Representatives of Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party left for Yemen yesterday to continue negotiations with the assistance of Yemeni President Abdullah Salah. The Hamas delegation was led by Khaled Meshal, who heads the organization's overseas wing.

Meanwhile, a new poll released yesterday shows that 77 percent of Palestinians support the document, which states that the Palestinian people "desires the liberation of its lands ... including the right to establish an independent state with holy Jerusalem as its capital on all the territories occupied in 1967."

The poll, conducted by Birzeit University in Ramallah, also indicated a dramatic drop in support for Hamas: 37 percent of respondents said they would vote for Hamas if parliamentary elections were held today, compared to 50 percent in April. Some 37 percent said they would vote Fatah.

Abbas agreed to extend his ultimatum during a meeting of the PLO's executive committee in Ramallah yesterday. The committee approved both the extension and his proposal for a referendum.

"Before the end of the week, President Abbas will hold a news conference to announce the holding of the referendum and the beginning of the process for carrying it out," Yasser Abed Rabbo, a PLO Executive Committee official close to Abbas, said.

On Monday night, according to a participant in that night's negotiations with Hamas, Abbas had declared that efforts to get Hamas to support the document had failed, and that he would announce a referendum on the issue today. But Abed Rabbo said that Arab leaders, including Salah, and representatives of the Palestinian prisoners had urged Abbas to grant the extension.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, however, said yesterday the gaps between Abbas and Hamas on the document are too great to be settled in two days. He said negotiations must continue without any time constraints, Israel Radio reported.

Abbas has said repeatedly he will not accept any changes to the plan, which was produced by prisoners from both Fatah and Hamas. But Hamas insists various changes be made. "The approach is to treat this document as a sacred document, and that is something we don't accept," said the Hamas spokesman.

Syrian Michel Kilo is also in prison. A historic opponent to Hafez el-Assad, then to his son Bachar, he was authorized to criticize the regime. That's all over. This 57-year-old political scientist was arrested in his home at dawn on May 14. Accused among other things of "defaming the Head of State," he risks life imprisonment. As do dozens of other intellectuals arrested in recent weeks.

Did the "Arab spring" only last a season? Three years ago, just before the Iraq offensive, George Bush announced his ambition to "spread democratic values" to the Middle East. A new regime in Baghdad would serve as a "powerful example of freedom for the other nations in the region." At first, American pressures falling under the generic heading "Greater Middle East" contributed just about everywhere to democratic advances: the first presidential election with several candidates in Egypt, freedom of speech for the Syrian opposition. "Before, when I was called in by the secret services, I was offered a couple of slaps as I left. Now, I'm offered a cup of coffee," one of them said only a few months ago. In the Gulf, women obtained the right to vote in Kuwait, among other things, and even Saudi women should be able to vote in the next partial municipal elections, inaugurated in 2005.

But three years after Bush's announcement, the dynamism seems to be arrested. Iraq is courting chaos and regimes are hardening up. Egypt has reinstated a state of emergency first established in 1981. Opposition leader Ayman Nour, who came in second place behind Hosni Mubarak in the September presidential election, has been condemned to five years in prison for "falsification of a file." He is also ineligible [as a candidate] for six supplementary years, which would prohibit him from running in 2011. Syria snaps up writers and re-establishes itself in Lebanon. In Saudi Arabia, the palace has specified that a constitutional monarchy is not on the program.

Contradictory Message From the United States

Has the Greater Middle east disappeared in the Iraqi quagmire? Some still want to believe in it. "There's been a slowdown in American pressure on governments for temporary reasons: the war in Iraq, Iran and Palestinian Hamas's victory, but they still think loosening is necessary," assures a high ranking Arab diplomat.

The United States has recently sent contradictory messages to their allies. A State Department spokesperson demanded Ayman Nour's liberation in May and talked about "a reversal for the Egyptian people's democratic aspirations." But, at the same time, Bush received Gamal Mubarak, the president's son and probable dynastic successor.

The American plan has already discovered its limits. Because democratization doesn't go in the right direction? Everywhere, from Saudi Arabia to Egypt, timid electoral openings have given victory to movements that assert their links to Islam. To the United States' great displeasure, believes researcher Olivier Roy.* "There's no democracy without political legitimacy and no political legitimacy without taking into account Arab nationalism and Islamism. Now, the United States distrusts Arab nationalism and Islamism.

Authoritarian regimes are betting on a reduction in American and European pressures and play up to the slogan, "It's Islamism or Us." During the World Economic Forum at Sharm el-Sheikh on May 20, Hosni Mubarak claimed he had obtained carte blanche from Condoleezza Rice for the next twenty years: "She understood that democracy in Arab countries takes a generation," he declared to the Egyptian press.

