Merciless slaughter in Gaza appalls (Excerpt)
BY GENE LYONS

What's less understood in this country is that Israel has zealots of its own: militant nationalists on Prime Minister Netanyahu's extreme right who believe that the territories he calls "Judea and Samaria" (and the rest of the world calls the West Bank) belong to Jews by divine dispensation, and that the indigenous Palestinians have no rights.

It's to that faction that Netanyahu is speaking when he says, in Hebrew more plainly than in English, "that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the river Jordan."

"That sentence, quite simply," comments David Horowitz in The Times of Israel, "spells the end to the notion of Netanyahu consenting to the establishment of a Palestinian state."

In short, not only no peace now, but no peace as long as Netanyahu can prevent it. He may not be so blunt on "Meet the Press," but that's what he's telling his supporters. Israel, after all, has overwhelming military superiority. Why should it risk anything at all for the illusion — as he sees it — of peace?

The New York Times' brilliant columnist Roger Cohen, a South African Jew resident in Europe, has an answer.

A lifelong Zionist, Cohen writes that what he "cannot accept, however, is the perversion of Zionism that has seen the inexorable growth of a Messianic Israeli nationalism claiming all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River; that has, for almost a half-century now, produced the systematic oppression of another people in the West Bank; that has led to the steady expansion of Israeli settlements on the very West Bank land of any Palestinian state; that isolates moderate Palestinians . . . in the name of divide-and-rule; that pursues policies that will make it impossible to remain a Jewish and democratic state; that seeks tactical advantage rather than the strategic breakthrough of a two-state peace; that blockades Gaza with 1.8 million people locked in its prison and is then surprised by the periodic eruptions of the inmates; and that responds disproportionately to attack in a way that kills hundreds of children."
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