This piece puts a human face on the Palestinian tragedy. It's long, so lock that attention span down and read it.

The Keys of Palestine
by Robert Fisk

When David Roberts toured the Holy Land, he was an explorer as well as an artist, a romantic who filtered the hot and crude realities of the Middle East through a special screen. As he journeyed on horseback through Palestine and then up the coast of southern Lebanon in the 1830s, he was an adventurer, staying overnight with the governor of Tyre, crossing the snows of the Chouf mountain chain to the gentleness of the Bekaa Valley where he sketched the great temples of the Roman city of Heliopolis.

In the world that he created, there were no wars, no political disputes, no dangers. His lithographs of Palestinian villages and of Lebanon, of Tyre and the peninsula of Ras Naqourra, of the temples of Baalbek, are bathed only in the peace of antiquity, a nineteenth-century dream machine that would become more seductive as the decades saw the collapse of the Turkish and then of the British Empire.

For today, Roberts’ delicate sketches and water-colours of Ottoman Palestine can be found in the hallways, bedrooms and living rooms of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Lebanon. In the dust of the great Elin Helweh Palestinian camp just east of Sidon, cheap copies of Roberts’ prints — of Nablus, of Hebron, of Jericho and Jerusalem — are hung on the cement walls of refugee shacks, behind uncleaned glass, sometimes held in place by Scotch tape and glue. His pictures of Lebanon’s forgotten tranquillity hang in Lebanese homes too. Volumes of Roberts’ prints of Lebanon and Palestine can be bought in stores all over Beirut. They can be purchased in almost every tourist hotel in Israel. They are a balm in which anyone can believe.

In Roberts’ drawing of Jaffa, the old city seems to bend outwards with domes and minarets and dusty tracks, watched from a distance by a pastoral couple with a donkey. At Acre, the ramparts of Richard Coeur de Lion’s massive fortress stretch down to a tideless Mediterranean while tiny Arab figures promenade in the dusk past the serail. From time to time, the dun-coloured hills are washed with a light green, faint proof for the Palestinians perhaps that the desert bloomed before the Israelis created their state. In his epic landscape of Jerusalem executed in April of 1830, Roberts draws the Holy City in silhouette, its church towers and minarets, the Dome of the Rock, mere grey outlines against a soft evening sky. Six Arabs — their headdress and robes suggest they are Bedouin — rest beside an ancient well of translucent blue water. A broken Roman column lies beside the pool, its mammoth pedestal a reminder of the immensity of history. Roberts’ prints have become almost a cliché, corrupted by overuse, representative of both a cause and a dream. If it was like that once, why cannot it be so again, a land of peace and tranquillity?
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David Roberts

Explaining the occupation to the occupier
By Amira Hass

How can a tiny Palestinian organization like Islamic Jihad produce so many walking bombs, suicide bombers who choose babies in strollers and their grandparents as targets? And how does an organization that once declared it would only target soldiers send its latest suicide bomber to a mixed Jewish-Arab city, to sow death and sorrow in a restaurant whose owners, workers and customers are Jews and Arabs, old and young.

Intelligence experts and Arabists on our side say it's because of Islam, which sanctifies wars, that there is unceasing incitement in the mosques, that Iran and Syria are behind it, that the suicide bombers and those who send them are out to destroy the State of Israel, that the people who blow themselves up are animals and that Arafat encourages terror.

There's a concept behind all these explanations, in which this sickening form of the Palestinian struggle has nothing to do with the occupation, that Israelis should not believe Palestinians who say there is a connection to the Israeli occupation. The concept says there is no connection between the proliferation of suicide bombings and the prevailing view in Palestinian society, which is that Israel, as a military and nuclear power, wants to squeeze a surrender out of the Palestinians that will legitimize the Israeli takeover of land in the West Bank and Gaza.

In other words, the concept is that the historical, political and geopolitical connections, the sociological and psychological
ramifications - none of it is relevant. The concept is that there is something inherent to the heritage of the suicide bombers and those who send them that is to blame, because the Palestinians won't give up their dream of destroying Israel and that Muslims only believe in the most radical interpretation of their
religion.
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Israel's date with a runaway freight train

Once more, the deceptive "calm" was shattered on Oct. 4 by the horrifying suicide attack in Haifa, that took the lives of 19 restaurant diners, among them men, women and children, both Jews and Palestinian Israelis. "Calm", as used by the news media in this context, does not mean that Israelis and Palestinians stopped attacking each other, but applies to Palestinian actions alone. Ongoing Israeli violence, no matter who its target, is never considered to disturb such a "calm".

The Haifa attacker was a young woman training to become a lawyer. Why would a person who ought to have had everything to live for choose, instead, to end her life in such a cruel and devastating manner? As we learned about her victims, we also learned that she too was a victim -- just a few months ago, her brother and her cousin were killed in Jenin by the Israeli occupation forces. In her mind, she may have been retaliating for the pain she saw inflicted on her family and country.

According to rules written in the blood of so many innocent people, it was Israel's turn to exact revenge for the revenge. Within hours, Israel bombed Gaza and demolished the family house of the suicide bomber, creating new victims whose pain and suffering may, in turn, harden into a desire for yet more revenge. And so on.

To this, Israel added the novel step of bombing what it claimed was a Palestinian "terrorist" camp close to the Syrian capital, Damascus, a measure hitherto absent from Israel's standard menu of measures after a suicide attack. But let us look at the standard list.
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Israel's Attack on Syria: The Impotence of Power

Sharon's target is not Arafat, but Palestinian solidarity
Until Hamas is drawn into a political role there can be no peace

It's the Policy, Stupid
Muslim Antipathy Driven Home by Latest White House Comments

Once again American strategic interests in the Islamic world have been sucker-punched by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and much of the U.S. body politic remains oblivious to the fact that they are even in the fight.

President Bush's defense of Israel's attack on Syria in the wake of Saturday's suicide bombing in Haifa has strengthened the hand of the radicals and left Muslims who favor a dialogue with the West shaking their heads in disbelief.

The president's declaration that Israel "must not feel constrained" in striking out at its enemies and Ariel Sharon's promise that Israel will "hit its enemies any place and in any way" have been headlines across the Islamic world.

In the view of Muslims, the comments drive home what they already know: American policy is inextricably linked with that of Israel.

"Israel has started enjoying its strategic 'gains' from the American occupation of Iraq, initiating a game of expanding the confrontation in the region," wrote one commentator in Lebanon's Al-Hayat newspaper, reflecting a common perception.

For the past two years, Americans - and their president - have been asking the question, "Why do they hate us?" But they have not wanted to hear the answer, which lies, in part, in the blood-soaked soil of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
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