The word apartheid typically evokes images of former South Africa, but it also refers to any institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another. Carter applies the term only to Israel's rule of the occupied Palestinian territories, where it has established more than 200 Jewish-only settlements and a network of roads and other services to support them. These settlements violate international law and the rights of Palestinian property owners. Carter maintains that "greed for land," not racism, fuels Israel's settlement drive. He is only partially right.

Israel is seizing land and water from Palestinians for Jews. Resources are being transferred, under the guns of Israel's military occupation, from one disempowered group - Palestinian Christians and Muslims - to another, preferred group - Jews. That is racism, pure and simple.

Moreover, there is abundant evidence that Israel discriminates against Palestinians elsewhere. The "Israeli Arabs" - about 1.4 million Palestinian Christian and Muslim citizens who live in Israel - vote in elections. But they are a subordinated and marginalized minority. The Star of David on Israel's flag symbolically tells Palestinian citizens: "You do not belong." Israel's Law of Return grants rights of automatic citizenship to Jews anywhere in the world, while those rights are denied to 750,000 Palestinian refugees who were forced or fled in fear from their homes in what became Israel in 1948.

Israel's Basic Law of Human Dignity and Liberty establishes the state as a "Jewish democracy" although 24 percent of the population is non-Jewish. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, counted 20 laws that explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews.

The government favors Jews over Palestinians in the allocation of resources. Palestinian children in Israel attend "separate and unequal" schools that receive a fraction of the funding awarded to Jewish schools, according to Human Rights Watch. Many Palestinian villages, some predating the establishment of Israel, are unrecognized by the government, do not appear on maps, and thus receive no running water, electricity, or access roads. Since 1948, scores of new communities have been founded for Jews, but none for Palestinians, causing them severe residential overcrowding.

Anti-Arab bigotry is rarely condemned in Israeli public discourse, in which Palestinians are routinely construed as a "demographic threat." Palestinians in Israel's soccer league have played to chants of "Death to Arabs!" Israeli academic Daniel Bar-Tal studied 124 Israeli school texts, finding that they commonly depicted Arabs as inferior, backward, violent, and immoral. A 2006 survey revealed that two-thirds of Israeli Jews would refuse to live in a building with an Arab, nearly half would not allow a Palestinian in their home, and 40 percent want the government to encourage emigration by Palestinian citizens. Last March, Israeli voters awarded 11 parliamentary seats to the Israel Beitenu Party, which advocates drawing Israel's borders to exclude 500,000 of its current Palestinian citizens.

Some say that Palestinian citizens in Israel enjoy better circumstances than those in surrounding Arab countries. Ironically, white South Africans made identical claims to defend their version of apartheid, as is made clear in books such as Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull.

Americans are awakening to the costs of our unconditional support of Israel. We urgently need frank debate to chart policies that honor our values, advance our interests, and promote a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. It is telling that it took a former president, immune from electoral pressures, to show the way.

The debate should now be extended. Are Israel's founding ideals truly consistent with democracy? Can a state established in a multiethnic milieu be simultaneously "Jewish" and "democratic"? Isn't strife the predictable yield of preserving the dominance of Jews in Israel over a native Palestinian population? Does our unconditional aid merely enable Israel to continue abusing Palestinian rights with impunity, deepening regional hostilities and distancing peace? Isn't it time that Israel lived by rules observed in any democracy - including equal rights for all?

George Bisharat (bisharat@uchastings.edu) is a professor of law at University of California Hastings College of the Law. He writes frequently on law and politics in the Middle East.

Ms Fahima, 30, was released from jail on Wednesday after serving almost 30 months in jail for travelling to the West Bank, meeting an enemy agent and translating a simple army document.

"My first crime was that I refused to work with Shin Bet, the second was that I insisted on going to see the Palestinians and the third was that I protested against the Israeli policy of assassination," Ms Fahima told the Guardian in her first interview since her release.

For nine months of her incarceration she was kept in isolation, without access to any distractions such as books or television. "I used to lie on my bed and think about Jenin, the people I met and wonder how things were going there. I never get bored on my own," she said.

Eventually, Ms Fahima was persuaded by her lawyer to agree to a plea bargain which would mean her serving only 10 months more than the 19 she had already served. It could take as long as a year to be found innocent, she was advised.

She is unbowed by her experience. "I learnt about the nature of Shin Bet, how they terrorise us, both the Israelis and Palestinians. I learnt about the nature of the government, how they do not want us to see what is going on in our name," she said.

Ms Fahima had been an apathetic legal secretary who voted for the rightwing Likud party and carried Israeli prejudices about Palestinians until in 2003 she decided she wanted to understand why the Palestinians were attacking Israel.

She began making regular visits to Jenin, which had been devastated in an Israeli raid earlier that year. She talked to hundreds of people including Palestinian militants and for the first time heard the Palestinian view of the intifada and the difficulty of life under Israeli occupation.

Her meetings with one militant, Zakaria Zubeidi, stood out. Zubeidi was the leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin whose mother and brother had been killed by the Israelis that year. In countless interviews with journalists, including Israelis, he described how he and his mother had been involved in an Israeli-Palestinian theatre project which was the basis of an internationally-acclaimed Israeli documentary, Arna's Children.

