This is a must read. I linked to an article that mentioned this article. This is the original complete article from the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth. In it they interviewed 4 ex-heads of Shin Bet, the Israel Security Service. They have no illusions about what Israel is doing to the Palestinians.

We are Seriously Concerned About the Fate of the State of Israel

When the meeting is almost over, we ask Avraham Shalom (Bendor) if he thinks we are on the brink of an abyss. We are on our way, he says, because all the steps that we have taken are steps that are contrary to the aspiration for peace. If we do not turn away from this path, of adhering to the entire Land of Israel, and if we do not also begin to understand the other side, dammit, we will not get anywhere. We must, once and for all, admit that there is an other side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully. Yes, there is no other word for it. Disgracefully.

What do you mean disgracefully, we ask, disgracefully at the roadblocks?

All of it, says Shalom, all of it.

What is disgraceful, we ask, do we behave disgracefully in the refugee camps?

Everything, everything, Shalom says. It is all disgraceful. We debase the Palestinian man individual to all and sundry. And nobody can take this. We too would not take it if it were done to us. And neither do they take it, why should they suffer? And we are incapable of taking even a small step to correct this. Shimon Peres once tried to take this small step, he at least talked about it when I was GSS director, and then nothing was done.
[more]

Twilight Zone / `I punched an Arab in the face'
by Gideon Levy

Staff Sergeant (res.) Liran Ron Furer cannot just routinely get on with his life anymore. He is haunted by images from his three years of military service in Gaza and the thought that this could be a syndrome afflicting everyone who serves at checkpoints gives him no respite. On the verge of completing his studies in the design program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he decided to drop everything and devote all his time to the book he wanted to write. The major publishers he brought it to declined to publish it. The publisher that finally accepted it (Gevanim) says that the Steimatzky bookstore chain refuses to distribute it. But Furer is determined to bring his book to the public's attention.

"You can adopt the most hard-line political positions, but no parent would agree to his son becoming a thief, a criminal or a violent person," says Furer. "The problem is that it's never presented this way. The boy himself doesn't portray himself this way to his family when he returns from the territories. On the contrary - he is received as a hero, as someone who is doing the important work of being a soldier. No one can be indifferent to the fact that there are many families in which, in a certain sense, there are already two generations of criminals. The father went through it and now the son is going through it and no one talks about it around the dinner table."

Furer is certain that what happened to him is not at all unique. Here he was - a creative, sensitive graduate of the Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts, who became an animal at the checkpoint, a violent sadist who beat up Palestinians because they didn't show him the proper courtesy, who shot out tires of cars because their owners were playing the radio too loud, who abused a retarded teenage boy lying handcuffed on the floor of the Jeep, just because he had to take his anger out somehow. "Checkpoint Syndrome" (also the title of his book), gradually transforms every soldier into an animal, he maintains, regardless of whatever values he brings with him from home. No one can escape its taint. In a place where nearly everything is permissible and violence is perceived as normative behavior, each soldier tests his own limits of violence impulsiveness on his victims - the Palestinians.
[more]

The above is from Aron Trauring's excellent site. Aron was also in the IDF and recounts his experiences here, here, and here. They are must reading.

The occupation corrupts from above

The lie we were told about the Air Force's bombing of the Nusseirat refugee camp has very long tentacles. These tentacles start from the very highest echelons and do not skip over any sector of Israeli society. Their roots are planted deep in the territories, fed by the poison of the occupation.

Without lies, it would be impossible to talk about peace with the Palestinians for 36 years while at the same time seizing more and more Palestinian land. Without lies, it would be impossible to claim that there is no partner for the road map, while at the same time injecting more and more money into outposts that the road map calls for dismantling. Without lies, it would be impossible to promise "painful concessions" in exchange for peace, while at the same time terming people who concluded such an agreement "traitors."
[more]

Religious right relishing Road Map's collapse
Fundamentalist leaders want Bush to add Palestinians to list of targets for war against terrorism

In the coming maelstrom that lies ahead, in the coming judgment that's going to burst in cyclonic fury over this world, and this planet, America's only hope -- listen to me, White House, listen to me, State Department, listen to me, Pentagon, listen to me, Mr. President -- America's only hope is not GNP, it's not scientific achievement, it's not an education at Harvard or Yale, but it's America holding on to that little, tiny state of Israel and saying, "We will stand with you," because God said, "They that bless Israel I will bless, and they that curse Israel, I will curse."
-- Rev. Jimmy Lee Swaggart, March, 1985
[more]

Bullshit Artists, Inc.

Ariel Sharon reminds me these days of Chance the Gardener, the star of the movie "Being There," based on Jerzy Kosinski's book. Chance's world revolves around images from the world of gardening: "Seeds are sown in autumn;" "flowers blossom in spring;" "leaves turn yellow in the fall;" "when winter is over and summer comes, the
trees will bear fruit."

The Washington political scene, including the president himself, is convinced that lurking behind Chance's simple words are incomparably profound political insights and multiple meanings that will solve the problems of the world. He utters a word and everyone thinks he might mean this or might mean that. Altogether, an out-and-out genius.
[more]

Which kind of binational state?

And there's a fourth model, which can be called "undeclared binationalism." It's a unitary state controlled by one dominant national group, which leaves the other national group disenfranchised and subject to laws "for natives only," which for the purposes of respectability and international law are known as laws of "belligerent occupation." The convenience of this model of binationalism is that it can be applied over a long period of time, meanwhile debating the threat of the "one state" and the advantages of the "two states," without doing a thing. That's the situation nowadays. But the process is apparently inevitable. Israel and the Palestinians are sinking together into the mud of the "one state." The question is no longer whether it will be binational, but which model to choose.
[more]