Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?

Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.

Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.

In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.

The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.

Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.

In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.

Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.

In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month's time -- killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.

Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."

And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?

Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in violation of all purported enlightenment values."

Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish communities.

The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.

In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East -- has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."

Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.

Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.

Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."

Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway ­ along with many others -- sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."

This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.

Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.

We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

"The chief of staff has accepted Adam's request and he will be replaced in accordance with IDF [Israel Defence Forces] procedures."

Local media reports said Adam tendered his resignation because of differences with army chief of staff Dan Halutz over the conduct of the 34-day offensive on Hezbollah, which ended under a UN-brokered ceasefire on August 14.

Some Israeli military affairs commentators had questioned whether Adam, a tank officer, had been the right choice to head the Northern Command and lead a campaign that relied largely on air power, artillery and infantry.

Adam had been widely expected to leave the army in the wake of a decision near the end of the 34-day war to appoint another general as "co-ordinator of operations in Lebanon" at the Northern Command.

'Great debt'

"The state of Israel definitely owes [Adam] a great debt," Amir Peretz, the defence minister, told Israel Radio. "No doubt we need to examine the meaning of the [move], why he decided to do it ... such an announcement by a general cannot be ignored."

On Adam's watch, Hezbollah seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight other troops in a cross-border raid on July 12, an operation that triggered the fighting that ended in a ceasefire on August 14.

Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets into Israel, embarrassing the Middle East's most powerful army, and the soldiers are still being held.

Under public pressure, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, on Monday appointed a retired judge to head an inquiry into the way the government and the military handled the war.

There is nothing new about their thesis, which is that, for reasons of domestic policy, the US supports Israel to the detriment of its own interests and of those of many of its allies.

What is striking about the article is that it is the work of two highly respected academics who have previously had little involvement in polemics about the Middle East. They insist that what they are describing is not a "Jewish lobby", since it has the support of Christian fundamentalists and is opposed by many US Jews.

In damning detail they analyse how the pro-Israel lobby operates and applies pressure, particularly in the US Congress, to secure declarations and resolutions that sometimes defy belief.

Unsurprisingly, there have been attempts to prevent any discussion of the article by denouncing both it and its authors as antisemitic. Professor Alan M Dershowitz of Harvard Law School, an unconditional supporter of Israel, claimed that the authors had gleaned their arguments from neo-Nazi web sites. Christopher Hitchens, a formerly leftwing columnist who supported the Iraq war, described the paper as "slightly but unmistakably smelly" - the odour, of course, being anti-semitism.

Mearsheimer and Walt have also provoked debate in Israel. Daniel Levy, a former adviser to Ehud Barak, stated that they had demonstrated the impossibility of any serious discussion of Israeli policy in Washington (2).

In the US, some commentators welcomed the article. Michael Massing wrote in the New York Review of Books: "Despite its many flaws, their essay has performed a very useful service in forcing into the open a subject that has for too long remained taboo" (3).

Tony Judt wrote in the New York Times: "The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-semitism when discussing Israel is threefold. It is bad for Jews: antisemitism is real enough . . . but for just that reason it should not be confused with political criticisms of Israel or its American supporters. It is bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences . . . But above all, self-censorship is bad for the US itself" (4).

But given the US government's unreserved support for the invasion of Gaza and the attack on Lebanon, a free debate is unlikely in the immediate future.

At first sight it seems surprising that the article attracted criticism both from Noam Chomsky and from Joseph Massad, who is associate professor at Columbia University, New York, and a member of the editorial committee of the Journal of Palestine Studies. While recognising the authors' courage, they questioned whether US policy would be different if the lobby did not exist.

Massad, who has suffered at the lobby's hands on his university campus, points out: "The US is opposed in the Arab world as elsewhere because it has pursued and continues to pursue policies that are inimical to the interests of most people in these countries and are only beneficial to its own interests and to the minority regimes in the regions that serve those interests, including Israel" (5).

