Word: bankes
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...hallmark of our coverage of Israel is balance. I know this isn't a very scientific way of measuring, but I tend to have as many people vehemently informing me that TIME is unfair to Israel as people telling me the opposite. I was in Israel and the West Bank only a few months ago, and I got an earful from all sides. People still recall the libel suit we won against Ariel Sharon in 1985 and Yasser Arafat's selection as one of our Men of the Year for 1993. But for all that, we strive to make sense...
...Islamic militants legitimately came to power in the January 2006 elections. Israelis rightly view such claims with skepticism, and yet all Palestinians and their Arab backers reject the current situation, where the meager land set aside for a future state is chopped into two, Gaza and the West Bank, ruled by rivals...
...Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said he doesn't intend to topple Hamas; he knows Israel can't fill the vacuum of leadership that its elimination would produce in Gaza. Neither can Mahmoud Abbas, Israel's preferred Palestinian leader, who is fading into the background in the West Bank. So Israel has said it will be satisfied if Hamas stops shooting rockets and an international force polices the Egyptian border to keep the militants from re-arming themselves with weapons smuggled through tunnels...
...kind it did in Lebanon and Gaza. But military might would be useless against the threat that looms within its borders. Israel's population of 7.1 million is today divided into 5.4 million Jews and 1.6 million Arabs. But if you include Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, they may already have a slender majority; and given their higher birthrate, the gap will widen quickly. This tectonic shift in demographics is what scared even hawkish Israelis like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into abandoning the biblical dreams of a Greater Israel stretching all the way from the Jordan River...
Israel has been wary of Hizballah coming to the aid of its Palestinian ally Hamas by opening up a fresh front. The Shi'ite group has done so in the past. In April 2002, during Israel's Defensive Shield operation to reoccupy the West Bank, Hizballah militants staged nearly daily assaults against Israeli military outposts in the Shebaa Farms, a strip of mountainside running along Lebanon's southeast border. This time around, however, Hizballah has confined its actions to fiery statements, speeches and demonstrations of support for the beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza. (See pictures of the heartbreak in Gaza...