I saw a map today in a friend’s recent National Geographic magazine that showed the present day situation of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation. I saw a field of yellow with islands of purple scattered throughout the area known as the West Bank, the Palestinian Homeland and, last I looked, still a sovereign state.

I had immediately assumed these islands were the Israeli settlers’ enclaves, but upon focusing more clearly on the legend, I saw that they were instead what was left of the Palestinians’ autonomy in a sea of occupied territory!

The Israelis, our closest bedfellows in the Middle East, now brutally control the greater body of Palestine, isolating the remaining indigenous communities with roadblocks that keep children from their schools and people from their jobs, cutting off water and other supplies, burning their olive groves — in short, exercising the systematic extermination of an entire people of a particular racial and ethnic background who have lived there for thousands of years!

Doesn’t this sound all too familiar, especially to Jews?

I fear that the Palestinian people will yet suffer the Israelis’ “”Final Solution”” under cover of the dark, dirty Oil War George Bush hopes to unleash in the area once known as the “”Cradle of Civilization.” An area perhaps soon to be re-named the “”Coffin of Civilization.””

Bia Winter, Mount Vernon