Martin Gibson, with all due respect to you sir, and I hear
your anger and acknowledge it, I think that there it's important
to weigh different points of view about Israel.

I believe, for example, as he has stated himself,Noam Chomsky is
not opposed to Zionism. Far from it. He advocates what it represented in the beginning.

I am not opposed to Israel in any way shape or
form and it's in this spirit that I feel compelled to disagree
with Sharon and Likud because I would feel terrible about Israel
destroying itself through beligerence and intolerence.

The important issue for me is that an Israeli expansion and
hegemony will only produce more suicide bombers. I applaud the
vitality and culture of the Sabra and have enjoyed Israeli music
by many of it's composers as well as my association with Israelis, themselves. It's in this spirit that I care very much
about Israel and it's people and don't want to see it become
a vehicle for repression and being taken over by "warlords".

I can't imagine anything except that the bulk of Israelis want
to live in peace with Palestinians and not be perpetually at war.
It doesn't serve Israeli leaders to be "hawkish" in a time
when nuclear proliferation is a fact of life and mankind has
developed a technical war machine capable of obliterating the
earth.

The way out of the dilemma is for both warring parties to accept
the responsibility for their actions. At the present time, I don't believe the US under Bush can be an honest broker.

I think that a model however impractical it seems at the present
is a vision for some time in the future. A single unified country
where diverse religions can practice in peace, free from animosity
and intolerance, where the rights of Jews are respected and the
Palestinian can be elevated from the status of second-class
citizenship.

One of the ways out of the box is to visualize (and I think
quite correctly) that Muslims differ in their practices as
much as Christians and Jews do in the United States. The
"Intafada" for example is different than the interpretation given to
the other "jihads" in other Muslim countries.

Hamas, as CarolC has pointed out is not the only faction of
Palestinian culture. Much of it is religion as applied politics
rather than the other way around. The heavenly reward is
due to saving the land rather than the religion per se.

I think we ought to step back and examine very closely the two
conflicting cultures so that all preconceived notions about who
is right or wrong is tempered by information.

For this reason, I believe the US government should have as part of the Executive Branch, a Department of Cultural Anthropology.

Frank