush given an indication that he has any appreciation of the reality of occupation or what to do about it, or any depth of understanding of what occupation means to Palestinians. He never mentions the notion of trading land for peace.

As has so often been the case with U.S. policymakers, Bush appears to be taking his cue from Israel on this issue. Just before his arrival in Washington for a meeting with Bush in early June, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authored an op-ed article in the New York Times praising the wisdom of Resolution 242, hailing its call for "secure and recognized boundaries" and claiming that the resolution "established that these were disputed territories where Israel had legitimate rights to defensible borders." Implying that Israelis had already carried out all of their obligations under the resolution, he observed that Israel "withdrew its military government over the Palestinian population" under the Oslo agreement in accordance with 242. In view of the disdain in which Sharon and his Likud party have always held Resolution 242, this praise for the resolution is an audacious and highly cynical turnaround. But it apparently worked on Bush, for although his new "peace plan" mentions the long-term goal of a peace settlement based on Resolution 242 and calls for Israeli withdrawal to positions held before the start of the intifada in September 2000, it does not deviate from Sharon's revisionist interpretation of the resolution. Neither man bothered to mention that the resolution is premised on the "inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war", which removes any justification for Israel's retention of the captured territories. Bush echoed Sharon in explicitly mentioning only one of the resolution's several provisions--that endorsing the idea of secure and recognized borders for Israel. Furthermore, Bush's only mention of the need for Israeli withdrawal was to pre-intifada positions--a territorial configuration that saw Israeli in full control of 60% of the West Bank and Palestinian autonomous areas covering the remaining 40% broken up into more than 200 separate, non-contiguous areas.

Once again, an Israeli prime minister has skewed the original intent of Resolution 242 to suit Israel's interests, and an uninformed and uninterested American president has willingly followed along. The real import of the resolution has long since been discarded and forgotten. If mentioned at all, the idea of land-for-peace now tends, in political discourse throughout the U.S., to be treated as a quaint anachronism, as when many commentators dismissed the significance of the recent Arab peace proposal based on Resolution 242 and land-for-peace. Only historians and Palestinians truly remember the significance of the 35- year-old resolution.

We hear much these days about how Israelis have lost trust in the Palestinians since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. This loss of trust is undeniable, but in the usual one-sided, Israel- focused approach of U.S. media commentators and policymakers, the fact that this sense of betrayal goes both ways has been almost totally ignored. Palestinians have also experienced a betrayal--not only a loss of trust in Israel because it has done nothing, despite seven years of a so-called peace process, to end decades of settlement building, land confiscation, checkpoints, and house demolitions, but more significantly a loss of trust in the United States as an honest and reliable mediator prepared to address the concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians equally and prepared to carry through with long-standing diplomatic obligations. The land-for-peace betrayal stands as a shameful example of diplomatic double-dealing and is the primary reason for the perpetuation of the tragic conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the University of California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story," was published in March 2002. Both Kathy and her husband Bill, also a former CIA analyst, are regular contributors to the CounterPunch website.

A few years ago, I had the temerity to write to David McCullough, the biographer of Harry Truman, to tell him I thought he was wrong about an aspect of Truman's character. I had seen McCullough on a C-SPAN rebroadcast of a talk on Truman. Speaking about the recognition of Israel in 1948, McCullough emphasized his belief that the reason Truman had persevered in recognizing the new state of Israel despite the opposition of many in his administration was that his high moral values would not permit any other course. Truman, McCullough said, simply had to "do the right thing" by rescuing the Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust and giving them a state in Palestine, and his courage in standing up to the naysayers clearly demonstrated his strength of character.

What I wrote to McCullough is that Truman's stubbornness seemed to me to show the strength of his convictions but not the strength of his character--that he did indeed "do the right thing" by helping Jews after the Holocaust, but he did not "do it the right way." The right way would not have involved displacing another entire population--the Palestinians who lived on the land Truman helped give away. Yet there is no evidence that Truman ever showed concern for this part of his moral project on behalf of Israel.

McCullough was nice enough to write back. He said he thought Truman had not been malicious but had simply lacked understanding, and in a revealing remark, he acknowledged that Truman "just didn't know enough about [the Palestinians] and their situation"--which he said, quite accurately, is still true of most Americans. "The great shame," he wrote, "is that a reasonable discussion of the subject remains so difficult to achieve in any public way."

Which brings me to my point: Reasonable discussion of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, and particularly of the Palestinian perspective, has always been "so difficult to achieve in any public way," and since the days of Woodrow Wilson immediately after World War I, this has been as true of policymakers as it has of ordinary citizens and the media. There has been much evolution in U.S. policy on the Palestinian issue over the years, but one reality has held true consistently: every president in the last 85 years, since World War I, has tried to one degree or another to ignore the Palestinian issue in the hope that it would somehow go away--that someone else would resolve it, or that it could be swept under some rug, or that the Palestinians would just not air their grievances.

But by ignoring the issue--by studiously not knowing what the Palestinians' real grievances have been all these years--the United States has kept the conflict going, and escalating, for over half a century. By not understanding and taking into account the Palestinian perspective equally with the Israeli perspective and assuming that Palestinians are motivated simply by hatred of Jews rather than by the fact of their expulsion and flight from Palestine, the United States has actually created the conditions that have led to most, or perhaps all, of the region's wars.

Public thinking and public perceptions, such as the one David McCullough propounded about the morality of Israel's creation, have had a profound effect on the making of U.S. policy on the Palestinian- Israeli conflict since World War I. Perceptions have a far greater impact, in fact, than do actual realities on the ground. Malcolm Kerr, the late scholar of the modern Arab world, wrote in 1980 that the conventional wisdom on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was based on a fundamental misperception that tended to skew all policymaking. The perception was that Palestinian national claims were "artificially and mischievously inspired" and thus could be ignored. Everyone--ordinary citizens and policymakers alike--had come to assume, Kerr said, that Arabs simply hated Jews and unreasonably refused to accept Israel's existence, and that this was the ultimate cause of the conflict. Virtually no one any longer remembered that the Palestinians had been dispossessed in 1948 and that this, not unreasoned hatred for Jews, lay at the heart of the conflict. The Palestinians' dispersal had become what Kerr called "an unrecognizable episode." Even policymakers had forgotten it and forgotten that this was where the root of Palestinian grievances lay.

Some things have changed by now, almost two decades after Kerr wrote this. Palestinians were hardly known among the general public in 1980, and almost nowhere were they accepted as having any legitimate stake in the peace process or any legitimate territorial claim. That has changed. But the policymaking frame of reference that Kerr spoke of-- which attributed legitimacy to Israel but not to the Palestinians, which approached peace negotiations and policymaking in general from an Israeli perspective--this mindset is still very much with us. Not only does the fact of Palestinian dispossession in 1948 remain "an unrecognizable episode," but the fact of Israel's occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem is now a new "unrecognizable" reality--mentioned rarely by the media, even more rarely by policymakers. And Israel still enjoys overwhelming predominance in U.S. policy considerations, a reality magnified under the Bush administration.

The basic set of assumptions that has governed policymaking on this issue is an enveloping blanket of tightly knit impressions, perceptions, and fixed ideas that's virtually impossible to unravel. It did not all just start in 1948; it is not a matter only of a very strong pro-Israel lobby; it's not only the influence of a very manipulative media. These are all part of it, but the frame of reference through which policymakers have always shaped policy began to develop well before 1948, and it's a much broader phenomenon than just skillful lobbying or media misinformation. The entire process has been cumulative. I want to emphasize that point: no one event, no one trend in public thinking, no one policymaker brought this frame of reference into existence.

So let me trace the cumulative nature of this frame of reference or mindset. American impressions and stereotypes of Arabs began to take shape in the 19th century. This was a period in which travel to Palestine became immensely popular, not only for scholars in many fields but for ordinary citizens wanting to retrace Christ's footsteps in the Holy Land. Travel writing flourished, adventurers toured the speaking circuit to talk about their experiences, missionaries returned to preach to their congregations. The word got around widely--and virtually all of them conveyed extremely negative images of the Arabs they encountered. Then, when Zionism emerged around the turn of the century, it seemed wholly appropriate to an America steeped in biblical teachings that Jews should return to the Holy Land. This notion was given added impetus by the prevalent view that Arabs and Muslims were somehow alien to that land and were inferior human beings in any case-- warlike and barbaric and not fit to associate with civilized Westerners.

This kind of thinking had a inevitable impact on policymakers of the early 20th century--including Woodrow Wilson, the first president who made a policy decision on Palestine, by endorsing the Balfour Declaration, and Franklin Roosevelt, who followed along because supporting Zionism was already part of the mindset. It's no accident that, after a century of denigration of the Arabs, the only arguments about Palestine that these presidents found convincing were those from the Zionist side.

By the time of Harry Truman, the mindset had been cast in concrete. The immense sympathy throughout the U.S. for the Jews after the Holocaust, on top of everything that had gone before, made the establishment of Israel a virtual inevitability. After this had been accomplished, literally everyone--including the State Department people who had initially opposed Israel's creation--fell into line, and the notion that Israel was a political fact became part of the mindset.

Not surprisingly, the Palestinians disappeared from the political radar screen in the United States altogether after 1948 and remained off for two decades. This was a period in which Israel's image was vastly enhanced, while the Palestinians, not constituting a state and sunk in political oblivion, were at a crippling disadvantage. When they were thought of at all in Washington, it was only as refugees--an issue to which each administration from Eisenhower to Kennedy to Johnson paid less and less attention.