He claims the lobby's disappearance would affect the "details and intensity" of US policy in the Middle East, but not its substance.

Translated by Donald Hounam

(1) http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/Resear .... After the Atlantic Monthly had refused to publish it, an "edited and reworked version" of the paper appeared in the London Review of Books, 23 March 2006.

(2) Haaretz, Tel Aviv, 25 March 2006, reprinted by the International Herald Tribune, 4 April 2006. It was also quoted in a dossier published by the Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 2006, Washington. A useful summary of the controversy appeared in Mother Jones, San Francisco, 18 May 2006.

(3) "The Storm over the Israel Lobby", New York Review of Books, 8 June 2006.

(4) "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy", The New York Times, 19 April 2006.

(5) "Blaming the Israel Lobby", Counterpunch, Petrolia CA, 25-6 March 2006.

The Israeli army had no immediate comment on the terms of the release or why it was ordered, but said the release would be deferred until Thursday so prosecutors had an opportunity to appeal.

An army spokesman said: "Twenty-one Hamas officials are to be released, but this has been put on hold for 48 hours so the prosecution can file challenges."

He also said that a successful appeal would put the release on hold.

Israeli forces took at least 30 Hamas officials into custody after an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, was seized in a raid on June 25.

Israel said the detainees were suspected of offences linked to Hamas's role in spearheading a six-year-old Palestinian uprising against the occupation. But Palestinians accused Israel of rounding up "bargaining chips" to force Shalit's release.

A senior aide to Ismail Haniya, a Hamas leader and the Palestinian prime minister, said the court's decision represented "significant progress" in securing Shalit's release.

Ahmed Youssef told Israel Radio: "The military court decision is part of a deal coming together to release Shalit, and in the coming days more will be known."

A lawyer representing the detainees, Osama al-Saadi, said the release was conditional on posting a collective bail of 25,000 shekels ($5,690).

"Significant progress" had continued to be made as regards the gradual UNIFIL coordination of Israel's withdrawal and the Lebanese armed forces' deployment into the south, said Annan.

Regarding the disarmament of armed groups in Lebanon, Annan urged that the issue be solved through "a political process that will lead to the full restoration of the authority" of the Lebanese government which, as he expected, would define a time line for Hezbollah's full disarmament through dialogue.

On the captured Israeli soldiers and Lebanese held in Israeli prisons, the secretary-general said he had appointed an experienced mediator to address the issue and both sides had said they were "open to a discussion."

Concerning the disputed Shebaa Farms, Annan said he was studying a Lebanese proposal to put the territory under UN jurisdiction until the issue of Lebanese sovereignty over it, and the delineation of the Lebanese-Syrian border, were fully settled.

The UN chief also said he was pleased that Israel had fully lifted the aerial and maritime blockade imposed on Lebanon.

"I now look forward to the imminent deployment of the UN naval task force off the Lebanese coast to assist the Lebanese authorities in securing the maritime border," said Annan.

"It's impossible to exercise the right to health if you have no [legal] standing," said Orly Alami, coordinator of a project run by Physicians for Human Rights in Israel to help unrecognized villages in the Negev.

Yet Eliada is one of hundreds of Negev Bedouin who have no legal standing, according to estimates by Physicians for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. Some of them are listed in the Gaza Strip's population registry, even if they have never lived there and have no Gaza documents.

When the father of a family has no standing, he is unable to find regular work and support his family. When the mother has no standing, her children also have no standing. And the problem is increasing: Over the next few years, hundreds more Bedouin will grow up in the Negev with no documentation, no rights, no hope and no future.

The primary reason for the problem is the 1959 expulsion of the Al-Azzama tribe. After Yair Peled, an Israel Defense Forces officer, was killed near tribal lands that year, Israel expelled part of the tribe to the Sinai and Jordan, and other members fled, fearing revenge attacks. The Bedouin who went to Sinai did not receive any legal standing from the Egyptians. In 1967, some of the tribe members were allowed to return to the Negev, but were still not granted legal standing. In the 1970s and 1980s, many of the men served as trackers in the IDF. ACRI has been fighting for the Al-Azzama tribe since the mid-1990s.

