Sydney rally against Israeli aggression 22-7-06

long live Lebanon  peace in the Middle East

long live Lebanon  peace in the Middle East

The aljazeerah that Faruque links to is not the TV station. It is the home of lovely articles like this one:

http://www.aljazeerah.info/27%20o/Hezbollah%20Model%20for%20Manliness%20By%20Joanna%20Francis.htm

Rome conference on Lebanon

Appeasement 2006: Europe capitulates to
American-Israeli aggression

The international conference in Rome held Wednesday to
address the crisis precipitated by the Israeli attack
on Lebanon ended without a call for a ceasefire.
According to numerous press accounts, US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice stood virtually alone in
opposing any language in the conference statement
suggesting that the Israeli onslaught, which has
already caused close to 500 civilian deaths and
destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, should
be ended any time soon.

According to the International Herald Tribune:
“European and Arab governments, as well as Secretary
General Kofi Annan of the United Nations and Javier
Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, also
had pushed hard for an immediate cease-fire, but lost
as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dug in. She
stuck to the position that agreement on an ‘enduring
peace’ had to be in place before the parties were
called to stop fighting.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, attending the
meeting along with senior diplomats from the US,
Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, Russia,
Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as
well as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan,
delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech to urge
an immediate halt to hostilities.

Sinoria asked: “Is the value of human life less in
Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we
children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth
more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

Saying his country was being “cut to pieces” by
Israel, he vowed to begin legal proceedings against
Israel, implying that Israel was guilty of war crimes
and saying he would seek war reparations for “the
barbaric destruction that [Israel] has inflicted on
us.” He ended his remarks with a quote from the Roman
historian Tacitus, which he said describes what Israel
is doing to Lebanon today. “They created a desolation
and call it peace.”

According to one press report, diplomats said there
was visible emotion around the room after Siniora’s
comments. Rice, however, was not moved. At a press
conference following the meeting, she mentioned in
passing Siniora’s “very impassioned” speech, and went
on to reiterate her opposition to a suspension of
Israeli attacks on Lebanese cities, towns and
villages, as well as her insistence that the purpose
of any international force in southern Lebanon would
be to disarm Hezbollah.

The Rome conference demonstrated both the lawlessness
of the US and the impotence of the European
governments. Everyone in the meeting room knew full
well what Israel and the US were up to in Lebanon.
Only the day before, Israel had fired a precision
missile at a long-standing and plainly marked United
Nations post on the Lebanese side of the border,
killing four UN monitors.

Rice’s role at the conference made crystal clear that
the war is being waged by Israel, but the US is the
power pulling the strings.

Yet not one of the participants had the principle or
courage to stand up to Rice. Why was there no
ceasefire resolution? Because the US was against it
and the US had the only vote that counted.

The entire European bourgeoisie, and the United
Nations as well, once again demonstrated their
impotence in the face of US imperialism. Europe is
prepared to defy the US when it comes to matters of
trade—that is, to haggle over money—but in the face of
massive and historic crimes it exhibits complete
cowardice. It is, in fact, complicit in these crimes.

This is true of all sides and shades of the official
political spectrum—so-called “left” governments and
parties no less than their right-wing counterparts.
Thus the Italian center-left government of Romano
Prodi, which includes in its coalition two parties
that arose out of the shambles of the Italian
Communist Party—the Democratic Party of the Left and
Communist Refoundation—agreed to host the meeting,
which was set up at Washington’s request to
rubberstamp the US-Israeli war policy. Massimo
D’Alema, a veteran of the Communist Party and current
foreign minister, was particularly obsequious toward
the American secretary of state.

Then there was the spectacle of Kofi Annan, who had
the day before accused Israel of deliberately
targeting his UN monitors, sitting beside Rice and
announcing his acceptance of Israel’s perfunctory and
cynical apology.

The brutal US-backed war against Lebanon, and the
unwillingness or inability of the other major powers
to oppose it, mark a milestone in the breakup of the
post-World War II framework of international law. The
world is witnessing once again a descent into the type
of untrammeled imperialist lawlessness and violence
that characterized the 1930s and culminated in the
second world war of the twentieth century.

