Brad,
Concerning your criticism of the Palestinians for not taking the Ghandi-road...
Chomsky actually addresses this. In one of the passages in the Chomsky Reader (don't have it with me - I'll provide details tomorrow) he talks about a Palestinian town that did precisely this - staged peaceful demonstrations and non-violent protests against the Israelis. They got zero international support, and were violently pushed aside.
The point is, the "Ghandi-road" only works if you get observers to pressure the oppressors. If your plight goes unreported, or others don't care, it gets you nowhere, and is doomed to failure.
>Well, it *is* the only democracy in the region, and when you compare
>even a Binyamin Netanyahu to a Hafez Assad there does seem to be a
>very clear difference. More important, however, is that a lot of
>American Jews care enough about Israel to make it them single-issue
>voters, and a lot of non-Jews feel responsible for the failure of the
>U.S. to have prevented the extermination of half the world's Jews
>between 1941 and 1945...
Why should people in the US feel responsible for the holocaust? The Nazi's, not the Americans, were exterminating Jews. I've never understood this position.
Brett