I am afraid that after two thousand years of going without a country Jews may no longer know what to do with one when they've got one (some of them might say "got one back"). After two thousand years on the move, maybe all they can think is: "neighborhoods", "neighborhoods", "neighborhoods".

How else to explain well off -- liberal -- Israelis living without sympathy, just down the road from painfully poorer Arabs within Israel proper: the Arabs seeming to them more from unrelated neighborhoods than from an overall society.

Ditto for setting up settlements in the occupied territories -- just more neighborhoods? Should displaced Arabs not be content to be poor somewhere else (move down the road; "How much difference can that make?"), but have the temerity to fight back (if often immorally -- but who invented the truck bomb?), they are the breakers of the peace.

The geopolitical concept of "sovereign-territory invading other sovereign-territory" eludes Israelis where the Palestinian homeland is concerned -- which is why the dots between Israel's American giant military/political/economic support and mad (by both definitions) Arabs blowing holes in New York City fail to connect also (Americans by and large fail to connect the dots -- 2 far for 20/20 vision?).

Word to Israel: You have been away for two thousand years. Two hundred year old technologies have altered psychic geography: the railroad and the telegraph -- which have made national borders feel both much less flexible and much more "sacred".

Back when the furthest you could extend your personal influence was how far you could ride your horse in a day (if you could afford a horse), the further reaches of your political realm might seem like the far side of the moon to you. The railroad and the telegraph pulled continental United States together so that African slavery that was tolerated by the North in 1800 became too close for psychic comfort in 1850.

The medium could be the message in the nineteenth century, as well. What will it take for Israelis to get the message to go with the country?