It's not the Islamization of society that bothers these regimes. Most, including Baathist Syria most recently, allow religious institutions to control society in exchange for their benediction. It's only when the Islamists make a show of organizing into parties that they are repressed, just like "secular" political oppositions. For analyst Bassma Kodmani, director of the Arab Reform Initiative, which brings together "liberal" Arab and western study centers, political opening-up is the only solution to settling the limits between religion, politics, and society.

She believes as well that authorizing political parties would also allow the organization of left and liberal currents, counterweights to the Islamists that are growing in power in Arab societies. Thus, in Egypt, the "Kefaya" ("Enough") network is more and more accompanying the struggle of peasants despoiled by big landowners. One of the many signs that political effervescence in the region is not about to die down.

Many people, like Shamaa's friend, believe the kidnappers are actually police. Usually the hostages are held for ransom. Sometimes they are killed because of their faith or ethnicity.

The fate of the 56 people was unknown Monday night. But the scale and audacity of the operation were unusual even by the capital's lawless standards.

The gunmen seized workers from several bus companies that offer transport to Syria and Jordan, witnesses and police said. Others of those taken were passengers aboard the buses: Syrian businessmen going home, a handful of Palestinians, Iraqis. Many Iraqis are leaving their own country precisely because it is the sort of place where a trip to the bus stop can end with being led away at gunpoint.

Shamaa said he was intent on returning to his office, to rejoin his son, Alaa, and thought the police wouldn't arrest him - he hadn't done anything wrong, he reasoned. Then he saw a dozen pickup trucks, two of them with machine guns mounted in their beds, and none with any license plates.

A man in a camouflage police uniform and a ski mask - an article commonly worn by police in Baghdad- stopped Shamaa, saying he would shoot him if he didn't turn back.

"I haven't done anything," Shamaa recounted explaining to him. "I just want to go to the bank to get some money, and I'll be gone."

The man let him pass. Shamaa went into the bank and watched the scene unfolding through the window. He said he saw gunmen entering the Mohammed Ugaili Transportation Co. across the street. He saw the owner, Jasim Ugaili, and his son being forced into one of the pickup trucks with the butts of rifles. Shamaa saw his own son, Alaa, with them, his hands tied behind his back.

Shamaa rushed outside to save his son. Another man with a rifle blocked his way.

"What, do you want to join him?" the man threatened. Shamaa turned back. And the trucks drove off.

Police Col. Adel Younis said guards at the Ministry of Justice shot at the kidnappers but couldn't stop them. Another witness, Hussein Ali, said he had seen a police car drive up to the scene, only to be driven off by gunfire and shouted warnings from the kidnappers that they were from the Interior Ministry's intelligence section.

Younis said the incident is under investigation. A police major who came on the scene after the attack said the men were not with the Interior Ministry, a witness said.

Raids like this one only increase popular mistrust of the police. Sunni Arabs often accuse the Interior Ministry police, dominated by Shiite Muslims, of conducting a terror campaign against them, or at least looking the other way as Shiite militias associated with political parties do so. But police say the attacks are carried out by criminals wearing police uniforms. At the same time, they counter that Iraq's major insurgent organizations are led by Sunnis and that a tough response is required.

Monday's kidnappings did not appear to be motivated by sectarian rivalry, a witness said. "Among the passengers were Syrian businessmen, about five or six of them," Hasan Falah said. "There were also some passengers from Diwaniyah" - a predominantly Shiite city south of Baghdad- "and other parts of Iraq. There was no question of Shiite or Sunni because it was a whole mixture."

That suggested that the people were simply taken for ransom, a lucrative business that has grown rapidly since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein's government in 2003.

A group of Shiite students in a neighborhood of southern Baghdad, kidnapped in another roundup on Monday, did not have the option of paying their way out.

In Abu Dashir, a Shiite neighborhood south of Dora, the volatile southern section of Baghdad, gunmen posing as drivers lined up a set of minibuses as if to offer rides to central Baghdad, a police officer said. Fifteen students from Abu Dashir got aboard.

The drivers and their accomplices killed them - where the murders happened is unclear - and threw their bodies off the side of the Dora highway.

Abduction statistics are unreliable because many families do not report crimes, fearing the police as much as they do the kidnapping gangs.

But every so often, kidnappers are brought to justice. On Monday, an Iraqi court sentenced an Iraqi man to life imprisonment in connection with the killing of Margaret Hassan, an Iraqi-British aid worker kidnapped in 2004. It is believed to be Iraq's first trial of a suspect accused of the abduction or murder of a foreign-born civilian since the U.S.-led invasion.

Mustafa Salman, charged with aiding and abetting the abductors, received the sentence a few hours after his trial started, the Reuters news service reported. Two other defendants in the case were freed.