Two trends in public thinking in the 1960s tipped the scales against the Palestinians even further. One was the revival of interest in the Holocaust because of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. The trial brought out the horrors of the Holocaust again and had a truly electrifying effect on American public opinion. The Holocaust was written about and discussed by intellectuals, including primarily Elie Wiesel, and it was portrayed in popular books and movies, principally Leon Uris's book and movie Exodus, which had an immense influence on an entire generation of Americans. In all of this, not only did Israel gain added sympathy and affection, but in a kind of zero-sum effect, every notch up in the Israeli image produced a notch down in the Arab image. Friends of Israel laid out for the public a kind of continuum of Jewish suffering, and Arabs were assigned the role of latter-day Hitlers, still trying to exterminate Jews. When the 1967 war broke out-- the second of these major events of the '60s--many people saw it as a concerted Arab attempt to continue Hitler's work and genuinely feared that Israel was facing another Holocaust.

All of this had a profound effect on policymakers. Lyndon Johnson already harbored all the stereotypical notions of Arabs, and he felt a special affinity for Israel--to such an extent that one adviser described him as having "Jewish corpuscles in his blood." He had many friends, inside and outside government, who were fervent supporters of Israel, who vacationed with him at his Texas ranch and had constant access to him to talk in an informal and emotional way about their concerns for Israel. The Palestinians didn't have a chance. There was no possible way to bring the Arab or Palestinian viewpoint to the attention of policymakers in this environment. Then the Palestinians compounded this in the late '60s and early '70s by launching a campaign of international terrorism. This did serve to bring them to public attention and out of oblivion, but of course it also severely damaged their already abysmal image.

1967 brought a profound change, not just because it so vastly enhanced Israel's image in the U.S., but chiefly because it fundamentally redefined the conflict by further obscuring its real origins and the Palestinians' real grievances. Policymakers who had long since forgotten anyway that the basis of the entire Arab-Israel conflict lay in the Palestinians' displacement in 1948, now focused on whether and how to resolve the territorial issues created by the '67 war. Those who had never wanted to acknowledge what was at the heart of the conflict could now divert all attention to the issue of the occupied territories.

What this cumulative build-up of a frame of reference totally focused on Israel meant is that the more the Palestinians did to bring themselves to world attention, the more strenuously the United States tried to ignore them. In the 1970s, Henry Kissinger was so nonplussed at the notion of having to legitimize the Palestinians by talking to them that he ignored several overtures from Yasir Arafat that might have been productive had they been explored. In the later '70s Jimmy Carter was completely hamstrung--by political pressures and lobby pressures and media criticism--in his attempts to pursue an opening to the Palestinians and bring them into peace negotiations. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan, who regarded the Palestinian problem as just another of history's "running sores," as he put it, that should be left to Israel to handle, created a policy so unquestioningly pro-Israeli and anti- Palestinian that he followed Israel's lead virtually everywhere, underwriting a vast consolidation of Israeli control over the West Bank and overseeing a campaign by his political allies to deny Palestinian nationalism altogether.

Perceptions of the Palestinians and the total Israeli focus of the general American mindset began to change after Reagan. The first intifada gained the Palestinians a great deal of sympathy in the United States and forced Israel at least to start on the road to peace talks. These factors, combined with the clear evidence the Palestinians gave, through the PLO's acceptance of the two-state formula in 1988, that they were ready to live in peace alongside Israel, forced U.S. policymakers to begin thinking of the Palestinians for the first time as a national entity with a stake in Palestine and in the peace process. But it's now easy to see in retrospect that these changes wrought a dozen years ago were not nearly enough to alter the basic mental framework through which the Palestinian issue has always been viewed.

As a result, even though the U.S. does now recognize the Palestinians as legitimate participants in the peace process, it is still second nature always to follow Israel's lead, letting Israel set the starting point, the pace, and the agenda of any move toward peace. This characterized policymaking in the Clinton years and has intensified in the current Bush administration. Clinton's failure, despite an intensive effort, to bring the peace process to a successful conclusion at Camp David in July 2000 and during the six months that followed was directly attributable to this pursuit of Israel's agenda. There's an irony here in the fact that Clinton had established closer ties with Palestinians than any previous president. But, at bottom, he had no deep understanding of what drove Palestinians, of what their grievances were, of what the occupation meant to their daily lives and to their national aspirations. His overriding focus on Israel was part of his upbringing, part of his mindset.

The Clinton team purported to adopt a position of strict neutrality, never taking a position on the issues under negotiation in the belief that the parties should be left to their own devices to work out a mutually acceptable solution. But in a situation in which Israel was the vastly stronger side, with physical control over all the territory under negotiation, and the Palestinian side had no way other than verbal argument to advance its position, a hands-off approach by the United States as mediator obviously heavily favored Israel. Clinton's false neutrality gave Israel a free hand to negotiate or refuse to negotiate according to its own needs and to take whatever steps it deemed necessary for its own security, no matter how these impeded further negotiations.

Throughout eight years of peacemaking, Clinton and his advisers removed the idea of "occupation" altogether from the political vocabulary of the conflict. As a result, they lost sight themselves, and most Americans lost sight, of the most basic issue in the conflict today. The Bush administration suffers from the same myopia. Although they do occasionally refer to the "occupation," Bush policymakers are no more aware of what the occupation involves for the Palestinians than the Clinton team was.

Bush, it's clear, has set himself up as distinctly different from Clinton--as sort of the "un-Clinton"--and he is obviously very different in many ways. This is particularly so in the influence the large group of neoconservatives in his administration have on policymaking, particularly in the Defense Department and on the various White House staffs, as well as the influence Christian fundamentalists exert. But in a very real sense, Bush has taken his cue from Clinton and pursues a policy virtually identical to his predecessor's. Bush inherited a mindset from Clinton that placed the entire burden of blame on the Palestinians for the collapse of the peace process, and as a result Bush policymakers fail to see any legitimacy in the Palestinian position. They show no understanding of the grievances that sparked the intifada, and no interest at all in the Palestinian perspective on the conflict. Only by ignoring the Palestinians in this way is it possible for Bush to hail Sharon as a "man of peace" at the very moment that Sharon is destroying the entire infrastructure of Palestinian society.

Today, perhaps more than at any time in the past, the political culture in the United States makes it almost impossible for policymakers to gain a balanced view of the conflict. The events of September 11 and their aftermath militate against any serious reassessment of where the Palestinian-Israeli issue stands; the domestic political risks of confronting Israel are almost overwhelming; sympathy for Israel is high; pressures on policymakers from supporters of Israel inside and outside government and in Congress are intense; and the media, which ultimately create the atmosphere in which ordinary citizens and policymakers alike form their most basic impressions, have shown a higher degree of vicious anti-Palestinian bias than at any time since the 1970s, and maybe ever.

There has never been much room in American political discourse, at any level, for the Palestinian perspective. But after years in which the Palestinians had begun to be accepted by public opinion as legitimate participants in the peace process, the extent and intensity of the poisonous atmosphere in the wake of the intifada and of September 11 are startling. The United States has always been blind, and is today even more blind, to the Israeli occupation as the root of the present conflict and therefore refuses to accept the Palestinian perspective on the conflict as having any merit. As always from the beginning, Palestinians and their concerns are essentially invisible to U.S. policymakers.

In the end, what has this singular U.S. focus on the Israeli perspective meant, for the Palestinians and for the Middle East in general? The failure to take the Palestinian perspective into account, I believe, has perpetuated the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, at every step along the way. In every war in the last half century, including the 1948 war, you can point to a U.S. failure to anticipate, or to understand the issues involved, or to probe openings that might have prevented conflict. And this has generally always been because we looked at the problem with one eye closed. If anything, this inclination is intensifying under President Bush, and this does not bode well for the future.

Kathleen Christison worked for 16 years as a political analyst with the CIA, dealing first with Vietnam and then with the Middle East for her last seven years with the Agency before resigning in 1979. Since leaving the CIA, she has been a free-lance writer, dealing primarily with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her book, "Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy," was published by the University of California Press and reissued in paperback with an update in October 2001. A second book, "The Wound of Dispossession: Telling the Palestinian Story," was published in March 2002.

It won't surprise anyone, I'm sure, that I think New York Times coverage of Arab--Israeli and particularly Palestinian--Israeli issues-- taking into account all types of coverage, from straight news reporting, to analysis, to editorial/op--ed coverage--tilts distinctly toward Israel. This is noticeable to a limited extent with straight news coverage, much more obvious with analysis, and very evident with editorial and op--ed coverage. Often this is a matter simply of reporting or analyzing from an Israeli perspective, without taking the Palestinian perspective into account--as if all reporting from Israel and about Israelis is essentially reporting on "us" and on concerns in which we the readers are vitally interested, whereas reporting on Palestinians is about a different, foreign people and therefore of much less interest.

This occurs, for instance, when we're treated to frequent features on the personal and psychological impact of suicide bombings on Israelis but seldom see stories about the impact on Palestinians of the occupation and all its aspects--the civilian deaths, the roadblocks, the land confiscation, the curfews, the depredations by settlers, the shootings by soldiers, the destruction of olive groves, etc., etc. Times reporters seem to spend little time in the West Bank and Gaza-- less and less as Israel tightens its control over these territories-- and as a result there is relatively little reporting on the situation there. Even the stories about Israel's July 22 missile attack in Gaza that killed 14 innocent civilians were filed from Jerusalem, not from Gaza.

