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"I want to have many boys, so we have more people and can get the Jews out."
By SUSAN TAYLOR MARTIN, Times Senior Correspondent
Published September 21, 2003

[Times photos: Jamie Francis]

Thuraya Eshbear, 35, has 13 children - from 20 years to 10 months - nine of whom are in this photograph. Her husband, Majed Eshbear, back left, is the father of 20 children, including all 13 here. Majed's other wife, back left, is Manal Sultan.

Members of the Abbas family of Gaza stroll to the beach for sunset, where they will make coffee and talk for several hours as a way to pass the time.

Friends toss Mohammed Abuzaya into the air as they celebrate the night before his wedding.

Mohammed Basheer, 3, clings to his brother through the fence at his preschool in Deir el Balah.

AML preschool in Deir el Balah is home to 120 students.

[Times art: Amanda Raymond]
The fertility rates of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are skyrocketing past those of Jews throughout Israel. Total fertility is the average number of children a woman of child-bearing years (assumed to be between 15 and 49) is expected to bear during her lifetime, according to the specific birth rates of women in the population in a given year.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - In the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians, Thuraya Eshbear wields a powerful weapon.

Babies.

At 35, this wisp of a woman has 13 children, from 20 years down to 10 months. Though she can't afford to school them all, though she rarely has a minute to herself, she would gladly bear more.

"I have many children so that the Palestinian people will have more than the Israelis," says Eshbear, a $37-a-week cleaner in the maternity ward of Gaza City's biggest hospital. Here, on any given day, dozens of other Palestinian women are doing their part to ensure ultimate victory over Israel.

It is a war fought not just with F-16s and suicide bombers, but with diapers and Similac.

Ever since Israel was created in 1948, starting a clash with the Arab world that has no end in sight, Jews have feared what Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat calls his "biological bomb." In Israel and the neighboring territories of Gaza and the West Bank, Arabs are reproducing at a rate double that of Jews.

Israel's 5.4-million Jews make up just more than half of the region's population, but Arabs will become a clear majority within 20 years, Haifa University professor Arnon Soffer says. By 2020, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be home to 8.5-million Arabs and just 6.4-million Jews.

Unless Palestinians get their own state, the soaring Arab population could mean one of two things: Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish nation or it would be forced into an apartheid-like system in which a Jewish minority ruled a Palestinian majority.

Unless something changes, "our country is finished in 17 years and there will be a collapse," Soffer warned Israeli political leaders.

Others say the demographic threat is exaggerated, that studies like Soffer's fail to take into account such important factors as continued Jewish migration to Israel. The Palestinian population figures are meant to scare Israel into giving up land - especially in the West Bank - to which it has an historic right, one expert charges.

"The same thing took place in '48 when Ben Gurion, the first prime minister, was urged by top statisticians to refrain from declaring independence for the same reason," says Yoram Ettinger of Israel's Ariel Center for Policy Research. "They predicted, based on certified figures, that by 1969 there would be an Arab majority. Their predictions were crashed against the rocks of reality."

Yet the battle for population supremacy rages on, although Israel at present seems to be lagging. A bleak economy has forced the government to cut once-generous allowances for big families, and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently said poor Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike, should stop having such large broods.

"A man can and should have a family with as many children as he likes," Netanyahu said, "but he must understand he is primarily responsible for providing for them, educating them, feeding them."

Meanwhile, the women of Gaza keep producing baby after baby. The Gaza Strip, where more than 1-million Palestinians live, has one of the world's highest growth rates - 4.5 percent, enough to double the population every 15 years.

"Many people have been killed in the intifada by Israeli soldiers so they want to reproduce," says Hala Sarraj, a Gaza psychologist, referring to the uprising in which more than 2,400 Palestinians have died since 2000.

That is true of Hanan Himad, whose 21-year-old son, Jawdad, was shot dead two years ago while throwing rocks at the Israelis, she says. He was the oldest of her nine children - Himad was pregnant with her 10th this summer when she tripped and fell while running from an Israeli bomb dropped near her home east of Gaza City.

A few weeks later she miscarried, and on this Thursday morning she was in the hospital, awaiting surgery to remove the dead fetus. But at 39, she is not about to quit.

"I want to have many boys," she says, as other women nod approvingly, "so we have more people and can get the Jews out."
A prize for the 10th baby

Except for the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee, there would seem little reason for two groups of people to fight so long and so hard over one New Jersey-size wedge of land.

