Long before the Nabka, long before the Holocaust, the present-day agony in Israel and Palestine had already taken root. The ineradicable core of the conflict is brutally simple: the attempt by one people to take another people's land. In this respect, the turmoil in the Middle East is just another chapter in one of the world's oldest stories, for human beings have always been about the bloody business of conquest, dispossession and domination. The United States, for example, was built on this ancient principle. Its settling was cast largely in the same terms as those used later by the Zionists in Palestine: the claiming and cultivation of a land that was essentially empty -- save for a few savages who could only benefit from the imposition of a superior civilization. (And if they couldn't, so much the worse for them.)
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