Imbalance in news coverage is chiefly a matter of omission rather than commission, as the examples above show. Since the beginning of the intifada almost two years ago, the Times has only rarely given casualty totals for Palestinians and Israelis--one suspects because Palestinian deaths outnumber Israeli deaths by about three to one, which makes it difficult to portray Israel as the party under siege. Times editorialists never saw fit to comment on the July 22 Israeli missile attack on Gaza, although they generally do run editorials decrying large Palestinian terrorist attacks.

The Times also seldom uses the word "occupation" to describe Israel's 35--year--old rule over the West Bank and Gaza, seldom describes East Jerusalem as occupied territory, seldom informs readers that the 200,000 Israelis who live in East Jerusalem are settlers who reside not in "neighborhoods" or in "suburbs" of Jerusalem but in settlements built on land confiscated from Palestinians, seldom reports on the steady expansion of Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, and seldom indicates that the intifada is an uprising against Israel's occupation.

A comparison of Times news reporting with Washington Post reporting shows the Post to be far superior in its on--the--ground coverage. Whereas Times reporters seem usually to file their West Bank and Gaza stories from Jerusalem, Post reporters generally write them directly from the West Bank or Gaza. Post stories are for the most part broader in scope, more in--depth, more probing, and more balanced than Times articles. Post reporters tend to get "down and dirty," more often reporting the grim realities of Palestinian life under occupation, more often following Israeli soldiers as they blow in doorways and walls in house--to--house searches in refugee camps, more often catching the uncomfortable realities of Israel's occupation practices, such as sniper shootings of rock--throwing Palestinian teenagers.

Whereas the Times only rarely reports casualty figures, the Post did so with some regularity until Israel's reoccupation of the West Bank in April. It is unclear whether Post reporting on deaths has dropped off because numbers became much harder to track during that month--long siege, or because the Post, and all other papers, have begun to receive much heavier criticism from Israeli supporters in recent months, and all print and electronic media are on the defensive. The Post's employment of an ombudsman--veteran reporter Michael Getler--although not a key to perfection, helps keep the paper more nearly honest. Getler writes a weekly column, which he frequently devotes to a thorough analysis and questioning of Post reporting from the Middle East.

Analytical reporting in both the Post and the Times is spotty. In the Times, analysis, which is usually done by the paper's best diplomatic correspondents, often indicates at least a mild bias, usually in the form of an inability to fathom where the Palestinians are coming from and what the Palestinian perspective is. One gets the impression that few if any Times correspondents understand what drives the intifada or accept that there is any legitimacy to Palestinian resistance to the occupation. For instance, in October 2000, during the first few days of the intifada, Palestinian citizens of Israel demonstrated in solidarity with West Bank--Gaza Palestinians, who at that point were being killed in very large numbers by Israeli soldiers, and during the demonstrations Israeli police shot to death 13 Israeli Palestinians.

In an analysis of the nationalistic reaction to the intifada throughout the Arab world written two weeks into the intifada, Judith Miller wrote that the "rift between Israeli Jews and the Arab citizens of Israel" was another "profound emotional scar" left by the violence. Her evidence of the "emotional scar" was that Israeli Jews "were horrified by the ferocity of this uprising, which closed off large sections of their country, and by the 'Death to the Jews' slogans chanted by the Arab protesters." She made no mention of an emotional scar for Israeli Palestinians, no mention at all of the fact that 13 unarmed Israeli-- Palestinian demonstrators had recently been shot to death, no mention that Israeli police had never in Israel's history opened fire on demonstrators when they were Israeli Jews, and no mention of the fact that Israeli Jewish demonstrators had chanted "Death to Arabs" during demonstrations at the same time.

More recently, on July 14, 2002, Serge Schmemann wrote a brief essay accompanying pictures of several West Bank Palestinians who described their frustration with U.S. policy. (A 12--year--old boy, for instance, says that he likes Americans when they support Palestinians, but then he notes that Colin Powell came to visit Yasir Arafat and "said something about" a Palestinian state but then did nothing. A taxi driver who had been waiting for hours for Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint to return his ID papers, said he blames everybody for the situation, including the Palestinian Authority, and feels that the U.S. gave the green light to Israel to continue the occupation.) Under a headline that does sympathetically acknowledge the Palestinians' "deep despair," Schmemann seems to give them the back of his hand by concluding his essay this way: "It is easy to argue with these voices, to recite the litany of Mr. Arafat's failings and lost opportunities. Perhaps it is useful, though, to simply hear them" [my emphasis]. If Schmemann didn't actually mean to be patronizing, as this sounds, then he must have felt it necessary to apologize for letting Palestinians speak their minds.

One other example of the failure of Times correspondents to understand-- even to fathom -- the Arab and Palestinian perspective: on March 3, 2002, diplomatic correspondent Elaine Sciolino ran a long article on the mood in Saudi Arabia and appeared on C--SPAN that morning to talk about it. On C--SPAN, she said she had been quite surprised during a three--week trip to Saudi Arabia to discover how much all levels of Saudi society focused on the Palestinian situation. It amazed her, she said, how very much the Palestinian crisis dominated Saudi conversation, and how the crisis informed their thinking about the U.S. because the U.S. armed Israel. It also surprised her, she said, that television pictures of Israelis attacking Palestinians appear all the time in Saudi Arabia [her emphasis]. She repeatedly emphasized her amazement at this discovery, and the tenor of the article was similar, although a little less obviously surprised. The article spoke of seeing television footage of "the Palestinian interpretation of the intifada," by which Sciolino meant that the pictures were one--sided, showing Israeli soldiers firing into crowds and dead Palestinian babies but no Palestinian suicide bombers or Israeli bombing victims.

What's most amazing about Sciolino's discoveries was not that the Saudis were concerned about the Palestinian plight, but that Sciolino was surprised to discover that they were. No media person and no one as well informed and savvy as Sciolino should ever have been surprised that the Arab man in the street sees frequent television pictures of Palestinians being beaten and shot by Israelis and that this arouses genuine anger on behalf of the Palestinians. This is an appalling level of obliviousness and denial. The Times understands historic Jewish fears and the impact these have on American Jews when they see Israelis under attack, but it generally isn't able to apply this same level of understanding to Arabs and their sense of solidarity with fellow Arabs under attack.

Times editorials, columns, and the selection of op--ed articles are far more blatant in their tilt toward Israel. In an article in Roane Carey's The New Intifada, Ali Abunimah and Hussein Ibish described the tilt of editorials and op--eds run during the first four months of the intifada. Of 15 editorials on the conflict, they labeled 14 as pro-- Israeli and one as neutral because it focused on internal Israeli politics and made no mention of Palestinians. Of 33 op--eds, 25 were pro--Israeli, six were pro--Palestinian, and two were sensitive to both sides. (The Post doesn't come off any better in its editorial coverage. Abunimah and Ibish found that of 13 Post editorials in the same period, 12 were strongly pro--Israeli, the remaining one neutral. Of 27 op--ed articles, 20 were pro--Israeli, five were sympathetic to the Palestinians, and two were sensitive to both sides.) Times editorial writers have criticized Israel for settlement construction and harsh practices in the West Bank and Gaza, but in the two years since the Camp David summit collapsed--years that have seen the outbreak of the intifada, a steady escalation in Palestinian violence, an increase in suicide bombings, Israel's complete termination of the negotiating process six months after Camp David, the election of hardliner Sharon, the collapse of various cease--fire and negotiating plans such as Mitchell and Tenet, a campaign of Israeli assassinations of Palestinians, the reoccupation and siege of the civilian population of the West Bank, the destruction of the Palestinian civil infrastructure-- Times editorials have concentrated the burden of blame for all turmoil almost entirely on Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians.

Arafat alone was blamed for the collapse of Camp David, Arafat has been blamed for provoking Israel into taking harsh measures during the intifada, Arafat and the Palestinians are blamed for escalating violence. In an August 2001 editorial, the Times declared that both sides needed to work to contain the violence and that their mutual goal should be "to create a calm enough atmosphere to take the first steps toward resumed negotiations." Getting to that point would, in the Times's view, require two things: that Arafat show "more responsible behavior" and that Israel be willing to recognize that "for now he [Arafat] is the only realistic Palestinian negotiating partner." In other words, Israel need do nothing except grin and bear Arafat; all real concessions and good behavior had to come from Arafat. The usual presuppositions were at work here: Israelis always show responsible behavior and don't need the admonition given Arafat, and, unlike Palestinians, Israelis obviously always desire "a calm enough atmosphere to take the first steps toward resumed negotiations."

The Times demonstrated its unbalanced approach most noticeably in July 2001 in its commentary on a major one--year--later retrospective on the Camp David summit published by Jerusalem bureau chief Deborah Sontag. In a striking--and, one must assume, deliberate--effort to maintain its own blame--Arafat position on Camp David, a Times editorial on the Sontag story undermined Sontag by contradicting her principal conclusion. Having done extensive interviews with Israeli, Palestinian, and American participants in the summit and in--depth analysis of what went wrong, Sontag concluded that Arafat was by no means solely to blame for the summit's collapse and that all three parties were responsible, more or less equally, for mistakes made over the entire seven years of the peace process. A "potent, simplistic narrative has taken hold" in Israel and the United States, Sontag wrote. "It says: Mr. Barak offered Mr. Arafat the moon at Camp David last summer. Mr. Arafat turned it down, and then 'pushed the button' and chose the path of violence." But officials to whom she spoke had concluded that the dynamic was actually far more complex than this, that Arafat did not bear sole or even a disproportionate share of the responsibility. In fact, Sontag concluded, Barak did not offer Arafat the moon at Camp David but rather proposed a solution that might have been generous and even politically courageous in Israeli terms, but that would not have given the Palestinians what they regarded as a viable state.