Arab sheep and camel herders long roamed the desert from which the Israelites were expelled more than two millennia ago. But in the late 1800s, after centuries of persecution, the Zionists announced their goal of resettling as many of the world's Jews as possible in their biblical homeland.

That set the stage for a struggle in which demographics might forever play a role.

By the end of World War I, what was then known as Palestine had 60,000 Jewish inhabitants. Growing Arab hostility toward the newcomers erupted in the 1921 Jaffa riots that killed 47 Jews.

But the huge migration came after World War II, when survivors of the Nazi Holocaust began flocking to the promised land. Some 650,000 Jews were living in Palestine by 1948 when Israel declared independence, and Arab nations immediately launched war against the new Jewish state.

Thus began another major population shift. To this day, there is strong debate over whether Arabs left Israel at their leaders' behest, on the promise they could return soon (as most Jewish historians say) or were forcefully removed by Jewish soldiers (as Arabs say).

Whatever the case, 700,000 Palestinians - as the Arabs began calling themselves - went to neighboring countries or to Gaza, then under Egyptian control, or the West Bank, then under Jordanian rule.

"Contrary to most colonial projects, the Israeli one was intended to substitute one people for another," French researcher Phillipe Fargues said in a 2000 study on the region's demographic battle. "It was not a will to dominate the Arab peoples so much as to dominate the territory. Relative sizes of the two populations were at stake."

As early as 1943, while the British ruled the area, the chief rabbi of Palestine urged Jewish families to have big families: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth."

Pressure to procreate grew even greater after 1948.

"Being a Jewish state and knowing that we lost 6-million Jews during the Holocaust, it is on the back or front of every Jew's mind that it is our responsibility for the future to make up for that traumatic loss," says Ettinger of the Ariel Center.

"Certainly when we talk about the demographic requirements of a Jewish state, that behooves many among us, either religious or nonreligious, hawks or doves, to have at least two children, three, four or five children."

As an incentive to reproduce, Israel in 1949 instituted the Ben Gurion Award - given to every woman delivering her 10th child. It was discontinued a decade later because so many Arab women qualified.

Israel's natural population growth has been greatly augmented by immigration, including the influx of almost 1-million Jews after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nearly 95 percent of Israel's Jewish population originates from immigrants; without them, there might be fewer than 300,000 Jews now in Israel.

Ettinger thinks immigration will continue, counterbalancing the effects of the Palestinian birth rate.

"We have more than 1-million Jews, probably 2-million, still in the former Soviet Union, there are 6-million Jews in America, and some of them I believe are going to end up in the Jewish state," he says. "We've got a half million Jews in France and a half million in Latin America.

"And who's to say that the Jewish birth rate has to stick to 2-point-something? It certainly could go up to 3-point-something, which would turn the whole thing upside down. When you consider the fact that we are 6-million Jews compared to 600,000 in 1948, you cannot but be highly optimistic about Jewish demographics in this part of the world."

But there is little economic incentive for Jews in America or Western Europe to emigrate to Israel, which has a lower per capita income than where they now live. Moreover, the Jewish population in the United States is shrinking and aging; even if American Jews did move to Israel, they would have only a modest effect on the birth rate.

Ettinger is more optimistic than many Israeli leaders, who have long worried about the Palestinian baby boom.

Soon after taking office in 1969, Prime Minister Golda Meier expressed concern about what would happen if Israel annexed the land it had seized in the 1967 Mideast War: "We would have to wake up every morning wondering how many Arab babies had been born during the night."

But as the prospect of a complete withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank grew increasingly remote, "both Israeli and Palestinian politicians realized that demographic growth is the Palestinians' most potent weapon," Fargues said.

Paradoxically, he found, the continuing conflict might be partly responsible for the high birth rate that so concerns Israel.

Thanks to huge amounts of humanitarian aid from the United Nations, Islamic charities and other organizations, Palestinians generally enjoy good health and live long lives, assuming they don't die of man-made causes. The aid, which includes money, food and schooling, helps ease the burden of raising children.

And while high unemployment normally discourages large families, the opposite has been true in Gaza.

In the first Palestinian uprising, from 1987 to 1993, incomes dropped 40 percent in a single year yet the birth rate went up. It seems that many fathers lowered the "bride price" to facilitate marrying off their daughters in a time of great insecurity. The result: Many more teenage brides and many more babies.
"I hate her"

In her face, Thuraya Eshbear looks older than the 35 years she admits to. But at just 5 feet and 100 or so pounds, she has the petite figure that caught the eye of Majed Eshbear as she returned home from school one day.

