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.”

At a panel on the defense and foreign policy impact of the midterm election, sponsored two days after the election by Congressional Quarterly, Steven Simon, late of the Clinton administration and still a member of the Democratic, pro-Zionist mainstream at the Council on Foreign Relations, pronounced on prospects for Palestinian-Israeli peace and essentially declared it not worth anyone's effort. Using words, a tone, and a body language that clearly betrayed his own disinterest, he said that Hamas is "there" (exaggerated shrug), that the Israeli government is in turmoil after its Lebanon "contretemps" (dismissive wave of the hand), that both sides are incapable of significant movement, and that therefore there is no incentive for anyone, Democrat or Republican, to intervene (casual frown indicating an unfortunate reality about which serious people need not concern themselves). There is simply no prospect for more unilateral Israeli withdrawals and therefore for any progress toward peace, Simon said in conclusion -- signaling not only a total lack of concern but an utter ignorance of just what it is that might bring progress, as if Israeli unilateralism were truly the ticket to peace.

Thus spake the Democratic oracle. Not that anyone who knows the Palestinian-Israeli situation from other than the selective focus of the Zionist perspective had any expectations in the first place. No one ever thought the new Democratic Congress would hop to and put pressure on Israel to make peace. Just remember John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, to say nothing of Bill Clinton, when any question of the Democrats' stance arises. And don't forget Nancy Pelosi, who rushed to condemn Jimmy Carter for using the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book and for whom, according to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile, support for Israel is personal and "heartfelt." One Jewish activist and long-time friend described her as "incredibly loyal" (interesting term) and as feeling Jewish and Israeli issues "in her soul."

But Simon's brief disquisition on the futility of even making an effort was particularly striking for its profound dismissiveness and its profound blindness to what is and has been going on on the ground. Simon's "contretemps" in Lebanon was no mere embarrassing misstep but a murderous rampage that killed 1,300 innocent Lebanese and dropped over a million cluster bomblets in villages across the south, left to be discovered by returning residents. But the Democrats don't care, and Steven Simon considers this hardly worth a second thought. Israel gets itself in trouble, showing its true brutal nature in the process, and this gives Simon and the Democrats a handy excuse to avoid doing anything.

Eighteen Palestinian innocents in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip were murdered while sleeping in their beds a day before Simon spoke, killed by Israeli shellfire, round after round fired at a residential housing complex -- 16 members of one extended family and two others who came to help them after the first round exploded. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.

In the six days preceding this incident, Israel assaulted Beit Hanoun the way it assaulted Jenin and Nablus and other West Bank cities in 2002 -- a murderous assault reminiscent of Nazi sieges or of the Russian siege of Chechnya, in which in these six days 57 Palestinians were killed, to one Israeli soldier. The dead include Palestinian fighters and a large number of civilians, including children and including two women shot down in the street while attempting to lift the Israeli siege of a mosque. The mosque was leveled. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.

In the four months preceding this six-day siege, the Israelis killed 247 Palestinians in a prolonged attack on Gaza. Of the dead, two-thirds are civilians, 20 percent children. Of nearly 1,000 injured, one-third are children. The Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.

Israel is planning a larger siege of Gaza, concentrating not just on Beit Hanoun in the north but on Rafah in the south, ostensibly to unearth arms-smuggling tunnels. This has been going on for years; Rafah has been the scene of Israel's murderous pummeling periodically since the intifada began -- in 2003 when Rachel Corrie was killed trying to protect the home of an innocent family from demolition, in 2004 when hundreds of homes were demolished in multiple sieges and a peaceful protest demonstration was strafed from the air. But the Democrats don't care. Steven Simon considers this not worth a mention.

Gaza, of course, is not the only Palestinian territory being raped and pillaged. Its 1.4 million residents are the most distraught -- living imprisoned in a territory with the highest population density in the world, walled in with no exit except as Israel sporadically allows, being deliberately starved by the official policy of Israel, which dictates to the U.S., which dictates to Europe, vulnerable to constant Israeli assault. But the West Bank's 2.5 million Palestinians are not much better off. They continue to be killed by Israelis and squeezed by Israel's separation wall, by settlement expansion, by movement restrictions, by theft of agricultural land, by diminishing economic opportunity, and by massive Israeli-fostered unemployment. Their death toll is only minimally less than Gaza's.

This obscenity of oppression and murder does not faze the Democrats or any of Israel's Zionist supporters in the U.S. Whatever Israel wants is all right with the Democrats. The 110th Congress will screw the Palestinians just the way the Republican 109th did.

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.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. They spent October 2006 in Palestine and on a speaking tour of Ireland sponsored by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Editors' Note: Ten, even five years ago, a fierce public debate over the nature and activities of the Israeli lobby would have been impossible. It was as verboten as the use of the word Empire, to describe the global reach of the United States. Through its disdain for the usual proprieties decorously observed by Republican and Democratic administrations in the past , the Bush administration has hauled many realities of our political economy center stage. Open up the New York Times or the Washington Post over the recent past and there, like as not, is another opinion column about the Lobby.

CounterPunch has hosted some of the most vigorous polemics on the Lobby. In May we asked two of our most valued contributors, Kathy and Bill Christison, to offer their evaluation of the debate on the Lobby's role and power. As our readers know, Bill and Kathy both had significant careers as CIA analysts. Bill was a National Intelligence Officer. In the aftermath of the September, 2001, attacks we published here his trenchant and influential essay on "the war on terror". Kathy has written powerfully on our website on the topic of Palestine. Specifically on the Lobby they contributed an unsparing essay on the topic of "dual loyalty" which can bed found in our CounterPunch collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

In mid May they sent us the detailed, measured commentary, rich in historical detail, that we are delighted to print below in its entirety. Which is the tail? Which is the dog? asked Uri Avnery in our newsletter, a few issues back, apropos the respective roles of the Israel Lobby and the US in the exercise of US policy in the Middle East. Here's an answer that will be tough to challenge.

-- A.C./J.S.C.

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the University of Chicago and Harvard political scientists who published in March of this years a lengthy, well documented study on the pro-Israel lobby and its influence on U.S. Middle East policy in March , have already accomplished what they intended. They have successfully called attention to the often pernicious influence of the lobby on policymaking. But, unfortunately, the study has aroused more criticism than debate ­ not only the kind of criticism one would anticipate from the usual suspects among the very lobby groups Mearsheimer and Walt described, but also from a group on the left that might have been expected to support the study's conclusions.

The criticism has been partly silly, often malicious, and almost entirely off-point. The silly, insubstantial criticisms ­ such as former presidential adviser David Gergen's earnest comment that through four administrations he never observed an Oval Office decision that tilted policy in favor of Israel at the expense of U.S. interests ­ can easily be dismissed as nonsensical . Most of the extensive malicious criticism, coming largely from the hard core of Israeli supporters who make up the very lobby under discussion and led by a hysterical Alan Dershowitz, has been so specious and sophomoric, that it too could be dismissed were it not for precisely the pervasive atmosphere of reflexive support for Israel and silenced debate that Mearsheimer and Walt describe.

Most disturbing and harder to dismiss is the criticism of the study from the left, coming chiefly from Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, and abetted less cogently by Stephen Zunes of Foreign Policy in Focus and Joseph Massad of Columbia University. These critics on the left argue from a assumption that U.S. foreign policy has been monolithic since World War II, a coherent progression of decision-making directed unerringly at the advancement of U.S. imperial interests. All U.S. actions, these critics contend, are part of a clearly laid-out strategy that has rarely deviated no matter what the party in power. They believe that Israel has served throughout as a loyal agent of the U.S., carrying out the U.S. design faithfully and serving as a base from which the U.S. projects its power around the Middle East. Zunes says it most clearly, affirming that Israel "still is very much the junior partner in the relationship." These critics do not dispute the existence of a lobby, but they minimize its importance, claiming that rather than leading the U.S. into policies and foreign adventures that stand against true U.S. national interests, as Mearsheimer and Walt assert, the U.S. is actually the controlling power in the relationship with Israel and carries out a consistent policy, using Israel as its agent where possible.