A week before Ms Fahima was arrested in August 2004 she received a phone call from a Shin Bet agent who inquired how she was finding life without work before inviting her to a meeting at her local police station in Kiryat Gat in the south of Israel. She decided not to go. In the month-long interrogation that followed her arrest she was questioned about the people she had met and asked for information which Ms Fahima said she did not have. During this period Shin Bet agents briefed Israeli journalists she had been having an affair with Zubeidi, who was well known to Israelis from newspaper interviews.

"It was a Shin Bet tactic to make me and him seem bad and to delegitimise us both," she said, adding that while it was obvious to some that it was malicious, many, including friends, believed it.

When she was finally charged she was accused of translating an army document which apparently detailed an arrest operation that was due to take place.

"In the wake of the explanations of the accused," read the charge sheet, "Zubeidi later ordered the wanted persons to hide until the conclusion of the military operation and the wanted persons, who carried out Zubeidi's directive and hid, were not detained."

The document contains three aerial maps of Jenin, and four photographs of wanted men, including Zubeidi, with a short description of each. Zubeidi speaks and reads Hebrew after years of work and imprisonment in Israel.

Timeline

August 8 2004 Tali Fahima arrested

September 2004 Placed under administrative detention

December 2004 Charged with "assistance to the enemy at time of war"

January 2005 Tel Aviv district rules Ms Fahima should be placed under house arrest during the trial

January 2005 Jerusalem's high court overrules district court saying she "identifies with an ideological goal"

December 2005 Ms Fahima pleads guilty to meeting and aiding an enemy agent and entering Palestinian territory

January 2006 Ms Fahima released

At a joint press conference, Mr Olmert apologised if innocent civilians were killed or wounded in Ramallah. He said that was not Israel's intention, but that it had to continue pursuing those who wanted to harm its citizens.

Two Israeli television stations reported last night that Mr Olmert was preparing to remove Amir Peretz as Defence minister and offer him another senior post. If he did not go quietly, the reports said, Mr Olmert would dismiss him. Mr Peretz, a former trade union boss, has been widely criticised for his handling of last summer's Lebanon war.

Mr Olmert felt free to move after parliament passed the 2007 state budget earlier this week. Mr Peretz's leadership of the Labour Party has been weakened by disenchantment over Israel's failure to win an outright victory over Hizbollah, but Mr Olmert will try to finesse things so that his biggest partner does not leave the ruling coalition.

An army spokesman said yesterday that the raiding force entered Ramallah to arrest wanted militants. They were greeted by a hail of stones from bystanders, followed by automatic fire that quickly developed into heavy exchanges. The Israelis said their helicopters raked an open space with "deterrent fire," though Palestinians claimed they also hit a building.

Arab television news footage showed bulldozers and armoured vehicles shunting aside parked cars near the city-centre Manara Square while dozens of civilians fled for their lives. Troops were also seen firing teargas. It was the biggest raid on Ramallah in six months. The Israelis captured four wanted men before withdrawing.

An Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire, agreed in late November, covered the Gaza Strip, but has not been extended to the West Bank. Israel has continued daily arrest operations there, but has refrained so far from retaliating for the persistent launching of Qassam rockets from Gaza into southern Israel.

In northern Gaza yesterday, a Hamas security man was shot dead and two other people were wounded in fire fights between Fatah forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and supporters of the Islamist government. On the West Bank, Fatah kidnapped the Hamas deputy Health minister, Bashar Karmi, in El Bireh and torched the car of another Hamas politician.

Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas Prime Minister, called for an end to the fighting. "These clashes must stop," he insisted on his return to Gaza from Mecca.

Fahima has always denied involvement in violence but said in 2004 that she was ready to serve as a human shield for Zubeidi, the target of three failed Israeli assassination attempts. She contacted him after talking to Arabs on the internet and was arrested after a clandestine meeting in Jenin.

After a year in custody, she pleaded guilty in December 2005 when more serious charges were dropped.

There was outrage in Israel when it was revealed that a Jewish woman had befriended the commander of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade in the Jenin refugee camp, a man accused of planning suicide bombings. Like many descendants of north African immigrants, she and her single-parent mother had always voted for the right-wing Likud party. She had also seen military service.

"I was brought up to consider Arabs as something that should not be here," she told Ha'ir, a Tel-Aviv weekly paper. "One day I understood there were many gaps in my information, things that are not in the media. I realised that it's about human beings, and that we have to take responsibility for the way their life looks."

* A Peruvian photographer, Jaime Razuri, 50, was kidnapped yesterday by Pales-tinian militants in Gaza.

Ms Fahima, a legal secretary, was arrested in August 2004 after the last of a series of visits to Jenin, which were publicised in the media. She was detained without trial after the defence minister said she "took part in planning a terrorist attack in Israel".

She was attacked in the Israeli press as a "terrorist's whore" after journalists were briefed that she had an affair with a Palestinian militant, Zakaria Zubeidi, who is often described as Israel's most wanted man.