Tall, handsome, with a thick shock of hair, Eshbear was divorced from his first wife, by whom he had six children. He married Thuraya, and over the next 20 years, she would have 13 children and three miscarriages.

A few years ago, Eshbear began to look around again. This time he settled on Manal Sultan, 18 years his junior, a pretty woman with a wide perfect smile. Sultan had never seen Eshbear, let alone met him, before her father agreed to give her hand in marriage.

Thuraya was so angry at her husband for taking another wife that she went home to her mother's. But after 15 days she came back.

Now both wives live with Eshbear under the same roof.

"I love her," the younger woman says of Thuraya.

"I hate her," Thuraya says of her rival.

As for Eshbear, he says, wearily, the two women fight and argue all the time. He might consider getting married again, "but not in Gaza."

Under Islamic law, men are allowed to take up to four wives. The original rationale was that in time of war, when so many men are killed in battle, widows would have no one to provide for them unless the surviving men could marry more than once.

But if there is one thing that Eshbear's wives agree on, it is that the practice is anachronistic.

"It's not fair. I think one wife is enough," Thuraya says, her heavily kohled eyes flashing in anger. "As women, we can't leave our children, but as a man he can leave and take a second and a third and a fourth wife."

Both women insist, though, that they love Eshbear and that he loves them.

Thuraya, who favors tight jeans and T-shirts instead of conservative Islamic dress, is the family dynamo. After her husband married Sultan, she decided to get a job and stay out of the house as much as possible. She rises at 6, gives the kids breakfast and takes a taxi to the hospital. There she mops floors and cleans toilets up to 12 hours a day.

Except for two married sons, no one else in the family works.

Sultan, who has a year-old boy, stays home. So does Eshbear, who closed his sweet shop three years ago when the intifada began and Gaza's economy hit bottom.

Now he spends most of the day watching cartoons on TV with his youngest kids and smoking one cigarette after another. He is still thin and handsome, his hair is still thick and black, but he has the tired, resigned look of a man who doesn't expect life to get much better, or even much different.

Eshbear says he is 47 but he struggles to remember names and ages. He thinks Sultan is younger than she says she is. He thinks Thuraya has 15 kids, not 13. He hesitates when asked the name of a particular child.

He never intended to have 20 kids, he says, but "my sisters love children so they say, "Bring, bring, bring."'

He pauses. "I made a mistake. If there were not this number I could teach them better."

Contraceptives are available from public and private clinics in Gaza, but they are used more to space children than to limit the number. And it is almost always the woman, not the man, who takes the responsibility of birth control.

Eshbear might not be as embarrassed about his big family as he sounds, nor should he be, says Sarraj, the psychologist. Children can be a hedge against the future in a place where there are no retirement plans and the government, the Palestinian Authority, is on the verge of collapse.

"Children mean support," Sarraj says. "It is desirable to have children because of the insecurity of our society - you are not guaranteed to live tomorrow but to have children is to give some protection to the family."

And, she says, there is another reason Eshbear might actually be proud of his giant clan.

In Gaza, where the conflict with Israel has thrown 60 percent of adults out of work, fathering children is one sure way an unemployed man can prove his masculinity.

"To be a man in Gaza means providing food and money and clothing," Sarraj notes. "If you can't do this you cannot be a real man - except if you show you are productive by giving lots of babies."

see link
http://www.markoinbangkok.com/opinion045.htm

FrontPageMagazine.com | May 3, 2004

In the ongoing battle for Fallujah, terrorists are using women and children as human shields against American soldiers. On April 27, 2004, in Jerusalem, Hamas used a Palestinian human bomb to kill two Palestinian alleged "collaborators." On April 28, 2004, even as UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, was busy characterizing Israeli policy as the "great poison in the region," Jordanian police arrested al-Qaida operatives who were quite literally trying to launch a chemical poison attack that might have killed 80,000 Jordanians and Americans. And, on May 1, 2004, in Gaza, Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a Jewish woman who was eight-months pregnant together with her four young daughters.

Despite enormous and continuing denial on the part of left and liberal ideologues and the media, we are facing an exceedingly pathological strain of Islamofascist terrorism. So a crucial question must be asked: from a psychological and anthropological point of view, what kind of culture produces human bombs, glorifies mass murderers, and supports humiliation-based revenge?