Finkelstein summarized the critics' position in a recent CounterPunch article ("The Israel Lobby," May 1, http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein05012006.html), emphasizing that the issue is not whether U.S. interests or those of the lobby take precedence but rather that there has been such coincidence of U.S. and Israeli interests over the decades that for the most part basic U.S. Middle East policy has not been affected by the lobby. Chomsky maintains that Israel does the U.S. bidding in the Middle East in pursuit of imperial goals that Washington would pursue even without Israel and that it has always pursued in areas outside the Middle East without benefit of any lobby. Those goals have always included advancement of U.S. corporate-military interests and political domination through the suppression of radical nationalisms and the maintenance of stability in resource-rich countries, particularly oil producers, everywhere. In the Middle East, this was accomplished primarily through Israel's 1967 defeat of Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser and his radical Arab nationalism, which had threatened U.S. access to the region's oil resources. Both Chomsky and Finkelstein trace the strong U.S.-Israeli tie to the June 1967 war, which they believe established the close alliance and marked the point at which the U.S. began to regard Israel as a strategic asset and a stable base from which U.S. power could be projected throughout the Middle East.

Joseph Massad ("Blaming the Israel Lobby," CounterPunch, March 25/26, http://www.counterpunch.org/massad03252006.html) argues along similar lines, describing developments in the Middle East and around the world that he believes the U.S. engineered for its own benefit and would have carried out even without Israel's assistance. His point, like Chomsky's, is that the U.S. has a long history of overthrowing regimes in Central America, in Chile, in Indonesia, in Africa, where the Israel lobby was not involved and where Israel at most assisted the U.S. but did not benefit directly itself. He goes farther than Chomsky by claiming that with respect to the Middle East Israel has been such an essential tool that its very usefulness is what accounts for the strength of the lobby. "It is in fact the very centrality of Israel to U.S. strategy in the Middle East," Massad contends with a kind of backward logic, "that accounts, in part, for the strength of the pro-Israel lobby and not the other way around." (One wonders why, if this were the case, there would be any need for a lobby at all. What would be a lobby's function if the U.S. already regarded Israel as central to its strategy?)

The principal problem with these arguments from the left is that they assume a continuity in U.S. strategy and policymaking over the decades that has never in fact existed. The notion that there is any defined strategy that links Eisenhower's policy to Johnson's to Reagan's to Clinton's gives far more credit than is deserved to the extremely ad hoc, hit-or-miss nature of all U.S. foreign policy. Obviously, some level of imperial interest has dictated policy in every administration since World War II and, obviously, the need to guarantee access to vital natural resources around the world, such as oil in the Middle East and elsewhere, has played a critical role in determining policy. But beyond these evident, and not particularly significant, truths, it can accurately be said, at least with regard to the Middle East, that it has been a rare administration that has itself ever had a coherent, clearly defined, and consistent foreign policy and that, except for a broadly defined anti-communism during the Cold War, no administration's strategy has ever carried over in detail to succeeding administrations.

The ad hoc nature of virtually every administration's policy planning process cannot be overemphasized. Aside from the strong but amorphous political need felt in both major U.S. parties and nurtured by the Israel lobby that "supporting Israel" was vital to each party's own future, the inconsistent, even short-term randomness in the detailed Middle East policymaking of successive administrations has been remarkable. This lack of clear strategic thinking at the very top levels of several new administrations before they entered office enhanced the power of individuals and groups that did have clear goals and plans already in hand ­ such as, for instance, the pro-Israeli Dennis Ross in both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations, and the strongly pro-Israeli neo-cons in the current Bush administration.

The critics on the left argue that because the U.S. has a history of opposing and frequently undermining or actually overthrowing radical nationalist governments throughout the world without any involvement by Israel, any instance in which Israel acts against radical nationalism in the Arab world is, therefore, proof that Israel is doing the United States' work for it . The critics generally believe, for instance, that Israel's political destruction of Egypt's Nasser in 1967 was done for the U.S. Most if not all believe that Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was undertaken at U.S.behest, to destroy the PLO.

This kind of argumentation assumes too much on a presumption of policy coherence. Lyndon Johnson most certainly did abhor Nasser and was not sorry to see him and his pan-Arab ambitions defeated, but there is absolutely no evidence that the Johnson administration ever seriously planned to unseat Nasser, formulated any other action plan against Egypt, or pushed Israel in any way to attack. Johnson did apparently give a green light to Israel's attack plans after they had been formulated, but this is quite different from initiating the plans. Already mired in Vietnam, Johnson was very much concerned not to be drawn into a war initiated by Israel and was criticized by some Israeli supporters for not acting forcefully enough on Israel's behalf. In any case, Israel needed no prompting for its pre-emptive attack, which had long been in the works.

Indeed, far from Israel functioning as the junior partner carrying out a U.S. plan, it is clear that the weight of pressure in 1967 was on the U.S. to go along with Israel's designs and that this pressure came from Israel and its agents in the U.S. The lobby in this instance ­ as broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt: "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to shape U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction" ­ was in fact a part of Johnson's intimate circle of friends and advisers.

These included the number-two man at the Israeli embassy, a close personal friend; the strongly pro-Israeli Rostow brothers, Walt and Eugene, who were part of the national security bureaucracy in the administration; Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas; U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg; and numerous others who all spent time with Johnson at the LBJ Ranch in Texas and had the personal access and the leisure time in an informal setting to talk with Johnson about their concern for Israel and to influence him heavily in favor of Israel. This circle had already begun to work on Johnson long before Israel's pre-emptive attack in 1967, so they were nicely placed to persuade Johnson to go along with it despite Johnson's fears of provoking the Soviet Union and becoming involved in a military conflict the U.S. was not prepared for.

In other words, Israel was beyond question the senior partner in this particular policy initiative; Israel made the decision to go to war, would have gone to war with or without the U.S. green light, and used its lobbyists in the U.S. to steer Johnson administration policy in a pro-Israeli direction. Israel's attack on the U.S. naval vessel, the USS Liberty, in the midst of the war ­ an attack conducted in broad daylight that killed 34 American sailors ­ was not the act of a junior partner. Nor was the U.S. cover-up of this atrocity the act of a government that dictated the moves in this relationship.

The evidence is equally clear that Israel was the prime mover in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and led the U.S. into that morass, rather than the other way around. Although Massad refers to the U.S. as Israel's master, in this instance as in many others including 1967, Israel has clearly been its own master. Chomsky argues in support of his case that Reagan ordered Israel to call off the invasion in August, two months after it was launched. This is true, but in fact Israel did not pay any attention; the invasion continued, and the U.S. got farther and farther embroiled.

When, as occurred in Lebanon, the U.S. has blundered into misguided adventures to support Israel or to rescue Israel or to further Israel's interests, it is a clear denial of reality to say that Israel and its lobby have no significant influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Even were there not an abundance of other examples, Lebanon alone, with its long-term implications, proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt conclusion that the U.S. "has set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state" and that "the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the 'Israel Lobby.'" As a general proposition, the left critics' argumentation is much too limiting. While there is no question that modern history is replete, as they argue, with examples of the U.S. acting in corporate interests ­ overthrowing nationalist governments perceived to be threatening U.S. business and economic interests, as in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, and elsewhere ­ this frequent convergence of corporate with government interests does not mean that the U.S. never acts in other than corporate interests. The fact of a strong government-corporate alliance does not in any way preclude situations ­ even in the Middle East, where oil is obviously a vital corporate resource ­ in which the U.S. acts primarily to benefit Israel rather than serve any corporate or economic purpose. Because it has a deep emotional aspect and involves political, economic, and military ties unlike those with any other nation, the U.S. relationship with Israel is unique, and there is nothing in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nothing in the government's entanglement with the military-industrial complex, to prevent the lobby from exerting heavy influence on policy. Israel and its lobbyists make their own "corporation" that, like the oil industry (or Chiquita Banana or Anaconda Copper in other areas), is clearly a major factor driving U.S. foreign policy.

There is no denying the intricate interweaving of the U.S. military-industrial complex with Israeli military-industrial interests. Chomsky acknowledges that there is "plenty of conformity" between the lobby's position and the U.S. government-corporate linkage and that the two are very difficult to disentangle. But, although he tends to emphasize that the U.S. is always the senior partner and suggests that the Israeli side does little more than support whatever the U.S. arms, energy, and financial industries define as U.S. national interests, in actual fact the entanglement is much more one between equals than the raw strengths of the two parties would suggest. "Conformity" hardly captures the magnitude of the relationship. Particularly in the defense arena, Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in glove to advance their combined, very compatible interests. The relatively few very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. In every way, the two nations' military industries work together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That's power. The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S. military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms ­ very successfully ­ in both Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of a definition of U.S. "national interests" that many Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.