Siniora’s futile plea to the Rome meeting recalls a
similar event that occurred almost exactly 70 years
ago: the speech of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie
before the League of Nations in June of 1936. Selassie
appealed to the world body to halt the bloody invasion
of his country by fascist Italy, but the League of
Nations did nothing.

Whereas in that period it was the drive of Japan for
regional dominance in Asia and of Germany for
domination over Europe that spearheaded the onset of a
global catastrophe, today the role of chief aggressor
is played by the United States, which is bent on
establishing hegemony over the entire world. For
Washington, the reorganization of the Middle East and
Central Asia is a critical component of this quest for
global supremacy. The American ruling elite sees
Israel’s striving for regional dominance as something
it can utilize in realizing its own grand, and
demented, design.

For decades following the Second World War, the
capitulation of the major powers to German imperialism
in the 1930s—their refusal to respond to the Nazis’
flagrant and violent assaults on international law—was
condemned as “appeasement.” But the same pattern has
reemerged no less forcefully today, in the form of
Europe’s appeasement of the United States.

The outcome of the Rome conference underscores the
fact that the United States is seeking to settle the
crisis in Lebanon on the basis of the military
destruction of Hezbollah. This is part of a deliberate
and long-standing plan worked out between the US and
Israel to destroy all popular resistance in Lebanon to
US domination of that country, to be effected by
turning it into a virtual protectorate of Israel.

The suppression of Hezbollah, considered by Washington
to be allied with Syria and Iran, is, in turn, seen as
critical to American imperialism’s goal of eliminating
those two regimes, which are deemed obstacles to US
domination of the oil-rich Middle East and Central
Asia.

Hezbollah’s July 12 border raid, in which two Israeli
soldiers were captured, was merely the pretext for
setting this imperialist operation into motion.

These facts are being systematically and deliberately
obscured by a media propaganda blitz which aims to
turn reality on its head, presenting the aggressors as
the victims and the victims as the war-mongers. Terms
are stripped of their real meaning and used to confuse
and conceal, rather than inform.

Thus, “diplomacy” is applied to the US government’s
policy of issuing ultimatums and demanding that
Hezbollah and Lebanon accede to the war aims of
Washington and Jerusalem, under threat of
annihilation. Rice’s mission to the Middle East and
Europe, whose first and foremost purpose was to keep
the war going and give Israel as much time as possible
to wipe out the Lebanese resistance—as well as the
Palestinian resistance in Gaza—is described as a
“peace” mission.

The ubiquitous term “terrorist” is applied to all
those who resist US and Israeli domination. What else,
however, is Israel doing with its military onslaught
but terrorizing the Lebanese people?

It is by now increasingly obvious that the term
“terrorist” is flung against whomever the United
States chooses at any given point to target for
political subversion or military attack. Once the
label has been applied, all further discussion of the
history, policies or social makeup of the country or
group so branded is treated as illegitimate. The US
government can always rely on a supine and compliant
media to demonize the latest “terrorist threat,” even
when the targeted organization or country was not so
long before one of the “good guys.”

In the current case, the absurdity of this all-purpose
propaganda gambit is underscored by the fact that
Hezbollah is a bitter political opponent of Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda.

All of this is designed to prevent the American people
from grasping the lawless and bloody character of US
foreign policy—a policy that is supported by the
entire political establishment, the Democrats no less
than the Republicans. It is difficult for broad masses
of people to grasp fully the scale of American and
Israeli violence, and the brazen character of their
aggression.

For decades the US postured as the defender of
international law. In the post-World War II period, it
generally supported ceasefires in regional conflicts,
something that was considered the basic precondition
for a negotiated political settlement.

That period is over. What increasingly predominates is
the unrestrained assertion of imperialist ambitions,
in which the United States plays the leading role.
That is the essential significance of the Bush
administration’s doctrine of preemptive war. As the
current slaughter in Lebanon demonstrates, for the
American ruling elite war is not only a legitimate
tool of foreign policy, it is the preferred means of
asserting its interests.

The problem that the US and Israel face in their
current offensive is that they underestimated the
depth of resistance in Lebanon. The Israeli military,
armed to the teeth by the US, has suffered
considerable casualties in its ground operations in
southern Lebanon, where it faces a determined and
disciplined opponent in Hezbollah, one, moreover, that
enjoys mass popular support.

