Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement scheme is being hailed by George Bush, Sharon and the major media as a step toward peace and security. A closer examination will show, however, that it is an egregious violation of human rights, an illegal action, and a major setback in the war against terror which will harm, not only Israel's security, but US security as well.

In a civilized world, Sharon's "disengagement" proposal would probably be rejected by all responsible governments because it is so akin to ethnic cleansing, even if it is being done by Sharon against fellow Jews.

Muslims today can and do live anywhere in the world, with migrations into Europe and America. Over a million Arab Muslims live inside Israel as voting citizens, but nine thousand Jews on historic Jewish land in Gaza are to be expelled because the Gaza Arabs, in their bigotry, will never accept Jews living among them.

Instead of the nations demanding that this Arab bigotry end, they now support Sharon in his scheme to expel thousands of Jews only because they are Jews. Let us not pretend that Israel's government or the nations oppose de facto, if not genocidal, ethnic cleansing. It is the moral corruption of the West and of the Sharon government that accepts the old double standard, which also amounts to state-sponsored anti-Semitism, endorsing the judenrein Gaza.

But if the disengagement idea is so wrong, how could intelligent Israelis be making such a major blunder in supporting it? Part of the answer is that the Israeli public was not properly informed, top military and intelligence officials were not properly consulted or allowed to advise, and the public was denied the opportunity for a full and open debate followed by a referendum in which to express the collective will of the people.

Israelis are only now waking belatedly to the huge dangers in this scheme, and public support has declined from 70% to below 50% and is falling. In response, the Sharon government is invoking increasingly ruthless measures to prevent the growing opposition from exercising its democratic rights to express its views.

From the beginning, disengagement was an inside initiative by Sharon and his close associate Dov Weisglass, with none of the usual and necessary steps that are a standard part of any major decision that affects the security of the nation. If the disengagement was such a good idea, why did Sharon prevent a review by the heads of the defense and intelligence services?

Upon learning of the plan, General Moshe Ya'alon, head of Israel's Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed strong opposition, as did other heads of Israeli security agencies. Ya'alon and others who objected were either replaced or pressured into agreement. When some cabinet ministers objected, they too were replaced. When some Knesset members hesitated to support Sharon's plan, Sharon unilaterally increased the budgets for their departments - effectively bribing them with public funds - and then received their support.

When some called for a national referendum to at least allow an open debate and a decision by the public, Sharon blocked the proposal.

Instead of Sharon meeting with the Gaza residents face-to-face and explaining his plans like a gentleman, and showing some compassion for those being uprooted, he did the opposite. He demonized these peaceful residents and issued grievous threats of punishment including jail for resistors and even taking away their young children. Three recent news reports (israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=85090, israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=85345, and israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=85277) provide examples of the undemocratic, brutal and likely illegal actions by Israeli police and Israeli courts.

The suppression of peaceful protest has become so pervasive that a special citizen's web site has been established to compile and document these ongoing human rights violations.

He selected expulsion troops based on their willingness to act with all necessary force against civilians, including children. These troops are to receive extra pay, are not required to wear identification tags, and are assured that the courts would be extremely lenient in case of their brutality.

Reporting on the expulsion would also be controlled by the Sharon government, to allow only what he wants to be seen to be shown.

Sharon also ordered the IDF to restrain its responses to the rain of terrorist missiles that have continued to fall on the Jewish residents in Gaza, thus exposing the people to high risk of injury and death - presumably to terrorize them into submission.

Sharon's former adversaries among the Israeli Left have eagerly seized upon this opportunity and have been spreading stories demonizing "settler extremists" and urging the government to be prepared to use lethal force against the residents. Because much of the Israeli media is controlled by leftists, it is easy to fabricate and spread stories of "settler violence," which are then quickly picked up by the international media and, citing "Israeli sources", splashed around the world, where it can do the most public relations damage.

Anti-disengagement leaders, on the other hand, have always insisted that all demonstrations be peaceful. It is the Israeli Left that is trying to provoke violence - and then play the role of innocent victim (standard operating procedure in leftist demonstrations around the world).

