Would the world, after the experience of the Holocaust, step in to stop a new wave of anti-semitism and persecution of the jews?

Any answer to the question should require an examination of how effective world opinion has been in a defense against the more than fifty (to be historical, maybe we should say one hundred) years of humiliation and persecution visited on another victimized people, the non-jewish palestinians.

This appalling and continuing world neglect would actually be the best argument for the continued need for a strong and independent jewish state, except that it hasn't worked. Jews aren't safe in Israel, certainly no safer than in 1948 or anytime after, and jews are now imperiled all over the world in a way not seen since 1945, largely because of a general tendency to confound the attitude of jews everywhere with the specific policies of the Israeli government, a confusion dangerously encouraged by so many jews themselves.

The strong jewish state is ironically a threat to itself and to jews everywhere.

What is to be done to help the jews and the palestinians in the Middle East? The people who seem not to be able to live with each other but not to be able to live apart from each other can realize what they want and need, if those wants and needs are separated from their respective fanaticisms, by constructing a single large, inclusive state which would comprise all of 1948 Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, or something close to all that, and call it Palestine, the Unholy Land, Abrahamland or whatever. It must however be a state where all residents enjoy full and equal freedoms and citizenship under a single, truly secular government, one which is recognized and jealously protected by its neighbors, and by the entire world, precisely for the safety of those neighbors and that world.

After the horrors of the most recent weeks, if not months, and those too easily imagined for the near and even distant future, this is certainly no more unrealistic or preposterous a proposal than any now being advanced.

It is a proposal which should be on the table now, and it surely will be there as all others are successivly rejected or, if effected, seen to be as calamitous as the jerry-rigged unstable status quo which repels us all now.

I am unable to say a thing. The report will have to speak for itself.

Israel continues to refuse the UN investigators any access to the Jenin camp largely because it alleges the anticipated UN desire to interrogate Israeli soldiers involved in the hostilities would be a violation of Israel's rights. Meanwhile Israeli has rounded-up (200 today alone, in Hebron) as many Palestinians as it chooses, now numbering in the thousands, and has detained them in concentrated camps, for the same purpose, interrogation.

In all, [Col. Miri Eisen, an Israeli intelligence officer and army spokeswoman] said [on April 22] Israeli forces had detained 4,500 Palestinians. Of those, just under 1,500 were arrested, of whom "over 800 have direct involvement in terrorist attacks," she said.

This of course is not seen as a violation of anyone's rights, not even by the UN apparently, and certainly not by the United States.

Israel has occupied the West Bank in violation of International Law and UN Resolutions for thirty-five years, and now refuses to let a provoked and finally aroused world see what it has done there this month.

Mr. Rivlin, speaking for the cabinet, said that the composition of the team and its terms of reference made it inevitable that its report would blame Israel.

"This awful United Nations committee is out to get us and is likely to smear Israel and to force us to do things which Israel is not prepared even to hear about, such as interrogating soldiers and officers who took part in the fighting," he said. "No country in the world would agree to such a thing."

Meanwhile, Israel is claiming that the Palestinians are stacking the numbers of the dead by planting bodies of many who have died of causes not related to Israeli military violence; ummm, so how is anyone to know that, or anything else, if there is no admittance to the West Bank except for the aggressors and their hand-picked agents?

Remodeling the heterosexual male.

It's not like every Joe is turning mo. But in the trendier zones of New York, L.A., Miami, and Montreal, the gay sensibility is rubbing off on receptive straights. It should be noted that this is mostly a white and Latino phenomenon. But in those circles, a new male identity is brunching toward B-Bar to be born. Call it post-straight.