Other problems include a disorderly registration process in the early years of statehood and a lack of knowledge among the Bedouin about the existence of the census, said Bana Shagri-Badarna, an ACRI attorney who has been looking into cases of Bedouin without standing since 1999. In addition, she said, some Bedouin registered but received no identification documents, and some women did not register for "cultural reasons." Oftentimes, there are families in which some siblings have legal standing in the country and others do not, or in which the parents do not have legal standing but their children do.

"The state must fix the injustice that was done to them and integrate them into Israel's working life," said Shagri-Badarna. But for now at least, the Interior Ministry has agreed to resolve only a few cases.

The spokeswoman of the Interior Ministry's population registry, Sabin Hadad, said that "anyone who was present within the borders of the State of Israel when the population census was conducted, including members of the Bedouin sector in the south, was registered in the Israeli population registry. The assumption is that those without standing entered Israel over the years, without arranging their stay legally."

Population registry officials do not consider it their job to locate those without standing. In Hadad's words: "Every person is allowed to submit an application for [legal] status, which is examined in accordance with the circumstances and the law. This is also our position regarding members of the Al-Azzama tribe."

Meanwhile, Eliada, who moved to Israel from the Sinai in 1980, at age 10, does not know whether his parents had documents or national identity cards, or where such documents might be.

Two years ago, he married a woman from the Al-Azzama tribe who has Israeli citizenship, and they have two children. Eliada has appealed to the director of the social welfare bureau for the Bedouin sector, and in late 2004, his wife sent a letter to the interior minister asking for help - but has yet to receive any.

Hadad said that a letter is not an acceptable alternative to filing an official request. Such a request, she said, "would be examined in accordance with the law and procedures."

For now, Eliada, like many Bedouin without legal standing, avoids going on the roads, in an effort to avoid checkpoints and arrest - not to mention car accidents.

"The European states have promised to reconsider their stance regarding the boycott of the Palestinian government. Following the war in Lebanon there is greater understanding in Europe that they must present a more balanced stance regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict," Yusef said in an interview with Haaretz on Tuesday.

Palestinian Labor Minister Mohammed Barghouti said Tuesday in an interview with the East Jerusalem daily Al-Quds that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas received assurances from the European Union and Arab states that they would cooperate with a national unity government headed by Haniyeh.

"If they [the international community] do not cooperate with the new government, which will represent the entire Palestinian nation, the people will have to reconsider the existence of the Palestinian Authority," Barghouti said.

While speaking with Haaretz, Yusef touched on the three preconditions set by the Quartet - the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia - in return for recognition of the Hamas government: ending violence, recognizing Israel and accepting previous accords between Israel and the Palestinians.

The U.S. State Department said on Tuesday that it would not deal with the new Palestinian unity government unless it met the three conditions and so far, it seems that the Palestinians are not complying with the demands.

"We have not seen all the details (of the new government) and we are taking a look, a close look at it. To the extent that we understand this so far, it does not meet the standard," U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch told reporters.

Yusef says there is no mention of recognition for Israel in the unity government's political platform.

"Recognition and other political issues will be part of the negotiations Abbas will hold. We have granted him full legitimacy to negotiate on behalf of the entire Palestinian people. If he can achieve a diplomatic solution, his plan will be presented before the Palestinian institutions, such as the government and the parliament, and they will need to authorize his proposal. The Arab initiative and the previous UN resolutions will be part of the government's future political agenda."

The Arab initiative refers to a March 2002 proposal by Saudi Arabia whereby the Arab states would recognize Israel in return for a withdrawal to the 1967 lines.

"To date, Israel has not recognized the 1967 lines as its legal border," Yusef said. "When it does so, I will tell you whether we recognize Israel," he added.

Regarding previous agreements, Yusef said the unity government intends to recognize them, but stressed this meant the accords "that serve the interests of the Palestinian people."