A unilateral withdrawal from Gaza would allow Hamas and other Islamists to greatly strengthen their terror base in that area. The evacuation would enable Arab terrorists to bring in weapons and terrorists by land, sea and air, which would no longer be fully controlled by Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas has shown himself unwilling and/or unable to oppose terrorism. On the contrary, he vowed to continue Yasser Arafat's programs and has even failed to stop ongoing incitement by the Palestinian Authority media, preaching the killing of Jews.

Egypt has refused to stem the flow of weapons into Gaza from their side of the border, too. The terrorists have publicly said they are involved now in preparation for another intifada, even more deadly than the current one. They also want to attack the retreating Israelis in Gaza, as they did when Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli forces from southern Lebanon.

The terrorists claimed it was their attacks that caused Israel to retreat and that future attacks will cause Israel to retreat even further. Hamas publicly rejects Israel's right to exist under any conditions. Sharon will receive absolutely nothing in return for his withdrawal, and the terrorists will be rewarded for their murder. Hence, they will be encouraged to continue and to escalate their genocidal activities. A recent report titled "Israel Betrayed?" summarizes many of the illogical and dangerous aspects of the proposed disengagement.

One nagging question is: how can Ariel Sharon, the great patriot and hawkish warrior, do this? How could he now go against everything he has advocated all his life? And how could he do this without any credible explanation and using tyrannical tactics?

Two Israeli authors, Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelach, in their recent book, Boomerang, offer a possible explanation for Sharon's total reversal of established policy. According to the two writers, Sharon's basic impetus for adopting the radical left-wing plan - overwhelmingly rejected by voters in the January 2003 elections - was his desire to avoid indictment by state prosecutor Edna Arbel for his role in corruption scandals, for which he and his sons Gilad and Omri were under police investigation. His Disengagement Plan was intended to save him by distracting attention from his scandal, and so far, it seems to have worked.

The Disengagement scheme would appeal to the political Left in Israel that supports almost any plan to transfer more land to the Arabs. The political Left also controls the Supreme Court, which would shield Sharon from legal action, while leftist Knesset members would then support the Disengagement - all as a political payoff to Sharon.

The Israeli public was told that Disengagement would rid Israel of a defense burden in Gaza while gaining US support to retain Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Not only will the withdrawal from Gaza reward and strengthen terrorists, but the Bush Administration has flipped on the West Bank as well.

George Bush earlier implied that Israel could not be expected to expel over 200,000 Jewish residents in the West Bank, but he and Condoleezza Rice now demand that Israel promptly follow up Gaza with the evacuation of Jews in the West Bank. Nowhere is there any mention that Jews have equal rights with Arabs to live in peace anywhere in the region. Evicting all the residents of the West Bank would rip apart the fabric of Israeli society, while bankrupting the economy. Even the much smaller Gaza expulsion will still scar the society and be costly to Israel's economy.

Americans may be tired of hearing about the conflict and indifferent to the fate of some 9,000 Jews in far-away Gaza, but there is something that should cause us to take careful note. Representative Dan Burton has published an entry in the Congressional Record titled, "The Potential Impact of Israel's Disengagement on U.S. Interests". The impact on US security is shown to be entirely negative. Further, Americans in a recent poll strongly opposed the eviction of Israeli residents from Gaza, and also do not believe it will contribute to improved security and to peace. This response is noteworthy because it demonstrates that Americans can understand the illogic of this plan, despite the support of our major media plus the support of Sharon and Bush.

Pastor James Vineyard of Oklahoma is a voice of Christian conscience from America's heartland. He visited the Gaza Jewish community and wrote "An Open Letter to President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon", citing 12 reasons why he opposes the "deportation of Jews by Jews" (www.science.co.il/Arab-Israeli-conflict/Articles/Vineyard-2005-01-26.asp). He is planning to make a video of his message and distribute it to thousands of Christian churches in America.

Israel's terrorist enemies have already made it clear that they regard the planned Disengagement as a victory on the road to their total elimination of Israel. Bush is now signaling that if Hamas wins support in Gaza elections, he may reluctantly have to accept that as part of his support for Middle East democracy.

The Europeans are even further along toward recognition of Hamas, which remains committed to exterminating Israel. And without any consultation or advance notification to Israel, Bush has decided to include Israel's adversaries Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the so-called Quartet (US, EU, UN and Russia), which is going to establish a Palestinian state adjacent to Israel's heartland and without any assurance of it being peaceful. Bush seems to be joining Israel's enemies in his ongoing policy changes and in his assembling an anti-Israel lynch mob that will press for only one outcome: the progressive dismantling of Israel as a viable state.