Rather than accept Sontag's considered assessment of where responsibility lay, a Times editorial two days later persisted in praising Barak and blaming Arafat. Barak had come to Camp David, the editorial proclaimed, "with a daring offer, a peace plan that essentially vaulted over the interim steps outlined under the Oslo accords.Mr. Barak gambled that Mr. Arafat would accept his approach." But, the editorial contended, Arafat was not up to the task, acted too hesitantly, did not offer any proposals of his own, and condoned and, it's implied, stirred up "the violent uprising" that erupted two months later. Words and phrases like "daring," "vaulted," and "condoned the violent uprising" set the tone here. The editorial is saying that, despite what Sontag wrote, Barak did offer Arafat the moon, and Arafat was solely responsible for letting it all fall apart. (Interestingly, Sontag left Jerusalem after this article was published. She's still with the Times and occasionally writes for the Magazine, but I can't help wondering if she got kicked upstairs, or aside, or something. Maybe she intended to leave anyway; this article would have been a great swan song. But maybe it turned into a swan song after the Times editors decided they didn't like it, or after they received complaints from pro--Israeli, anti--Arafat readers?)

The story of what actually transpired at Camp David, unearthed by Sontag a year after the fact, is also an indictment of the U.S. media, including particularly the Times. By unquestioningly accepting the U.S.- -Israeli version of Camp David, which from the moment it ended placed the entire responsibility for failure on Arafat, the media made a very serious political and diplomatic miscalculation that has had far-- reaching consequences. As Rob Malley, an American diplomat who participated in the summit and has written extensively on it since, wrote recently in the New York Review of Books, "The one--sided account that was set in motion in the wake of Camp David has had devastating effects--on Israeli public opinion as well as on US foreign policy," setting in train a string of misperceptions that add up to a mythology about the Palestinians' supposed inability to make peace.

Malley puts it this way: "Barak's assessment that the talks failed because Yasser Arafat cannot make peace with Israel and that his answer to Israel's unprecedented offer was to resort to terrorist violence has become central to the argument that Israel is in a fight for its survival against those who deny its very right to exist. So much of what is said and done today derives from and is justified by that crude appraisal. First, Arafat and the rest of the Palestinian leaders must be supplanted before a meaningful peace process can resume, since they are the ones who rejected the offer. Second, the Palestinians' use of violence has nothing to do with ending the occupation since they walked away from the possibility of reaching that goal at the negotiating table.And, finally, Israel must crush the Palestiniansif an agreement is ever to be reached."

Although Israel and the U.S., and most especially President Bill Clinton and his Middle East advisers, are responsible for starting up this body of myths by stridently playing the blame game and loudly trumpeting Arafat's "sole responsibility" for Camp David's failure, the media--and the Times as the leading U.S. newspaper--bear an equal or nearly equal share of the responsibility for buying into this line without questioning, without investigating, without ever wondering if there might be something self--serving in the U.S. and Israeli versions of the story.

Deborah Sontag did a good job of research and in--depth analysis in publishing her story, but it should not have taken a year to get the real story. It was there to be ferreted out much earlier from the Palestinian press, the Israeli press, various Internet websites, and the numerous officials on all sides who were at Camp David, but no U.S. media organ was interested. It should have been obvious from day one that there was something not quite straight in the tales of Barak's great readiness to compromise versus Arafat's total stone--walling. No negotiation is ever that black and white. But the mindset and the body of assumptions from which the media and U.S. policymakers have always approached this issue blinded correspondents and commentators to what was actually going on.

Thomas Friedman's commentaries, perhaps more even than the Times editorial line, determine the impressions gained by Times readers of what's involved in the conflict, who's responsible for its continuation, and where it's headed. I won't go into a detailed analysis of Friedman's writings since Camp David, but suffice it to say that he has in repeated columns over two years obsessively heaped blame on Arafat and the Palestinians (taking the line that the intifada proves that Palestinians cannot make peace and want to destroy Israel) and seriously distorted what Israel offered at Camp David (repeating the fiction that Barak offered "95% of the West Bank and half of Jerusalem, with all the settlements gone," never mentioning that the resulting so--called "state" would have been broken up into several non- -contiguous parts).

Friedman likes to blame Arafat for "provoking the Israelis into brutalizing Palestinians" and for provoking the "ritual sacrifice" of Palestinian children: "The Palestinians seem to have no qualms about putting up their youths to be shot at." He adds that Israelis seem to have no qualms about shooting at Palestinians, but it's clear that in his book the basic fault lies with the Palestinians. This is the way Middle East policy is often made in Washington--through the commentary of leading opinion--molders like Friedman and Times editorialists who spout distortions like these all the time and whose critical position at the center of public discourse enables them both to influence public thinking and at the same time to reflect that thinking upward to policymakers.

Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Words fail; ordinary terms are inadequate to describe the horrors Israel daily perpetrates, and has perpetrated for years, against the Palestinians. The tragedy of Gaza has been described a hundred times over, as have the tragedies of 1948, of Qibya, of Sabra and Shatila, of Jenin -- 60 years of atrocity perpetrated in the name of Judaism. But the horror generally falls on deaf ears in most of Israel, in the U.S. political arena, in the mainstream U.S. media. Those who are horrified -- and there are many -- cannot penetrate the shield of impassivity that protects the political and media elite in Israel, even more so in the U.S., and increasingly now in Canada and Europe, from seeing, from caring.

But it needs to be said now, loudly: those who devise and carry out Israeli policies have made Israel into a monster, and it has come time for all of us -- all Israelis, all Jews who allow Israel to speak for them, all Americans who do nothing to end U.S. support for Israel and its murderous policies -- to recognize that we stain ourselves morally by continuing to sit by while Israel carries out its atrocities against the Palestinians.

A nation that mandates the primacy of one ethnicity or religion over all others will eventually become psychologically dysfunctional. Narcissistically obsessed with its own image, it must strive to maintain its racial superiority at all costs and will inevitably come to view any resistance to this imagined superiority as an existential threat. Indeed, any other people automatically becomes an existential threat simply by virtue of its own existence. As it seeks to protect itself against phantom threats, the racist state becomes increasingly paranoid, its society closed and insular, intellectually limited. Setbacks enrage it; humiliations madden it. The state lashes out in a crazed effort, lacking any sense of proportion, to reassure itself of its strength.

The pattern played out in Nazi Germany as it sought to maintain a mythical Aryan superiority. It is playing out now in Israel. “This society no longer recognizes any boundaries, geographical or moral,” wrote Israeli intellectual and anti-Zionist activist Michel Warschawski in his 2004 book Towards an Open Tomb: The Crisis of Israeli Society. Israel knows no limits and is lashing out as it finds that its attempt to beat the Palestinians into submission and swallow Palestine whole is being thwarted by a resilient, dignified Palestinian people who refuse to submit quietly and give up resisting Israel’s arrogance.

We in the United States have become inured to tragedy inflicted by Israel, and we easily fall for the spin that automatically, by some trick of the imagination, converts Israeli atrocities to examples of how Israel is victimized. But a military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a residential apartment building in the middle of the night and kills 14 sleeping civilians, as happened in Gaza four years ago, is not a military that operates by civilized rules.

A military establishment that drops a 500-pound bomb on a house in the middle of the night and kills a man and his wife and seven of their children, as happened in Gaza four days ago, is not the military of a moral country.

A society that can brush off as unimportant an army officer’s brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl on the claim that she threatened soldiers at a military post -- one of nearly 700 Palestinian children murdered by Israelis since the intifada began -- is not a society with a conscience.

A government that imprisons a 15-year-old girl -- one of several hundred children in Israeli detention -- for the crime of pushing and running away from a male soldier trying to do a body search as she entered a mosque is not a government with any moral bearings. (This story, not the kind that ever appears in the U.S. media, was reported in the London Sunday Times. The girl was shot three times as she ran away and was sentenced to 18 months in prison after she came out of a coma.)

Critics of Israel note increasingly that Israel is self-destructing, nearing a catastrophe of its own making. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy talks of a society in “moral collapse.”

Michel Warschawski writes of an “Israeli madness” and “insane brutality,” a “putrefaction” of civilized society, that have set Israel on a suicidal course. He foresees the end of the Zionist enterprise; Israel is a “gang of hoodlums,” he says, a state “that makes a mockery of legality and of civil morality. A state run in contempt of justice loses the strength to survive.”

As Warschawski notes bitterly, Israel no longer knows any moral boundaries -- if it ever did. Those who continue to support Israel, who make excuses for it as it descends into corruption, have lost their moral compass.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

Neither Israel nor the US will ever have peace until Israel is made to recognize the people it displaced in Palestine as equals in the land.

Noting that he had been raised with the deep conviction that the Jewish people would never have to relinquish any part of the "land of our forefathers," Ehud Olmert told Congress in his address to a joint session on May 24, "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." He did then concede that dreams alone cannot bring peace and will not preserve Israel as a "secure democratic Jewish state." But what stands out in this little-noted statement of Jewish attachment to the land is its affirmation of a supreme Jewish right to all of Palestine, never mind who else may live there. In the context of any hope for a just and equitable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, this is a deal-breaker par excellence.

