In 1969, Isreali Prime Minister Golda Meir said, "Palestinians do not exist." Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eshkil, said, "Where are the Plaestinians? When I came here to Plaestine ther were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bdouins. It was desert, more then underdeveloped. Nothing." Prime Minister Meanchem Begin called Palestinians "tow-legged beasts," Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them "grasshoppers" who cuo..ld be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State not words of ordinary people

In 1947 the UN formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 percent of Palestine's land to the Zionists. Within a year they had captured more than 76 percent. On May 14, 1948 the State of Israel was Declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States and Russia recognized Isreal. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza strip came under the military control of Egypt. Formally Palestine ceased to exist accept in the minds and hearts of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees.

In the summer 1967, Ireal occupied The West bank and The Gaza strip. Settlers were offered state subsidies and development aid to move into the occupied territories. And today, almost every day, more Palestinian families are forced off their lands and driven into refugge camps. Palestinians who continue to live in Israel do not have have the same rights as Isralis and live as second class citizens in their former homeland.

Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease fires  declared and vilolated. But the blood shed does not stop. Palestine still remains illegally occupied.  Its people live in inhuman conditions, in vitual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, twenty four hour curfews; where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And  when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in site. They have no  control over their lands, their security, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed and words like "autonomy" and even "statehood" are bandied about, it's always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have?

Young Palestinians who cannot contain their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel's streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisals and even more hardship on Palestinian people.  But then suicide is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic. Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli civilians, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli Government daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new-fashioned, twenty-first century war.

Israel's staunchest political and military ally is and always was the United States govrnment.. The US government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinain homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States.

What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewidh people who suffered so cruelly themsleves - more cruelly perhps than any other people in history - to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they displaced? Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the huan race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for, or the rights to a life of liberty  and dignity to everyone, regardless of their ethnicity r religion?

Palestine  was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East, But now the weak, undemocratic, by all account corrupt but ovoedly non-sectarian PLO, is losing ground to Hamas, which spouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from their manifesto: We will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn enemies.

The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed o before they arrived at this destination? September 11 1922 to September 11 2008- eighty five years is a long, long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world  can give the people of Palestine? Some scrap of hope we can hold out? Should they just settle for the crumbs that are thrown their way and behave  like the grasshoppers or two-legged beasts they've been described as? Should they just folow  Golda Meir's   suggestion and make a real effort to not exist?