Building Israel from the wasteland and the desert has been a risky, heartbreaking proposition from the beginning. Time and again, the desert was tamed and made into fertile, irrigated cropland, by the passion of Israelis for their buildinghomeland.

The region has also been a wasteland of hard emotional ridges and troughs, where hatred flies in the wind as readily as desert dust does.

The Israelis, as well as everyone else married to the region, need to learn the secrets of orrigating those emotions, and making them fertile again.

There is a path, and it must include a Palestinian state; that much I think is certain.

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