At some point, Israeli's enemies, including Iran, will feel the time has arrived for their next attempt at exterminating Israel. Israelis know that that no one will come to their aid and they can rely only on themselves. At that point, Israel may feel desperate, abandoned and enraged over this total betrayal. Should the Israelis conclude that all hope is gone, and with nothing more to lose, they might unleash their formidable nuclear arsenal and in the process, incinerate the regional oil facilities, thus collapsing Western economies.

Perhaps, Western governments, including the Bush administration, confidently assume that Israel would never actually do the unthinkable. Let us hope that Israel is never pushed into a position where we will have to find out.

In the last few weeks we have explored some possible motives behind the government of Israel's insanely self-destructive decision to expel the Jewish population of Gaza and part of Samaria, and to withdraw Israel's military outposts from these areas, which are essential for Israel's defense. Among the explanations we have considered are the deeply engrained Jewish tendency to seek to please friends and protectors and to appease enemies at all costs -- a legacy of the Jewish peoples' many centuries as a helpless, ghettoized minority.

Omir and Arik Sharon (Israel Insider, AP file)

Another possibility is that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/Politics/6113.htm) has been blackmailed by Israel's leftist public prosecutors, who are zealous supporters of the supposed "peace process," and who have been threatening for years to bring criminal charges against Sharon and his two sons.

But these tentative explanations don't fully satisfy even ourselves. Still the question remains: how is it possible for one of Israel's greatest military heroes, a man with a reputation as a patriot and even as a "hard-line" supporter of Israeli settlement in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, to bulldoze through a suicidal project that runs counter to everything he has stood for during the past fifty-seven years? Over the past few days, new revelations have caused suspicions of a more tangible motive for the old soldier's betrayal to be raised: corruption.

Sharon appears to be personally and financially beholden to a circle of financial backers and campaign contributors who stand to make a killing from the Gaza "disengagement". In addition, at least one, and possibly three, other powerful officials in the Sharon administration seem to have a financial interest in the expulsion/withdrawal operation.

Three years ago, a mysterious loan that Sharon had received from an old friend and former army buddy, a wealthy British businessman named Cyril Kern, dominated Israel's headlines. Sharon had apparently used the money to pay a stiff fine imposed on him by Israel's election authority for his solicitation of illegal campaign contributions. It is also illegal for an Israeli public official to accept loans from a foreign national. But Sharon, despite a widely publicized investigation by Israel's public prosecutions office, was never charged with a crime. One of the arguments that he used to defend himself was that Kern had absolutely no business interests in Israel; hence, the loan could not be construed as a bribe.

Now, it seems that a corporation has been formed to develop a gambling casino on the site of the Gaza Jewish community of Elei Sinai, whose land is slated for confiscation and whose inhabitants are marked for expulsion in mid-August. The principal organizer of this venture is a financier, Samuel Flatto-Sharon, who has been a fugitive from justice in France for over 20 years, charged with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from investors in a fund he had managed. Israel gave Flatto-Sharon refuge and citizenship under its Law of the Return, which allows Jews of every background and past history to immigrate to Israel. Among the other investors are a Saudi billionaire and -- you guessed it -- a British citizen named Cyril Kern.

Nor, as it turns out, is this Kern's first venture into the Palestinian casino world. He has been a major investor in the casino in Jericho, which had to close down during the recent "intifada" because the terrorists couldn't resist the impulse to shoot it up.

Another major investor in the Jericho casino is an Austrian financier named Martin Schlaf. Described in the Israeli press as a close personal friend of Sharon, he was also a major source of the illegal campaign contributions that enabled Sharon to be elected Israel's Prime Minister in 2001.

The investors in the Jericho casino still have hopes of reviving it, but the Israeli military authorities have been reluctant to authorize Israelis to visit the still-standing and refurbished casino, in view of the Palestinian Authority's failure to maintain even minimal security in Jericho. Hence the interest in a new casino in the Gaza-Gush Katif area.