The plans of the US and Israel for a short, bloody war
have evaporated. However, that only increases the
likelihood that Israel, at the urging of the US, will
carry out a colossal intensification of violence in
Lebanon. This has already been signaled by Israel’s
deliberate bombing of the UN monitoring post.

Neither the US nor Israel can afford a military
quagmire that punctures the myth of Israeli
invincibility. Such a development would encourage the
popular resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout
the Middle East and Central Asia, placing in doubt not
only Israel’s regional supremacy, but the existence of
the Arab bourgeois regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and
Egypt upon which both the US and Israel rely.

It would have no less explosive consequences within
Israel itself. The effort of the Israeli ruling elite
to hold the working masses in thrall with the
supposedly omnipresent threat of annihilation by the
Arabs is complimented by the depiction of the Israeli
military as the only guarantee of survival. A serious
crack in that image could provide an outlet for social
tensions that are simmering just beneath the surface
of one of the most economically polarized societies in
the world.

There are already signs of mounting opposition within
Israel to the current war, and that opposition will
grow not only as a result of the rising toll of
Israeli military and civilian deaths, but also as
Israeli workers and youth begin to comprehend the
scale of the havoc, chaos and death being inflicted on
the Lebanese people in their name.

The great and tragic lesson of the 1930s was that the
catastrophe of war could not be averted by appealing
to one or another imperialist power, or allying with
the bourgeoisie of any nation, but only through the
revolutionary mobilization of the working people
against militarism and the capitalist system that
breeds it.

The only force that can prevent another global
catastrophe is the international working class. Today,
once again, this lesson comes to the fore, and it must
become the basis for the building of a new
international socialist movement of the working class.

Israeli Cowards

Israeli cowards have been using F18s, Apache helicopters, tanks, machine guns, cruise missiles, naval ships etc. etc. against kids in kindergartens and frail old women residing in nursing homes! These disgusting Israelis have been crossing the borders of Lebanon and the occupied Palestine to murder innocent civilians and kidnapping thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians for a long long time. Ironically the wider world population under the Zionist feet are too scared to say anything against Nazi Zionist Israel. Such silence and lack of opposition to these war crimes and genocides makes all of us guilty.    

The Hezbollah captured two Israeli terrorists inside the Lebanese territory and therefore they have acted properly and correctly to defend their own homeland. I think, only a love child of Adolph Hitler would invent a reason to condemn the Hezbollah rather than Nazi Zionist Israeli Terrorists and their supporters and sympathisers. Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s latest media release supporting Israeli aggressions in Lebanon and Gaza under the false pretext of the capture of two Israeli terrorists from Israel is factually incorrect and morally repugnant.      

War criminal Israelis also bombed ambulances, hospitals, mosques, power plants, water treatment plants, sewerage treatment plants, roads, bridges, schools and many many types of civilian infra structures. Their recent cruel and deliberate murders of several United Nation officials are not a new phenomenon. Because the wider world in general is under Israel’s feet and thoroughly zionised! Like all other occasions, Israeli war crimes and genocides will be rewarded on this occasion too!       

Recent United Zionist States of America and Zionised United Kingdom sponsored barbaric atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon is making it easier for Bin Laden and his types.  They have been looking for faster computers to process new and eager recruits across religions and regions! Everyone knows, “America is under Israel’s feet”. They also know that the corporate governments of USA, UK and Australia would sell and kill their own children for their Zionist masters! They also do not differentiate between Christians and Muslims! “If you are an Arab and not Israeli or an Israelite, then you may be worthy to be disposed of.”

Remember, Israel not only received the green light to start and continue its barbaric war crimes and genocides! Israel has been financed and even fuelled by the “peace loving West”!! Surely, Hitler is laughing in his grave.      

Beside the Similarities Between Nazis and Israelis one must look at the alternative peace proposals for the Middle East. The traditional diplomats, statesmen, experts have been trying to make peace in the Middle East and they failed miserably! Therefore, we have to look for some new ideas and alternative ways to bring real and lasting peace in this region. As an example, Israel has demonstrated the fact that it does not understand the language of peace and for whatever reasons or grounds it has became a law unto itself.

