The extent of Americans’ ignorance is breathtaking. Israel has the Palestinians jammed into tightly controlled ghettos known as Gaza and the West Bank. With Egypt’s help, Israel controls the inflows of food, medicines, water, and energy into Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are not permitted to enter Israel or Egypt. Last week a humanitarian ship bringing food and medicine was rammed by Israeli gunboats and turned away.

In the West Bank Palestinians are walled off from their fields, jobs, medical care, education, water, and from one another by endless checkpoints, roads for “Jews only,” walls, barbed wire, and machine gun towers. Palestinians are being evicted from their towns house by house, block by block.

Israel’s slow theft of Palestine is illegal under international law but protected by US “diplomacy.”

The Palestinians are no more of a threat to Israel than Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto were a threat to the Nazi state. Yet, everywhere in America--Congress, the executive branch, the print and TV media, the universities, evangelical Christian institutions--there is the belief that Israel is on the verge of annihilation by Palestinian terrorists. This ignorance, so carefully cultivated by the Israel Lobby, turns genocidal aggression into self-defense.

It fools Americans, but it doesn’t fool Israelis. The Israelis have always known that “self-defense” is a cloak for a Zionist policy of territorial expansion. The policy is controversial within Israel. Many Israelis object, just as many Americans object to President Bush’s illegal wars and violations of US civil liberties. Many Israelis give voice to their moral conscience, but they are overwhelmed by vested interests.

Abbas, the Palestinian president and Yasser Arafat's successor as PLO leader, of effectively collaborating with Israel by ordering Fatah members to gather intelligence on the whereabouts of Hamas leaders and pass it to Israel.

PA president Abbas has chosen the path of negotiation and accommodation with Israel, concluding (as the PLO did officially as long ago as 1988) that armed resistance is futile. The problem is that Abbas has so little to show for it: the 15 years since the Oslo agreement have seen Israeli settlements double and the West Bank carved up into disconnected enclaves controlled by Israel. The Hamas challenge to the effectiveness and legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority is not a hollow one.

Israeli actions have widened the gap between the West Bank and Gaza, and created the conditions that led to the 2007 Hamas takeover. Israel's narrative, backed by the US, is of unprovoked attacks despite its unilateral withdrawal of troops and settlers from the strip in 2005. The truth is that Israel has been waging war against Gaza through economic blockades, assassinations and other means, with results that have been painstakingly documented in dozens of reports by the UN and others. Ordinary Palestinians have suffered most, just as ordinary Iraqis suffered far more than Saddam Hussein under UN sanctions. But Gazans are not going to rebel against Hamas because their children are hungry or the streets are full of untreated sewage.

Former Shin-Bet chief, Yaakov Peri, when asked if Israel had created Hamas in the 1980'o, answered enigmatically: “We did not create it, but we did not hinder its creation.”

For years, the occupation authorities favored the Islamic movement in the occupied territories. All other political activities were rigorously suppressed, but their activities in the mosques were permitted. The calculation was simple and naive: at the time, the PLO was considered the main enemy, Yasser Arafat was the current Satan. The Islamic movement was preaching against the PLO and Arafat, and was therefore viewed as an ally.

With the outbreak of the first intifada in 1987, the Islamic movement officially renamed itself Hamas (Arabic initials of “Islamic Resistance Movement”) and joined the fight. Even then, the Shin-Bet took no action against them for almost a year, while Fatah members were executed or imprisoned in large numbers. Only after a year, were Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his colleagues also arrested.

Since then the wheel has turned. Hamas has now become the current Satan, and the PLO is considered by many in Israel almost as a branch of the Zionist organization. The logical conclusion for an Israeli government seeking peace would have been to make wide-ranging concessions to the Fatah leadership: ending of the occupation, signing of a peace treaty, foundation of the State of Palestine, withdrawal to the 1967 borders, a reasonable solution of the refugee problem, release of all Palestinian prisoners. That would have certaily arrested the rise of Hamas.Nothing of this sort happened. On the contrary, after the death of Arafat, Ariel Sharon declared that Mahmoud Abbas, who took his place, was a “plucked chicken”. Abbas was not allowed the slightest political achievement. The negotiations, under American auspices, became a joke. The most authentic Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, was sent to prison for life. Instead of a massive prisoner release, there were petty and insulting “gestures”.

Abbas was systematically humiliated, Fatah looked like an empty shell and Hamas won a resounding victory in the Palestinian election – the most democratic election ever held in the Arab world. Israel boycotted the elected government. In the ensuing internal struggle, Hamas assumed direct control over the Gaza Strip.

Labeling anybody on The Palestinian as extremist when your next prime minister is almost certainly going to be Bibi Netanyahu is some kind of chutzpah.