Clearly, the advantages in the relationship go in both directions: Israel serves U.S. corporate interests by using, and often helping develop, the arms that U.S. manufacturers produce, and the U.S. serves Israeli interests by providing a constant stream of high-tech equipment that maintains Israel's vast military superiority in the region. But simply because the U.S. benefits from this relationship, it cannot be said that the U.S. is Israel's master, or that Israel always does the U.S. bidding, or that the lobby, which helps keep this arms alliance alive, has no significant power. It's in the nature of a symbiosis that both sides benefit, and the lobby has clearly played a huge role in maintaining the interdependence.

The left's arguments also tend to be much too conspiratorial. Finkelstein, for instance, describes a supposed strategy in which the U.S. perpetually undermines Israeli-Arab reconciliation because it does not want an Israel at peace with its neighbors, since Israel would then loosen its dependence on the U.S. and become a less reliable proxy. "What use," he asks, "would a Paul Wolfowitz have of an Israel living peacefully with its Arab neighbors and less willing to do the U.S.'s bidding?" Not only does this give the U.S. far more credit than it has ever deserved for long-term strategic scheming and the ability to carry out such a conspiracy, but it begs a very important question that neither Finkelstein nor the other left critics, in their dogged effort to mold all developments to their thesis, never examine: just what U.S.'s bidding is Israel doing nowadays?

Although the leftist critics speak of Israel as a base from which U.S. power is projected throughout the Middle East, they do not clearly explain how this works. Any strategic value Israel had for the U.S. diminished drastically with the collapse of the Soviet Union. They may believe that Israel keeps Saudi Arabia's oil resources safe from Arab nationalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Russia, but this is highly questionable. Israel clearly did us no good in Lebanon, but rather the U.S. did Israel's bidding and fumbled badly, so this cannot be how the U.S. uses Israeli to project its power. In Palestine, Finkelstein himself acknowledges that the U.S. gains nothing from the occupation and Israeli settlements, so this can't be where Israel is doing the U.S.'s bidding. (With this acknowledgement, Finkelstein, perhaps unconsciously, seriously undermines his case against the importance of the lobby, unless he somehow believes the occupation is only of incidental significance, in which case he undermines the thesis of much of his own body of writing.)

Owning the Policymakers

In the clamor over the Mearsheimer-Walt study, critics on both the left and the right have tended to ignore the slow evolutionary history of U.S. Middle East policymaking and of the U.S. relationship with Israel. The ties to Israel and earlier to Zionism go back more than a century, predating the formation of a lobby, and they have remained firm even at periods when the lobby has waned. But it is also true that the lobby has sustained and formalized a relationship that otherwise rests on emotions and moral commitment. Because the bond with Israel has been a steadily evolving continuum, dating back to well before Israel's formal establishment, it is important to emphasize that there is no single point at which it is possible to say, this is when Israel won the affections of America, or this is when Israel came to be regarded as a strategic asset, or this is when the lobby became an integral part of U.S. policymaking.

The left critics of the lobby study mark the Johnson administration as the beginning of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but almost every administration before Johnson's, going back to Woodrow Wilson, ratcheted up the relationship in some significant way and could justifiably claim to have been the progenitor of the bond. Significantly, in almost all cases, policymakers acted as they did because of the influence of pro-Zionist or pro-Israeli lobbyists: Wilson would not have supported the Zionist enterprise to the extent he did had it not been for the influence of Zionist colleagues like Louis Brandeis; nor would Roosevelt; Truman would probably not have been as supportive of establishing a Jewish state without the heavy influence of his very pro-Zionist advisers.

After the Johnson administration as well, the relationship has continued to grow in remarkable leaps. The Nixon-Kissinger regime could claim that they were the administration that cemented the alliance by exponentially increasing military aid ­ from an annual average of under $50 million in military credits to Israel in the late 1960s to an average of almost $400 million and, in the year following the 1973 war, to $2.2 billion. It is not for nothing that Israelis have informally dubbed almost every president since Johnson ­ with the notable exceptions of Jimmy Carter and the senior George Bush ­ as "the most pro-Israeli president ever"; each one has achieved some landmark in the effort to please Israel.

The U.S.-Israeli bond has always had its grounding more in soft emotions than in the hard realities of geopolitical strategy. Scholars have always described the tie in almost spiritual terms never applied to ties with other nations. A Palestinian-French scholar has described the United States' pro-Israeli tilt as a "predisposition," a natural inclination that precedes any consideration of interest or of cost. Israel, he said, takes part in the very "being" of American society and therefore participates in its integrity and its defense. This is not simply the biased perspective of a Palestinian. Other scholars of varying political inclinations have described a similar spiritual and cultural identity: the U.S. identifies with Israel's "national style"; Israel is essential to the "ideological prospering" of the U.S.; each country has "grafted" the heritage of the other onto itself. This applies even to the worst aspects of each nation's heritage. Consciously or unconsciously, many Israelis even today see the U.S. conquest of the American Indians as something "good," something to emulate and, which is worse, many Americans even today are happy to accept the "compliment" inherent in Israel's effort to copy us.

This is no ordinary state-to-state relationship, and the lobby does not function like any ordinary lobby. It is not a great exaggeration to say that the lobby could not thrive without a very willing host ­ that is, a series of U.S. policymaking establishments that have always been locked in to a mindset singularly focused on Israel and its interests ­ and, at the same time, that U.S. policy in the Middle East would not possibly have remained so singularly focused on and so tilted toward Israel were it not for the lobby. One thing is certain: with the possible exceptions of the Carter and the first Bush administrations, the relationship has grown noticeably closer and more solid with each administration, in almost exact correlation with the growth in size and budget and political clout of the pro-Israel lobby.

All critics of the lobby study have failed to note a critical point during the Reagan administration, surrounding the debacle in Lebanon, when it can reasonably be said that policymaking tipped over from a situation in which the U.S. was more often the controlling agent in the relationship to one in which Israel and its advocates in the U.S. have increasingly determined the course and the pace of developments. The organized lobby, meaning AIPAC and the several formal Jewish American organizations, truly came into its own during the Reagan years with a massive expansion of memberships, budgets, propaganda activities, and contacts within Congress and government, and it has been consolidating power and influence for the last quarter century, so that today the broadly defined lobby, including all those who work for Israel, has become an integral part of U.S. society and U.S. policymaking.

The situation during the Reagan administration demonstrates very clearly the closeness of the bond. The events of these years illustrate how an already very Israel-centered mindset in the U.S., which had been developing for decades, was transformed into a concrete, institutionalized relationship with Israel via the offices of Israeli supporters and agents in the U.S.

The seminal event in the growth of AIPAC and the organized lobby was the battle over the administration's proposed sale of AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. Paradoxically, although AIPAC lost this battle in a head-on struggle with Reagan and the administration, and the sale to the Saudis went forward, AIPAC and the lobby ultimately won the war for influence. Reagan was determined that the sale go through; he regarded the deal as an important part of an ill-conceived attempt to build an Arab-Israeli consensus in the Middle East to oppose the Soviet Union and, perhaps even more important, saw the battle in Congress as a test of his own prestige. By winning the battle, he demonstrated that any administration, at least up to that point, could exert enough pressure to push an issue opposed by Israel through Congress, but the struggle also demonstrated just how exhausting and politically costly such a battle can be, and no one around Reagan was willing to go to the mat in this way again. In a real sense, despite AIPAC's loss, the fight showed just how much the lobby limited policymaker freedom, even more than 20 years ago, in any transaction that concerned Israel.

The AWACS imbroglio galvanized AIPAC into action, at precisely the time the administration was subsiding in exhaustion, and under an aggressive and energetic leader, former congressional aide Thomas Dine, AIPAC quadrupled its budget, increased its grassroots support immensely, and vastly expanded its propaganda effort. This last and perhaps most significant accomplishment was achieved when Dine established an analytical unit inside AIPAC that published in-depth analyses and position papers for congressmen and policymakers. Dine believed that anyone who could provide policymakers with books and papers focusing on Israel's strategic value to the U.S. would effectively "own" the policymakers.

With the rising power and influence of the lobby, and following the U.S. debacle in Lebanon ­ which began with Israel's 1982 invasion and ended for the U.S. with the withdrawal of its Marine contingent in early 1984, after the Marines had become involved in fighting to protect Israel's invasion force and 241 U.S. military had been killed in a truck bombing ­ the Reagan administration effectively handed over the policy initiative in the Middle East to Israel and its American advocates.