Ms Fahima said there was no truth in any of the allegations and said she was only arrested after she declined to work for Shin Bet, Israel's secret service.

When she was tried no evidence was presented of her involvement in a terrorist attack, although she admitted reading an Israeli army document that soldiers lost on patrol.

Ms Fahima pleaded guilty to meeting enemy agents and passing information to them as part of a plea bargain in December 2005.

The charges could have led to a life sentence but Ms Fahima was offered the opportunity to serve only a further 10 months in return for a guilty plea.

As part of the condition of her release she is "banned from leaving the country in the coming year, contacting a foreign agent or entering unauthorised territories", the Israeli prison service said in a statement.

She said she had no plans to visit Jenin and Zubeidi but said she wanted to continue to fight Israel's occupation of the territories.

There were no reports of Israeli troops being wounded in the exchange.

As plumes of smoke rose above the mostly deserted Manara Square in the Palestinian Authority's capital, live footage at the scene showed smashed or overturned cars that had been cleared out of the way by armoured personnel carriers and bulldozers, during what Israeli forces described as "routine arrest activity."

The clash erupted when Israeli forces entered the open-air vegetable market to try to arrest fugitives with the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the Associated Press reported, quoting an anonymous Palestinian security official. The militant group is affiliated with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.

An Israeli army spokeswoman was quoted as saying four Palestinian militants were detained in the raid.

Israel routinely conducts arrest raids in the West Bank, but usually avoids such operations in downtown Ramallah, where the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority is located.

The raid came as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in talks with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to find ways to restart Mideast peace talks that have been stalled for more than six years and to free an Israeli soldier held by Hamas-allied militants in Gaza.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Thursday's action violated a promise Olmert made in a rare summit with Abbas last month to work toward peace.

And in a statement read by a spokesman, Abbas said: "This operation proves that Israeli calls for peace and security are false."

Separately, a new round of factional fighting broke out Thursday between the rival Hamas and Fatah groups in the Gaza Strip, leaving two Palestinians dead.

A member of a Hamas security force was killed when his car came under fire from unidentified assailants in the Jebaliaya refugee camp, a security official said. Hamas accused Fatah of the attack, but Fatah denied involvement.

Hamas gunmen surrounded the house of a Fatah-linked security commander in Beit Lahiya and exchanged fire with guards, leaving a Fatah member dead and 14 other people wounded, witnesses and security officials said.

Clashes erupted during the funeral for three Fatah loyalists killed in gun battles with Hamas on Wednesday, wounding five people.

Assailants also targeted three senior Hamas officials in the West Bank, kidnapping one, torching the car of a second and shooting in the air as a third emerged from a mosque, security officials said.

Brushing aside Haniyeh's plea for calm, Fatah issued a harshly worded statement in Gaza: "Blood for blood and aggression for aggression... and all the sons of the movement should retaliate to each aggression openly."

The Muslim cleric, who was in a car when the gunmen opened fire, was affiliated with neither Hamas nor Fatah. No group claimed responsibility for the shooting, which occurred after services at a mosque in the Maghazi refugee camp.

Residents said the cleric had sharply criticized internal fighting in his Friday sermon.

At one of the funeral marches, members of Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades threatened to assassinate Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar and Interior Minister Saeed Seyam of Hamas.

"Zahar and Seyam, you have to leave Gaza. We will tear your bodies to pieces," an al-Aqsa member screamed through a megaphone as gunmen fired into the air.

Overnight, Hamas-controlled militants and police forces stormed the house of senior Fatah leader Sufian Abu Zaida in northern Gaza Strip, smashing furniture. Abu Zaida, a former cabinet minister, was unhurt.

Factional fighting has surged in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since Abbas challenged the ruling Hamas faction by calling for early parliamentary and presidential elections after talks on forming a unity government failed.

Haniyeh said after late-night emergency talks with Abbas, their first meeting in two months, that they had agreed to "withdraw all gunmen from the streets and deploy police forces to keep law and order".

Abbas made no public comment, but a diplomat who attended the talks and declined to be identified confirmed an agreement had been reached.

Similar pacts in the past have quickly been shattered by violence and Gazans said they feared another eruption of bloodshed later in the day when Thursday's dead are buried.

In a move that could fuel tension, Washington will provide $86 million to strengthen security forces loyal to Abbas, expanding U.S. involvement in Fatah's power struggle with Hamas.

In fighting between rival Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, Fatah gunmen killed a policeman loyal to Hamas.

Hamas gunmen, blaming the shooting on bodyguards of Colonel Mohammed Ghareeb of the Preventive Security Service, besieged his home in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahiya, killing Ghareeb and six of his men and wounding his wife.

Some Fatah gunmen expressed anger at Abbas for not sending forces to save Ghareeb, who had pleaded for help on Palestinian television.

The fighting spread overnight to the occupied West Bank, where gunmen critically wounded a Hamas activist near the city of Nablus, Hamas officials said.

"Hamas and Fatah, you are brothers, please stop the fighting," cried an elderly woman as Ghareeb's funeral passed her house in the Jabalya refugee camp.