On the question of relinquishing violence, Yusef said that if Israel ceases its military operations, the Palestinians would also agree to a cease-fire.

He explained that the national unity government would be set up so that the boycott would be lifted, contacts with the EU and Arab world would be renewed, and pressure on Israel to alter its policies would increase.

"We will put forth a broad political program that will result in greater European support for the Palestinians, and that will create more diplomatic pressure on Israel, in the hope that this will soon end Israeli occupation. A new diplomatic initiative is needed to bring about change and a solution through peaceful means. The initiative must include greater European, international and Arab involvement than the failed initiatives of the past."

"The new government is not a Hamas government but one of the entire Palestinian people. All the issues are open for discussion from out point of view, and Abbas can meet Israeli politicians from our point of view," Yusef said.

While expressing reservations over the likelihood of Haniyeh negotiating with Israel, Yusef said, "If the two prime ministers must meet, and the matter serves Palestinian interests, there is no Islamic prescription against this."

Yusef said Hamas can offer Israel a hudna, a long-term cease-fire, but not a peace agreement. "It is possible to reach an agreement for calm between the two sides for many years, and then the situation can be reconsidered," he said.

Responding to the press conference held on Tuesday by Noam Shalit, father of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Yusef said the Palestinians hoped a deal would be concluded soon.

"I want to send a message to the father of the soldier Shalit: He is alive and well; the Palestinians, when we have a prisoner in our hands, we give him food and drink and do not torture him."

Yusef called on the Israeli government to release Palestinian prisoners before the Ramadan holiday, which begins on September 24.

The Prime Minister's Bureau said Olmert paid Messer a fee for handling the sale of the house, located on 54 Shiloh Street in the Nahlaot neighborhood. Neither Olmert nor Messer would disclose the size of the fee.

As reported this week on Channel 10, the house was registered under the name of Olmert's wife Aliza and sold in the mid-'90s to Jewish-American businessman Uri Harkham, and Harkham's three brothers. Harkham contributed $25,000 to United Jerusalem, the ticket Olmert headed in the 1993 Jerusalem mayoralty campaign, on the eve of the elections.

Before the Olmerts sold the house, they used it to showcase Aliza Olmert's artwork, after which the Olmerts' children moved in.

Harkham told Channel 10 that he has never contributed to individuals, only institutions, and has certainly never made any contributions to Olmert. The businessman said he sold the house because he was not happy with the way it had been treated and said the sale did not involve any corruption.

The Harkhams paid NIS 1.95 million at the time, the equivalent of about $660,000, or $5,000 per square meter for the 120-square-meter house, which has a large garden and a parking space.

The Olmert house appears to have gone for the highest price per meter paid for a residence in Nahlaot during the mid-'90s or since then according to an examination of many real estate deals in the neighborhood over the last decade or so.

Other properties were sold for about $1,500 per square meter, reaching as high as $3,000 per square meter in a few cases. It should be noted that the other sales were for apartments, not private homes, which are generally priced higher.

The Harkham brothers sold the house in 2000 to two foreign residents for about $430,000, a far lower sum than they had paid the Olmert family. About a year ago, the house was sold again, also to a foreign resident, for about $490,000 some 30 percent less than the amount the Olmert family received for it a decade earlier.

Kobi Bir, who until recently headed the Jerusalem appraisers association, said the real estate prices in Nahlaot are now the same as they were in the mid-'90s.

"There are a few facts here that are a bit surprising," he said. "The property, in the year of sale, was essentially a ruin. About 300 meters could have been built on the property. In the same period, the prices stood at $1,200-$1,500 for a meter of construction. That is, the expected worth of a property of this type should have been $450,000 to $500,000 maximum. If it was sold for $650,000, that means it was sold for $150,000 to $200,000 more than the price that Olmert should have expected in that time period."

Last week the Jerusalem Municipality approved a plan to demolish all but the facade of the house, and rebuild it.