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.”

How does the reader feel if he goes back to his homeland after many years of absence, and as he stands before the family house, he finds that another family lives in it? This experience is shared by a minority out of a million Palestinians or so who lost their homes during the tragedy, came back in the 1990s after the conclusion of the Oslo Agreements, and cried as they carried foreign passports while standing in front of their stolen homes.

Today, I present to the readers the experience lived by a friend of mine named Adel Dajjani and his daughter Loubna. My colleague Salim Nassar drew my attention to a report published on them and on the stolen family home in The Chicago Tribune newspaper, so I called Adel in Amman to learn the details.

The report writer Joel Greenberg was fair. He saw a young woman videotaping the neighbors' house in west Jerusalem and estimated that there was a story that is worth being told. He knows that the house belonged to an Arab family that left it behind when the Palestinians left Palestine or were displaced in the 1948 disaster.

Greenberg says the young woman was Loubna Dajjani and was accompanied by her father Adel and other relatives who came to see the family home they had left sixty years earlier. Such is the case of other similar houses belonging to members of the big, respectable, and famous family in Jerusalem.

The American journalist noted that the Hagana men blasted the Samiramis Hotel in the vicinity, after which the Deir Yasseen and other massacres took place, resulting in the emigration of many Palestinians escaping death. Adel said to Greenberg, 'We thought that they would come and blast everything …' The family went to Egypt and then to Jordan and Lebanon. At the same time, it was commonly thought that the matter was temporary because Arab armies would defeat the Jews in months and the Palestinians would go back to their homes.

Greenberg took the Palestinian visitors to his home which lies behind the Dajjanis' house and said he knew his house belonged to another Palestinian family. Adel saw the garden of his old house and related how they, as kids, used to play on the wide stony balcony. Afterwards, everybody walked in the street while Adel was listing the names of the Palestinian families who used to own the houses. Dr Issam Dajjani, a retired man, also talked about his house and Dr Rajai Dajjani saw his family house exactly as he remembered it. However, the family members refused to enter another house of theirs inhabited by an Israeli family that invited them to a cup of coffee, but the conversation was friendly and people shook hands.

Many Palestinians came back to see their occupied houses, but there are many more who can not go back. I remember having seen a film on TV that hosted my professor and friend Hisham Sharabi and the prominent Israeli writer Amos Oz wandering in Yafa, Hisham's hometown, and looking at the Arabs' houses confiscated by the Israelis following the forced displacement of the Palestinians . After 1948, Israel confiscated houses and lands under the Absentee Property Law. Greenberg says in his report that the Dajjani family is engaged in a legal battle in Jerusalem to keep another family house in old Jerusalem that the Israeli authorities intend to seize it under the pretext that its owners were not present when it conducted a population census after the occupation of Jerusalem in 1967… This means that each man visiting his mother in Amman or shopping in Beirut while the occupation was taking place lost his home.

When I asked Adel Dajjani about the case, he said the family lost it and Israel will seize the house near the Church of the Resurrection, which is made up of a shop at street level and two apartments above it.

The Israeli judge, ie the enemy and the arbiter rejected all the family arguments proving that Adel was there and that the house, being a shared inheritance, does not belong to his father alone, but also to his uncle and his children. But the Dajjanis faced a decision taken in advance. The Israelis authorities have been for years seizing houses by court decisions. They are also helping Israeli Jews or Jews from different parts of the world to buy them after their owners have been subjected to all types of intimidation and have started considering departure.

Jerusalem as I know it is the Arab Jerusalem, whereas west Jerusalem is a modern neighborhood. Arab houses are in the old part of the city, in what is known as the upper spot and the lower spot that were lost after 1948, while the 1967 houses are now being lost.

If Palestine is a land without a people, or if it is for a people without a land, as Golda Meir said one day, then Adel Dajjani, Issam Rajai, Loubna and a hundred other Dajjanis I know of, hundreds of Husseinis, Nashashibis, Khalidis, Nussaybas (to whom Omar Ibn Al-Khattab delivered the key to the Church of the Resurrection fourteen centuries ago), Aboul Sou'ouds, Koudwas, Akls, and others constitute a rumor and do not exist except in my imagination and the reader's imagination.