In light of this official Israeli view that the Jewish people have "an eternal and historic right to this entire land," one is startled by the hypocrisy of the demand -- enunciated universally by Israel, the U.S., the EU, and most of the rest of the international community -- that the Palestinians must recognize Israel's "right to exist" before anyone will even speak to them, before they can be admitted to civilized company in the world. Does this demand that Palestinians recognize Israel's right to exist mean that they must recognize Israel's "right to the entire land" as defined by Olmert? And if that is the case, how could the Palestinians possibly be assured, even if Israel were magnanimously to grant them a "state" or a "Bantustan" in a part of that "entire land," that Israel would not at some future date take it back, since Jews have "an eternal and historic right" to it? Why should anyone believe that any Israeli concession of land would be permanent?

Olmert's assertion of this all-encompassing Jewish "right" is certainly not a new feature of Israeli and Zionist dogma. The notion has underlain Zionism from the beginning, hidden sometimes behind a leftist veneer of accommodation to the reality of the Palestinian presence in this sacred Jewish land, but never very far beneath the surface. The Zionist belief in Jewish supremacy has never truly been hidden. I ran into this in crude form a few years ago. Shortly after the Palestinian intifada began in 2000, an acquaintance -- no friend, but an irritating bigot who always argues Israel's case openly on the basis that Jewish interests are superior to Palestinian interests -- wrote me an email in which he concluded that, because there is "simply not enough room in Palestine for both Jews and Palestinians," the Palestinians should "go back to Jordan, where they came from" and leave Palestine to the Jews, who own it and so badly need a homeland. (The erroneous notion that Palestinians came from Jordan is a conscience-clearing artifact of the Zionist imagination, designed to "prove" that Palestinians did not originally come from Palestine, are simply interlopers in a Jewish land, and therefore will not be hurt or inconvenienced by "going back" where they came from.) I told him he was factually wrong and completely immoral -- which I'm sure did nothing to burden his conscience, but which did serve, blessedly, to end our correspondence.

The particular argument put forth by this particular man expresses more crude racism than most supporters of Israel would admit to feeling, but in fact his position reflects the official views of the Israeli government and of the U.S. government that supports it. Ultimately, his position, which is of course identical to Olmert's, captures the essence of Zionism and defines what has been the basis of U.S. policy toward Israel and Zionism since well before the state of Israel was established 58 years ago: that is, that Israel's interests as a Jewish state and Israel's "rights" always take precedence, no matter what the interests and rights of the Palestinians, and that Palestinian needs can be accommodated only when these do not interfere with Israel's or when Palestinians give in to Israel's demands. At bottom, this is a policy based on the assumption that there is "simply no room in Palestine for both Jews and Palestinians" and that the only possible solution over the long term is for the Palestinians to disappear in some fashion. As the PLO ambassador to the U.S., Afif Safieh, is fond of saying, Israel wants the Palestinians' geography but not their demography -- the land but not the people.

This Palestinian disappearance can be accomplished in one of several ways, by Israeli calculation. First, they could be induced to leave Palestine altogether; Israel has been working since its creation on some version of this option -- outright expulsion, as occurred in 1948, or inducing a "voluntary" exit by making life insupportable, as is occurring today -- as the best way to relieve itself of the Palestinian "problem." Or, as a second option, the Palestinians could be forced into submission; this has been the fate of the 20 percent of Israel's population that is Palestinian, and it was the fate of West Bank-Gaza Palestinians during the first 20 years of the occupation when they were quiescent under Israeli control. This option is no longer feasible from Israel's standpoint, however, since there are now or soon will be more Palestinians than Jews in Palestine, which makes the job of forcing submission too unseemly for a state claiming to be democratic. Or, as a third option, the Palestinians could be lulled into a political submissiveness that leads them, out of desperation, to accede to every Israeli condition; this is what Yasir Arafat did by signing on to the Oslo agreement and recognizing Israel's "right" to exist, thus giving away all the Palestinians' negotiating cards without securing in return any Israeli agreement to do more than conduct negotiations.

Since this third option collapsed at Camp David in 2000, Israel has reverted to working on the first option. The Oslo process failed essentially because Arafat woke up at the last moment, after Israel had tried to force feed a totally unsatisfactory final agreement, and refused to be lulled into complete capitulation. Since Arafat's awakening, the Israeli agenda, supported wholeheartedly by the U.S. and to a lesser extent by the rest of the West, has been to pursue option one, inducing the Palestinians in one way or another to leave Palestine altogether -- in other words, attempting to force the Palestinians' abject surrender on terms that assume total Jewish supremacy.

The U.S. and the West are working hard to help Israel enforce this surrender. While the Palestinians starve under the international community's aid cutoff, media leaders like the Washington Post set the tone by blaming the Palestinian victims. "Palestinian leaders," the Post intoned in a recent editorial describing the aid crisis, "have a long tradition of exploiting the suffering of their own people for political ends; Hamas has been content to foster a humanitarian crisis in the West Bank and Gaza Strip." If the logic of this charge that the Palestinians caused their own catastrophe because they failed to vote the way Israel and the Post wanted and because Hamas refuses to give in to Israel's dictates is not immediately clear, it helps to understand that the basic assumption of Israel and its supporters in the U.S. is that Israel's demands and rights always take precedence and the Palestinians are acceptable only if they always recognize this.

Shortly after the Hamas election in January, Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy -- the think tank affiliated with the Israeli lobby organization AIPAC -- laid out the essential demand on the Palestinians. Appearing on the Lehrer News Hour, Satloff declared that the Palestinian people must pay a price for their choice and that it should be a "strategic objective" of the world community to bring down the Hamas government. Twenty years ago, Satloff observed with astounding arrogance, the PLO acceded to what he called the "minimum entry requirements" by recognizing Israel -- entry, that is, to Israel's and the lobby's world, where Jews have the superior rights in Palestine and hold the whip hand and where Palestinians count only when they bow to this Jewish supremacy.

This do-as-I-say-or-else approach now characterizes all Israeli and Western attitudes toward the Palestinians and informs the demand that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist. In a press conference with Olmert on May 23, Bush chided the Palestinians, declaring that no country (meaning Israel) "could be expected to make peace with those who deny its right to exist." Yet the Palestinians themselves are expected to make peace with those who deny their right to exist as a nation. Bush sees no contradiction here because he cannot see past the assumed supremacy of Israel's rights in Palestine.

The Hamas election, and Israeli and Western reaction to it, have in fact exposed the basic problem with all peace negotiations as framed by Israel and the U.S. for the last several decades: Palestinians have been allowed to participate -- have been given any role at all in reconciliation efforts -- only when they have agreed to go along with Israel's demands. But this principal demand on the Palestinians is a fundamental obstacle to any real resolution of the conflict. The insistence that the Palestinians "recognize Israel's right to exist" does not mean, to Israel and the U.S., simply that the Palestinians must pledge not to throw Jews into the sea. Refraining from this drastic step is fairly easy even for the most militant of Islamists. It means instead recognizing Israel's moral legitimacy. For a Palestinian this means recognizing -- indeed, embracing as a moral imperative -- Israel's right to have expelled the Palestinians and taken their homes and their land.

This demand ignores the reality that Israel was established as a specifically Jewish entity in a land populated overwhelmingly by non-Jews and that maintenance of its Jewish majority required the expulsion of much of that non-Jewish population. To paraphrase George Bush, no people can be expected to make peace with, or to recognize the moral legitimacy of, those who have attempted and are still attempting to destroy them. The demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel's moral legitimacy presupposes a priority of Israeli over Palestinian interests in peace negotiations that totally undermines any negotiating process intended to deliver justice to both sides. This Palestinian recognition cannot be the central prerequisite of any peace process -- to be compulsorily accepted before the process even begins -- when Israel refuses to recognize a similar moral right for the Palestinians.

The PLO did recognize Israel's right to exist in 1988 as a condition of its participation in peace negotiations, but any continuing Palestinian obligation to adhere to this recognition has been obviated by Israel's refusal to offer a reciprocal recognition of the Palestinians' existence. The grave injustice inflicted on the Palestinians in 1948 and in the decades since has never been redressed, and this must be the centerpiece of any negotiating process. For the very reason that there is no established Palestinian state, the core issue in any negotiation should be, not recognition of Israel's legitimacy, but recognition of the Palestinians' right to exist as an independent, viable, sovereign state. Israel exists and is in no danger of ceasing to exist; continued concern about its existence and continued demands that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state, without a demand for reciprocation from Israel, constitute an affirmation that Jewish rights are superior. This is a fundamentally unjust and immoral presumption in international relations, as in all human relations. Neither Israel nor the United States will ever have peace until Israel is made to recognize the people it displaced in Palestine as equals in the land.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession. She can be reached at kathy.bill@christison-santafe.com.

"When we demonstrate non-violently the world at least is with us," a young Palestinian resident of the West Bank village of Bilin recently told British journalist Graham Usher. "When we resist violently, it isn't."

Usher, a veteran correspondent in Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories, was describing a non-violent protest against Israel's separation wall that has been running continually since February in this tiny village situated three miles from Israel's 1967 border. Palestinian residents of Bilin, Palestinian activists from neighboring villages, Israeli peace activists, and internationals from the International Solidarity Movement have maintained an almost permanent presence in Bilin to protest the confiscation of the majority of the village's farmland for construction of the wall. The protesters have committed themselves to non-violent tactics, even prohibiting stone-throwing. In response, Israeli security forces have fired live ammunition and rubber-coated bullets into the crowds, beaten and teargassed protesters and, in at least one instance caught on film, sent in provocateurs posing as Palestinians who threw stones at police, provoking an assault on the protesters and the arrest of several Palestinians. More than 100 Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals have been injured by Israeli police and military. And construction of the wall moves on inexorably.