Israel and its agents began, with amazing effrontery, to complain that the U.S. failure to clean up in Lebanon was interfering with Israel's own designs there ­ from which arrogance Reagan and company concluded, in an astounding twist of logic, that the only way to restore stability was through closer alliance with Israel. As a result, in the fall of 1983 Reagan sent a delegation to ask the Israelis for closer strategic ties, and shortly thereafter forged a formal strategic alliance with Israel with the signing of a "memorandum of understanding on strategic cooperation." In 1987, the U.S. designated Israel a "major non-NATO ally," thus giving it access to military technology not available otherwise. The notion of demanding concessions from Israel in return for this favored status ­ such as, for instance, some restraint in its settlement-construction in the West Bank ­ was specifically rejected. The U.S. simply very deliberately and abjectly retreated into policy inaction, leaving Israel with a free hand to proceed as it wished wherever it wished in the Middle East and particularly in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Even Israel, by all accounts, was surprised by this demonstration of the United States' inability to see beyond Israel's interests. Prime Minister Menachem Begin had attempted from early in the Carter administration to push the notion that Israel was a strategic Cold War asset to the U.S. but, because Israel did not in fact perform a significant strategic role for the U.S. and was in many ways more a liability than an asset, Carter never paid serious attention to the Israeli overtures. Begin feared that the United States' moral and emotional commitment to Israel might ultimately not be enough to sustain the relationship through possible hard times, and so he attempted to put Israel forward as a strategically indispensable ally and a good investment for U.S. security, a move that would essentially reverse the two nations' roles, altering the relationship from one of Israeli indebtedness to the U.S. to one in which the United States was in Israel's debt for its vital strategic role.

Carter was having none of this, but the notion of strategic cooperation germinated in Israel and among its U.S. supporters until the moment became ripe during the Reagan administration. By the end of the Lebanon mess, the notion that the U.S. needed Israel's friendship had so taken hold among the Reaganites that, as one former national security aide observed in a stunning upending of logic, they began to view closer strategic ties as a necessary means of "restor[ing] Israeli confidence in American reliability." Secretary of State George Shultz wrote in his memoirs years later of the U.S. need "to lift the albatross of Lebanon from Israel's neck." Recall, as Shultz must not have been able to do, that the debt here was rightly Israel's: Israel put the albatross around its own neck, and the U.S. stumbled into Lebanon after Israel, not the other way around.

AIPAC and the neo-conservatives who rose to prominence during the Reagan years played a major role in building the strategic alliance. AIPAC in particular became in every sense of the word a partner of the U.S. in forging Middle East policy from the mid-1980s on. Thomas Dine's vision of "owning" policymakers by providing them with position papers geared to Israel's interests went into full swing. In 1984, AIPAC spun off a think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, that remains one of the pre-eminent think tanks in Washington and that has sent its analysts into policymaking jobs in several administrations. Dennis Ross, the senior Middle East policymaker in the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came from the Washington Institute and returned there after leaving government service. Martin Indyk, the Institute's first director, entered a senior policymaking position in the Clinton administration from there.

Today, John Hannah, who has served on Vice President Cheney's national security staff since 2001 and succeeded Lewis Libby last year as Cheney's leading national security adviser, comes from the Institute. AIPAC also continues to do its own analyses in addition to the Washington Institute's. A recent Washington Post profile of Steven Rosen, the former senior AIPAC foreign policy analyst who is about to stand trial with a colleague for receiving and passing on classified information to Israel, noted that two decades ago Rosen began a practice of lobbying the executive branch, rather than simply concentrating on Congress, as a way, in the words of the Post article, "to alter American foreign policy" by "influencing government from the inside." Over the years, he "had a hand in writing several policies favored by Israel."

In the Reagan years, AIPAC's position papers were particularly welcomed by an administration already more or less convinced of Israel's strategic value and obsessed with impeding Soviet advances. Policymakers began negotiating with AIPAC before presenting legislation in order to help assure passage, and Congress consulted the lobby on pending legislation. Congress eagerly embraced almost every legislative initiative proposed by the lobby and came to rely on AIPAC for information on all issues related to the Middle East. The close cooperation between the administration and AIPAC soon began to stifle discourse inside the bureaucracy. Middle East experts in the State Department and other agencies were almost completely cut out of decision-making, and officials throughout government became increasingly unwilling to propose policies or put forth analysis likely to arouse opposition from AIPAC or Congress. One unnamed official complained that "a lot of real analysis is not even getting off people's desks for fear of what the lobby will do"; he was speaking to a New York Times correspondent, but otherwise his complaints fell on deaf ears.

This kind of pervasive influence, a chill on discourse inside as well as outside policymaking councils, does not require the sort of clear-cut, concrete pro-Israeli decisions in the Oval Office that David Gergen naively thought he should have witnessed if the lobby had any real influence. This kind of influence, which uses friendly persuasion, along with just enough direct pressure, on a broad range of policymakers, legislators, media commentators, and grassroots activists to make an impression across the spectrum, cannot be defined in terms of narrow, concrete policy commands, but becomes an unchanging, unchallengeable mindset, a sentimental environment that restricts debate, restricts thinking, and determines actions and policies as surely as any command from on high. When Israel's advocates, its lobbyists, in the U.S. become an integral part of the policymaking apparatus, as they have particularly since the Reagan years ­ and as they clearly have been during the current Bush administration ­ there is no way to separate the lobby's interests from U.S. policies. Moreover, because Israel's strategic goals in the region are more clearly defined and more urgent than those of the United States, Israel's interests most often dominate.

Chomsky himself acknowledges that the lobby plays a significant part in shaping the political environment in which support for Israel becomes automatic and unquestioned. Even Chomsky believes that what he calls the intellectual political class is a critical, and perhaps the most influential, component of the lobby because these elites determine the shaping of news and information in the media and academia. On the other hand, he contends that, because the lobby already includes most of this intellectual political class, the thesis of lobby power "loses much of its content". But, on the contrary, this very fact would seem to prove the point, not undermine it. The fact of the lobby's pervasiveness, far from rendering it less powerful, magnifies its importance tremendously.

Indeed, this is the crux of the entire debate. It is the very power of the lobby to continue shaping the public mindset, to mold thinking and, perhaps most important, to instill fear of deviation that brings this intellectual political class together in an unswerving determination to work for Israel. Is there not a heavy impact on Middle East policymaking when, for instance, a lobby has the power to force the electoral defeat of long-serving congressmen, as occurred to Representative Paul Findley in 1982 and Senator Charles Percy in 1984 after both had deviated from political correctness by speaking out in favor of negotiating with the PLO? AIPAC openly crowed about the defeat of both men ­ both Republicans serving during the Republican Reagan administration, who had been in Congress for 22 and 18 years respectively. Similarly, does not the media's silence on Israel's oppressive measures in the occupied territories, as well as the concerted, and openly acknowledged, efforts of virtually every pro-Israeli organization in the U.S. to suppress information and quash debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, have an immense impact on policy? Today, even the most outspoken of leftist radio hosts and other commentators, such as Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, and now Cindy Sheehan, almost always avoid talking and writing about this issue.

Does not the massive effort by AIPAC, the Washington Institute, and myriad other similar organizations to spoon-feed policymakers and congressmen selective information and analysis written only from Israel's perspective have a huge impact on policy? In the end, even Chomsky and Finkelstein acknowledge the power of the lobby in suppressing discussion and debate about Middle East policy. The mobilization of public opinion, Finkelstein writes, "can have a real impact on policy-making ­ which is why the Lobby invests so much energy in suppressing discussion." It is difficult to read statement except as a ringing acknowledgement of the massive and very central power of the lobby to control discourse and to control policymaking on the most critical Middle East policy issue.

Interchangeable Interests

The principal problem with the left critics' analysis is that it is too rigid. There is no question that Israel has served the interests of the U.S. government and the military-industrial complex in many areas of the world by, for instance, aiding some of the rightist regimes of Central America, by skirting arms and trade embargoes against apartheid South Africa and China (until the neo-conservatives turned off the tap to China and, in a rare disagreement with Israel, forced it to halt), and during the Cold War by helping, at least indirectly, to hold down Arab radicalism. There is also no question that, no matter which party has been in power, the U.S. has over the decades advanced an essentially conservative global political and pro-business agenda in areas far afield of the Middle East, without reference to Israel or the lobby. The U.S. unseated Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala and Allende in Chile, along with many others, for its own corporate and political purposes, as the left critics note, and did not use Israel.