Haniyeh told reporters: "The battle is not an internal battle, it is a battle against the occupation."

Earlier on Friday, Israeli forces raided the village of Attil near the West Bank town of Tulkarm. The army said two members of Islamic Jihad were seized.

On Thursday, Israeli forces mounted a rare raid into the West Bank city of Ramallah in which hospital officials said four Palestinians were killed and at least 25 wounded.

In Moscow, the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement it welcomed the Abbas-Haniyeh meeting but considered Israel's raid into Ramallah inflammatory. "This operation led to new victims among peaceful Palestinian citizens," it said.

(Additional reporting by Ari Rabinovitch in Jerusalem; Mohammed Assadi in Ramallah and Atef Sa'ad in Nablus)

© Reuters 2007. All Rights Reserved.

Fighting between Abbas's Fatah faction and Hamas has surged since talks on forming a unity government collapsed and Abbas called for early parliamentary and presidential elections. Hamas accused Abbas of mounting a coup.

The U.S. money will be used to "assist the Palestinian Authority presidency in fulfilling PA commitments under the road map to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza," a U.S. government document obtained by Reuters said.

Speaking to reporters after Friday prayers in Gaza City, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh urged Palestinians not to let the violence spill over to the West Bank and to focus on fighting Israel. "Our fight is not an internal one, it's against the occupation," Haniyeh said.

Haniyeh's words were echoed by senior West Bank Fatah official Jibril Rajoub,speaking in the town of Bilin to supporters celebrating the movement's 42nd anniversary.

"Our battle with Hamas is not a battle of assassination, kidnapping or
revenge. Our battle with Hamas is a democratic moral battle," he told a crowd of about 100. "Our battle is with the occupation, not with each other."

Thousands of Palestinians carried bodies draped in yellow flags through pouring rain Friday in a funeral procession for seven Fatah men killed in the bloodiest single battle in weeks of factional fighting in the Gaza Strip.

Dozens of Fatah gunmen marched in the procession, firing in the air and
calling for vengeance against the rival Hamas group, which is locked in a
power struggle with Fatah over control of the Palestinian government.

Hamas critic gunned-down in Gaza

A local religious leader who was a frequent critic of the Islamic militant group Hamas was killed in a drive-by shooting Friday as he walked out of a Gaza mosque, witnesses and medical officials said.

There was no claim of responsibility in the death of Adel Nasar, who was shot by gunmen who were waiting in a car outside the mosque in the Mughazi refugee camp in central Gaza. Nasar was not openly affiliated with any political party, but he was a well-known in the refugee camp and often spoke against Hamas in his sermons.

Haniyeh, Abbas agree to defuse tensions

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said on Friday he and Abbas had agreed at emergency talks to keep gunmen from their rival Hamas and Fatah factions off Gaza's streets after six people were killed and 18 were wounded.

"We have expressed our regret and sorrow for these incidents that do not reflect our struggle," Haniyeh told reporters at Abbas's office at the end of their first meeting in two months.

Haniyeh said he and Abbas agreed to "withdraw all gunmen from the streets and deploy police forces to keep law and order."

Abbas made no public comment after the session, but a diplomat who attended the talks and declined to be identified confirmed an agreement had been reached.

Similar pacts in the past have been shattered swiftly by violence and Gazans said they feared another eruption of bloodshed later in the day when Thursday's dead are buried.

Gunbattles broke out between forces loyal to Abbas and the Hamas government in northern Gaza on Thursday, killing six people and wounding 18 other people, witnesses said.

In the northern Gaza Strip, a senior Palestinian security officer allied with Fatah was killed when Hamas militants laid siege to his house, engaging in a protracted gun battle with his guards, and then attacked it with grenades and a dozen rockets, Palestinian officials and witnesses said.

The officer, Colonel Mohammed Ghayeb, was on the phone to Palestine TV just moments before his death and appealed for help as his house came under attack. Ghayeb's wife was seriously wounded in the attack, in which Hamas fired assault rifles and rockets at the building.

"They are killers," he said of the Hamas gunmen. "They are targeting the house, children are dying, they are bleeding. For God's sake, send an ambulance, we want an ambulance, somebody move."

The battle outside the house raged for much of the day and killed four of Ghayeb's guards and a Hamas gunman. About three dozen people, including eight children, were also wounded.

Ghayeb was the chief of the Preventive Security Service in northern Gaza, and his killing was expected to trigger revenge attacks by the men under his command.

During the standoff outside Ghayeb's home in Beit Lahiya, dozens of women rushed into the streets in protest, chanting "Spare the bullets, shame, shame."

One resident, Amina Abu Saher, told the local Al Quds radio station that it was difficult for her to see Palestinians fighting each other and said she and the other women were determined to stop the internal fighting.

Haniyeh called for calm in the wake of the renewed internal violence. Five people were killed on Wednesday in fighting.

"These clashes must stop, this bloodshed must end. Let all of you love one another, let's resolve differences through dialogue and not with weapons," Haniyeh told reporters after returning from making the Haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. "Weapons must only be directed against the Israeli occupation," he added.