This Palestinian non-violence is an edifying spectacle, worthy of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But one wonders how the young Palestinian's hope that the world will stand in solidarity with the Palestinians if they are non-violent can ever be realized. For how will the world ever know? How will Israelis and Americans, let alone the world, ever know that Palestinians and their few friends in the Israeli and the international peace movements are risking their lives for the principle that Israel's violence and aggression against Palestinians should be met with non-violent, non-aggressive resistance?

Who in the world cares? Apparently no one. A search of the Washington Post and New York Times archives for the name Bilin (including in its other transliteration, Bil'in) turns up nothing in the Post and only two items in the Times, both merely brief afterthoughts at the end of long wrap-up articles, both limited to two sentences about Israeli forces "clashing" with protesters, both dating five months into the months-long protest, and neither mentioning the non-violent nature of the protest or its duration. If CNN and the television networks have mentioned Bilin at all, the coverage has been minimal.

An even smaller village named Khirbet Tana in the north central West Bank fell into the same kind of oblivion, only worse, when in early July the Israeli military totally leveled it, and no one but Ha'aretz correspondent Amira Hass noticed. Almost every one of the village's structures, housing its 450 people and its large flock of sheep, was destroyed; only the 200-year-old mosque and two other structures still stand. But this small-scale ethnocide was of no interest to the self-described newspaper of record; the New York Times took no notice. Nor did any other major U.S. paper, perhaps because to do so would have required recognizing, as Hass did, that, besides destroying "a venerable social fabric," Israel's destructive action was "yet another method by which Israel attacks the broad margins of the Palestinian West Bank and dispossesses their occupants, in preparation for their annexation to Israel."

Palestine Dying

Palestine is fighting for its life in near-total political darkness. A particular horror always surrounds murders that occur in darkness, with no one to aid the victim or even tell the tale of his death throes. Atrocities like the 1964 murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi arouse such horror, as do the murders of "desaparecidos" in 1970s Argentina, and the middle-of-the-night knocks on the door in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia that meant disappearance and certain death. Such horror is being committed against Palestine today. Israel is terrorizing an entire people, clearly intending to disperse this people as a unified national entity and prevent them from ever becoming a viable nation state. But virtually no one lights the pervasive darkness in the media and in public discourse.

Palestine is being slowly done to death by Israel -- and death is not too strong a word. It is death through ethnic cleansing. It is death through theft of life-giving land; through murder and intimidation of its people; through the removal even of Arabic road signs pointing to Palestinian towns, as if they no longer exist; through destruction of Palestine's agricultural base, its economic potential, its transportation system, its water, its infrastructure, its people's very homes. And hardly anyone in the world knows.

The common elements in the stories of Mississippi, Argentina, and the others are that the victims were terrorized in secret, that they were helpless, and that they were innocent of anything except being what they were: blacks or Jews, or their defenders, or peaceable seekers after justice. No one will ever know their real terror. But because these were innocents, our sense of outrage is limitless. And because they were helpless -- utterly without any means of rescue from a lynch mob or a dictatorial security apparatus -- our horror is palpable. But where is the horror on behalf of Palestine?

Everyone has something better to do. Most of America has gone shopping, or is on a five-week vacation while war and oppression rage, or has been out to lunch all along. Those who may know something don't care about the Palestinians, don't care to fight for simple justice, and don't fathom the long-range strategic import for the U.S. of continued support for Israel's oppressive regime. They don't get how deeply the Arab people feel about the U.S.-supported Israeli terrorism daily being imposed on the Palestinians, or that this is where genuine support for the Palestinians lies, and where hatred of the U.S. festers and terrorism is bred.

Those supposedly in the progressive camp fall broadly into two categories on this issue. In one category are those who actively buttress Israel: who oppose the occupation but believe that Israel-as-Jewish-state is a marvelous enterprise and who therefore cannot bring themselves to criticize Israel itself or to acknowledge Israeli atrocities. In the second category are progressives who may in their most honest private moments recognize the horrors of what is occurring in Palestine but who are so intimidated by fear of being labeled anti-Semitic that they turn away, or who believe that other things, like opposing George Bush or opposing the Iraq war, are more important.

The result is a pervasive silence about Palestine and its fate. Wherever on the spectrum these Zionist and non-Zionist progressives, or the fervent supporters of Israel on the right, or the Christian Zionist supporters, may fall, the bottom line is that virtually no one is paying attention to the death of Palestine. And the problem almost daily grows more serious. As time passes and other large events intervene, Palestine recedes ever farther into the background and is ultimately forgotten altogether. It has become an old story, after all, and it is such a difficult issue, so easy to push aside.

Everyone takes the easy way. Antiwar activists focus on the war where Americans are dying, not where Palestinians are dying and believe that for tactical reasons they should avoid introducing disunity by talking about this issue. Far too many moviemakers who turn out anti-Bush films ignore the Palestinian issue and Israel's role in U.S. politics altogether. Tikkun and its leader Rabbi Michael Lerner, who for years put themselves forward as the progressive religious voice opposing the occupation, have apparently concluded that they were getting nowhere with their effort to strike a balance between Israel and the Palestinians -- always a futile effort in this most unbalanced of conflicts -- and have now turned away almost completely, concentrating instead on a campaign to inject spirituality into U.S. politics.

Mainstream Christian churches, although taking some commendable steps toward condemnation of Israel's separation wall and divestment from companies that support the occupation, are hesitant and extremely slow. The issue is too contentious for most denominations; the brave but tentative steps the Presbyterian church has taken, which it has labored over with excruciating care for a year now without making any definitive move, have caused the church incredible heartburn, from congregants within and particularly from organized Jewish groups, and other Christian sects have feared to go even this far. Theologians and churches that led the way in the civil rights struggle in the U.S. and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and can construct brilliant theses against injustice elsewhere have little, and in some cases nothing, to say about Israel's oppression of the Palestinians. Christian-Jewish dialogue groups for the most part ignore the Palestinian-Israeli issue altogether, refusing even to listen to the facts of the situation on the ground. The Catholic church, under both the present and the recently deceased pope, is so concerned with strengthening its now friendly ties to Judaism and atoning for its relationship to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s that it too is loath to issue direct criticism of Israeli and U.S. policies toward the Palestinians.

Europe is hardly better. Tony Blair, never willing to look much beyond U.S. limits in setting British policy on the conflict, has apparently decided that his best political move is to capitalize on the London train bombings by emphasizing a new-found Islamophobia. He has become a blustering George Bush in miniature, utterly blinded to the notion that western depredations in the Arab and Muslim world inevitably arouse Arab and Muslim hatred against the West. As for France, a critic of Israel since the de Gaulle era and a stalwart of antiwar, anti-U.S. sentiment during the run-up to the Iraq war, it too has shrugged its shoulders over Palestine and now warmly welcomes Ariel Sharon to Paris. Again, Amira Hass has been the only one to notice the significance of this gesture. After listing the multiple instances of a constant Israeli strangulation of the Palestinians while Jacques Chirac embraces Sharon, Hass wonders, "Why should Chirac and other European leaders take an interest in the millions of trifles of the calculated dispossession, which dictate the lives of the Palestinian people? Trifles that add up to a clear picture: Sharon is determinedly striving to realize the master plan -- integrating most of the West Bank into the sovereign State of Israel." She concludes that Europe bears an historic and a moral responsibility for both Israelis and Palestinians and that this "should be enough to obligate Europe not to assist Israel in implementing its master plan."

But of course it will not be enough.

Reframe This

The notion of reframing public discourse has gained currency recently with the popularity of linguist and reframing guru George Lakoff's small bible on the subject, Don't Think of an Elephant! Written to help out-of-power Democrats regain the field from conservative Republicans who have spent three or four decades and millions of dollars on think tanks and media consultants to fashion a winning message with mass appeal, Lakoff's book urges progressives to use the conservatives' strategy but not their language to do the same for the left. His thesis is that the Republican message, or frame, has filled public discourse, becoming a never-questioned set of assumptions that, like an elephant, overwhelms us and takes over our thinking, to the exclusion of any other line of thought. The only way to counter this is not to confront the elephant directly but to develop and propagate a new framework for thinking that will gradually seep into the public mindset.

Such a reframing of the American mindset on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is most likely the only possible way in which the death of Palestine can be stopped. Some few activists on behalf of Palestinian independence have talked cogently of a campaign to reframe the conflict, of turning around the demise of Palestine by putting forth a new way of thinking about the Palestinians. Like the Republican elephant and the conservative frame of reference, the sacrosanct notion of Israel as a Jewish state and the fact that every reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict revolves around guaranteeing Israel's continued existence, overwhelms and fills public thinking in the United States so that all other possibilities are secondary and are judged in relation to how they might somewhere, somehow affect Israel's security and survival. The point of a reframing would be to open public thinking to other possibilities, such as recognition that Palestinian rights in Palestine -- the right to genuine independence, to the sanctity of homes and personal property, to a life free of human rights abuses by an occupying power -- are as important in a just world as Israel's right to exist.

