With Arafat, but without him

The images of the bombing at the Megiddo Junction that showed up on American TV screens yesterday are just a promo for the joint press conference Bush and Sharon will have after their meeting next Monday at the White House. Who cares if Arafat is about as responsible for the Islamic Jihad as Sharon is responsible for the plot to blow up the girls school in Abu Dis?

Religious fundamentalists are behind both. Both groups have declared a "holy war" on secular regimes. The difference is that Arafat isn't ready or isn't interested in paying the political price for aggressively restraining the religious zealots, without getting any political payoff in return. Sharon, meanwhile, is only ready to offer him a declaration that - with or without an end to terror - he'll never consider removing the extremists among the settlers. The incentive for the Palestinians to punish their extremists is more land expropriations from Palestinian farmers and shepherds by the settlers of Bat Ayin, under the watchful eyes of the IDF.
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Strangers in a strained land
Christian Right ratchets up support for Israel

One would think, however, that all the "rapture" and "end-times" talk would raise a huge red flag for Jews. After all, when the day of reckoning comes, they will be among those left behind. Stillman writes that it is not surprising that "born-again Christians rarely cite their personal interest in meeting Christ as the actual reason they embrace Israel." Gary Bauer recently told the Washington Post that conservative Christians believe that "America has an obligation to stand by Israel" based on "readings of the Scripture, where evangelicals believe God has promised that land to the Jewish people." Stillman says that Bauer "didn't mention that once Christ returns, Jews — at least those Jews who have not accepted Jesus as a personal savior — get a one-way ticket to hell."
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Our son, the rebel
As he approaches the end of his 18-year jail sentence for exposing Israel's nuclear secrets, Mordechai Vanunu is still full of rage and refusing to be silenced. Suzanne Goldenberg meets the American couple who adopted him so they could meet him in prison

He won't sit down to lunch on time. He won't shake the hand of an old legal acquaintance. And he won't let his dad admonish him for that rudeness. It is, at times, exasperating to be the adoptive parents of a 47-year-old rebel, particularly when your son is Mordechai Vanunu, now in his 16th year of imprisonment for exposing Israel's secret nuclear programme.

The years have seen a world of changes since Vanunu was convicted of treason and sentenced to 18 years in Israel's highest-security prison. In 1986, the former technician at the desert plant near the town of Dimona leaked photographs of and information about Israel's nuclear facilities to the Sunday Times, destroying Israel's policy of "nuclear ambiguity". Using his pictures and testimony, nuclear experts estimated that Israel had the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons - about 200 warheads.
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