The two sides declared the truce in an attempt to end violence that surged after Abbas challenged Hamas by calling for early parliamentary and presidential elections after unity government talks failed.

Also Thursday, unknown gunmen fired on mourners at a funeral for three security officers loyal to Abbas who were among those killed the day before.

Fatah sources and medical officials said two mourners were wounded during the funeral march in central Gaza when gunmen shot at the procession.

A senior Hamas member was also kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in Gaza City, the Islamists said.

Abbas met with leaders of political factions in Gaza on Thursday night. The smaller Islamic Jihad group, which has stayed out of the fighting, was to propose another round of unity talks, this time between Abbas and Hamas' supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, rather than between lower-level envoys.

As the fighting worsened, Haniyeh of Hamas cut short a tour of Arab nations and returned to Gaza on Thursday. His next stop was to have been Jordan, which has offered to host a meeting between Haniyeh and Abbas, in an attempt to defuse the tensions.

"In comparison to the international sphere, the big companies get credit at very good terms," he said. "Someone else pays for that. It's a case of cross-subsidization. The margin in one sector would appear to fund the margin in the second sector and subsidize it."

Do the banks in Israel behave as though they are a cartel?

"Your question has legal implications and therefore I am unable to reply to it. We need to take into account that when there are very few players in the market, it's difficult for them to behave in a manner that looks competitive."

What are you, as governor, doing about this?

"I'm trying to bring in a foreign bank. Every time I am abroad, I go to the chairmen of the big banks and try to persuade them to open a branch here. If we succeed in getting foreign banks to work here on the retail side, it will be a major accomplishment for the country. That will solve the problem."

The complete interview will appear in Friday's Magazine.

What Netanyahu said Tuesday night was not new for him; he was reported to have made the same appeal to the same sort of audience - haredi political leaders - a couple of years ago as finance minister.

Then, as now, he was apologizing for the way his child welfare cuts had hurt large haredi families, while at the same time asking the haredim to look at the bright sides of that policy.

"Two positive things happened," he told a conference of haredi government officials in Nir Etzion this week. "Members of the haredi public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate." (Quoted in Ynet, Yediot Aharonot's Web site. The speech was also reported in Haaretz.)

The once-and-possibly-future prime minister of Israel says publicly that he's sorry his welfare cuts made life harder for Jewish families who are "blessed," as he put it, with many children, but isn't it "positive" that these cuts resulted in fewer Arab children being born? Then Netanyahu went on to suggest a national remedy for the victims of his economic policies - but for Jewish victims only, not Arab victims.

"I don't think that the Jewish Agency should refrain from helping part of the Jewish public in the state," he said, "and it is possible that additional non-governmental bodies could have done so."

IMAGINE IF any gentile government official in the world cited the lowering of the Jewish birthrate in his country as an accomplishment, then recommended that his country's founding institution raise money to help poor gentile families, but not poor Jewish families. How would the Jewish world, starting with Israel, characterize such an individual? What sort of pressure would the Jewish world apply to get him or her fired, blackballed and, if possible, indicted?

Yet everyone knows the speech in Nir Etzion will not hurt Netanyahu at all - even though, again, this is not the first time he's said this, and even though the statements are perfectly in line with his standing as Israel's number one fear-monger on the Israeli Arab "demographic threat." (On second thought, Netanyahu is probably only number two - Avigdor Lieberman, his former right-hand man and alter ego, is number one. When it comes to the subject of Israeli Arabs, it's hard to tell where Netanyahu ends and Lieberman begins.)

The worst that will happen to Netanyahu from this is that maybe another liberal commentator or two will denounce him, and there will be a press release from some civil rights organization. Maybe not even that. If, on the other hand, we're really, really lucky, the attorney-general might have a word to say. (FYI, even if there was a chance of it happening, I wouldn't want to see Netanyahu indicted. If every Israeli who made racist remarks in public had to stand trial, the courts would collapse under the load.)

The only political parties that might censure Netanyahu are the left-wing parties, and nobody cares about them; in fact, a bad word from Meretz can only help the Likud leader in the polls.

The Anti-Defamation League won't say anything, and neither will the other Diaspora Jewish organizations. Bibi is just too big, too popular, too important, too much a symbol of Israel for the Diaspora Jewish establishment to say a word against him, let alone accuse him of being a shameless bigot.

Two positive things happened: Members of the haredi public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate.

That's the Israeli people's overwhelming choice for prime minister talking. I hope The New York Times, CNN and every other major news medium in the world picks up this story and doesn't let it go until Israel and Diaspora Jewry are shamed into dumping this guy once and for all.

On second thought, exposure as an anti-Arab racist by the international media could cause Netanyahu some problems overseas, but at home, it would only increase his appeal.

The decision confirmed a concern that some observers had about former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's disengagement plan, which pulled 8,000 settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip after Israel's 38-year-long occupation of the territory.

Skeptics wondered if Mr. Sharon would move many of the settlers from Gaza into the West Bank, a place which - in religious, historic, and strategic terms - Israel has always held in higher regard. Settler leaders in this region, in fact, claim that Sharon promised them he would relocate some of the Gaza evacuees here.