But these facts do not minimize the power the lobby has exerted in countless instances over the course of decades, and particularly in recent years, to lead the U.S. into situations that Israel initiated, that the U.S. did not plan, and that have done harm, both singly and cumulatively, to U.S. interests. One need only ask whether particular policies would have been adopted in the absence of pressure from some influential persons and organizations working on Israel's behalf in order to see just how often Israel or its advocates in the U.S., rather than the United States or even U.S. corporations, have been the policy initiators. The answers give clear evidence that a lobby, as broadly defined by Mearsheimer and Walt, has played a critical and, as the decades have gone on, increasingly influential role in policymaking.

For instance, would Harry Truman have been as supportive of establishing Israel as a Jewish state if it had not been for heavy pressure from what was then a very loose grouping of strong Zionists with considerable influence in policymaking circles? It can reasonably be argued that he might not in fact have supported Jewish statehood at all, and it is even more likely that his own White House advisers ­ all strong Zionist proponents themselves ­ would not have twisted arms at the United Nations to secure the 1947 vote in favor of partitioning Palestine if these lobbyists had not been a part of Truman's policymaking circle. Truman himself did not initially support the notion of founding a state based on religion, and every national security agency of government, civilian and military , strongly opposed the partition of Palestine out of fear that this would lead to warfare in which the U.S. might have to intervene, would enhance the Soviet position in the Middle East, and would endanger U.S. oil interests in the area. But even in the face of this united opposition from within his own government, Truman found the pressures of the Zionists among his close advisers and among influential friends of the administration and of the Democratic Party too overwhelmingly strong to resist.

Questions like this arise for virtually every presidential administration. Would Jimmy Carter, for instance, have dropped his pursuit of a resolution of the Palestinian problem if the Israel lobby had not exerted intense pressure on him? Carter was the first president to recognize the Palestinian need for some kind of "homeland," as he termed it, and he made numerous efforts to bring Palestinians into a negotiating process and to stop Israeli settlement-building, but opposition from Israel and pressures from the lobby were so heavy that he was ultimately worn down and defeated.

It is also all but impossible to imagine the U.S. supporting Israel's actions in the occupied Palestinian territories without pressure from the lobby. No conceivable U.S. national interest served ­ even in the United States' own myopic view ­ by its support for Israel's harshly oppressive policy in the West Bank and Gaza, and furthermore this support is a dangerous liability. As Mearsheimer and Walt note, most foreign elites view the U.S. tolerance of Israeli repression as "morally obtuse and a handicap in the war on terrorism," and this tolerance is a major cause of terrorism against the U.S. and the West. The impetus for oppressing the Palestinians clearly comes and has always come from Israel, not the United States, and the impetus for supporting Israel and facilitating this oppression has come, very clearly and directly, from the lobby, which goes to great lengths to justify the occupation and to advocate on behalf of Israeli policies.

It is tempting, and not at all out of the realm of possibility, to imagine Bill Clinton having forged a final Palestinian-Israeli peace agreement were it not for the influence of his notably pro-Israeli advisers. By the time Clinton came to office, the lobby had become a part of the policymaking apparatus, in the persons of Israeli advocates Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk, both of whom entered government service from lobby organizations. Both also returned at the end of the Clinton administration to organizations that advocate for Israel: Ross to the Washington Institute and Indyk to the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy, which is financed by and named for a notably pro-Israeli benefactor. The scope of the lobby's infiltration of government policymaking councils has been unprecedented during the current Bush administration. Some of the left critics dismiss the neo-cons as not having any allegiance to Israel; Finkelstein thinks it is naïve to credit them with any ideological conviction, and Zunes claims they are uninterested in benefiting Israel because they are not religious Jews (as if only religious Jews care about Israel). But it simply ignores reality to deny the neo-cons' very close ties, both ideological and pragmatic, to Israel's right wing.

Both Finkelstein and Zunes glaringly fail to mention the strategy paper that several neo-cons wrote in the mid-1990s for an Israeli prime minister, laying out a plan for attacking Iraq these same neo-cons later carried out upon entering the Bush administration. The strategy was designed both to assure Israel's regional dominance in the Middle East and to enhance U.S. global hegemony. One of these authors, David Wurmser, remains in government as Cheney's Middle East adviser ­ one of several lobbyists inside the henhouse. The openly trumpeted plan, crafted by the neo-cons, is to "transform" the Middle East by unseating Saddam Hussein, and the notion, also openly touted, that the path to peace in Palestine-Israel ran through Baghdad grew out of the neo-cons' overriding concern for Israel. Both Finkelstein and Zunes also fail to take note of the long record of advocacy on behalf of Israel that almost all the neo-cons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, John Bolton, and their cheerleaders on the sidelines such as William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and numerous right-wing, pro-Israeli think tanks in Washington) have compiled over the years. The fact that these individuals and organizations are all also advocates of U.S. global hegemony does not diminish their allegiance to Israel or their desire to assure Israel's regional hegemony in alliance with the U.S.

The claimed interchangeability of U.S. and Israeli interests ­ and the fact that certain individuals for whom a primary objective is to advance Israel's interests now reside inside the councils of government ­ proves the truth of the Mearsheimer-Walt's principal conclusion that the lobby has been able to convince most Americans, contrary to reality, that there is an essential identity of U.S. and Israeli interests and that the lobby has succeeded for this reason in forging a relationship of unmatched intimacy. The "overall thrust of policy" in the Middle East, they observe quite accurately, is "almost entirely" attributable to the lobby's activities. The fact that the U.S. occasionally acts without reference to Israel in areas outside the Middle East, and that Israel does occasionally serve U.S. interests rather than the other way around, takes nothing away from the significance of this conclusion.

The tragedy of the present situation is that it has become impossible to separate Israeli from alleged U.S. interests ­ that is, not what should be real U.S. national interests, but the selfish and self-defined "national interests" of the political-corporate-military complex that dominates the Bush administration, Congress, and both major political parties. The specific groups that now dominate the U.S. government are the globalized arms, energy, and financial industries, and the entire military establishments, of the U.S. and of Israel ­ groups that have quite literally hijacked the government and stripped it of most vestiges of democracy.

This convergence of manipulated "interests" has a profound effect on U.S. policy choices in the Middle East. When a government is unable to distinguish its own real needs from those of another state, it can no longer be said that it always acts in its own interests or that it does not frequently do grave damage to those interests. Until the system of sovereign nation-states no longer exists ­ and that day may never come ­ no nation's choices should ever be defined according to the demands of another nation. Accepting a convergence of U.S. and Israeli interests means that the U.S. can never act entirely as its own agent, will never examine its policies and actions entirely from the vantage point of its own long-term self interest, and can, therefore, never know why it is devising and implementing a particular policy. The failure to recognize this reality is where the left critics' belittling of the lobby's power and their acceptance of U.S. Middle East policy as simply an unchangeable part of a longstanding strategy is particularly dangerous.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

In mid-November, Hillary Clinton visited Israel and, following a meeting with Ariel Sharon, in remarks that presaged the praise being heaped on the now-comatose Sharon, began her campaign for president by praising the Israeli as a "courageous" man who had taken "an incredibly difficult" step by withdrawing from Gaza. The withdrawal, she claimed with remarkable disregard for reality, was intended as "a means of demonstrating that he is committed to trying to get back into a process" with the Palestinians. Clinton also stopped for a photo op during her trip, in what constituted an equally monumental lie. She stood on a hilltop inside the Israeli settlement of Gilo, an illegal subdivision populated by 28,000 Israelis on the southern edge of Jerusalem overlooking Bethlehem. Gilo is in occupied Palestinian territory. It was built three decades ago, illegally according to international law, on approximately 700 acres of land confiscated from Palestinian ownership. It is just inside the expanded municipal limits of Jerusalem -- boundaries that Israel redrew when it captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967, then expropriated 25 square miles of Palestinian West Bank territory and annexed it, also illegally according to international law, to Israeli West Jerusalem.

Clinton stood on this spot and, striking an elaborate pose, gazing pensively off to the side, had her photo taken with the 26-foot-high concrete monstrosity that is Israel's separation wall in the near distance behind her. Where she stood, the wall, like Gilo itself, is built on confiscated Palestinian land. On the other side of the wall, in the middle distance, was the dying little town of Bethlehem, now partially encircled by the wall and cut off from Jerusalem, its religious and cultural twin.

