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Lawrence Upton said, >Here it was put with honesty - on the one hand the repression and >injustice and on the other evil, joined and separated by a but. So I >have to deal with it. Lawrence, I agree with almost everything you say in this rather powerful post. A qualification to the above, though, in case I made myself misunderstood: I am clear that the Israeli military has been targeting civilians in various ways for many years now, and I regard that as evil, too, just as I regard the policies the U.S. (and the U.K.) has aimed against the civilian population of Iraq as uncategorically evil. So it's not "injustice" on the one (Israeli) side and "evil" on the other (Arab) side. I am not saying that the Palestinians are engaging in "more evil" acts than the Israelis. And one other disagreement (though again, the agreement in general is large): I would also quarrel with your cholera analogy, and our difference here would seem to be an important point. True, cholera and hatred are both brought forth by "conditions," but one catches cholera if one catches cholera; one does not strap on semtex and walk onto a bus that contains children because one has been "exposed" to hatred, or even necessarily because one has "caught" it. There is an element of choice, obviously, involved in the latter. And many Palestinians abhor the tactics of suicide bombing, even while they hate the policies of Israel and struggle heroically for their nation's self-determination. All of which might seem presumptuous from your standpoint, inasmuch as you alluded to our "freedom" to judge and opine in particular ways and from the convenience of particular conditions-- and I agree, in fact, that it's inherently presumptuous to talk about the rights and wrongs of other people's plights and struggles. But since I'm saying nothing different, essentially, than many, many Israelis or Palestinians themselves are saying, I think it's not *too* presumptuous to say it: It's evil to target civilians, no matter what the cause, and whether from 50,000 feet above, in a tank, through purposeful disease and hunger, or with a body turned into a bomb. Once you do this, there is little hope of turning back, nor of stopping what worse might be done. Kent