Paul, I don't want to talk too much about Israel, because I don't know enough about the situation there.

There is one thing I've been thinking, though. The Jews suffered what is almost comparable to one holocaust after another in Europe over the centuries. When the U.N. finally gets around to giving the Jews a land of their own, they give them a part of Palestine. Where Arab tribes already live, and have lived for centuries.

Yes, I know, I know that the Bible says that God will give the children of Israel the promised land. I have read the Bible, too. And of course I know that the Jews did live there for many centuries. There is no doubt whatsoever that King David founded a mighty kingdom there around 1000 B.C. And the Jews weren't really expelled from Palestine until, I think, 153 A.D. or thereabout.

Even so... I've been thinking to myself how I would have felt if the U.N. decided to give another homeless people, maybe the gypsies or the Kurds, their own land in Sweden. What if the U.N. decided to take the nicest part of Sweden, Skåne, where I live, and give it to the gypsies or the Kurds? I would furious, shocked, outraged... I don't know if I could get over it.

And then suppose that the gypsies or the Kurds, the people who had come to take over my land, were heavily armed by someone, maybe the Russians or the Chinese, and not only did Skåne become their land, but the "intruders" chased us away from our land, too, and shot many of us. How long would it take until we could forgive? How long would it take until we could be friends with them?

I think that many, many Arabs use Palestine as a symbol of the general Arab misery and all the unfair things that the world has done to them. Is the economy down in many Arab countries? Blame the occupation of Palestine. Are many young Arabs unemployed? Yeah, well, how can you expect Arab kids to have jobs when the world is allowed to steal everything from the Palestinians? Can Arabs get no respect? Right, what respect can you give when they can take your land away from you and shoot you when you try to defend yourself?

All of this is exaggerated. The overwhelming number of bad things that plague the Arab world has nothing to do with Palestine at all. But Palestine has become a symbol of the humiliation that the Arab world is perceived to suffer at the hands of the world. In particular, at the hands of the West. In particular, at the hands of the United States of America. (And, of course, at the hands of Israel...that goes without saying.)

I don't know what to do about the conflict between Israel and Palestine. But I do believe that as long as this conflict has not been resolved at all, and certainly as long as there are horror stories coming out of Palestine describing how their land is turned into a patchwork of little "islands" with innumerable checkpoints in between, how people get stuck for hours at checkpoints, how occasionally someone dies because they are being kept at a checkpoint and prevented from going to hospital, how people who live two miles from each other inside Palestine can't even go and visit one another, how the Israeli wall is built inside Palestinian territory, how Israeli bulldozers level Palestinian houses, how olive tree plantations are razed and destroyed, how so many Palestinian children get killed by Israeli missiles (which they have gotten from the U.S.A.) - well, as long as that is kept up, this Palestinian suffering is going to fuel Arab and Muslim anger and even hatred of the United States. That is what I believe anyway.

Ann