Already surrounded by nine Israeli settlements, including Gilo, by a network of roads restricted to Israeli use, and by what the UN estimates are 78 Israeli checkpoints and other physical obstacles to Palestinian movement, Bethlehem has had only limited access to its surroundings for years. Completion of the wall on its northern and western sides, separating it from Jerusalem, is the final closure on Bethlehem's breathing room. A huge terminal went into operation in November, requiring travelers entering and leaving Bethlehem to pass through multiple turnstiles, x-ray scans, and permit checks. Palestinians must have hard-to-obtain permits to leave Bethlehem. The terminal is manned by both Israeli military and civilians. It functions like nothing so much as an international border, except that the guards and soldiers on both sides of this border are Israeli.

If you know Palestine, Clinton's photo-op beggars the imagination. She no doubt knows nothing of the history of the area; she might even be excused for not knowing that Gilo is in occupied territory. But one would like to assume that she is a thinking, feeling human being, able to see at a glance the huge concreteness of the wall and the scar it leaves across the land and across Palestinian humanity. Yet her ability to stand in front of the wall and sing its praises is clear testimony to the power of denial, and the power of politics. Clinton made it clear that she had no intention of visiting "Palestinian areas" -- by which she meant Palestinian areas where Israelis do not yet live -- and her promise was triumphantly repeated in Israeli press coverage of her visit. Her constituents in New York and among Democrats eager for her presidential candidacy were undoubtedly also pleased that she refused to associate with those people, the Palestinians.

The wall, Clinton announced in its shadow, coyly mislabeling it a fence, "is not against the Palestinian people," only against the terrorists. As if she knew. As if she knew anything about the situation on the ground. As if the wall selectively disrupts only the plans of a few terrorists and does not destroy the property, the land, the homes, the livelihoods, the very lives of 500,000 innocent Palestinians. In a statement posted on her website following the trip, Clinton affirmed her "strong" support for Israel's "right" to ensure the safety and security of its citizens and to build a "security barrier to keep terrorists out," and boasted that she had "taken the International Court of Justice to task for questioning Israel's right to build the fence." Apparently, we are supposed to be edified by Clinton's cheek in taking an international court to task. Such steely determination on Israel's behalf plays well in the U.S. political arena, where the utter immorality of the wall is of little import.

Squeezed in Nu'man

What Hillary Clinton does not know about the wall, about the Palestinian lives it affects, about anyone's security, would fill a large volume. Take the little village of Nu'man, whose 200 or so inhabitants have lived throughout the 38 years of Israel's occupation in a strange kind of limbo and are now facing the total destruction of their homes and entire village. We visited Nu'man in September and heard its story from the elderly mother of the village leader and her nephew, a young man who is also a leader in the village.

Nu'man lies a few miles northeast of Bethlehem, not more than five miles as the crow flies from where Clinton stood admiring the wall. Few people in Israel and the U.S. had ever heard of Nu'man until just recently when Ha'artez correspondent Gideon Levy revealed that Israeli Border Police, a notoriously vicious lot, had probably tied a Nu'man resident, father of nine children, to his donkey and then spooked the donkey so that it ran and dragged the helpless man to his death. Although the Border Police deny any culpability, the practice is common enough, according to Palestinians, to have acquired a name, "the donkey procedure." Ha'aretz thought to publish an editorial criticizing Israelis for the kind of apathy that allows this sort of thing to happen frequently to Palestinians without anyone noticing, but the criticism is at least 38 years late.

The small village of Nu'man is in a rural area just inside the municipal limits of Jerusalem, but in 1967 when Israel required all residents of the recently captured territories to register and obtain residency cards, Nu'man's inhabitants were given West Bank IDs, meaning it is illegal for them even to be in Jerusalem -- to be in their homes, to live where they live, to have been born where they were born. This anomaly was never a major problem until the 1990s, at the height of the so-called peace process, when Israel imposed closure on the West Bank and Gaza and required that Palestinians have permits before they could enter Israel, including annexed Jerusalem.

Until this point, Nu'man's children had attended schools in Jerusalem, but eight years ago they were barred from Jerusalem and required to go to school in Bethlehem. Like hundreds of tiny rural villages throughout the West Bank, Nu'man depends on other nearby towns and villages, in this case Bethlehem and surrounding villages, for virtually all vital services -- not only schools, but medical services and groceries. But the village is gradually being squeezed on all sides and cut off from its neighbors. To the north, Jerusalem is no longer accessible. The wall, which encircles the village on the east and south, has separated it from several neighboring villages and, when completed, will cut it off from Bethlehem. On the west, the large Israeli settlement of Har Homa is encroaching on village land. Israeli authorities have informed the village that the settlement intends to expand to a hillside literally only a stone's throw away from Nu'man's homes, all of which have been issued demolition orders.

Israel's contention is that these homes, a few of which have already been demolished, were built without permits. And of course this is true. The village, whose inhabitants are Bedouin, has existed since the early 19th century, well before Israel was created and about a century and a half before Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank in 1967, annexed a large swath of land to Jerusalem, and began imposing its own permit regulations, its own laws, and its own expansionist ambitions on another people. Several years ago, Israel tried to buy Nu'man's land, but the villagers refused. The Israelis then cut off the village's water and electricity, but the people existed on wells and were able to get electricity from Bethlehem. When these steps failed to empty the village, Israel began encircling and squeezing it.

Fatma, the village leader's mother, and her nephew explained all this to us matter-of-factly, with remarkably little emotion. Our friend Ahmad interpreted for us. But near the end of our meeting, Fatma began to tell a long story that we did not at first understand, until tears began to roll down her cheeks as she talked. As Ahmad explained the story, one of Fatma's sons, a lawyer, is married to a woman, also a lawyer, who has a Jerusalem ID card. About a year ago, their five-year-old daughter became ill and Fatma's son went into Jerusalem, carrying his West Bank ID card, to buy medicine for the girl. He was arrested for illegally being in Jerusalem and was held for six months, under Israel's occupation "law," which allows Israel to detain anyone for six-months without bringing charges. The day before Fatma's son was to be released, the Israelis imposed a second six-month sentence, and just two days before we met her, after the family had prepared a welcome-home celebration for him, her son was sentenced for a third six-month period.

While we sat somewhat mute, unable to react adequately to this (typical) example of Israel's nightmarish occupation, Fatma's nephew Yussuf struck a hopeful note. Noting that Nu'man, and the Palestinians in general, have neither airplanes nor tanks nor guns, he said they will fight non-violently. Nu'man's story is getting out, he said -- a Swedish film crew was in the village this very day -- and "maybe this will give us power."

This puts us sadly in mind of a video we recently saw of a group of teenage folk dancers from the Ibdaa Cultural Center at Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem, in which one boy comments that foreigners come all the time to Dheisheh to help the Palestinians, but nothing ever changes. We could not share Yussuf's optimism. Nor did our friend Ahmad, who commented after we left, "It doesn't help if you're a lawyer like her son, or a professor. It only helps if you're a Jew." Harsh but true. Nu'man is not a threat to Israelis. It's just in the way -- in the way of expansion plans for Israeli Jews.

Hillary Clinton will most likely never hear about Nu'man. Even she would have some trouble justifying Nu'man's treatment as something that ensures the "safety and security" of Israelis, so she deliberately chose not to see it, not to see Palestine or Palestinians at all.

Cut Off in Qalqilya

If you're Jewish in Israel or Palestine, or an ambitious whistle-stopping American politician, it is easy not to see the wall. To see it figuratively, you have to be open-minded, a rare quality where seeing Palestinians is involved. To see the huge concrete structure literally, you have to be in Palestinian areas, in East Jerusalem or deeper in the West Bank, so not many Israelis or their political visitors see where the wall cuts a village off from its land, or runs down the middle of a busy commercial street, or cuts directly across a street, or winds through a residential neighborhood, looming right outside the front door of a private home. So hardly anyone except Palestinians and their friends truly knows about the wall. Where it comes near Israeli settlements, as in Gilo, Israelis are able to see it, but usually only on the settlement's outskirts. In the few places where the wall runs along Israel's border, attractive landscaping on Israel's side hides its ugliness from Israelis.

On the Israeli side of Qalqilya, for instance, the principal Palestinian city in the agricultural heart of the West Bank, the wall can barely be seen. Qalqilya sits adjacent to the Green Line, just inside the West Bank, and it used to be an agricultural and commercial center for the area, a place where both Israelis and Palestinians came to shop and do business. But the wall, erected here almost three years ago, encloses the city on three sides and most of the fourth, cutting it off completely from Israel, placing almost 2,000 acres of its land on the Israeli side, and leaving only one road out of the town, to the east. This road was closed except to permit holders until about a year ago. Now it is still controlled by Israeli soldiers and movement is restricted. Israelis can still not come to shop.