We will not despair. There is no solution without Jerusalem, and the Dajjanis still exist: our colleague Fatina is with us here in London, Hani is a pharmacist, Nabil Dajjani is in Beirut, and Adel spends his time between London and Amman. The Arabs of London certainly know Adel who was the manager of the Arab Bank until his retirement, and his wife Arwa is a sister and a friend. As for Loubna, I have known her since her childhood.

Adel is a friend in a group who play the dice together. Each claims that he is the king of the dice while I claim to be the emperor. Some people claim that Adel emigrated to Amman after losing in the dice games, but he told me he came to London in summer and found out that all of us had either traveled or escaped out of fear of an inevitable defeat at his hands. I wish all Arab defeats were limited to the dice game.

The present situation in the Palestinian territories has placed me in a position of objection par excellence as I oppose everything that is taking place in Palestinian politics today.

I object to the Hamas-staged coup in the Gaza Strip, as I object more to the attempts at isolating this faction. I object the two governments of Ismail Hanyia and Salam Fayad until they reach an agreement. I object to the corruption of Fatah and then I object to the intimacy prevailing in the meeting of Abou Mazen and Ehud Olmert.

Since I am not a party and I can be more objective than the supporters of this or that party, I find that both parties are wrong. Hamas will not be able to monopolize power and the authorities, in order to preserve their national feature, must not attempt at isolating Hamas and will not succeed in doing so. Then, I do not want Ismail Hanyia to become the first Prime Minister coming from Hamas ranks and the last prime minister. Nor do I want Salam Fayad to fail after he had been the best minister and the most successful minister in consecutive Palestinian governments.

Today talks are focusing on bilateral encounters and general meetings as a prelude to a conference to be held in November and that President Bush called for to come up with a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. We have heard that Abou Mazen and Olmert tackled major issues, that the Americans are behind the two men, and that there is a peace plan carrying the names of Ehud Olmert and Shimon Peres. According to the plan, Israel has to withdraw from the entire West Bank except for the settlement blocs, and the Palestinians will be given Israeli land equivalent to the area of the entire West Bank.

I see the chances of success in the November congress very slim. They reflect the difference in potential between George Herbert Bush who sponsored the Madrid Conference in 1991 and his son George W. Bush who was going to fail in dealing with the Palestinian issue alone so he added to it the Iraqi issue. As a result the chances of success are beyond the scope of reality and logic.

I object to the upcoming conference not just because I expect it to fail, but because I have a feeling the objective behind it is not the solution to a chronic conflict and the creation of a Palestinian state. It is rather the fulfillment of either of two other objectives, namely dealing a blow to Hamas or to Syria.

I do not have in Hamas cousins I need to defend and I have criticized much of this faction's conduct despite my familiarity with the leadership. Nevertheless, only an obstinate person or an Israeli will think that Hamas today represents the Palestinians more than any other faction or party does. Attempts at isolating it mean isolating the Palestinians from their cause, which will by no means succeed. In the event the Palestinian authorities participate in those attempts as a party, the conflict will be transformed into an inter- Palestinian one and the children of the same cause will kill each other.

I have never trusted Israeli policies and I have the same feelings toward the present American administration, though I consider it is more likely that President Bush acts out of ignorance whereas Foreign Minister Condoleezza Rice is really seeking a solution.

If the target is Hamas, not peace, then it is Syria.

The weakness of the Olmert government does not predispose it to seek peace; it rather makes it threatening like an injured animal. It may reply to the accumulated failure by turning the tables on its enemies through a war that guarantees the solidarity of the Israelis as long as it lasts. The war is also supposed to guarantee the support of the American administration, maybe with an enthusiasm that is greater than Israel's enthusiasm for the war. If we overlook the content of American and Israeli news, we find out that it all converges on war.

The American administration accuses Syria of producing large amounts of chemical and biological weapons. Such is the type of accusations made against Iraq on the eve of the illegal war on it, and for the same reason. Israel says that Hizbullah has rebuilt its military force after last summer's war, that it possesses more than the three thousand rockets it had launched on northern Israel, that among the new rockets some can reach the Israeli inland, and that arms smuggling through Syria is still going on.