Hassan, originally from Ireland, married an Iraqi engineer and lived in Iraq for more than three decades before becoming an Iraqi citizen. At the time of her kidnapping in October 2004, she headed Iraqi operations for the CARE International charity. She was abducted on her way to work in Baghdad. She was presumed murdered about a month later, after her captors released video messages of her appealing for the withdrawal of British forces from Iraq. Her body has not been found.

Also in Baghdad on Monday, the defense team in the trial of Saddam Hussein protested the arrest of four of its witnesses. Defense attorneys charged that some of them were beaten by Iraqi guards.

The chief judge said they were jailed on suspicion of perjury last week after testifying that they had seen the chief prosecutor offering money and unspecified fake documents in exchange for testimony. One of the witnesses also claimed that some of the 148 Shiites from the town of Dujail who were allegedly killed on Hussein's orders were still alive.

These were the days when Palestinians carried far less news value for editors than Furbish's lousewort, and no politician ever held that this beleagured plant didn't actually exist as a species, which is what Golda Meir, Israel's prime minister said of Palestinians.

Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the intrepid professor from Hebrew University.

It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then and at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic trends were established in '74 and '75, including settler organizations, mystical ideology, and the great financial support of the United States to Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the key decisions were taken, and from that time it's a straight line." Among these decisions, said Shahak, was "to keep the occupied territories of Palestine," a detailed development of much older designs consummated in 1967.

Gradually, through the 1980s, very often in the translations from the Hebrew language press that Shahak used to send, the contours of the Israeli plan emerged, like the keel and ribs and timbers of an old ship: a road system that would bypass Palestinian towns and villages and link the Jewish settlements and military posts; ever-expanding clusters of settlements; a master plan for control of the whole region's water.

It wasn't hard to get vivid descriptions of the increasingly intolerable conditions of life for Palestinians: the torture of prisoners, the barriers to the simplest trip, the harassment of farmers and school children, the house demolitions. Plenty of people came back from Israel and the territories with harrowing accounts, though few ever made the journey into a major newspaper or onto national tv.

And even in the testimonies that did get published here, what was missing was any acknowledgement of the long-term plan to wipe the record clean of all troublesome U.N. resolutions, crush Palestinian national aspirations, steal their land and water, cram them into ever smaller enclaves, ultimately balkanize them with the Wall, which was on the drawing board many years ago. Indeed to write about any sort of master plan was to incur further torrents of abuse for one's supposedly "paranoid" fantasies about Israel' bad faith, with much pious invocation of the "peace process".

But successive Israeli governments did have a long-term plan. No matter who was in power, the roads got built, the water stolen, the olive and fruit trees cut down (a million) the houses knocked over (12,000), the settlements imposed (300) the shameless protestations of good faith issued to the US press (beyond computation).

As the new millennium shambled forward, surely it became impossible to believe any Israeli claim to be bargaining, or even to wish to bargain in good faith. By now the "facts of the ground" in Israel and the territories were as sharply in focus as one of Dali's surrealist paintings.

In May of this year the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, comes to Washington and addresses a joint session of Congress in which he declares: "I believed, and to this day still believe, in our people's eternal and historic right to this entire land." In other words he doesn't recognize the right of Palestinians to even the wretched cantons currently envisaged in his "realignment". Why should Hamas believe a syllable of Olmert's poppycock? When Arafat and the PLO gave worrisome signs of being eager for an accommodation Israel's reply was to invade Lebanon.

In Olmert's "realignment plan the "Separation Barrier," now scheduled to be Israel's permanent "demographic border," annexes 10 per cent of the West Bank, while melding into Israel vast settlements and half a million settlers. The Palestinians lose their best agricultural land and the water. Israel's greater Jerusalem finishes off all possible viability for a viable, separate Palestinian state. This Palestinian mini-archipelago of cantons is shuttered to the east by Israel's security border in the Jordan Valley.

The press here, timid and ignorant, greets Olmert's "realignment" with tranquil respect. In the meantime a frightful historical tragedy is in its final chapters. With the connivance of what is sometimes laughably referred to as the "world community"--notably the US and EU, Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians into submission as the reward for having democratically elected the party of their choice. Whole communities are on the edge of starvation, cut off by Israel from food and medicines. The World Bank predicts a poverty rate of over 67 percent later this year. A UN Report issued in Geneva on May 30 says that four out of 10 Palestinians in the territories live under the official poverty line of less than $2.10 a day. The ILO estimates the jobless rate to be 40.7 percent of the Palestinian labor force.

The end of the story? I'd say the basic strategy is what it was in 1948: population transfer, to be achieved by making life so awful for Palestinians that most of them will depart, leaving a few bankrupt ghettoes behind as memorials to all those foolish hopes of a sovereign Palestinian state.

"We certainly can handle it for a while," he said. "There is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and we have other approaches."