Last February, during the usually life-giving winter rainy season, the entire Qalqilya area flooded after seven consecutive days of rain because the concrete wall prevented runoff. Backed-up sewage caused by the wall created a further problem. According to the armistice agreement that established the Green Line between Israel and the West Bank in 1949, Israel provides an outlet to the sea for sewer water from the Qalqilya region. Because the wall has blocked the drainage channels, a system of gates was established to provide for runoff. These are controlled by the Israelis, but Israeli attention to the gates is at best spotty (as is also the case with the gates controlling farmers' access to their land), and during the period of heavy rains and floods, the gates went unmanned for three days. As a result, sewage mixed with flood waters, and an estimated 200 acres of land was polluted, causing a devastating crop loss for hundreds of farm families.

When we met with Qalqilya's deputy mayor, Hashim al-Masri, in September, he described an economically devastated city. Qalqilya once had three principal sources of income, now totally cut off or severely limited by the wall. Approximately 12,000 residents once worked inside Israel; now only about 300 sneak in to work illegally. The town was also an agricultural market center, selling fruits and vegetables to Israelis as well as Palestinians. Now 80 percent of this market has been lost because most of Qalqilya's land is on the Israeli side of the wall. Produce from the Qalqilya fields that ended up on Israel's side of the wall is now being sold all over the West Bank by Israelis, al-Masri said, with the result that what Qalqilya is still able to grow and sell goes very cheaply. Finally, the town was once a business and commercial center for both Israelis and Palestinians, with what al-Masri said was a business capacity more than three times what was needed for the town itself. Now less than 25 percent of that capacity is left. Israelis cannot get into the town, shops are closed, commerce is dying.

Al-Masri estimated that Qalqilya had lost more than 65 percent of its economy. Approximately 12 percent of the residents have left to move farther into the West Bank. The city's distress is evident in streets lined with closed shops, in a market area obviously not thriving, and in the prevalence of donkey carts used for ordinary transport by people unable any longer to afford cars.

Steven Erlanger of the New York Times visited Qalqilya in November, but his principal concern was not what the wall has done to Qalqilya -- he mentioned the "separation barrier" only in passing, as the only thing that separates Qalqilya from the Israeli town of Kfar Sava. He was more interested in the fact that al-Masri and his four fellow members of the city council are all members of Hamas and what this means for Israel. Hamas swept the local elections in June; al-Masri is serving as acting mayor because the mayor, another Hamas man, was elected while in an Israeli prison, where he has been languishing, without charges, for over three years.

"A lot of eyes are fixed on Qalqilya" because both Fatah and Israel are shocked at the Hamas victory, Erlanger wrote earnestly. He went out in search of ordinary Qalqilyans in the market who would discuss al-Masri's performance, and he found enough dissatisfaction with Hamas' restrictive rule to make an article. Erlanger himself was concerned about Hamas' attitude toward Israel, noting early in the article that Hamas "advocates Israel's destruction" and asking al-Masri about what he called the Hamas "commitment" to establishing a Palestinian state in all of Palestine and thereby destroying Israel. Wondering about the kind of threat Hamas might pose to Israel from a small town sitting besieged and helpless behind a massive concrete wall would seem to be a serious upending of reality, certainly out of proportion to any actual danger to Israel. But this was clearly Erlanger's principal concern; he seemed unable to conceive of an Israeli threat to the Palestinians. He mentioned nothing about the floods of February, or the jobs lost to the wall, or the fields left fallow, or the huge agricultural loss, or the general economic strangulation.

Another example, like that of Hillary Clinton, of not seeing the wall even when it and its consequences stare you in the face.

Bil'in: A Sequel

We wrote in September ("Travels in Palestine, Part One: Horror Story,") about meeting with the mayor in the small village of Bil'in; he is actually head of the village council, a man named Ahmad Issa Yassin. Bil'in has lost three-quarters of its land to the separation wall and has staged non-violent anti-wall protests every Friday since February, with the participation of hundreds of Palestinians from Bil'in and nearby villages, Israeli peace activists, and internationals. The protests are continuing even though almost no one in the West or the Western media sees these either, any more than they do in Gilo or Qalqilya. Israel's violent response to the peaceful protests also continues, also more or less unseen.

Steven Erlanger did finally record the protests for the New York Times in October, eight months after they had begun, but he managed to minimize the significance of the protests and of the village's loss of land to the wall. Calling the interplay between protesters and Israeli soldiers "almost joyful" and likening the confrontation to a kabuki dance, Erlanger emphasized that the Israeli military has backed off from its earlier confrontational mode and now only wants to "protect" the "barrier" from the protesters. He quoted an Israeli commander as saying, with a straight face, "We don't want to bother them in the village or the fields" -- as if the wall and the confiscation of the village's agricultural land that it entails are themselves no "bother." In a remarkable verbal circumlocution, Erlanger noted that the Israelis had become concerned that their earlier use of batons, stun grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas against protesters "made it look as if" Israel was repressing dissent. Well, duh. Erlanger did not see fit to interview any Palestinians, not even village leader Yassin.

At about the time Erlanger was making excuses for them, the Israelis began resorting to middle-of-the-night raids to arrest and intimidate village residents. Erlanger did not see these either. Since October, several young men from the village have been seized in the nighttime raids and detained for various periods for "damaging the foundation" of the wall. Two of Ahmad Issa Yassin's nine children are among those arrested during multiple raids on Yassin's house in November. Both sons were among about a dozen fined $200 each and sentenced to four months in jail. One son is 28 years old, married with two children and a third on the way. The other is only 14. We met this boy, Abdullah, in September and thought him even younger -- a smiling, clean-cut boy, who is Yassin's youngest child. He is at Israel's notorious Ofer military detention center.

Bil'in's residents are continuing their struggle undeterred. Just before Christmas, they acquired a trailer and set it up on village land lying on the Israeli side of the wall, proclaiming it an "outpost" of Bil'in, much as wildcatting Israeli settlers establish settlement outposts on nearby hillsides and live there in trailer villages. Israeli soldiers immediately dismantled the Bil'in "outpost," using sledgehammers and a crane, but villagers replaced it with a tent and a few days later moved another trailer onto the same spot and built a small shed to mark their claim. Israeli soldiers removed this trailer too, but the shed remains for now, under threat of demolition.

When we visited him in September, Yassin pointed to his now-jailed son Abdullah and expressed his worry about the kind of future that lay ahead for his children and grandchildren, and for the future of an entire village being strangled by Israel. Yassin himself is without a job or a livelihood, having lost his permit to work in Israel when the intifada began in 2000 and now having lost his productive olive trees to the wall. We gave him a button carrying a quote from Howard Zinn: "There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Yassin was quite taken with the quote and asked if we had more of the buttons that he could pass out. "We are people who want a future to live in peace," he said. "We don't want war and blood and killing."

But Bil'in is in the way of Israel's plans, and in the West Bank that's all that counts. Until Israeli leaders and the American politicians who toady to them begin to see what is happening right before their eyes, begin to see the human lives that they and their occupations and their walls are destroying, nothing will change. Ahmad Issa Yassin's children will remain in jail.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. 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.

Every so often, the usually even-tempered Ahmad bursts forth with an exclamation of deep anger, almost startling in its intensity. He is talking about the confiscation of vast tracts of land belonging to West Bank Palestinian villages for construction of Israel's separation wall and to provide lebensraum for the network of Israeli settlements throughout Palestinian land. "Why you want to put your shit in my salon?" he exclaims. Then he catches himself. "Sorry for the language, but sometimes it gets on my nerves."

"Gets on my nerves" is quite an understatement. Although Ahmad is talking figuratively, of Israeli settlements and Israeli walls and -- something you don't usually hear about -- Israeli trash dumps throughout the West Bank, scarring the landscape and invading Palestinian space, the reference to what is being dumped in the Palestinian salon applies literally as well as figuratively in the small village of Wadi Fuqin southwest of Bethlehem. A large settlement, Betar Illit, looms over this village and has on two occasions quite literally dumped its sewage down into the fertile valley where the village's life-sustaining agricultural land lies. That's sewage from a settlement of 25,000 poured onto a village of 1,200.