But there is good reason to believe that any such reframing is a hopeless task, in no small measure because the Israel-as-Jewish-state frame, built up over decades and based in great part on compassion for Jews as a persecuted people, has such a firm lock on the media that it is utterly impossible to break into this essential conduit to change the message. Ultimately, the media are the only vehicle through which the thinking of antiwar activists, church groups, Zionist and non-Zionist progressives, politicians, and the general public might be changed. But the media will not cooperate. One small example: Amira Hass, almost the lone media voice telling the true story, reports that when she asked a European journalist why this other journalist did not write about the separation wall being built around -- that is all the way around, totally enclosing -- the East Jerusalem suburb of Anata, the answer was that the journalist's editors were interested only in the Gaza disengagement because it was action-packed and exciting; the editors were tired of the "repetitious details" of the damage the wall is doing.

Oppression is such a drag.

Something exciting did happen several weeks ago to a Palestinian, but this too went virtually unnoticed in the media. A group of teenage Israeli settlers from the West Bank, come to Gaza to protest the impending disengagement, nearly beat to death a Palestinian teenager as he lay unconscious on the ground, in full view of a group of Israeli soldiers who did nothing and an international press contingent. Newspapers throughout Israel had the grace to be horrified and termed the event a lynching, but the U.S. media ignored it. One has to wonder if the old puzzle about whether a tree falling in the forest makes any noise if there's no one there to hear it can be applied to the Palestinians: do Palestinians suffering oppression under Israeli occupation really suffer if the media fail to report it?

A comparison of media coverage of the evacuation of settlers from Gaza with coverage of the massive demolition of Palestinian homes that has been going on for years in Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem turns up the same pervasive silence about Palestine. During the disengagement, 900 journalists from around the world gave us day after day of the made-for-TV anguish of 7,000-8,000 settlers and the opportunistic fanatics who came from outside Gaza to support them, but no such theatrics have ever surrounded Palestinian anguish over the literally thousands of homes destroyed and the tens of thousands of innocents left homeless because Israel deemed their land to be in a "security zone" or too close to an Israeli settlement or in the way of the separation wall or simply lacking an impossible-to-obtain building permit. These are the mere repetitious details of oppression, not as emotional or evocative as Jewish pain.

Although the media in the U.S. and in Europe have gone silent about Palestine's death throes, they seldom miss an opportunity to lecture the Palestinians: Israel is taking a step of surpassing courage in Gaza ("the most significant and painful steps toward peace ever made in the Middle East" trumpeted one newspaper with spectacular hyperbole), and the future now depends entirely on whether the Palestinians behave. "Behaving" means not disturbing the Israelis, not disturbing the media's sense that peace is just around the corner if only the Palestinians cooperate. "Behaving" means not mentioning, certainly not complaining about, Israel's massive consolidation and expansion across the West Bank while the world watches Gaza.

"Behaving" means, essentially, surrendering. The new, post-Gaza media spin goes something like the dictum recently laid out on a Fox News Sunday talk show: Israel is out of Gaza, the separation wall has put an end to terrorism, the Palestinians have no remaining leverage and must therefore give up all their demands and "reach an agreement" -- meaning, surrender to whatever Israel dictates. Although this is a rightwing prescription, there is little enough difference between the right and the left on this issue that one is probably safe in assuming that something like this formula will become the new truth for the entire spectrum of the mainstream media in the U.S.

Those media commentators and editorialists most inclined to wag fingers at the Palestinians are the ones most likely to ignore what is going on in the West Bank. Washington Post columnist Jackson Diehl, one of many, devoted an entire column just before the disengagement to his disappointment that the Palestinians had somehow not risen to the occasion. "Palestinian leaders," he pronounced with breathtaking myopia, "appear more focused on using U.S. mediators to extract concessions from Israel than they are on formalizing agreements with the Jewish state" -- all the while managing never to mention the West Bank or the multiple steps Israel is taking there to smother Palestine. The latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly carries a 20,000-word article on "How Yasir Arafat Destroyed Palestine" without ever mentioning settlement expansion in the West Bank, the extent of the separation wall, the destruction of Palestinian property, or any of the other ways in which Israel has destroyed Palestine. So goes the phenomenon of Palestine's disappearance from everyone's field of vision.

These examples are merely the tip of an iceberg called "the Jewish state": a framework for thinking and public discourse that sees everything Israeli as good, everything Palestinian as bad or, at best, as not worthy of attention, that sees all developments in the region solely in terms of how they affect the existence and survival of Israel as a Jewish state. Thus, Israel is always innocent, always the victim, always needing to defend its existence, whereas any Palestinian action, even non-violent resistance to Israeli aggression, is viewed in terms of how it might affect Israel's future. Almost inevitably, those who think in these terms will view anything the Palestinians do as threatening to that future.

The media are the principal purveyors of this "Jewish state" frame of reference and therefore the principal purveyors of the frame that regards the Palestinians and their plight as just so many repetitious details. The details of Palestinian oppression are always judged in relation to the media's sense of the importance of Jewish suffering. The media go silent on the daily Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians, including children -- in sniper shootings, in missile attacks, under bulldozed homes, "collaterally" in targeted killings of militant leaders. The killings take place in an atmosphere of what Human Rights Watch recently characterized as total impunity. Media silence and the western indifference that this silence spawns help create this atmosphere, in which Israeli soldiers have license to kill almost whenever they please.

Studies of U.S. and British media coverage show repeatedly that Palestinian civilian deaths receive little media attention while Israeli deaths get disproportionate coverage -- leaving the impression that Israelis are dying at rates far higher than Palestinians, when in fact throughout the intifada Palestinian deaths have consistently outnumbered Israeli deaths by three or four times. Few media consumers know the true story of these disproportionate Palestinian deaths. Journalist Alison Weir, director of IfAmericansKnew.org, has done extensive content studies of reporting in major mainstream newspapers and television networks and has found consistently that the media underreport Palestinian deaths by a factor of anywhere from three to 14. During the first year of the intifada (October 2000 through September 2001), for instance, Weir found that, despite the much higher Palestinian death rate, the media covered all Israeli deaths at rates three to four times greater than Palestinian deaths, and reported the deaths of Israeli children at rates up to 14 times greater than Palestinian child deaths. The disparity was just as pronounced in a similar study done by Weir of deaths and how they were reported during 2004, the third year of the intifada.

An in-depth 2004 study of British television treatment of the conflict, including both content and the impact of coverage on audience understanding and attitudes, showed similar distortions. In an article describing the book-length study (Bad News from Israel, by Glasgow University researchers Greg Philo and Mike Berry), a former BBC Middle East correspondent wrote that British radio and television coverage of the intifada was "in the main, dishonest -- in concept, approach and execution." Tim Llewellyn, who reported from the Middle East for ten years for BBC, endorsed the book's conclusions by observing that in his experience "the broadcasters' language favours the occupying soldiers over the occupied Arabs, depicting the latter, essentially, as alien tribes threatening the survival of Israel, rather than vice versa."

The Glasgow researchers studied British television broadcasts for two years and found that Israelis were quoted or appeared in interviews more than twice as often as Palestinians; that news broadcasts provided no historical information on the origins of the conflict or on the Palestinians' dispossession in 1948; that the occupation -- the word itself as well as the concept of Israeli control over Palestinian territories -- was never mentioned in broadcasts; that Israeli settlements and other features of the occupation such as land confiscations were never described as having a role in imposing the occupation. The researchers' survey of television-watching audiences in Scotland and England found widespread ignorance and confusion about the conflict. Gaps in audience knowledge closely paralleled the gaps in news coverage. Most viewers, not knowing the history and only rarely if ever hearing the word "occupation" used, did not know who was occupying whom. Only an astounding ten percent understood that Israel is occupying Palestinian territory and not the reverse, and most thought the Palestinians always initiated the fighting. As Llewellyn concluded from the study's findings, the result of television's "distorted lens" is that "the Israelis have identity, existence, a story the viewer understands. The Palestinians are anonymous, alien, their personalities and their views buried under their burden of plight and the vernacular of 'terror.'" But How?

One hears these revelations with despair. How is a frame of reference so longstanding, so set in concrete, so much a part of the mindset of the public and the media and politicians ever to be changed? George Lakoff's formula for reframing the Democrats' position in the face of the right's massive investment of money and time toward putting their point of view forward is a very long-term one, which Lakoff measures in terms of years. Science tells us, he says, that the fundamental structure of thought is often deeply lodged in the brain and cannot be changed simply by hearing facts. Before facts will make sense, "they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us."

Some of this helps explain why media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict ignores the Palestinian point of view; it simply does not fit with the media's ingrained thinking -- or with the expensively financed and eminently successful lobbying and propaganda campaign of organized supporters of Israel. All this in turn is a major reason why the public does not know the Palestinian narrative; it is not part of the accepted, politically correct public mindset. Israel as oppressor does not fit the image of innocence and morality drummed into all of us, Israel as massively strong does not fit the picture of victimized Jews with which we have all grown up, Israel's soldiers as killers do not fit the concept of "purity of arms" that we have all been told is instilled in the Israeli military, Israel as perpetrator of ethnocide against a powerless people does not fit the victim-of-genocide image that is embedded in the brains of most Americans.

