Next day of the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, 300,000 Israelis took to the streets of Tel-Aviv protesting against Sharon. Sharon went downhill inthe polls. He was judged by an Israeli tribunal and condemned at never again to become defense minister. 300,000 Israeli manifesting against the policies of Sharon is a tremendous event full of significance. It was, and still is, pregnant with lessons. One could at least say that there are conditions in which the criminal expansionists loose the support of the Israeli people. In these conditions, the door is open for a decrease in the distance between the two people.

It is Sharon who was smart enough to learn his lessonand to conclude that, unless he succeeds in increasing the distance between the two peoples, the Israeli and the Palestinian, his expansionist policies were doomed to failure. He resorted to the Aksa provocation in the hope that the Palestinians will fall into the trap. Some Palestinian leaders obligingly did.

There was in that gigantic Tel-Aviv manifestation a lesson to be learned on the Palestinian side. And it is "decrease the distance between the two peoples and you render the expansionist policies still harder to implement."

The key of the situation is the distance between the two people. The smart expansionists do their best to increase it, while so many Palestinian leaders do not care about it. Still worse they adopt policies which increase that distance. It is a case in which passion and prejudices are blinding some Palestinian leaders to the reality of the situation.

A friend of the Palestinians, Shraga Elam, is a proponent of the one democratic state for the whole of Palestine's inhabitants be them now Palestinians or Israelis.

In his crystal ball, Shraga sees the following:

There are three main possible possibilities:

1) Continuation of the present apartheid situation

2) Mass deportation of the Palestinians, e.g. after a mega-terror attack ( possible scenario a Kassam missile will hit the oil reserves in Ashkelon).

3) A democratic state of all its citizens. This is the option with the lesser chances partly because the forces pushing options I & II are much stronger and partly because people like yourself and Chomsky are selling illusions. It is the duty of every decent person to look for more effective means to fight against the dominating racist attitude. This is anyway at the heart of the problem and there is no geographical "solution" for it. (The underline is my doing. C.L.)

Shraga, say you are an excellent physician. You child is sick and you prognosis is

1) we do nothing and the child might either die, or we operate on the child

2) and then the child remains alive but incapacitated in some measure

3) we do nothing and, by miracle, the child recovers totally (this is the least probable)

It is clear that the outcome 3) is the best but, betting on it, will very likely kill the child. What do you do Shraga once you have decided that the outcome 3 is very unlikely? Would you not prefer a long life with some incapacity for your child to a very probable death or very illusory miraculous cure? Would you not consider that once you have secured the survival of the child, a way could be found to overcome the incapacity?

Apply the hypothetic personal problem to the actual Palestinian problem. Having had the historic proof that decreased distance between the two people is deadly to the expansionist, why don't you work in that direction?

I have already shown how the betting on the Geneva accord would introduce a wedge between the Israeli people and the expansionist leadership which could lead to the toppling of the expansionist Israeli establishment. I showed how the restrictions on the Palestinian rights introduced by the Geneva accord will naturally evaporate, once a chance is given to a Palestinian state to demonstrate how profoundly democratic and tolerant it can be. Of course this presupposes that the Israeli expansionist will have been already toppled. No 2-state solution is practical as long as Sharonists, ot their likes, would be ruling Israel.

I bet on a vision (decreasing the distance between the 2 peoples) whose credibility has been historically demonstrated. The odds are now greater, but no one who neglected the lessons of the past when the cons were so favorable, is qualified to reject the validity of an option which he then refused to take.