At the same time, official and media sources in Israel say that the government is short on defending Tel Aviv and Jerusalem against a missile attack and the building of shelters is going very slowly.

Newspapers have also published reports released by Israeli security sources, which say that Syria is getting ready for war. It has boosted its forces facing Israel in the Golan Heights, moved Scud missiles and built new fortifications. When Israel starts saying that Syria is making war preparations, this means it is itself also getting ready for war. This issue will definitely pacify the soldiers' insubordination displayed by those who refused to evacuate settlers from the city of Al-Khalil.

Maybe Israel intends to take anticipatory measures. It seems that a war with Syria means opening two new fronts on Israel's borders: north against Hizbullah and south against Hamas. Hence its need to move before its enemies enhance their power. In the meantime, the discussion of a new peace conference has intensified and I fear, for the reasons mentioned above, that it will be a mere camouflage. I can feel a little reassured if I see practical steps to bring about a reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah and the restoration of the national unity government instead of conspiring against Hamas. This does not only represent my opinion, but also the positions of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, in addition to that of Russian which returning to the Middle East.

In New York, Darfur is the most important issue in the world, or at least this is what the resident or visitor sees and hears.

From subway tunnels to the streets, there are thousands of posters talking about 'genocide' and 400,000 people killed, with advertisements in the newspapers and on television. The lobby to save Darfur claims that it comprises 180 organizations representing 130 million Americans, and its aim is to pressure the Congress and the administration to stop this 'genocide' and punish the Khartoum government.

Darfur is a terrible humanitarian disaster that should not be played down. I am not doing that myself. However, the UN itself said that 200,000 were killed and that what had been committed there were war crimes, not genocide.

I choose to believe the UN, not the lobby to save Darfur, because this lobby is just the Israel lobby nicknamed. The goal is to divert attention from Israel's crimes, or the catastrophe of the war in Iraq.

The US war on Iraq has killed, according to a medical estimate, 655,000 Iraqis. That is, more than three times the dead in Darfur, and perhaps five times if we believe the higher estimate of nearly a million victims. Yet, we do not see posters in New York for the Iraqi victims, nor read about 'genocide' or a call to punish the war cabal on charges of genocide, or at least for committing war crimes.

Today, I pick up on what I said yesterday. The US media tycoon in Iraq is exposed, and the distinguished and capable US press did not resist the war in Iraq as it did over Vietnam. It did not try to expose those responsible for it, as we saw done in the Watergate scandal. The reason, at least in my personal opinion, is that the victims were Arabs and Muslims.

In Darfur, the victims are Muslims. There are 200,000 Muslims killed by Muslims. This lobby, whether of Israel or Darfur, does not defend them. It just makes use of them as a smokescreen to obscure the other crimes stretching from Palestine to Iraq. The Israeli lobby, after all, has been very active in the pursuit of war and still defends it; i.e. still supports killing the youth of the US in an unjustified war to protect Israel's security.

Thus, the US press is not interested because the victims are Arabs and Muslims, and the lobby prevents any in-depth discussion and diverts the attention from the crimes committed every day in Palestine and Iraq.

If there is anyone who questions the influence of the lobby, the AIPAC annual conference last month has provided a sufficient answer, as it attracted senior administration figures and the Democratic opposition at the same time. Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a speech entitled 'The United States and Israel: Tradition and Transcendence'. He stressed that the US "would remain unflinching and steadfast", while the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), reiterated that the US stands with Israel, now and forever. In short, the lobby announced that half of the members of the Senate and half the members of the House participated in the annual conference, which heard the words of a hundred US officials and guests, as well as some Israelis, such as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, via satellite, and Foreign Minister Tzibi Livne who was present.

I argue that the official Israeli lobby, i.e. the Jewish lobby AIPAC, does not represent US Jews. It is led by an extremist minority of war advocates, while the majority of US Jews are moderate liberals who always lean toward peace. The US presidential elections are undisputable evidence of this. During President George Bush's two campaigns, in 2000 and 2004, no more than 20% of US Jews supported him. In other words, 80% of them voted against the most pro-Israeli US President yet, and this is the highest proportion for an ethnic or religious group in the US elections.