According to Minnesota based psychoanalyst and Arabist, Dr. Nancy Kobrin, it is a culture in which shame and honor play decisive roles and in which the debasement of women is paramount. In an utterly fascinating and as-yet unpublished book, which I will be introducing, the Sheik's New Clothes: the Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Suicide Terrorism, Kobrin, and her Israeli co-author, counter-terrorism expert Yoram Schweitzer, describe barbarous family and clan dynamics in which children, both boys and girls, are routinely orally and anally raped by male relatives; infant males are sometimes sadistically over-stimulated by being masturbated; boys between the ages of 7-12 are publicly and traumatically circumcised; many girls are clitoridectomized; and women are seen as the source of all shame and dishonor and treated accordingly: very, very badly.

According to Dr. Kobrin, "The little girl lives her life under a communal death threat--the honor killing." Both male and female infants and children are brought up by mothers (who are debased and traumatized women). As such, all children are forever psychologically "contaminated" by the humiliated yet all-powerful mother. Arab and Muslim boys must disassociate themselves from her in spectacularly savage ways. But, on a deep unconscious level, they may also wish to remain merged with the source of contamination--a conflict that suicide bombers both act out and resolve when they manfully kill but also merge their blood eternally with that of their presumably most hated enemies, the Israeli Jews. In Kobrin's view, the Israeli Jews may actually function as substitutes or scapegoats for an even more primal, hated/loved enemy: Woman.

Widespread child sexual abuse leads to paranoid, highly traumatized, and revenge-seeking adults. Based on my own experience in Afghanistan (a non-Arab, Muslim culture), a polygamous, patriarchal culture also leads to an infernal, fraternal competition for paternal favor and inheritance. It is brother against brother, full brothers against half-brothers, full and half brothers against first cousins--and thus, can entire families and clans remain locked in revenge-fueled mortal combat for generations.

Clearly, only evolution of democracy and the elevation of women can begin to change such dynamics. Western feminists, American leaders: Please note. Alas, historically and theologically, Arab and Muslim culture strongly opposes both democracy and equality for women. This is why the battles to liberate Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East are so important and so very difficult. The American and Israeli war against terrorism is like World War Two, not like Vietnam.

Yesterday, further confirmation of Dr. Kobrin's thesis arrived at my door. The remarkable and charming Walid Shoebat, an ex-PLO terrorist, came to visit. He has been speaking about his renunciation of terrorism and conversion to evangelical Christianity. Shoebat has been touring the country speaking out for Israel and against the "occupation of Palestinian minds with Jew-hatred." Unlike the human bombs, Shoebat "merged" with his American-born mother by finally rescuing her from years of captivity and domestic abuse in Bethlehem/Beit Sahur. He also rescued his father, the man who imprisoned and abused her.

Shoebat confirmed the widespread sexual abuse of both boys and girls in Palestinian society. "It is a strange society. Homosexuality is forbidden but if you're the penetrator, not the penetrated, it's okay." He is describing prison sexuality. "If you're a teenage boy with no hair on your legs other boys your age will pinch your butt and tease you. Once, I saw a class of clothed teenage boys sexualize their gymnastics exercizes. And once, on a hiking trip, I saw a line of shepherd boys waiting for their turn to sodomize a five year old boy. It was unbelievable."

Shoebat's father also told him stories about starving Arab men who would barter sex for meat from Iraqi soldiers. According to Shoebat, teenage boys prey upon younger children; older male relatives prey upon pre-adolescent and adolescent boys and girls. They do not have intercourse with the girls since this would render them un-marriageable and bring shame upon their families. I heard many stories in both Afghanistan and Iran about the male preference for anal sex, even within marriage, either as a form of birth control or as a preferred homosexual practice.

Most Arabs and Muslims will deny that this is so. They will attack westerners who say so as "orientalists, colonialists, racists." Western intellectuals will agree with them. They have been well indoctrinated by--no, western academics were the ones who first glorified the work of the late Edward W. Said who, in my opinion, published his master work, Orientalism, in 1978 as a way of denying feminist ideas and refocusing academic attention away from women and onto brown, Muslim, Arab men as the truest victims of oppression. Neat trick.

