I SUPPOSE I SHOULD TALK ABOUT ISRAEL.
For the record: I am absolutely in favor of a State of Palestine. I do not wish any anti-Zionist to misunderstand me on this point. The ideals of self-governance and the ancestral homeland are as important to the Palestinians as they are to the Israelis, and I believe that some sort of co-existence is the right solution.

The trouble is that the damn PLO is bent on re-inventing the Final Solution.

Oh, yes, they are. Your average Palestinian on the street is probably only as complicit as your average German on the street sixty years ago (which is to say that he's not vocally opposed to what his government intends, assuming he even knows what that is), but your above-average explosive-wearing Palestinian is far, far guiltier, and has the stated aim of destroying Israel and annihilating the Jewish people.

This is unacceptable to me. The fact that it is not unacceptable to so many people is unacceptable to me. No Israeli official, and probably no average Israeli on the street, has advocated (in word or deed) the annihilation of the Palestinian people as a solution to the perpetual tension in the Holy Land. And yet people continue to vilify the Jews and heap praises on Yasser Arafat and I can only hope that most of them sincerely do believe peace can come from concessions to the PLO, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But dammit: do six million more people have to die, one restaurant at a time, before the world will admit that appeasement doesn't work?