New push for peacemaking

Any move to allow new - or expand old - settlements in the West Bank could complicate efforts already under way to give Middle East peacemaking a fresh push.

On Thursday, in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarek, to discuss a potential deal on a prisoner release and restarting peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, internecine Palestinian tensions appear to be worsening as kidnappings and shootings between armed gangs affiliated with Hamas and Fatah continued in Gaza and spilled into part of the West Bank.

Israel's Peace Now organization, a group that tracks Israeli settlement expansion, charged that any move to put Israelis in a new settlement over the Green Line (Israel's pre-1967 boundary) would be a mistake, and one which, like the settlements in Gaza, was likely to be removed in the long run.

"We're taking a place that was an abandoned military place and making it a civilian settlement," says Yariv Oppenheimer, a spokesman for Peace Now. "It's an extreme right-wing decision and it's not something we expected from this government. I don't think that the government should give in to the pressure of the settlers to live there. It's against the promises of the roadmap and promises to the international community."

Amid the controversy over the issue, Israeli officials said this week the decision is still under consideration.

"It's not a new site in any case, but given the sensitivity of the issue, it's being reviewed," says Israeli government spokeswoman Miri Eisin. The Defense Ministry, which issued the permit a week ago, declined to comment. An official who asked not to be quoted said that a final decision has not yet been made.

Here in Maskiot, there is a sense that a new settlement - or at least a significantly expanded one - is not merely being considered, but is already taking root.

There are currently a few dozen young post-high school men living here, studying in a religious preparatory program before their induction into the army. Two of the families who were evacuated some 16 months ago from Gaza have already moved in; they refused to speak to a visiting reporter.

The families are two of at least 16 families who plan to settle here, and are part of a narrative that seems problematic for people of all political stripes. Moved out of Gaza in August 2005, the Israeli government never found a permanent community for them. And because their settlement in Gaza wasn't officially recognized by the government, they didn't qualify for some of the same relocation benefits other settlers did.

"This is my place now. My bones will be buried here," says Binyamin Rabinovich, as he was busy fixing a car. It's so remote that there's hardly any cell phone reception, and when there is, the phones pick up Jordanian rather than Israeli signals.

"I'm disappointed in our government, that they would agree to freeze this because of pressure from the US," he says. "The Land of Israel is ours and we need to develop it."

Searching for a home

About 10 minutes down the winding road from Maskiot is the settlement of Hemdat, where nine of the 16 families who had lived in the Gaza settlement of Shirat Hayam are now living in a cluster of mobile homes on the side of hill. Shirat Hayam's name means "Song of the Sea," a reference to a biblical poem, which is depicted as a song sung by the Israelites just after their exodus from Egypt.

The analogies are not coincidental. Here, people take an extraordinary long view of history. They don't use the word disengagement or withdrawal so much as gerush, which means expulsion and is reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition.

The leader of the group of temporary settlers, waiting for what they now expect will be their new homes in Maskiot, says they've taken shelter in five different places since being evacuated by Gaza.

"We wanted to build our new community as quickly as possible. It's already more than a year and we're still not in our homes," says Yosef Hazut, a young father of two, after tramping through the rainy season's red mud between the boxy trailer homes.

"It's not so easy to start a new community over the Green Line," says Mr. Hazut. There they looked in the less populated parts of the country that Israel has long expressed hopes to develop, such as the Negev and the Galilee. They face only obstacles and delays, he says, and decided to come here.

Still, the dislocation of being moved out and around has not discouraged them from resettling in the West Bank. The fact that they don't believe there's too great a likelihood they'll be evacuated yet again is a window into how Israelis see this area, which they refer to as the Jordan Valley, but not the West Bank. Polls have shown that the majority of Israelis think they should maintain control of this area, even if only for defense purposes.

"We're people of faith," says Hazut. "And I think there's only a very small chance there would ever be a disengagement from the Jordan Valley. "For most Israelis, the Jordan Valley is a red line: giving up the Jordan Valley means to return the whole of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and allow the establishment of a terrorist state here, just the way we're seeing in Gaza."

Evolving view of the West Bank?

The gap between how most Israelis view the West Bank and how it is viewed elsewhere appears to be widening. As a case in point, Education Minister Yuli Tamir introduced a plan to change Israeli school textbooks to include the Green Line on maps of the country. Her proposal was voted down earlier this week, 8-2, by a Knesset education committee panel that disagreed and painted her as a radical with a extreme left agenda.

Rather than this being a conscience decision to build up settlements in the Jordan Valley, some analysts here say, the government is taking an ad hoc, policy-less approach to which settlements grow and where.

"Maskiot was a kind of military settlement a few years ago and they want to kind of reestablish it," says Hillel Cohen, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace.

"I think the point is the Israeli government doesn't really know where it's going to," says Professor Cohen. "I don't see that they have any plan. They just deal with problems from day to day. Where they want us to be in five years isn't clear. So if they have a group that wants to settle in the Jordan Valley, they say OK, go settle there.