Shoebat's grandfather was the Muktar of his village. Nevertheless, eleven-fifteen people lived cramped into two rooms with a huge balcony, a courtyard, and an outhouse. Once, when Shoebat's American-born Christian mother, (she was forced to convert to Islam), upended a backgammon board in front of his father Achmed's friends, Achmed took a hammer and cracked her skull. Shoebat, her youngest child, took her hand and walked with her to the nearest church where the nuns sewed up her head. There were no hospitals. Whenever his mother tried to escape, (always together with her three children) the Shoebat men would find her, re-kidnap her, subject her to further punishment.

The male sexual abuse of female children exists everywhere; it is one of the main means of traumatizing and shaming women into obedience and rendering them incapable of resistance or rebellion. However, the male sexual abuse of male children--denied, never admitted--may work differently and may turn boys into predatory, pedophilic men. Also, among Arabs and Muslims, revenge killings are uniquely prevalent.

Shoebat told me several extraordinary stories which illustrate Palestinian and Arab Middle Eastern mentality. One of his paternal uncles was supposedly having an affair with the mother of Yusuf Al-Atrash who belongs to the family of Sami Al-Altrash, the Montreal-based student who stopped Bibi Netanyahu from speaking at Concordia University. The woman's husband was the chief of police whose revenge consisted of throwing live grenades at Shoebat's family home. The home bore the unrepaired damage for years. The outraged husband wanted to not only kill his wife's lover but his entire family. "My father and his immediate family all had to die because of what his brother did."

Shoebat asked me how I would resolve this feud-unto-death because of his uncle Najib, who was also the chief of police. I foundered. Bride-exchange sacrifice? Blood money? I could not come up with the ingenious plan that Najib crafted--a plan which may also shed light, in part, upon the nature of the Arab war against the Jews. Najib persuaded the village that they had to attack, pogrom-style, a nearby Jewish community. (Ramat Rachel). Once the Israelis opened fire in self-defense, most of the Arabs fled. However, the Arab attack upon the Jews provided cover for what Najib had to do: He himself snipered Yusuf in the back. When the Israelis, as they always did, allowed the Arabs to safely retrieve their dead, Najib proclaimed Yusuf al-Atrash a "shahid" and buried him in his bloody clothing. This is a mark of honor. A "shahid" enters heaven more quickly, clothed in his own blood.

This characterizes an Arab way of thinking. From here, it is easy to create the kinds of doctored footage and photo-opportunity journalism that has dominated this latest Intifada against the Jews. It is also a way of thinking that the liberal western media does not comprehend.

Yusuf's martyrdom was not enough, the "honor" of the al-Atrash family had not yet been redeemed. Another man from the al-Atrash family attacked Shoebat's father Achmed, who, in self-defense, stabbed his attacker to death, "ripped his stomach open like a sheep." The man did not die. Shoebat's father immediately went into hiding. By this time, Shoebat was living in America. His paternal uncles called him and asked that he pay the blood money. Shoebat did so but not until each of his uncles ("nice uncles") publicly "abandoned" Achmed. "He is not my brother, I denounce and abandon him."

And only in this way was Shoebat finally able to rescue his mother. He paid the blood money and brought both his long-suffering mother and her abuser, his father, to America. Since Shoebat's mother holds an American passport she was able to bring her husband into the country with her.

Recently, Shoebat's brother-a man they had previously socialized with-- called Shoebat's wife. "Tell your husband that we know what he is doing against Islam. Tell him we know where he lives. Bye bye."

"I told my wife, Welcome to the Middle East where your beloved one day can become your executioner the next day."

Shoebat is, miraculously, engaged in redefining loyalty. He has taken his mother's side, and in so doing, has broken with the shame, honor, and secrecy codes of his father's culture. It is important to understand that Shoebat has not broken with his father. On the contrary, he rescued him too. Shoebat's mother and father both live near him in the United States.

These amazing anecdotes confirm the veracity of Dr. Kobrin's work. In my view, they also suggest that Americans and Europeans begin to think twice about what Arabs tell them about who started a fight, and why the Israelis, the Jews, and the Americans are to blame.

http://www.countrymagazines.com/land%20grab.html

Shlomo Toren:

Thanks for joining us here. It is good to see actual Israeli interact with us in here. Not sure if you are a native Israeli or an American-born naturalized Israeli (perhaps you could clarify this later if you don't mind). I am myself Moroccan (you've got many of our people in Israel).

On the first issue, I guess we could thank you and your governments for "improving" the standard of living of Palestinians. Could you provide us with a summary of Israeli investments in Palestinian towns under its occupation?

