[mburbank]

In Question A, you miss my point. I mean, if Arafat called for, and actively meant to call for a ceasefire.

It's moot, because you do see the rest of my point which is that no one in any position of power on either side wants a ceasefire, or a roadmap or anything of the kind.


"leave the Israeli's to work things out with the Palestinians as they see fit."
Is pussyfooting. What do you mean by that? The whole problem with the US's involvement to date has been just this, we refuse to make a coherent statement, or we make statements that appear to be substantive but we don't put anything on the line.

Are you advocating
A.) Permanent, active, military occupation.
B.) Forced removal
C.) Genocide
D.) Group activities such as paper flower making and square dance

In the absence of a Palestinian power capable of making and enforcing a political peace with NO EXCEPTIONS, ie. erradicating terrorism, something that we, a superpower can't do, Israel, an actual state with an actual, functioning government is the only player capable of delivering anything.

Other Arab countries need to step up to the plate and deny aid and money to the Palestinians until some form of reliable authority is established, but they will have zero incentive to do this until we do the ame with Israel. We are there principal benefactor, we fund their war machine or their security machine dpeneding on how you look at it. We cannot stop them from fighting but we can work toward making it more difficult for each side to fight.

We need to find partners in a 'coalition of the willing' to first acknowledge and then step away from participation in this conflict.