The overt alignment of Mr. Bush with the Israeli definitions of terrorism and the dynamics of violence in the Mid-East further tangles a web of politics which makes it ever more difficult to find a way toward peace and justice in that part of the world.

Our government and our media habitually take the point of view that what is going on in Israel and Palestine is, first, an act of terror on the part of Hamas and then, a reasonable, justifiable retaliation of even more violence on the part of the Israeli government.

If one takes only one slice of that violence and only at the point where it is situated in some part of Israel, then the analysis sounds reasonable.

There is a much larger history and a much more understandable, hence, politically salient analysis to be made.

First, we must start at the Holocaust in Europe and Russia which began, sporadically, in the 19th century and reached a violence on a scale against Jews and other minorities unknown in human history. Literally millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, dissident Catholics and Protestants were systematically murdered in German occupied territories during WWII.

In order to cope with that terror, that violence, there arose a renewed quest for a Jewish Homeland in which this ancient peoples would be safe, secure and free to express their great genius. European Jews, many socialists and unwelcome in US occupied Europe, began a migration to Palestine, set up an Israeli home state and offered sanctuary to every oppressed Jew from Asia to Africa to Europe, east and west.

Jewish freedom fighters, defined as terrorists by both British and Arabic governments in the area, were successful in establishing a state and, with help from poor and wealthy Jews around the world, especially in the USA, managed to survive in a very hostile region.

But European Jews pushed thousands, then tens of thousands Islamic Arabs out of a slowly growing Jewish nation. European Jews, with their understandings of land tenure saw lands in both Israel and later, in occupied Palestine as free for the taking. A bit like Americans settled Indian lands in the West, there were quite different laws/traditions of land use and water use between Arabs and Israelis.

Arab land use traditions gave a family use of land loosely demarcated for years on end. Then as family size changed, as older brothers migrated, as different families gained status, tribal councils apportioned land differently without recourse to formal title, deed registration, surveyors or land use taxation.

And, as European Jews, African Jews, Asian Jews and South American Jews, even Jews from North America were able to save money and make the trip, land for more housing, for more schools, for more kibbutzim and for more shops and stores became ever more scarce.

For the past 40 years, especially since the 1967 war in which a much smaller Israeli army beat back a much larger Arabic army, the Israeli government has been taking ever more 'free' land from traditional Arab land use.

And, at the same time, the USA had use for a 'friendly ally' in that part of the world. In Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan, US policy and British policy of supporting elitist governments 'friendly' to 'American Interests,' oil, lead to ever greater hostility toward the USA by the young people across Arabic and Islamic lands. Oil, the heritage of the people of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, became the property of a few powerful families; some arbitrarily defined as 'owners,' by oil companies and foreign governments alike.

As Israel became more useful to the US, our government armed and trained Israeli military and gave billions to the Israeli government. There was and is much merit in our aid to Israeli; much merit in the uses to which the Israelis put it.

But the gap between the military capacity, the ability to use violence grew wider. Arabs had low-tech violence available...rifles, bombs, mortars. Israelis had modern military aircraft, tanks, artillery and, as well, intelligence from US satellites about military movements in surrounding Arab countries. One by one, the US government neutralized enemies of Israel close to that country. The US Air Force helped Israeli air force shoot down Egyptian planes with secret electronic guidance systems to end that war and save Israel...while those of us who admire and support Israel, as do I, still that help alienated whole cohorts of Arabs. Then too, that secret technology was improved and put to use in Desert Storm...again, to save oil company interests in Kuwaiti oil...interests understood inimical to those of Arab masses in the region.

President Carter neutralized Egypt; then Lebanon was neutralized in a bloody war. Israel withdrew from both Egyptian lands in the Sinai and in Lebanon....keeping 'buffer' zones...which later provided land for more refugees drawn to the dream of a Jewish homeland...understandably drawn to such a dream.

The Camp David Accords settled much of the dispute between Egypt and Israel having to do with the 'buffer zones,' but did little to put a better, mutually understood and equitable set of land tenure laws in place. It guaranteed 'due process of law, but didn't say whose law.

In 1988, elements of the Palestinian Liberation Army began an 'intifada' which sputtered, flamed and failed to free those 'buffer zones.'

And in the Mid-East, absent effective political tools to deal with the USA, more and more young people, mostly males, listened to militant Islamic teachers who made a strong argument that Islamic religion required resistance and rewarded sacrifice.

There is much more to the history and politics of that beleaguered region but a one-sided alignment of the USA with Israeli using the Bush government definitions of 'terrorist' already appropriated by the now very conservative Israeli government, that alignment only radicalizes and politicizes and validates militant Islamic calls for still more violence against both Israel and the USA.

The advent of Osama bin Laden and his rare genius and large private fortune brought forth a much larger, much wider vision of fundamentalist Islamic resistance to US foreign policy and US culture.

There are many elements in modern, free-market dynamics which greatly offend Islamic sensibilities; crime, use of drugs, a militant feminism, racism for both Blacks and Arabs (whom I seen called sand niggers in US university grafiti). All these create great ambivalence among Arabic and other ethnic groups devoutly committed to Islam.

The Bush Administration, Mr. Bush himself, Mr. Powell and Mr. Rumsfeld all ignore this history and all focus on the events of 11 September as though they had no roots, no history, no logic beyond the madness of religious zealots.

So...what to do?

Think about it. Killing Palestinian leaders, killing Taliban leaders, freezing resources of every organization which deals with any 'terrorist' cum 'freedom fighter' or targeting the 50 or 60 countries (The Federation of American Scientists count 370 such organizations) around the world where one can find cultures of resistance and groups excluded for military operations... attacks on Saddam Hussein/Iraq or Qaddafi/Libya or North Korea will only bring on more hatred for the US and more violence toward our citizens.

Alignment against Hamas and continued expansion of 'anti-terror' targets promises to convert the war in Afghanistan to a class/economic bloc warfare in which wealthy European nations use high-tech and remote weaponry against poor countries/organizations around the world who have low-tech and face-to-face technology with which to resist what many millions in those countries believe to be exploitation by those rich countries.

A much better foreign policy involves the UN, involves Islamic participation in solutions, involves a more genuine commitment to democracy, equality and economic justice than permitted by the big 7 or by the 2000+ transnational corporations which move wealth, food, raw materials and US policy around the world.

                                                                            TR Young

Note My sympathies continue to be with the people of Israel. I have been guest in the homes of several families in Israel. I have walked with my Israeli Military host on the Golan Heights. I have lain stones on the graves of Golda Meir and Ben Gurion. I have lectured at Tel Aviv University and in two of the largest Kibbutz in Israel. I have attended Mass on Christmas morn in the Church of the Nativity and I have walked the Via Dolorosa. I have no friends in Palestine; but I do have great sympathy for a distressed people everywhere. I put those people above the simple minded nationalism which the Bush Administration evokes to mask ugly politics at home and abroad.