DougR: I dropped out of this thread some time ago when I realised how far our viewpoints diverged, since your idea of a positive suggestion was "let them all contine slaughtering each other and last one still standing is the winner". If we had a few hours to spare and could get together and share a few beers, I'm sure we could find some common ground, but this forum isn't amenable to that kind of meeting of minds.

I started out a few decades back very sympathetic to the Israelis, whom I saw as heroic underdogs, victims of one of the worst genocides in history, rebuilding a nation surrounded by hostile forces.

Now Sharon above all has come for me to be the incarnation of an arrogance tinged with racist disregard for the human dignity of Palestinians and the value of their lives. It started with his invasion of Lebanon (was that 1982 or thereabouts?) I still have a vivid recollection of a TV interview with an Israeli woman who was apparently a holocaust survivor saying of the Israeli soldiers "They're even tall and blond". That remark by a Jewish woman about her own people has caused me to explore just how far the parlallels extend. Sharon's role in Sabra and Shatila bears a more than passing resemblance to that of the German forces when they invaded the Baltic states and "stood by" while local "Christians" massacred their Jewish neighbours. His support for colonisation in the occupied territories (settlements)and call to Jews throughout the world to "return" to Israel show evident parallels to Hitler's "Lebensraum" and "Heim ins Reich" slogans. I don't suggest that Sharon has any exterminationist vision, but I would like to know just what he does see as the Final Solution of the Palestinian Question. It certainly seems to entail treating the Palestinians in some way as Untermenschen, corralled into an economically unviable bantustan (to switch analogies).

That outcome is the logical consequence of DougR's positive suggestion, and to me it is unacceptable.

Reverting to the Northern Ireland parallel which I have cited in the past, it seems to me that the first stage has to entail cooling the violence. Try to get from the Shakespeare to Chekhov stage.

The second involves building institutions which can be trusted. The situation in Palestine/Israel is much worse than Northern Ireland ever was (even Thatcher never bombed Dundalk, Shannon or Tralee), and some international mediation and continuing supervision is therefore essential. Unfortunately, since Israel is regarded as being in the US's back yard, and since Bush from the moment he took up office has been systematically dismantling any means of working towards the establishment of the rule of law in international relations, the UN is further than it ever was from being seen as a credible "enforcer" of a peace solution. But some international "force d'interposition" with genuine neutral credentials and both the military strength and political will to prevent further incursions is essential. That means a UN mandate which the US will not allow Israel this time to treat with contemmpt (ponder for a moment the US citing Iraq's refusal to accept UN inspections as a casus belli while simultaneously vetoing resolution after resolution regarding Israel and then acquiescing in Israel's contemptuous treatment of the aborted Jenin investigation). It would be unreasonable to expect Israel to disarm given the wider regional context, but the Palestinians need to feel sufficiently secure for their side not to have recourse to rearmament, so the international peace-keeping presence would be a long-term commitment.

The next stage has to be to allow politics and civil administration to develop once more in Palestine (the wanton destruction of the embryonic apparatus of public administration by the IDF extended to destroying school records and even the very prisons in which the Israelis wanted the Palestinians to detain people guilty of killing Israelis).

The following stage has to be to begin the twenty-year or more process of education to include giving each side an understanding of the other side's perception of their respective history. School textbooks and even classrom practice in both Palestine and Israel would need to be monitored by neutral experts (cf. Council of Europe reference in an earlier posting under my name Roger O'K)

In parallel it is obviously necessary to allow the economy to begin to develop again, and here too the Israelis unfortunately have to be supervised as they cannot be allowed to disrupt the Palestinian economy at will by arbitrary closure of border crossing-points. Some of the past remarks in this forum about the respective business acumen and educational standards of the Israeli and Palestininan people are unworthy and inappropriate. I have no doubt that, in a more normal environment, Palestine could be a thriving economy and this in itself would reduce the sense of grievance, the idleness and the frustration which are breeding-grounds for terrorism or even for the mere stone-throwing which has led, by escalating tit-for-tat responses on both sides, to the deaths of so many who, while not innocent, did not deserve to lose their lives.