Bodman also said that he is convinced oil producers want "to keep the market well supplied. It's in their interest as well as the interest of consumers."

"We think that by the end of this year our military mission will end in Iraq," he added.

For his part, Zebari said that the visit of the Italian foreign minister was also aimed at congratulating the new Iraqi government for its formal inauguration on May 20 as well as "holding talks on the withdrawal of the Italian troops, which we want to be a gradual pullout."

Italy has maintained about 3,000 troops in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah, the fourth largest contingent after the U.S., Britain and South Korea.

Answering reporters' questions in Laredo, Texas, U.S. President George W. Bush said he was "concerned" about the situation.

"Obviously when there's instability anywhere in the world we're concerned. There is instability in Somalia," Bush said.

"[The] first concern, of course, would be to make sure that Somalia does not become an al-Qaeda safe haven, doesn't become a place from which terrorists plot and plan, so we're watching very carefully developments there," he said.

The Courts Union will have to negotiate with clan leaders who have been running the city for more than a decade.

The largest such clan drew 3,000 demonstrators calling for peace into the streets.

The Courts Union says the secular warlords are puppets of Washington who work for the CIA.

Israel cannot claim the boycott weapon is illegitimate. It makes extensive use of this weapon itself, and its victims are suffering under severe conditions of deprivation, from Rafah to Jenin. In the past, Israel called upon the world to boycott Yasser Arafat, and now it is calling for a boycott of the Hamas government ? and via this government, all of the Palestinians in the territories. And Israel does not regard this as an ethical problem. Tens of thousands have not received their salaries for four months due to the boycott, but when there is a call to boycott Israeli universities, the boycott suddenly becomes an illegitimate weapon.

Those calling for a boycott of Israel are also tainted with a moral double standard. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education ?(NATFHE?) in Britain and the Canadian Union of Public Employees in Ontario, which have both decided to boycott Israel, did not act similarly to protest their own countries' war crimes and occupations ? the British army in Iraq and the Canadian army in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the handful of human rights advocates and opponents of the occupation in Israel should thank these two organizations for the step they have taken, despite their flawed double standards.

It would have been preferable had the opponents of the occupation in Israel not needed the intervention of external groups to fight the occupation. It is not easy to call upon the world to boycott your own country. It would have been better had there been no need for Rachel Corrie, James Miller and Tom Hurndall, bold people of conscience who paid with their lives after standing in front of the destructive bulldozers in Rafah. These young foreigners did the dangerous and vital work that Israelis should have done.

The same is true for the few peace activists who still manage to roam the territories, to protest and offer assistance to the victims of the occupation in the framework of organizations like the International Solidarity Movement ?(ISM?) ? which Israel fights ? preventing its members from entering its borders. It would be better if Israelis mobilized to fight instead of them. But except for a few modest groups, there is no protest in Israel and no real mobilization. Thus, it only remains to hope for the world's help.

The world can help save Israel from itself in limited ways. In a situation in which the governments of the West effectively support the continuation of the occupation, even if they declare their opposition to it, this role moves to civil organizations. When a group of American attorneys, including Jews, calls for a boycott of the Caterpillar company, whose bulldozers razed complete neighborhoods in Khan Yunis and Rafah, it should be thanked for this. The same applies to the boycott of the universities: When an association of British university lecturers boycotts Israeli colleagues who are not prepared to at least declare their opposition to the occupation, we should appreciate it. Each group in its field, and perhaps this will someday also include tourism officials, business people, artists and athletes. If all these boycott Israel, perhaps Israelis will begin to understand, albeit the hard way, that there is a price to pay for the occupation ? a price in their pockets and in their status.

The occupation is not just the domain of the government, army and security organizations. Everything is tainted: institutions of justice and law, the physicians who remain silent while medical treatment is prevented in the territories, the teachers who do not protest against the closing of educational institutions and the prevention of free movement of their peers, the journalists who do not report, the writers and artists who remain mum, the architects and engineers who lend a hand to the occupation's enterprises ? the settlements and the fence, the barriers and bypass roads and also the university lecturers, who do nothing for their imprisoned colleagues in the territories, but conduct special study programs for the security forces. If all these boycotted the occupation, there would be no need for an international boycott.

The world sees a great and ongoing injustice. Should it remain silent? It is not, of course, the only injustice in the world. Nor is it the most terrible. But does this make it any less necessary to act against it?

It is easy to exempt ourselves from our moral responsibility and attribute, as usual, any criticism to anti-Semitism. There may indeed be some elements of anti-Semitism among those calling for the boycott. But also among them are groups and individuals, including quite a few Jews, for whom Israel is close to their hearts. They want a just Israel. They see an Israel that occupies and is clearly unjust, and they believe they should do something. We should thank them for this from the bottom of our hearts.