I believe that the lobby is on the way toward paying the price for its fanaticism and for not being representative of the majority of the US Jews. While campaign financing silences candidates, blogs are free from such influence. And there are now many blogs that challenge the lobby, refute its falsehoods and extremism, and enjoy huge popularity. But such issue needs pages to be dealt with properly. I will suffice by saying that many among the leaders of the campaign against the lobby are liberal US Jewish bloggers, who have started to record some remarkable success. This is especially the case after the lobby went too far and began to accuse Jews of anti-Semitism just because they oppose the violations of Israel.

I would not lay the responsibility for the Iraq war on only the lobby, as the US press, particularly the great liberal part of it, is responsible before anyone else. I refuse to believe that newspapers such as the 'New York Times' have failed to find out about the forged Niger uranium letters, or cover the fabrication story as they had done with Watergate. On the other hand, a young Italian woman journalist discovered the forgery easily by herself. The forgery was confirmed by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). I also do not believe that the US press did not see clear and flagrant errors in Bush's State of the Union address on January 28, 2003, or in the then Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech in front of the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, a speech Powell himself said, some time later, was the lowest point in the history of his political career.

Members of Congress stood and clapped a great deal for Bush, and the US press published praises about Powell's speech. If the shortfall had come from the Arab press, which is negligent by nature, I would have accepted their excuse. But the US press is smarter than to be tricked, and has its traditions and its freedoms that would have made it easier to expose the crime of the war, if it had wanted to. I will continue this topic in a few days.

As the Imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.

As we all know now, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini as he spoke to students who gathered in Tehran for a conference called "The World Without Zionism."

All hell broke loose after the speech and Iran was threatened by the same countries, which apologize for Israel's crimes against the Palestinians.

I said yesterday words don't kill, bullets do. But since the West shows more interest in words than deeds, I have the following:

-- "If only it would sink into the sea", Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin referring to Gaza, just before signing the Oslo Accords.

-- "I don't know something called International Principles. I vow that I'll burn every Palestinian child (that) will be born in this area. The Palestinian woman and child is more dangerous than the man, because the Palestinian child's existence infers that generations will go on, but the man causes limited danger. I vow that if I was just an Israeli civilian and I met a Palestinian I would burn him and I would make him suffer before killing him. With one hit I've killed 750 Palestinians (in Rafah in 1956). I wanted to encourage my soldiers by raping Arabic girls as the Palestinian women is a slave for Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do", Ariel Sharon, current Prime Minister, in an interview with General Ouze Merham, 1956.

-- "We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population", David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. Also Israel Koenig "The Koenig memorandum".

-- "Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories", Benjamin Netanyahu: Speech at Bar-Ilan University, 1989.

-- "We must expel Arabs and take their places", David Ben Gurion, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.

-- "We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves." Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.

-- "[I advocate] using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes [and] against recalcitrant Arabs as an experiment. [I do not understand] the squeamishness about the use of gas [...] We cannot in any circumstamstances acquiesce in the non-utilisation of any weapons which are available to procure a speedy termination of the disorder which prevails on the frontier." Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State at the British War Office, authorising RAF Middle East Command to attack rebelling Iraqis with chemical weapons, 1919.

-- "The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more".... Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time - August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000.

-- "The Palestinians" would be crushed like grasshoppers ... heads smashed against the boulders and walls." Israeli Prime Minister Menahim Begin in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988.

They are all Menahim Begin. But bad as they are they are no worse than their apologists who provide them with cover, and always come up with excuses to justify their crimes.

The Israeli translation company Memri would translate a sermon of an Imam in a desert outpost that no Muslims outside the outpost itself had heard of. But it does not translate the venom of the settlers' rabbis. Four Palestinian civilians have been killed by settlers since the withdrawal from Gaza and about one hundred other civilians by military strikes since the hudna (truce) of February. This is terrorism, not words that mean nothing in practical terms.