U.S. sending mixed signals on Arafat

Two seemingly contradictory messages have reached Israel in recent days from high level officials of the U.S. administration. One told an Israeli official that the U.S. "won't cry if Arafat collapses on his running machine" while another said that "Israel is making a mistake" by declaring that the Palestinian Authority chairman is irrelevant, "because it results in just the opposite."

In a closed-door session, a high-ranking American official told his Israeli interlocutor that "the U.S. must find a way to channel the anger and frustration in the Palestinian Authority into political and economic reforms. We won't cry if Arafat falls tomorrow on his running machine, but until then an alternative leadership must be encouraged." But the official warned that Israel and the U.S. cannot be seen as identifying any alternative Palestinian leaders, for fear they would be branded as traitors.
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Why Israel's 'seruvniks' say enough is enough
The laywer representing Israeli conscripts who refuse to serve beyond the 1967 ceasefire lines explains why a growing number of soldiers are disobeying orders, in order to protect the basic values on which Israel was founded.

It is said that in the first few years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, no one seriously thought of holding on to these territories forever. It was at the time widely assumed, that these newly conquered lands were to be handed back to the Arabs as part of a peace agreement. I don't remember those days.

I was raised in a different Israel. In my Israel the small fundamentalist group of Jewish settlers has always enjoyed more political power than their relative share in the Israeli population. In my Israel both left-wing and right-wing governments enabled the colonialisation of these occupied Palestinian lands. My Israel paid, and is still paying, a heavy moral price for ruling another nation by the force of the sword. My Israel, built on the founding values of humanism, pluralism and democracy is being lost.
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AGAINST ETHNIC PANIC.
Hitler Is Dead

Has history ever toyed so wantonly with a people as history toyed with the Jews in the 1940s? It was a decade of ashes and honey; a decade so battering and so emboldening that it tested the capacity of those who experienced it to hold a stable view of the world, to hold a belief in the world. When the light finally shone from Zion, it illuminated also a smoldering national ruin; and after such darkness, pessimism must have seemed like common sense, and a holy anger like the merest inference from life. But it was in the midst of that turbulence, in 1948, that the scholar and man of letters Simon Rawidowicz published a great retort to pessimism, a wise and learned essay called "Am Ha-Holekh Va-Met," "The Ever-Dying People." "The world has many images of Israel," Rawidowicz instructed, "but Israel has only one image of itself: that of an expiring people, forever on the verge of ceasing to be.... He who studies Jewish history will readily discover that there was hardly a generation in the Diaspora period which did not consider itself the final link in Israel's chain. Each always saw before it the abyss ready to swallow it up.... Often it seems as if the overwhelming majority of our people go about driven by the panic of being the last."
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