"I don't think [that] the government really thought about it and they didn't think the US would say much about it, either."

One of the reasons for this view, he says, is that in the 1970s, Israeli military strategist and foreign minister Yigal Allon proposed a plan to give West Bank Arabs autonomy but keep the Jordan Valley forever under Israeli sovereignty. The plan is unacceptable to all known Palestinian political factions.

But Mr. Allon, from the same left-leaning Labor Party that later signed a historic peace deal with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, was once seen as a bulwark of the security-conscious mainstream. He encouraged settlements in the Jordan Valley, and drew many agriculturalists there. Today, some 70 percent of the current residents are secular people from liberal backgrounds, unlike the religious nationalist population that dominates in other areas of the settlements.

"In the heart of people in the Labor Party, we know that there are places which seem more logical or legal to settle, and this is one of them," says Cohen. "Also today, I think that if there is a plan of the Israeli government, it does include keeping at least part of the Jordan Valley as part of the future Israeli state."

Haniyeh said he and Abbas agreed to "withdraw all gunmen from the streets and deploy police forces to keep law and order".

Abbas made no public comment after the session, but a diplomat who attended the talks and declined to be identified confirmed an agreement had been reached.

Similar pacts in the past have been shattered swiftly by violence and Gazans said they feared another eruption of bloodshed later in the day when Thursday's dead are buried.

Gunbattles broke out between forces loyal to Abbas and the Hamas government in northern Gaza on Thursday, killing six people and wounding 18 other people, witnesses said.

In the northern Gaza Strip, a senior Palestinian security officer allied with Fatah was killed when Hamas militants laid siege to his house, engaging in a protracted gun battle with his guards, and then attacked it with grenades and a dozen rockets, Palestinian officials and witnesses said.

The officer, Colonel Mohammed Ghayeb, was on the phone to Palestine TV just moments before his death and appealed for help as his house came under attack. Ghayeb's wife was seriously wounded in the attack, in which Hamas fired assault rifles and rockets at the building.

"They are killers," he said of the Hamas gunmen. "They are targeting the house, children are dying, they are bleeding. For God's sake, send an ambulance, we want an ambulance, somebody move."

The battle outside the house raged for much of the day and killed four of Ghayeb's guards and a Hamas gunman. About three dozen people, including eight children, were also wounded.

Ghayeb was the chief of the Preventive Security Service in northern Gaza, and his killing was expected to trigger revenge attacks by the men under his command.

During the standoff outside Ghayeb's home in Beit Lahiya, dozens of women rushed into the streets in protest, chanting "Spare the bullets, shame, shame."

One resident, Amina Abu Saher, told the local Al Quds radio station that it was difficult for her to see Palestinians fighting each other and said she and the other women were determined to stop the internal fighting.

Haniyeh, a senior Hamas leader, called for calm in the wake of the renewed internal violence. Five people were killed on Wednesday in fighting.

"These clashes must stop, this bloodshed must end. Let all of you love one another, let's resolve differences through dialogue and not with weapons," Haniyeh told reporters after returning from making the Haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. "Weapons must only be directed against the Israeli occupation," he added.

The two sides declared the truce in an attempt to end violence that surged after Abbas challenged Hamas by calling for early parliamentary and presidential elections after unity government talks failed.

Also Thursday, unknown gunmen fired on mourners at a funeral for three security officers loyal to Abbas who were among those killed the day before.

Fatah sources and medical officials said two mourners were wounded during the funeral march in central Gaza when gunmen shot at the procession.

A senior Hamas member was also kidnapped by unidentified gunmen in Gaza City, the Islamists said.

Abbas met with leaders of political factions in Gaza on Thursday night. The smaller Islamic Jihad group, which has stayed out of the fighting, was to propose another round of unity talks, this time between Abbas and Hamas' supreme leader, Khaled Meshal, rather than between lower-level envoys.

As the fighting worsened, Haniyeh of Hamas cut short a tour of Arab nations and returned to Gaza on Thursday. His next stop was to have been Jordan, which has offered to host a meeting between Haniyeh and Abbas, in an attempt to defuse the tensions.

Gunmen target 3 senior Hamas men

Assailants targeted three senior Hamas officials in the West Bank, kidnapping one, torching the car of a second and shooting in the air as a third emerged from a mosque, officials said Thursday.

Although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the attacks came a day after four supporters of the rival Fatah group were killed in factional fighting in the Gaza Strip. Gaza is a Hamas stronghold, while Fatah dominates in the West Bank.

Late Wednesday, gunmen stormed the home of Deputy Health Minister Bashar Karmi in the West Bank town of El Bireh and seized him. Arab satellite TV stations reported that he was released Thursday morning, but the report could not immediately be confirmed independently.

Mohammed Barghouti, a Hamas Cabinet minister, held Fatah responsible. "It is obvious who kidnapped him," Barghouti said. "People are trying to bring the fighting from Gaza to the West Bank."

Karmi's wife, Suhad al-Kubaj, said the gunmen took a laptop, numerous compact discs and 600 shekels from his wallet before abducting him.