Second issue, Israeli policy is well described in Drobless plan. Israeli ethnic cleansing tactics are relatively invisible and discreet (destroying farm lands, Residency permit tactics in Eastern Jerusalem, etc).

On the issue of roads in the West Bank, here is the evidence:

http://www.btselem.org/download/200408_Forbidden_Roads_Eng.pdf

On top of the evidence backing my original claim with a listing of all roads that are off to Palestinians, the report also answers one of the comments you made about not being able to drive through Area A.

Bt'selem explains that the restriction on Israeli civilians in Area A is part of ISRAELI military orders, not Palestinians.

It is your government which is not allowing you as an Israeli civilian to enter occupied Area A. Israeli military is of course free to go anywhere they wish in Area A.

Would you please read the report above and tell me what you think of it?

On expelling Palestinians from the West Bank, American-Palestinians who are born in the West Bank and who reside in the US are often barred from going there. When they are allowed to, they are required to get an Israeli tourist visa!

If you don't believe that this doesn't happen or that your government has no policy (whether written or not) of keeping Palestinians away from their native homes, I can provide few more reports if you are willing to open you mind.

I am sure you know who Benny Elon is (former Israeli Tourism Minister), and what campaign he launched in 2002:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0206/p05s01-wome.html

To Karim:

The main fact you miss is that you play very fast and loose with "facts".

From 1967 to 1987 (the first "intifada"), standards of living in the West Bank rose greatly, infrastructure improved and universities were established. True, settlements were also established, but I challenge you to bring a case of a village that was "erased" or a massacre committed. Israel as an occupier at least attempted to better the lives of the Arabs living in the West Bank, although surely more could have been done.
As for "Jewish only" roads, could you please identify them. Do you realize that there are roads where Jews are not allowed to use. (All roads going through Areas A for instance). I travel regularly on Road 60 and it is full of Arab traffic.
Yes, there are Israelis who believe that there should be Jewish settlements in the West Bank, some for historical reasons, others because they see the dangers of another Arab state west of the Jordan river. Never has an Israeli government set as a goal to expel Arabs from their homes in the West Bank (since 1967). (by the way your referral of state lands as Arab is acceptable to me as my calling them Jewish lands would be to you).

To the point though. No difference really between Abbas and Hamas, it is really just some sort of spin since Abbas never was willing to reign in terrorists/activists. Also neither are so pro-democracy (ever see a free press / freedom of religion / right to assembly in the PA?). The main issue now is that the PA and Israel are at war and will continue to be at war as long as rockets are being fired into Sderot. A little quiet would result in the freeing of funds without having the Hamas recognize Israel.

Folks:

THE FACT is: Israeli and their government do not recognize the Palestinians right to exist as Palestinians in their own native lands.

This is why they wouldn't allow Palestinians to have their own sovereign state. And it is why Israel is still playing these dirty games.

Was there a Hamas in the 80s? There wasn't.

Were there any suicide bombings in the 80s? There weren't.

THERE WAS however a grand plan in Israel to settle the West bank, Gaza, and Eastern Jerusalem and to do everything possible to have its non-Jewish natives either leave (to Jordan) or be prevented from forming their own state.

Don't think that the settlements were erected by chance or through clandestine ways. The settlements were the direct result of a well thought, well planned, well financed policy of the Israeli government supported by Israeli citizens.

Below can be found the text of one those immoral plans from the World Zionist Organization. MATTITYAHU DROBLESS is one of the master minds of the settlements; read for yourself (it is from 1981):

http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/99818751a6a4c9c6852560690077ef61/3e5d731750eeb69e8525696600663ad0!OpenDocument

"It is therefore significant to stress today, mainly by means of actions, that the autonomy does not and will not apply to the territories but only to the Arab population thereof. This should mainly find expression by establishing facts on the ground. Therefore, the state-owned lands and the uncultivated barren lands in Judea and Samaria ought to be seized right away, with the purpose of settling the areas between and around the centers occupied by the minorities so as to reduce to the minimum the danger of an additional Arab state being established in these territories. Being cut off by Jewish settlements the minority population will find it difficult to form a territorial and political continuity.

There mustn't be even the shadow of a doubt about our intention to keep the territories of Judea and Samaria for good. Otherwise, the minority population may get into a state of growing disquiet which will eventually result in recurrent efforts to establish an additional Arab state in these territories. The best and most effective way of removing every shadow of a doubt about our intention to hold on to Judea and Samaria forever is by speeding up the settlement momentum in these territories."