How to change the images before it is too late? Discussing the difficulty progressives have in reframing the conservatives' message, Lakoff points out that conservatives can appeal to an established frame and so their message need only be short and punchy to be instantly understandable, whereas progressives, with no such accepted framework to rely on, must go into long, more elaborate, and less appealing explanations. A conservative on television, he notes, can use two words, "tax relief," and be instantly understood, but the progressive must go into a paragraph-long discussion of his own view on taxes. This aptly describes the Palestinians' difficulty: Israel and its supporters can say "Jewish state" or "threat to Israel's existence" or "anti-Semitic" and be understood and empathized with instantly. The established framework is that the conflict is all about Israel's survival; we have all been led to believe for half a century that the Arabs want to destroy Israel as a state and kill Jews, and so the "frame" accepts that Israel -- with massive U.S. aid, of course -- must defend itself at all costs, that Israel's security is all-important. No further explanation is needed. In reality, the issue is not Israel's survival, which is not in danger, but the Palestinians' survival and the threat to the Palestinians' existence as a people and a nation. But in order to put this point across, Palestinians must, as a Palestinian woman once put it, "go into books and books of history just to explain why falafel is not an Israeli dish." The day when a Palestinian can refer to the "threat to Palestinian existence" and be immediately understood and empathized with is far off. The process of changing a mental framework where books of history are required to explain the Palestinian story will necessarily be an extremely long and perhaps impossible one. Lakoff, who is trying to formulate an agenda for the Democratic Party for 2008, claims he believes that for progressives it won't take as long to change minds and establish a progressive political frame as the thirty years the Republicans took to establish their framework, but even he acknowledges that the process of establishing a new framework is a long one requiring the constant repetition of new facts.

No one has even started repeating the facts on behalf of the Palestinians yet. Lakoff's time frame for Democrats -- set somewhere vaguely between 2008 and thirty years hence -- is hardly encouraging for the Palestinians. In fact, one must assume that in the absence of some dramatic and currently unforeseeable change in the situation, the tight boundaries that constrict thinking and limit public discourse on the Palestinian issue will only grow stronger. The growth of the framework that surrounds the conflict -- a notably Israel-centered frame from the beginning and one that has always more or less ignored the Palestinian side of the equation -- has been a cumulative process over decades, going back not just half a century to Israel's creation but a century or more to the rise of Zionism, and such a structure of assumptions and misperceptions will not likely be easily undone. Indeed, the likelihood is very remote that anyone among the Palestinians themselves or the minuscule number of their supporters will ever be able to rearrange the thinking of those in Israel, among the American public, in the U.S. media, in Congress, and in the policymaking councils of the current or any future U.S. administration where the life and death of Palestine are ultimately determined.

Palestinians themselves will not disappear, despite Israel's best efforts, and they will not give up their struggle -- not now, after successfully fighting for sixty years against a concerted multinational attempt to make them disappear. But Israel's occupation of Palestinian land, this Israeli violence, is destroying any possibility of Palestinian nationhood, while the media ignore the occupation, politicians ignore Israeli violence, and western publics know and care little about any of it. Palestine and Palestinians are terrorized and murdered in darkness. No one helps them, few note their dying. They are helpless, facing the power of a massive Israeli military machine and a propaganda machine abetted by the major western media.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years.

Imagine my chagrin. While vacationing in beautiful Vancouver, I had my sun-and-mountain reverie interrupted on Tuesday by a New York Times article seeming to give the final word on Ariel Sharon's plans -- blessed, of course, by George Bush -- for the disposition of Israel's border with the West Bank and the Israeli settlements inside that territory. The article, by veteran diplomatic correspondent Steven Erlanger, discussed the "small furor" supposedly set off inside the Bush administration by Israel's announced determination to build 3,500 new housing units in Maale Adumim, the largest of several Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and the fact that this new move will unilaterally expand Israel's borders into the Palestinian territory. But Erlanger gives us the impression that this is not really the disastrous development it might seem. He quotes David Makovsky, of the pro-Israeli think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as saying that after all things are not so bad because Sharon, the Israeli most associated with wanting 100 percent of the West Bank, has now scaled down his sights to only 8 percent. This 8 percent is the proportion of the West Bank to be incorporated on the Israeli side of the separation wall when its new route, approved by the Israeli cabinet in February, is completed. This was bad enough for my vacation mood, but then come to find out a columnist for Canada's national newspaper the Globe and Mail, Marcus Gee, picked up the story the next day and, for all of Canada to see, played it as indicating a great breakthrough:

"After decades of blood and tears, a solution to the conflict over the Holy Land is emerging . . . . It is not an entirely just solution. But it is a solution, and it could give both sides what they need most: an independent homeland for the Palestinians and secure borders for Israel. The solution is the work of one man: Ariel Sharon."

Thus are widespread misperceptions and gross distortions of reality born among a broad segment of the media-savvy public.

Steven Erlanger might be excused for swallowing the unlikely story that the Bush administration is really in anything like "small furor" over Israel's settlement expansion plans, but it is dismaying to see a correspondent of Erlanger's caliber allowing himself to be misled by an apologist for the Israeli settlement enterprise like David Makovsky.

Over the last several years, Makovsky has made a career of defending Israel's settlements and its wall in a way that tries to minimize the impact on the Palestinians of these massive Israeli intrusions into Palestinian territory. He now seems unfortunately to have persuaded Erlanger that the barrier (which is indeed a 26-foot-high concrete wall throughout Jerusalem and environs, as well as in many sections elsewhere along its route) is of relatively minor significance to the Palestinians.

Makovsky used to defend the old route of the wall as taking "only" 15 percent of West Bank territory; now he can triumphantly say that the new route is "even better" because it puts only half that amount on the Israeli side. But his math is screwy, his logic badly distorted, and Erlanger has fallen for it. Makovsky doesn't care; Erlanger should know better.

The wall, Erlanger claims, relying on Makovsky's "research," puts a mere 8 percent of West Bank land and fewer than 10,000 Palestinians on the Israeli side, leaving 99.5 percent of Palestinians living in 92 percent of the West Bank. Yet this is what Erlanger and Makovsky leave out of the equation:

1. the approximately 195,000 Palestinians living in Jerusalem (nearly 10 percent of the West Bank's total population) will remain on the Israeli side of the wall, separated from the West Bank by a concrete wall, multiple checkpoints, and a permit system going into effect in July that will prevent nearly all Jerusalemites from entering the West Bank and West Bankers from entering Jerusalem (Erlanger does note as an afterthought that his numbers do not include the Palestinians in Jerusalem -- an odd omission unless one assumes that actually counting this huge number of people whose lives are being totally disrupted by the wall is simply too inconvenient for his idyllic picture);
2. the wall to be built around Maale Adumim and the fact that the entire area of Jerusalem and its environs will end up on Israel's side of the wall mean that the West Bank will be divided into two totally non-contiguous areas, attached only by a promised highway that will permit Palestinians to skirt Jerusalem to the east; this is Ariel Sharon's idea of contiguity, which he calls "transportation contiguity";
3. several Palestinian suburbs of East Jerusalem to the north and the south have been or will soon be surrounded by the wall on all sides, rendering them small concentration camps to which entry and egress will be allowed only to permit-holders and only through a gate manned by Israelis; the thousands of Palestinians in these areas whose livelihoods lie in Jerusalem will be left high and dry;
4. the entire Jordan Valley, encompassing nearly one-quarter of the West Bank, will most assuredly never be relinquished by Ariel Sharon or any Israeli government on the right (even most Labor governments have envisioned retaining this strategic, settlement-filled territory in perpetuity, and Ehud Barak's best offer at Camp David in 2000 involved Israel holding it under a long-term lease), meaning that Makovsky's "92-percent solution" is actually only at best a "68-percent solution" that would leave the so-called Palestinian "state" in three pieces counting Gaza, each completely surrounded by and under the domination of Israel, and with no capital; each of the two West Bank land segments, moreover, would be made into Swiss cheese by the intrusion of fingers of the wall built to accommodate Israeli settlements;
5. tens of thousands of Palestinians live in towns and villages along the route of the wall that have been bisected by it, leaving rich farmland, olive and fruit orchards, and fresh water wells on Israel's side, unreachable by their Palestinian owners except via a limited number of gates in the wall that are manned irregularly by Israeli security personnel;
6. 53 Palestinian communities, according to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, will be surrounded on three sides by the wall -- twice the number so enclosed under the old route;
7. the hundreds of miles of wall and fence have necessitated the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes, the bulldozing of hundreds of thousands of acres of private agricultural land, and the razing of thousands of olive and fruit trees; Israel has called this wall temporary, but the demolished homes and the destroyed olive groves can never be restored.

The pity about Erlanger's heavy reliance on Makovsky to interpret the situation on the ground for him is that he is right there himself, able to observe first hand what the wall is doing to the Palestinians or, if he somehow cannot get out on the street, able at least to look at any map, including ones issued by the Israeli government itself, to see with his own eyes that what Israel is creating is not some benign situation in which the Palestinians get almost all (well, 92 percent) of the West Bank, but a truly horrific, Kafkaesque nightmare in which no Palestinian will be free.

And it must not be forgotten that, far from leaving the Palestinians alone to make a life for themselves in a few Bantustans comprising 50 or 60 or maybe even 90 percent of the West Bank, Sharon's actual long-term intent is to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that those left in the small remnants of their territory will simply gradually filter out. This process may take a while, but Sharon is pragmatic and therefore patient -- he and his countrymen have already been waiting 2,000 years to take this land -- and it is already beginning to happen in any case. The wall has already turned some of the West Bank cities that it most affects into virtual ghost towns as residents move into the interior where some kind of livelihood might be possible. Sharon and his right wing can wait before he needs to squeeze them further.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years.