Schlaf cannot be ruled out as a player in the proposed new casino, either. His company has exclusive rights to operate other casinos in territories administered by the Palestinian Authority. How will the Flatto-Sharon group and the Schlaf group manage their seemingly conflicting interests in Gaza casino development? Will they cooperate, or fight it out for control? Perhaps Cyril Kern, whom the Israeli press has described as an investor in both casino enterprises, will act as a bridge between them. Those possessing a morbid fascination with evil will undoubtedly watch closely how the jackals divide up the spoils.

Not that the Flatto-Sharon and Schlaf groups are the only ones that stand to profit from the confiscated land of the Israeli "settlers". Yet a third such enterprise has as its managing director none other than Eival Giladi, the official in the Prime Minister's office whom Sharon has designated as the "coordinator" of the expulsion-retreat. The British-owned Portland Trust corporation has plans to raise US$500 million to build 150,000 housing units for Arabs on the land seized from the Jewish farmers. Giladi will substantially augment his meager income as an Israeli civil servant by directing the development of the land, whose present owners are to be "evacuated," after he supervises their expulsion himself. No public official, it would seem, has ever had a stronger incentive for getting his job done!

The principal investor in the Portland Trust is Sir Ronald Cohen, a British billionaire who is a close advisor and political backer of the number two man in the British government, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown. Cohen also recently bought up Israel's monopoly telephone company, Bezeq.

The Portland Trust's corporate charter says openly that one of its objectives is to promote the foreign policy goals of the British government and the European Community in the Middle East. One of these goals is, of course, to bring about Israel's withdrawal to its pre-1967 "Auschwitz borders," as the late Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban named them. That makes corporate CEO and withdrawal-expulsion "coordinator" Giladi a foreign agent as well as a public official with a massive conflict of interest. The Portland Trust, too, has "recommended" casino development for the seized Gush Katif lands.

Another public official who has a possible financial interest in the Disengagement is Sharon's closest advisor, his chief of staff and personal emissary Dov Weissglass. Virtually all-knowledgeable Israelis believe that Weissglass is the principal architect of, and driving force behind, the Disengagement. His only qualification for advising the Prime Minister about matters vital to Israel's security is the fact that he has long been Sharon's personal attorney, the man who has helped him to bail out of countless legal scrapes over the years.

Weissglass's law firm, from which he is on temporary leave while he works in the Prime Ministers Office, represents the Austrian company that is a part owner of the gambling casino in Jericho and has a franchise from the PA to develop future casinos. Weissglass's firm also represents the business interests of the Palestinian Authority itself, which owns a substantial interest in the Palestinian casino companies, and is either part or full owner of nearly all businesses in the territory it rules.

Weissglass is a friend of the shadowy Palestinian financier Muhammad Rashid, who managed the looting of the PA-owned companies and the transfer of their assets to the personal accounts of Yasir Arafat, Jabril Rajoub, and other Palestinian officials. Weissglass and Ariel Sharon's son and business partner Giladi "celebrated" Sharon's election as Prime Minister in 2001 with Rashid, in the swank apartment that Rashid owns in Tel Aviv, according to knowledgeable Israeli journalists.

Still another Israeli official who may have a financial interest in the Disengagement is veteran Israeli politician Shimon Peres, who is currently Israel's deputy prime minister. (Over the past thirty years he has served as prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister, and in practically every other cabinet portfolio).

Peres is the founder of something called the Peace Technology Fund, a venture capital entity chartered in the Cayman Islands, which had as its stated goal bringing together investors from around the world to promote development in the Palestinian "territories," including Gaza.

It invested in, among other things, Palestinian real estate companies. Perhaps not coincidentally, real estate prices in the vicinity of the Israeli communities slated for evacuation have gone through the roof in the past few months, as the expulsion and land-grab draws near. Peres suddenly dissolved this secretive partnership earlier in 2005 after Israeli investigative journalist David Bedein began to ask some hard questions about the secretive PTF, such as, "How much was it paying Peres to act as an investment 'finder'?" Supposedly, its assets were all sold to unidentified Palestinian "entities".

The apparent reality is that Israel's government is a cesspool of corruption and treason. Its prime minister appears willing to place his people in mortal peril by destroying their national security, unity and morale, for no better purpose than to confer financial benefits on his financial backers and political hangers-on. Could the ethical and patriotic standards of Israel's leaders really have declined so far, so quickly from those of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, or Menechem Begin?

