The first to take up the cause perhaps were Palestinian extremists, who trotted out the venerable quack nostrum of a "Democratic Secular State." In theory, Jews and Arabs would live side by side in this state happily ever after. The opportunity for such a state may have existed in the 1920s. But as Arab opposition to Jewish immigration grew, it became apparent to all but the most optimistic that Arabs and Jews could never realize their national rights in either a single state or a binational Palestinian state. Then right wing Zionists, backed by bogus calculations of Palestinian demography, tried to sell us on the notion that there could be a "single state solution" from the river to the sea, which would still be a "democratic Jewish state." Recent Palestinian census figures put an end to that idea, perhaps, but not to its equally obnoxious clones.

The idea has been revived in a new way. Rami Khouri echoes the idea of Adnan Abu Odeh: to dissolve the Palestinian Authority and "allow" Israel to annex the West Bank and Gaza. Then the Palestinian demography will overwhelm the Jews, and that will be the end of the Jewish state. The enemies of peace and reason on both side know no rest, and their feverish imagination conjures up the oddest ideas. R

ight wing Zionists would like nothing better then to end the Palestinian authority and end the peace process. But of course, being demonic and evil right wing Zionists, as Rami Khouri imagines them to be, they will not be so stupid as to annex the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza and make them citizens. Even the Egyptians don't want Gaza with Gazans in it, why should the evil Zionists want either Gaza or the West Bank with Arabs in them? Khouri's and Abu Odeh's idea of Zionism, apparently gleaned straight from the Protocols of the Elders, is that Zionism seeks to dispossess the Arabs of Palestine. If so, why does Rami Khouri think that the evil and greedy racist Zionists, as he would say, would annex all these new Arab citizens?? The Palestinian authority, the embryo self-government of the Palestinian Arabs, would be dissolved, and the situation would go back to what it was in 1992, or worse, it would descend into a chaotic anomie worse than Iraq and worse than Lebanon in the civil war, carefully fenced off from the Jewish parts of Israel, and with an international status that is completely in limbo, like the Gaza strip today. The whole territory would be ruled by a "government" of thieves, con men, Oozlebarts and mullahs, that will make the rule of the Hamas and the Fatah seem like the New Deal by comparison. As there would be no Palestinian Authority and no peace process, Israel could truly say it had no peace partner and there would no longer be an international aid fund for the Palestinians either.

No Arab Palestinian strategy as brilliant as that of Abu Odeh and Khouri has been advanced since the strategic call of the Arab Higher Committee in 1948, urging Arab Palestinians to leave their homes so that the victorious Arab armies could rid Palestine of the Jews. That masterstroke resulted in the first Nakba, and now Khouri and Abu Odeh wand to perpetrate a worse Nakba.

Equally nihilistic are the urgent calls of Israeli peace camp leaders for negotiations with the Hamas. The latest such call was issued by Amos Oz. Amos Oz should know better. An Israel agreement with the Hamas means the end of the Palestinian Authority. It adds up to the same program as that of Rami Khouri and Abu Odeh, of Israel Eldad and Benny Elon and Rabbi Dov Wolpe: Hang the moderates and let's take it all for one people at the expense of the other.

Ami Isseroff