One look at a map to see how perfectly Gaza and the West Bank would fit into the rest of Israel will send the concept of "manifest destiny" running through American minds – that 1800s American presumption that our nation was destined to stretch from sea to shining sea.

Israel seems to many to be trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of their homeland – not via outright massacre – but by making their lives progressively more unbearable, until they feel forced to uproot themselves and go somewhere else.

Israel wants the world to believe that the bits and pieces of the West Bank and Gaza that Israeli settlements have taken over should be tolerable to Palestinians. What Israel does not want the world to understand is that said settlements must be connected up to each other and to Israel by what I call "Martian roads" because they are such an alien intrusion.

Not only may Palestinians not travel ON "Martian roads", but they may not CROSS over them, except at points Israel designates and at time's when Israelis are in the mood. Imagine if, after America won independence for England, British subjects stayed behind in enclaves and communicated with each other along main roads and thoroughfares which Americans could never travel on, nor even cross over at will. That would not leave much feeling of independence would it?

That would also have made most American economic life ground to a halt, wouldn't it have? Ditto, for the Palestinians, especially as creeping Israeli settlements encroach always on the best land and acquire ever more precious water wells.

With all this evidence of Israel as a nation going fascist as, shall we say, Mussolini (to avoid the obvious comparison) why do Palestinians continue to bleed themselves with suicide bombings? Everyone, today, knows that the all important thing you have to do to win any war or political conflict in the world is to get the American public on your side.

With all this evidence of Israel gone master race why don't Palestinian activists get some funding from Saudi Arabia or other oil rich friends and SYSTEMATICALLY make the points I have made above in paid commercials on American television and media.

American media outlets yield enough information for people here to figure Israel out for themselves, but there is such a natural prejudice in favor of Israel in this Christian country -- as the land of our spiritual forefathers, too; Israel can seem like the 51st state to us -- that the bad news never connects in our brains to make Israel the true bully.

Palestinians have to sort it all out for the American public as analytically as I have. I have been educating myself in American politics for 20 years but I, myself, never looked at that map of Israel until recently. Our oceans make us feel very far from the rest of the world.

Israel's trump card – given America's natural affinity for her survival – has been that she needed the West Bank as an outer military defense line (go back and look at the same map and it once made sense). But, the events of the Gulf War and more recent examples of the power of American military technology undercuts the need for old fashioned defense in depth. The kind of offense that Syria could mount with old Russian arms (Syria is the only remaining threat) would be reduced to scrap metal in hours by precision anti-tank weapons – while Israel took almost no casualties; least of all would lose any land.

To anyone with any feel at all for American politics it is seems absurd for Palestinians to send youths to die as suicide bombers in Israel when all they have to do is drop sufficient funds on Madison Avenue in New York to cut Israel's American-as-apple-pie image to ribbons.