One Big Hizballah
by Uri Avnery

OK, so we are going to kill Saddan Hussein. America wants it. And if America wants something, we want it, too. Right?

After all, there can be no doubt. The last time, Saddam threw Scuds at us, just in order to win popularity in the Arab world. (At that time somebody invented the story that "the Palestinians are dancing on their roofs"’ and Yossi Sarid wrote his article "From now on, the Palestinians can search for me".)

Now all this has become topical again. George Bush Jr. wants to start a war, the same war that George Bush Sr. stopped in the middle. The son wants to finish the job begun by the father. How touching.
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thanks to Ethel the Blog

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The above article had some links to other articles by Uri Avnery including this most cogent analysis of the right of return.

The Right of Return

The new scarecrow is the “Right of Return”. Not as a practical problem, to be dealt with in rational terms, but as a hair-raising monster: now the Palestinians’ sinister design has been revealed! They want to eliminate Israel by this terrible ploy! The want to throw us into the sea!

The Right of Return has again widened the abyss, which seemed to have been narrowed to a rift. We are frightened again. The end of our state! The end of the vision of generations! A second Holocaust!

It seems that the abyss is unbridgeable. The Arabs demand that each and every Palestinian refugee return to his home and land in Israel. The Israelis staunchly object to the return of even one single refugee. On both sides, everything or nothing. There goes the peace.

In the following lines I shall try to show that the scarecrow is indeed a scarecrow; that even this painful problem can be resolved; that a fair compromise can even lead to a historic conciliation.
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This dude was making more sense than everyone else combined. He has a website — Uri Avnery's News Pages. Check out his biography. He has seen it all — firsthand. Many, many excellent articles.

Barak: A Villa in the Jungle

A well-known Israeli theater critic once left the opening performance of a new play after the first five minutes and then wrote a withering review about it. When his colleagues said that this was unfair, he answered: "I don't have to eat the whole egg in order to know that it is rotten."

One does not have to read the whole long interview with Ehud Barak, published in The New York Review of Books (June 13, 2002), in order to know that he is - well, not exactly an enlightened statesman. It is enough to read the following words of his:

"They (the Palestinians, and especially Arafat) are the products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category…The deputy director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation told me that there are societies in which lie detector tests don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance (on which the tests are based)."

This passage speaks volumes.
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