We must all pray that honest and patriotic men and women will take back Israel's government and clean it up before it is too late.

Postscript for July 29, 2005: We have just received word that the Knesset Controls Committee has recommended that the Knesset order an investigation by the State Controller of Eival Giladi's apparent conflict of interest affecting his position as "Public policy coordinator" of the Gaza withdrawal-expulsion. The committee has learned that Giladi didn't sign the conflict of interest agreement required of all civil servants when they are appointed to a new position until more than three months after his appointment and one hour before the Controls Committee met to consider the allegations against him!

It has also learned that Giladi was appointed to this position by Prime Minister Sharon without a public advertisement for applicants for the position and the open, competitive hiring process required by Israeli law. Stay tuned for more developments...

On the face of it, Israel's decision to expel some 9000 of its own citizens from Gaza and Samaria and to withdraw its military outposts from these strategically vital areas - so absolutely necessary for the defense of the Israeli homeland and population - has something self-destructive and insane about it.

What could possibly motivate such a decision, when the Palestinian leaders say openly that it will not bring peace, when the terrorist factions openly vow to continue their "struggle" and "resistance" (meaning the deliberate slaughter of unarmed children, women and the elderly of both sexes) while the so-called "disengagement" is in progress and after it is completed? When the withdrawal will expose Israeli communities within the pre-1967 borders to more intense bombardments of Palestinian rockets and mortars? And above all, when the feelings of betrayal and disillusionment by the loyal Israeli citizens about to be expelled from their homes, and the fears of 400,000 other Israelis living outside the pre-1967 "green line" that their communities may be next on the chopping block, threaten to so divide and demoralize the Israeli people that they will be unable to defend themselves from future assaults by their enemies?

Relentless pressure from the entire "international community," including the only nation willing to give Israel any sort of support at all, the United States, was certainly one immediate motive for Prime Minister Sharon's endorsement of the "disengagement" scheme. In addition, some Israeli journalists have suggested that Sharon may have been blackmailed by Israel's Office of Public Prosecutions into implementing a plan that initially had been proposed by his leftist opponents (Israel's prosecutors, who had been investigating Sharon's questionable business relationships and political fundraising for years, are nearly all leftist "peace" advocates, as are Israel's judges and the higher echelons of the Israeli police force). In support of this theory, it is a fact that the criminal investigations of Sharon and his two sons, during which the Prime Minister had been subjected to thirteen-hour, non-stop interrogations by the police, and which had dominated Israeli press coverage for months, seemed to evaporate within days after he announced the retreat-and-expulsion scheme. Israel's Attorney General even took the unprecedented step of publicly chastising the prosecutors for overzealousness in their pursuit of the Prime Minister! And once he had approved the "disengagement" himself, Sharon put relentless pressure on his fellow government ministers and the Israeli parliament to rubber-stamp it.

But surely these facts cannot fully explain the irrationality and self-destructiveness of the "disengagement." Why do so many members of Israel's elite ruling classes - the politicians, the journalists, the academic "experts," the legal and police establishments, even some senior officers of the army - support unilateral Israeli concessions to a treacherous and ruthless enemy in the first place? Why have they continued to hand over strategic land to this enemy after thirteen years of a "peace process" marked by non-stop terrorism and the killing of nearly two thousand Israelis, two-thirds of them defenseless civilians? There must be deeper influences at work to explain such bizarre, suicidal behavior.

One underlying psychological motive, I think, is a belief born of the hundreds of years when Jews were a powerless, unarmed and persecuted minority crowded into the ghettoes of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East: the only way to survive was to accommodate and cooperate with the powers that be, no matter how hostile. Resistance to the enemies of the Jews was considered impossible; the Jewish community would submit to all of their decrees in the belief that any resistance would only result in still harsher persecution. On the other hand, if any Gentile ruler made any effort at all to protect the Jews from the wrath of the mob, or the rantings of fanatical priests who incited the crowds to massacre them, the Jews would fall over their faces in displays of loyalty, gratitude and obedience. Yet all too often these powerful "friends" proved unreliable in a crisis, giving the Jews only half-hearted protection or none at all when they were most in need of it.