Located exactly on the Green Line marking Israel's pre-1967 border, Wadi Fuqin is a long narrow oasis between high ridge lines, about to be squeezed from both sides by Israeli encroachment. The Green Line is on the western side, atop one ridge. The hillside here is covered by olive groves, but the Israelis will soon start construction of the separation wall here, meaning the destruction of hundreds of olive trees. This is despite the fact that Wadi Fuqin has had good relations with the nearby Israeli town throughout the 38 years of the occupation. On the eastern side, the burgeoning Israeli settlement of Betar Illit looks down on the village, pushing in from the other side.

Wadi Fuqin could once claim 12,000 dunams (some of the old-timers say it was 17,000) but lost everything except 3,000 dunams (about 750 acres) to Israel in 1948. Now it has lost another 1,000 dunams to Betar Illit, and it will lose still more land to the wall. We approach from the north, gradually descending the surrounding hills, past Betar Illit, and come to a high point where we can look down to the valley, lying bright green below. The place is like a garden. Stretched out over two miles, the valley is a neat patchwork of small orchards, right now producing pomegranates and figs; vegetable plots of cucumbers, cabbages, herbs, squashes; and well tended olive groves. Brilliant bougainevillea drape the walls around many houses. Fields are fed by five natural springs, dating back to Roman times. Collection pools for irrigation water, constantly replenished from the springs, lie alongside the road throughout the village. Those who have been spreading the myth for decades that only the Israelis have made the desert bloom would be a bit chagrined.

We pick figs and a farmer gives us cucumbers right off the vine as we walk through town. Farther along, school is just letting out, the children dressed neatly in school uniforms even in this tiny place. At one spot, several kids, probably eight or nine years old, are using one of the pools as a swimming hole. Only the boys dive in, but several girls stand around the pool laughing with the boys. They are all delighted to have their pictures taken and show off for our benefit.

The nearly idyllic scene is marred halfway up the hillside toward Betar Illit, where the Israelis have dumped all the construction debris from the settlement. Although it began as a small settlement twenty years ago, Betar Illit has grown rapidly, its population expanding by 50 percent, in the last five years. So much debris has been cleared to make room for the settlement's large apartment blocks that the contours of the ridge line have changed over the years, encroaching dramatically on Wadi Fuqin and its fields. In one long stretch, the Israelis have built a makeshift retaining wall of huge boulders, rather precariously settled at the bottom of the hillside, all on top of Wadi Fuqin's agricultural fields, to hold the dirt, rocks, and other debris from settlement construction.

Near the top of the new ridge line at one spot is a very evident large-diameter sewage pipe. The village leader who shows us around says that twice in the last few years, the settlement has experienced some kind of overflow problem and has poured sewage onto the field below. Now the only part of the village not blooming, the field below has obviously been polluted. The pipe is still there, ready for other Israeli "emergencies."

It's Everywhere

Much of the spectacular landscape of Palestine is so beautiful it takes your breath away. Wadi Fuqin is one of the breathtaking places in the southern West Bank, where the hills of the central range open up to a rich landscape of vineyards and fruit trees and fields of vegetables in the wide valleys between hillsides. Farther north, the mountains and steep valleys and endless terraced olive groves form a serene landscape, dotted with small villages of white stone houses and tall minarets. In the east, the desert hills unfold in gentle, pastel-colored undulations. Israeli debris is increasingly scarring this landscape everywhere.

Israeli construction on a massive scale is changing the pastoral landscape of Palestine in striking ways, intruding on the Palestinian salon. Large settlements spill down hillsides, looking like crusader castles. (They are not particularly unattractive, if their identical concrete-block style happens to please you -- the red-tile roofs give them a Mediterranean flair -- but their massiveness and the regimentation of the large apartment blocs very noticeably change the character of the pastoral terrain.) Wide highways, meant to connect the settlements and avoid the need for Israelis to pass through or near Palestinian towns, and accessible only to those with Israeli license plates, make sweeping cuts in the land. Outside Jerusalem, where Israel is planning to link the huge settlement of Maale Adumim to the city, vast expanses of the steep hillsides and wadis that once made this a place of spectacular unspoiled beauty have been cleared of trees and rocks in preparation for building roads and housing -- a grim urbanization of a peaceful landscape.

The separation wall is the most oppressive. Over 400 miles long when all its twists and loops are completed, the wall appears seemingly everywhere, on that hillside, around this corner. It is ugly, it is destructive. Where it is a concrete wall, it is dull gray, lacking any design, and lumpish, a bit of urban blight slashing through city neighborhoods. Where it is a fence, its combination of electronically monitored chain link, razor wire, and trenches and patrol roads bulldozed through destroyed agricultural land make it look exactly like the hostile border marker that it is. Hardly the "good fence" that Israel and its American supporters are trying to portray, it is altogether an ugly gash in the landscape, visible at great distances. (Where the wall is on or near the Green Line and Israelis might actually have to see it from their side, it has been hidden more or less completely with neatly landscaped mounds of earth that reach almost to the top.) Although Israel's friends defend the barrier by noting that a major portion is a fence rather than a concrete wall, it is -- and is intended to be -- totally impenetrable, and one part is no more or less destructive than any other. Although they claim it is temporary and easily removable if only the Palestinians will behave, the wall, whether concrete or fence, has destroyed homes, land, and the very essence of the landscape that cannot ever be restored.

Destruction accompanies all of this building of walls and settlements. In addition to vast landscapes excavated, urbanized, and polluted, there is a helter-skelter of debris. Mounds of construction junk like the one hovering over Wadi Fuqin are everywhere, creating new hillsides in some places, evident in small piles on roadsides elsewhere. In one place near a settlement under construction, you see the remnants of spilled cement and torn cement sacks, obviously with Hebrew lettering. Elsewhere, you come across olive groves and agricultural fields strewn with boulders that local Palestinians say have been excavated from settlement construction sites and simply dumped there throughout the fields. In other places, the roads are littered with rusted cars, many with Hebrew lettering that gives away their origins.

Trash disposal is a major problem throughout the West Bank. In the town of Anata, for instance, which lies almost entirely in a section of the West Bank totally controlled by Israel, just outside Jerusalem, there is little or no trash pick-up for the town's 9,000 residents. Anata bought one garbage truck a few years ago with donations from the EU, but the nearest dump is in another town, through several checkpoints and on the other side of the wall from Anata, so trash and garbage are burned or simply piled up. The large city of Ramallah and its suburb of al-Bireh are facing a near-term crisis. Israelis authorities have informed the two municipalities, which together have a population of approximately 85,000, that the solid waste landfill they have been using for the last several years, which was originally built to serve a population of 100,000, will be closed to the Palestinians at the beginning of 2006, although it will remain open for Israelis from the nearby settlement of Psagot. Israeli authorities closed the landfill to Palestinians for a couple of years at the start of the intifada in 2000, forcing Ramallah and al-Bireh first to reopen an old landfill that had been abandoned because it was overloaded and, when that became so totally overburdened that it posed environmental risks to the municipalities, to halt trash pick-up altogether until the usable landfill was finally reopened. The towns will have no alternative if this landfill is again closed to them.

These are only a few examples of a critical environmental situation throughout the West Bank. A recent devastating analysis of widespread ecological destruction, written by dissident Israeli environmentalist Ethan Ganor and published in Earth First! Journal, reports that waste from unregulated settlement factories that produce aluminum, plastics, fiberglass, batteries, and pesticides pollutes the land and the water. Wastewater from a large complex of 80 Israeli factories in the northern West Bank is discharged into a wadi, polluting Palestinian farmland in several nearby villages. Garbage from Israel has for years been dumped in a Palestinian quarry near Nablus, causing great demonstrable damage to groundwater and plant life. Early this year, Israeli settlers near Hebron poisoned fields used by Palestinians to graze flocks of sheep; an extremely toxic rodenticide manufactured only in Israel was found strewn across a wide area, causing the death of dozens of sheep and goats and affecting an array of birds and wildlife. Ganor concludes that "From the Jordan River Valley and Dead Sea Basin, through the central highlands comprising the West Bank's populated core, to the fertile western hills bordering Israel . . . a labyrinth of settlements, industrial zones, dumps, military camps, fortified roads, electrified fences and a massive concrete wall . . . is draining the life from this ancient land . . . causing the West Bank's once-lush ecology to deteriorate. The cumulative impact on the land's hydrology, topsoil, biodiversity, food security and natural beauty is severe."

The injustice is overpowering. There is no acceptable answer to Ahmad's question about why this is happening in the Palestinians' salon.

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: christison@counterpunch.org

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch's history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. They can be reached at christison@counterpunch.org.