In such a scenario, arming the people of Lebanon and Palestine is a pragmatic proposition as such a situation would compel all parties to sit down and work out a peaceful way forward for their own existence. In recent history the Pakistani nuclear bomb was used to ensure peace between India and Pakistan. Similarly, as a consequence of the illegal and immoral invasion of Iraq North Korea became nuclear for it’s own safety and survival.               

Remember, Hitler invaded Poland because “the Polish government failed to stop cross border incursions in Germany”! Now, we have Israel invading Lebanon for the same types of cross border incursions in a similar way to what Hitler claimed.

Rome conference on Lebanon

Appeasement 2006: Europe capitulates to
American-Israeli aggression

The international conference in Rome held Wednesday to
address the crisis precipitated by the Israeli attack
on Lebanon ended without a call for a ceasefire.
According to numerous press accounts, US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice stood virtually alone in
opposing any language in the conference statement
suggesting that the Israeli onslaught, which has
already caused close to 500 civilian deaths and
destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, should
be ended any time soon.

According to the International Herald Tribune:
“European and Arab governments, as well as Secretary
General Kofi Annan of the United Nations and Javier
Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, also
had pushed hard for an immediate cease-fire, but lost
as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice dug in. She
stuck to the position that agreement on an ‘enduring
peace’ had to be in place before the parties were
called to stop fighting.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, attending the
meeting along with senior diplomats from the US,
Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Canada, Russia,
Turkey, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, as
well as United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan,
delivered an impassioned and eloquent speech to urge
an immediate halt to hostilities.

Sinoria asked: “Is the value of human life less in
Lebanon than that of citizens elsewhere? Are we
children of a lesser God? Is an Israeli teardrop worth
more than a drop of Lebanese blood?”

Saying his country was being “cut to pieces” by
Israel, he vowed to begin legal proceedings against
Israel, implying that Israel was guilty of war crimes
and saying he would seek war reparations for “the
barbaric destruction that [Israel] has inflicted on
us.” He ended his remarks with a quote from the Roman
historian Tacitus, which he said describes what Israel
is doing to Lebanon today. “They created a desolation
and call it peace.”

According to one press report, diplomats said there
was visible emotion around the room after Siniora’s
comments. Rice, however, was not moved. At a press
conference following the meeting, she mentioned in
passing Siniora’s “very impassioned” speech, and went
on to reiterate her opposition to a suspension of
Israeli attacks on Lebanese cities, towns and
villages, as well as her insistence that the purpose
of any international force in southern Lebanon would
be to disarm Hezbollah.

The Rome conference demonstrated both the lawlessness
of the US and the impotence of the European
governments. Everyone in the meeting room knew full
well what Israel and the US were up to in Lebanon.
Only the day before, Israel had fired a precision
missile at a long-standing and plainly marked United
Nations post on the Lebanese side of the border,
killing four UN monitors.

Rice’s role at the conference made crystal clear that
the war is being waged by Israel, but the US is the
power pulling the strings.

Yet not one of the participants had the principle or
courage to stand up to Rice. Why was there no
ceasefire resolution? Because the US was against it
and the US had the only vote that counted.

The entire European bourgeoisie, and the United
Nations as well, once again demonstrated their
impotence in the face of US imperialism. Europe is
prepared to defy the US when it comes to matters of
trade—that is, to haggle over money—but in the face of
massive and historic crimes it exhibits complete
cowardice. It is, in fact, complicit in these crimes.

This is true of all sides and shades of the official
political spectrum—so-called “left” governments and
parties no less than their right-wing counterparts.
Thus the Italian center-left government of Romano
Prodi, which includes in its coalition two parties
that arose out of the shambles of the Italian
Communist Party—the Democratic Party of the Left and
Communist Refoundation—agreed to host the meeting,
which was set up at Washington’s request to
rubberstamp the US-Israeli war policy. Massimo
D’Alema, a veteran of the Communist Party and current
foreign minister, was particularly obsequious toward
the American secretary of state.

Then there was the spectacle of Kofi Annan, who had
the day before accused Israel of deliberately
targeting his UN monitors, sitting beside Rice and
announcing his acceptance of Israel’s perfunctory and
cynical apology.

The brutal US-backed war against Lebanon, and the
unwillingness or inability of the other major powers
to oppose it, mark a milestone in the breakup of the
post-World War II framework of international law. The
world is witnessing once again a descent into the type
of untrammeled imperialist lawlessness and violence
that characterized the 1930s and culminated in the
second world war of the twentieth century.