We can see these hoary and deeply ingrained assumptions about Jewish powerlessness and dependence in the Sharon government's willingness to accommodate Arab demands for unilateral withdrawal and other concessions, in the absence of any evidence that this compliance will lead to a lessening of Arab violence or a softening of the Arab goal of destroying Israel. We can also see this mindset in Sharon's eagerness to comply with the incessant demands from the Bush administration that Israel take unilateral steps to appease the Arabs - demands made not out of concern for Israel, nor even for the Palestinians, but in order to ease Saudi pressure on the United States. Convinced that maintaining the goodwill of Israel's only powerful friend, the United States, is a supreme priority that supersedes all other considerations of Israel's security, Sharon and his minions have complied with U.S demands to freeze all new construction in the "settlements" of Judea and Samaria, close down checkpoints vitally needed to prevent terrorists from entering Israel, suspend work on the security barrier that is also a necessity for keeping terrorist infiltrators out, reroute the barrier so as to exclude Israeli communities outside the "green line" from its protection, and release terrorist prisoners, who then immediately resume their murderous attacks on Israeli civilians - and to perform all of these unilateral "confidence-building measures" in the absence of any effort at all by the Palestinian "Authority" to restrain the terrorist organizations or disarm them, or to take any measures whatsoever to halt terrorist attacks.

Yet this eagerness to comply with Saudi-inspired demands from the State Department and White House has done nothing to reduce U.S. criticism of, and pressure on, Israel. Still less have the unilateral Israeli concessions resulted in any improvement of Israel's relations with the Arab nations. Least of all have they resulted in any moderation of Palestinian hatred and violence directed against Israel.

Faced with a situation in which their external enemies appeared all-powerful and immovable, the ghettoized Jews of past centuries frequently turned on each other as an outlet for their pent-up anger. For example, fervently Orthodox Jews in medieval France complained to the French authorities about Moses Maimonides' philosophical work The Guide to the Perplexed, which they regarded as unorthodox and heretical, and asked them to ban the work. The French authorities were only too happy to comply - and then proceeded to ban the Talmud as well, and to burn all copies of it that they could get their hands on. Hundreds of Talmud manuscripts, all painstakingly copied out by hand in this pre-printing-press era, were then burned in a public square in Paris; the manuscripts destined for the flames filled several large wagonloads.

We can see a continuation of this impulse toward internal conflict and "self-hatred" in the actions of the Sharon government directed against the Gaza Jews and their supporters - a hatred manifested in the decision to brutally drive them from their homes, in the imprisonment of those attempting to protest this gross violation of human rights, in the bringing of criminal charges against those who have spoken out against the injustice, in the beating and manhandling of peaceful protest demonstrators by the police, and in incessant slanders and false accusations against the opponents of the expulsion.

The incessant verbal abuse of the "settlers" and their supporters by Israel's left-leaning press, such as the newspaper Ha'aretz, the false accusations of "incitement," violence and subversive intentions constantly leveled against people who are asking only to be allowed to keep their homes and farms, may be another manifestation of this tendency to substitute verbal battering of one's fellow Jews for confronting their enemies and less-than-loyal friends.

It is almost like a man who is given a very hard time by his boss at work, has a very dangerous and stressful job, and is not paid enough to support his family, who goes home from a tough day at work and beats up on his wife and kids, or at any rate screams at them. The wife and kids are vulnerable; the boss, and others who make life difficult for him at work, are not. Jews learned many years ago that it was safe and easy to beat up on their fellow Jews, verbally at any rate, while confronting external adversaries who tormented entire Jewish communities was neither safe nor easy. Nevertheless, this displacement of anger onto our Jewish brothers and sisters is a self-destructive and morally wrong behavior.

The great Jewish sage Hillel asked pointedly two millennia ago, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" It is long overdue for us Jews to be for ourselves - and above all, for each other - if we are to survive in a hostile world. Or as an American sage, Benjamin Franklin, told his fellow patriots during the American War of Independence, "If we don't hang together, we will most assuredly hang separately."

Rachel Neuwirth is a Los Angeles-based analyst on the board of directors of the West Coast Region of the American Jewish Congress and the chairperson of the organization's Middle East committee.

Part I appeared in MichNews.com July 14, 2005. It is archived at
http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_8732.shtml.

Bertram Cohen and John Landau contributed to these columns.

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