A lot of people complain about comparing apples and oranges. I usually don't have a problem with it, they are both round and approximately the same size and weight, call them both fruit and forget it. For a comparison to be really different compare apples and atom bombs, the two have nothing in common. What brings this up is the way a lot of the mainstream press (i.e. The New York Times and its liberal brethren) try to make the Israelis and the Palestinians equivalent. "Tit for tat attacks inhibit peace process" What an inane headline! To compare a homicidal attack on innocent women and children to a narrowly targeted attack on enemy combatants which is calculated to inflict the least amount of collateral damage it can is the height of intellectual dishonesty. Some people twist morality to fit their beliefs instead of making their beliefs conform to morality. They love to talk about the all rights of the Palestinians but they never once consider any of the rights of the Israelis. They say Palestinians who abandoned their property in 1948 have an unrestricted right of return to Israel but they don't care that would mean the complete destruction of the only homeland Jews have. Lets look at some facts instead of relying on what appears to be liberal gut feelings. If you compare land area, Israel doesn't come close to what Arabs and Muslims have. Israel comprises less than one tenth of one percent of the area Arab and Muslim lands occupy. Apparently this is too much for some, who apparently think Israelis don't deserve to have a single acre of land to call their own. Let's compare natural resources. Israel is one of the few places in the Middle East where you don't find significant quantities of oil. Most Middle Eastern countries have fantastic amounts of oil to finance their economies -- Israel depends on the blood, sweat and tears of its inhabitants to wrest what it can from the land, and upon tourism, which certainly isn't helped by terrorism. Let's look at the word Palestine. The word derives from the biblical Philistine. Philistines were not Arabs -- they were related to the Greeks. Over the years the word was used in a variety of ways by the Greeks, Romans and others to refer to the area at the east end of the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the 20th Century up until the 1960s the word Palestinian referred almost exclusively to Jews. The Palestinian problem faced by Lord Balfour was how to let the Jews acquire a homeland. The British Mandate for Palestine was to create a homeland for the Jews, that was the exclusive reason it was entrusted by the League of Nations with the area. "Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed ... to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty [the Balfour Declaration], and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country;..." Some folks seem to hate those pesky facts -- they get in the way of their feelings. They feel Israel is mean to the Arabs so any act Israel takes is filtered through their glaringly obvious prejudices. Nowhere in the British Mandate was any mention of creating a homeland for Palestinian Arabs, such a thought would never have entered anyone's head back then -- the Arabs had plenty of homelands. The only stipulation mentioning Arabs was the clause in the Mandate that the civil and religious rights of non-Jews would be respected. In 1948, the U.N. was contemplating the partition of Palestine, something that already happened, de facto if not de jure, in the 20's. Britain founded trans-Jordan, a country stuck in Palestine simply because no one knew what to do with the king, who had been kicked off the Arabian peninsula by his peers. Arabs refused to accept a Jewish country. Don't try to compare a democratic country founded to give Jews a place to call their own to a group of refusniks who refused to cooperate and live in peace in 1948 when they were offered the chance and who refuse to accept any plan that doesn't include the total destruction of Israel to this day.