For readers who are not familiar with the World Zionist Organization (in which Drobless was a director), please read the following article: (THe WZO is basically quasi-government)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-08-14-israelsettlercosts_x.htm

This is the map of the West Bank in 2002 after decades of implementing Drobless plan:

http://www.btselem.org/Download/Settlements_Map_Eng.pdf

Notice how the West Bank was patched up with Jewish-Israeli settlements that are connected using their own Jewish-only road network (and superior to Palestinians road, of course).

So what has changed lately? All of us hear and read that Israel is now considering the 2 state solution but you need to ask yourself what has changed? Billions of dollars were invested in the West Bank (for Jewish settlers only, of course) and Palestinians turned to violence since the 90s which cost both Israeli and Palestinians many innocent lives.

What has changed is not Israeli recognition of Palestinians rights. They have realized that Palestinians grew too many in numbers to the point where keeping them would be a demographic suicide.

Are we Arabs going to be fooled by these cheap Israeli tactics and their fundamental denial of the natives right to their own lands?

What you have to ask yourself is what if Palestinians didn't present any demographic danger for Israel, would Israel continue to settle their lands or would it recognize their rights? I think we all know the answer to that.

There are 20 among 22 Arab states who do not recognize Israel. Yet Israel and other countries led by the US want to force the people who live in refugee camps to recognize their oppressors.

I myself will never set foot in Israel until justice is done or its Palestinian victims are satisfied with any settlement.

Israeli should know that they can not force Arabs to recognize their state against their will.

I agree with C that too much time/history has passed and Israel is here to stay even though the land belongs to Palestine. To have lasting peace, the injustice must be corrected and I suggest that Israel(pre 1967 borders) become a province of a federal Palestine. At the municipal level it could run it's own affairs. The government of Palestine(democratically elected, therefore consisting of Palestinians and Israelis)would
restructure its armies to ensure that peace is kept. Palestine's motivation would be that if Israel falls, it would fall too.

Dear B,
Okay. Israel decides to go? How does that happen? Does the government just capitulate and let the Arabs take over? Do all Israelis leave and live in other countries? That isn't going to happen without mass deportations of Isaelis.

Israel and/or Palestine can no more be rid of Israelis -- and Palestinians, for that matter -- than the U.S. can be without immigrants -- legal or illegal.

Y-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-wn.

The question is not whether or not Hamas supports the Israeli state, but whether it represents the democratic selection of the people of Palestine.

I have to ask myself, if I were living in Palestine and Zionists were keeping me from returning to my family home and village which the Zionists were occupying illegally for the last 60 years and I was seeing Zionists in fascist uniforms lining up kids in my concentration camp and killing them with rifles, would I not want to have a government which called for the removal of Zionism from my borders.

You can kill them, starve them, and deport them, but you are not going to get them to consent to your theft of their lands, homes, schools, streets, graves, farms, cities, and other properties which you stole from them, O Israel.

And the more you kill them out in the open as you have been doing for so long, you are not going to get them to do anything you want them to do. In fact, you are going to get the same stubborn resistance and the will to continue opposing you until you leave their region so they can live in peace, because, O Israel, you have proven you will never allow them to be in peace through your 60 years of killing, torturing, and starving them.

Haven't you figured out it is time for you to go? You aren't going to win this. In fact, if there's a God, you won't win it.

I agree, give people food, work, proper education, and a functioning infrastructure first. The rest is nonsense anyway. It seems to me the reason people voted for Hamas regardless of it's terrorist nature is NOT just because they support the destruction of Israel. That is A reason (not the only one), and the people (considering the majority are relatively young) have been well-indoctrinated, brain-washed some would say, by the PA and the clannish mullahs and imamas that Israel = Death; but that's not the only reason. There has ALSO been some success in various locales with reducing corruption and improving infrastructure services, which has gained Hamas some support. THAT is probably more what the Palestinians were voting to support in the first place.

Look at Hizbullah, whom Hamas is also trying to emulate -- they tie unreasoning hatred of Israel together with provision of social services; so that people feel they cannot separate one from the other. And I don't think anyone in either country would be quite so eager to support hatred of Israel (especially in palestine considering their economic dependence on Israel) if the vitriol didn't come with the improved ifrastructure and service provision; and the ostensible gaurantee to eliminate corruption.

Ultimately people are rational: if they see their lives improving, they support it, if not -- they don't.