"He told me they tied his hands and blindfolded him, and passed him from one car to the next" during his 5 and a half hours in captivity, she said.

"They released him with a warning: What happens in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah can happen here, in the West Bank," she added.

In the town of Jenin, assailants torched the car of Prisoner Affairs Minister Wasfi Kabaha of Hamas, security officials said. It was the third attack on a car owned by Kabaha.

In the village of Jabaa, gunmen fired in the air as the local prayer leader and senior Hamas activist, Nasser Al Awna, emerged from the mosque. He was not harmed.

Smuggling tunnel between Gaza and Egypt collapses
A smuggling tunnel under the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt collapsed Thursday morning, Palestinian security officials said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties or details on who might have been inside at the time of the collapse, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Palestinian smugglers use hundreds of tunnels dug under the border to bring weapons and contraband goods into Gaza from Egypt.

Israel says antitank missiles, tons of explosives and thousands of rifles have reached militants in Gaza through the tunnels. Palestinian militants claim to have smuggled in long-range Katyusha rockets, as well as the materials needed to upgrade their homemade rockets to reach deeper into Israel.

Five killed in intense gunfighting in Gaza

Fighting between Fatah and Hamas gunmen intensified Wednesday in the Gaza Strip and claimed the lives of five Palestinians.

Four of the dead were Fatah militants and one was a civilian caught in the cross-fire.

In the bloodiest incident, three members of Fatah's Preventive Security Service were shot dead in Khan Yunis when their vehicle came under attack by gunmen. Fatah blamed Hamas for the attack.

Earlier, a 22-year-old Palestinian woman, Mona Salha, was killed when a bullet struck her in the head during an exchange of fire between Fatah and Hamas gunmen at the Jabalya refugee camp near Gaza City. A dozen other people were injured in those clashes.
Intense gun battles continued throughout the afternoon in Jabalya, but there were no reports of further casualties.

At noon, gunmen shot and killed a member of Fatah in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip. Eyewitnesses said that the Fatah man was on the roof of a residential building when he was shot.

Hamas said that two of its men were injured, one seriously, while patrolling in a vehicle belonging to a security organization affiliated with the radical Islamic group.

Palestinian security sources said Wednesday that they had urged all foreign nationals to evacuate the Gaza Strip because of threats to kidnap them. However, foreign organizations in Gaza said that they were not aware of such an announcement by the Palestinian security forces.

In a stark statement published on Saturday Brigadier General Oded Tira observed, "President Bush lacks the political power to attack Iran. As an American strike in Iran is essential for our existence, we must help him pave the way by lobbying the Democratic Party (which is conducting itself foolishly) and US newspaper editors.

We need to do this in order to turn the Iranian issue to a bipartisan one and unrelated to the Iraq failure."

Because of the dramatic loss of political power of the Bush-Cheney administration, General Tira urges the Israel Lobby to, "turn to Hillary Clinton and other potential presidential candidates in the Democratic Party so that they support immediate action by Bush against Iran."

In another move designed to strengthen Bush politically, General Tira urges the Israel Lobby to exert its influence on European countries so that, "Bush will not be isolated in the international arena again."

As if all of that Israel-lobbying in America and Europe were not enough, General Tira proposes an even more aggressive political tactic, "We must clandestinely cooperate with Saudi Arabia so that it also persuades the US to strike Iran.

For our part, we must prepare an independent military strike by coordinating flights in Iraqi airspace with the US.

We should also coordinate with Azerbaijan the use of airbases in its territory and also enlist the support of the Azeri minority in Iran.

In addition, we must immediately start preparing for an Iranian response to an attack."

Based on the urgency of General Tira's extraordinary pleas, it is immediately apparent that he has been shocked by the turn of political events inside America.

By this time, he has learned from official US sources that the long-anticipated attack against Iran has been shelved because of tectonic shifts in American politics.

Apparently, General Tira did not realize that President Bush has become the most deeply unpopular president in American history and that it was his subservience to the dictates of the Israel Lobby and its demands for wars against Iraq and Iran that led him into the political prison where he now finds himself isolated and impotent.

Neither does General Tira realize that the Republican Party is no longer unified in its support of President Bush's deeply unpopular war in Iraq or his plans for expanding the war by a sustained bombing campaign against Iran. Since General Tira did not publish any remarks about the Iraq Study Group headed by former US Secretary of State, James Baker, he may be oblivious to the political facts now in place in 2007 America.

Instead of the bipartisan commitment to broaden Bush's unpopular war as General Tira proposes, there is now a broadening bipartisan movement to reign in the US losses in Iraq. No major American politician has voiced any enthusiasm for broadening Bush's war into Iran as General Tira beseeches the US to do.

General Tira's outburst suggests that the official channels for news and the analysis of public affairs in Israel are not working as efficiently as they should in the 21st century. Perhaps, someone should provide the General with a subscription to Ha'aretz and the International Herald Tribune for starters.

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Michael Carmichael is Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, The Planetary Movement, Oxford, United Kingdom

Expect a ruthless last ditch attempt by israel to plunge the world headlong into war.