Siniora’s futile plea to the Rome meeting recalls a
similar event that occurred almost exactly 70 years
ago: the speech of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie
before the League of Nations in June of 1936. Selassie
appealed to the world body to halt the bloody invasion
of his country by fascist Italy, but the League of
Nations did nothing.

Whereas in that period it was the drive of Japan for
regional dominance in Asia and of Germany for
domination over Europe that spearheaded the onset of a
global catastrophe, today the role of chief aggressor
is played by the United States, which is bent on
establishing hegemony over the entire world. For
Washington, the reorganization of the Middle East and
Central Asia is a critical component of this quest for
global supremacy. The American ruling elite sees
Israel’s striving for regional dominance as something
it can utilize in realizing its own grand, and
demented, design.

For decades following the Second World War, the
capitulation of the major powers to German imperialism
in the 1930s—their refusal to respond to the Nazis’
flagrant and violent assaults on international law—was
condemned as “appeasement.” But the same pattern has
reemerged no less forcefully today, in the form of
Europe’s appeasement of the United States.

The outcome of the Rome conference underscores the
fact that the United States is seeking to settle the
crisis in Lebanon on the basis of the military
destruction of Hezbollah. This is part of a deliberate
and long-standing plan worked out between the US and
Israel to destroy all popular resistance in Lebanon to
US domination of that country, to be effected by
turning it into a virtual protectorate of Israel.

The suppression of Hezbollah, considered by Washington
to be allied with Syria and Iran, is, in turn, seen as
critical to American imperialism’s goal of eliminating
those two regimes, which are deemed obstacles to US
domination of the oil-rich Middle East and Central
Asia.

Hezbollah’s July 12 border raid, in which two Israeli
soldiers were captured, was merely the pretext for
setting this imperialist operation into motion.

These facts are being systematically and deliberately
obscured by a media propaganda blitz which aims to
turn reality on its head, presenting the aggressors as
the victims and the victims as the war-mongers. Terms
are stripped of their real meaning and used to confuse
and conceal, rather than inform.

Thus, “diplomacy” is applied to the US government’s
policy of issuing ultimatums and demanding that
Hezbollah and Lebanon accede to the war aims of
Washington and Jerusalem, under threat of
annihilation. Rice’s mission to the Middle East and
Europe, whose first and foremost purpose was to keep
the war going and give Israel as much time as possible
to wipe out the Lebanese resistance—as well as the
Palestinian resistance in Gaza—is described as a
“peace” mission.

The ubiquitous term “terrorist” is applied to all
those who resist US and Israeli domination. What else,
however, is Israel doing with its military onslaught
but terrorizing the Lebanese people?

It is by now increasingly obvious that the term
“terrorist” is flung against whomever the United
States chooses at any given point to target for
political subversion or military attack. Once the
label has been applied, all further discussion of the
history, policies or social makeup of the country or
group so branded is treated as illegitimate. The US
government can always rely on a supine and compliant
media to demonize the latest “terrorist threat,” even
when the targeted organization or country was not so
long before one of the “good guys.”

In the current case, the absurdity of this all-purpose
propaganda gambit is underscored by the fact that
Hezbollah is a bitter political opponent of Osama bin
Laden and Al Qaeda.

All of this is designed to prevent the American people
from grasping the lawless and bloody character of US
foreign policy—a policy that is supported by the
entire political establishment, the Democrats no less
than the Republicans. It is difficult for broad masses
of people to grasp fully the scale of American and
Israeli violence, and the brazen character of their
aggression.

For decades the US postured as the defender of
international law. In the post-World War II period, it
generally supported ceasefires in regional conflicts,
something that was considered the basic precondition
for a negotiated political settlement.

That period is over. What increasingly predominates is
the unrestrained assertion of imperialist ambitions,
in which the United States plays the leading role.
That is the essential significance of the Bush
administration’s doctrine of preemptive war. As the
current slaughter in Lebanon demonstrates, for the
American ruling elite war is not only a legitimate
tool of foreign policy, it is the preferred means of
asserting its interests.

