Where the leaders of the State of Israel stand now, destabilized as they are by their recent failures, it becomes urgent for those who feel a lasting friendship for the inhabitants of the country to question its destiny. It should be obvious that pursuing a policy of military strength, rampant colonization and army occupation of territories conquered by warfare, and of brutal repression of Palestinian attempts to assume their identity, only blackens the image of a country that needs to find its fair place in the Middle East.

The Zionist enterprise, which labeled Palestine as a "land without a people for a people without land," has caused a great deal of harm and has irreversibly failed. Israel's policy is now more ambiguous, more Machiavellian, but equally bound to fail: On the one hand, it confines Palestinians to a number of small, highly populated areas--open-air prisons like the Gaza Strip and West Bank towns deprived of cultivable land, like Qalqilya, Bethlehem and Bil'in. On the other, it increases the Jewish urbanization of Jerusalem and its adjacent settlements up to the border of Jordan itself, closing off passage to West Bank Palestinians.

This policy violates UN Security Council resolutions, precludes the setting up of a viable Palestinian state and condemns the Arab population to misery and economic collapse, making it an all-too-easy prey, despite the eagerness for peace of most, to Islamist violence. As my generation clearly remembers, military occupations elicit staunch resistance and legitimize violence. Initiated by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, this policy may have created the illusion of increased security for Israelis. But it only delays the dawning of a lasting solution, which requires the fall of the wall now being built in the occupied territories and the sharing of the land between a state for the Jews and a state for the Palestinians.

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