Like most consumers of American media, I always took Israeli settlements in the West Bank for inkblots (ever expanding?) within contiguous Palestinian territory.

Viewing the (FRONTLINE) Oslo II map, I figured out that the negotiated Palestinian homeland is to be the hodgepodge of inkblots (ever diminishing?) within a contiguous Israeli realm – which civilian domain encompasses 40% of West Bank land (today).

Not surprisingly, 75% of West Bank water is incorporated into said 40% (as I wrote this, I heard a C-Span call-in complain that settlers control 50% of Gaza water!?). Even future, sovereign Palestinian nation-etts are to be crisscrossed by the hundreds of miles of Jew-only bypass roads (BYPASS MAP) and, even more incongruously, to be dotted with Israeli settlements and towns!

The Frontline map identifies 52 settlements created since Sharon took power -- out of the existing 98! Does Israeli civilian control really need to reach 50% -- with the Israeli military controling West Bank borders and Israeli civilian intrusion dispersed throughout Palestinian so-called sovereignty -- before all logic forces us to acknowledge the fact of “Greater Israel” ?

2004’s Gaza disengagement process bulldozed 28,000 people out of their homes (COUNTERPUNCH – para. 15) -- while the IDF chief has announced the hope of excluding all Palestinian workers from Israel by 2008 (para. 21) – sounding more like a Marshall Plan in reverse.

Israel would like Palestinians out of the West Bank too – but Palestinians have not taken the hint – nor have their billion-plus Islamic friends. Which is a necessary and sufficient explanation for America – suckered, by behind-the-curve media and path-of-least-resistance politicians, into doing too much for an Israel that does too much to vulnerable Islamic people – trading skyscrapers for settlements.

Forget any clash of Western and Islamic civilizations. Israel’s West Bank occupation is simply the Islamic world’s version of South African apartheid and Bosnian ethnic cleansing all rolled into one –perpetually vexing its people into undoing the unendurable – much as the “peculiar institution” of slavery once pecked away at the American conscience.

America’s talking heads and following leaders are way overdue getting the word to their people that a Palestinian nation cannot exist half slave and half free either.

200,000 people may be causing a world war all by themselves. 40% of both American and Israeli Jews agree most settlements have to be removed from the West Bank – it should not be hard to get 80% of all other Americans and a majority of American Jews behind removing all so-called settlers if and when our media fully portrays the off-the-scale, in-your-face nature of the so-called occupation.

I don't know what century Islamic terrorists are inhabiting: they drain tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars from the Saudis and who-knows-who-else to build hate schools systems, and blow up buildings full of people (didn't Menacham Begin start that in the mideast?); didn't they ever hear of television, or Madison Ave? They have a great story to tell -- why don't they switch one-tenth of their present effort to attempting to educate the one uncomprehending, isolated-by-oceans part of our universe, which happens to be the only part which supports Israel's aggression? -- an high-tech, unstoppable info outflanking worthy of twenty-first century political warfare.