The problem that the US and Israel face in their
current offensive is that they underestimated the
depth of resistance in Lebanon. The Israeli military,
armed to the teeth by the US, has suffered
considerable casualties in its ground operations in
southern Lebanon, where it faces a determined and
disciplined opponent in Hezbollah, one, moreover, that
enjoys mass popular support.

The plans of the US and Israel for a short, bloody war
have evaporated. However, that only increases the
likelihood that Israel, at the urging of the US, will
carry out a colossal intensification of violence in
Lebanon. This has already been signaled by Israel’s
deliberate bombing of the UN monitoring post.

Neither the US nor Israel can afford a military
quagmire that punctures the myth of Israeli
invincibility. Such a development would encourage the
popular resistance in Iraq, Afghanistan and throughout
the Middle East and Central Asia, placing in doubt not
only Israel’s regional supremacy, but the existence of
the Arab bourgeois regimes in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and
Egypt upon which both the US and Israel rely.

It would have no less explosive consequences within
Israel itself. The effort of the Israeli ruling elite
to hold the working masses in thrall with the
supposedly omnipresent threat of annihilation by the
Arabs is complimented by the depiction of the Israeli
military as the only guarantee of survival. A serious
crack in that image could provide an outlet for social
tensions that are simmering just beneath the surface
of one of the most economically polarized societies in
the world.

There are already signs of mounting opposition within
Israel to the current war, and that opposition will
grow not only as a result of the rising toll of
Israeli military and civilian deaths, but also as
Israeli workers and youth begin to comprehend the
scale of the havoc, chaos and death being inflicted on
the Lebanese people in their name.

The great and tragic lesson of the 1930s was that the
catastrophe of war could not be averted by appealing
to one or another imperialist power, or allying with
the bourgeoisie of any nation, but only through the
revolutionary mobilization of the working people
against militarism and the capitalist system that
breeds it.

The only force that can prevent another global
catastrophe is the international working class. Today,
once again, this lesson comes to the fore, and it must
become the basis for the building of a new
international socialist movement of the working class.

i hope that all the jewish people would at least give the palestinies a good time and let them have there own freedom and that everyone would live a peace and nice life because no one knows when the day of judgement would come and everyone would be punishet 4 wut they did in there life

The arabs are reasonable, gentle educated people, if the jews had their way we would be all living in prisons & be tattoed, its getting that way with media, computers mobile phones, your foxtel & a variety of other crap we are bombardered with, perhaps hitler didn't do a good enough job & he was really right all along, basically the idea is to live simply, after germany lost the war it became a place of corporate buildings & it lost its fairy tale village atmosphere.

Many parts of the middle east are beautiful. they might not have all the brand names & all that junkfood but they live well & have good lives, mussolini warned against the rise of the corporate state & how it could imprison humanity & hitler listened to him closely.. does everything have to be made in big factories, whats wrong with small factories, what about small business as opposed to multinational business.

The arabs are a gentle, educated people who enjoy to live life simply, mussolini warned hitler about the rise of the corporate state & hitler listened closely & instigated the holocaust to stop the jews from achieving their crazy goals of world domination, it was a shame that germany lost the war & germany became a horrible corporate state after the war & lost its fairytale village atmosphere. If the jews had their way we would be all living in prisons & be tattoed & forced fed junkfood while being brainwashed by foxtel, internet & our only contact with other humans would be via sms & all woman would have to buy their sperm from the sperm bank.

This is slightly ridiculous. It's not as though Israel is surrounded by Mahatma Gandhi type pacifists. A lot of Israelis also disagree with much of the policy coming from the top, but, like you and me, what can they *really* do about it? A two state solution is nuts. It won't work. I'm not a right-wing fruitcake but I really think a transfer (like that between India and Pakistan) is probably the best solution to this problem. With a massive Marshall aid type plan to help Palestinians settle in Jordan etc. Israel does need to reign in the religious wackos who want to go beyond the Jordan but an annexation of the territories is a good idea.  The thing is, they have to be decisive about it and not try to do it sneakily or brutally (like the Nazis with Cazechoslovkia and Poland).  It's not in Israel's interests though to try and pit the Christian world against the Muslim world. A lot of people have woken up to what some extremists are up to vis-a-vis this and the only result can be/will be this huge, horrible antisemitic backlash. Then again, sometimes I think that is what they want so that everyone in the diaspora will have no choice but to move to Israel.