The war of 1948 created Israel and destroyed Palestinian Arab society. Argument over that destruction has never ceased.

The 1948 war had two main phases. First, it was mainly a civil war between irregular Arab and Jewish forces within Mandatory Palestine. Then it became an international conflict in which troops from five Arab states intervened. Israel was decisively victorious in both phases. During and after the conflict, most Arab inhabitants of the new Israeli state left their homes.

All those persons who were prevented from returning their homes after November 29, 1947 are called 'Palestinian Refugees'.

There are about 4.3 million Palestinian refugees. They live in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Almost half of them are registered with UNRWA. They have long been suffering from severe and inhuman restrictions involving residency rights, freedom of movement and employment, as well as property ownership rights.

With the exception of Jordan and Syria, Palestinian refugees in the Arab world are subject to the same strict employment laws applicable to foreigners.

The vast majority of the Palestinians in the Arab world are treated as foreigners and are denied access to government-supplied services such as education, health and social benefits. Syria is the only Arab state where Palestinians enjoy freedom of access to government services.

In addition, the Arab governments impose restrictions on Palestinian property ownership.

Arabs support Palestinian refugees' right of return to their homes as part of a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While Israel calls for the settlement of Palestinian refugees in a future Palestinian state.

Israel's concern are justified. Any fools can see that return of 4.3 millions Palestinians will turn Jews into minority.

US Secretary of state cautions against taking Arab peace initiative as is, says Israel's ideas must also be considered

Former Israeli Ambassador to the US Zalman Shoval has denounced the much-touted Saudi peace plan as an attempt to get Israel to commit suicide.

Shoval noted that the demands on Israel contained in the Saudi plan are actually presented as preconditions for peace, effectively making the initiative a "recipe for the destruction of Israel" that is not up for negotiation.

Mr. Olmert said in a sweeping, policy-setting speech during a memorial for Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. He said :

"The past cannot be changed, and the victims of the conflict, from both sides of the border, cannot be returned. Dictates are futile and mutual accusations are nothing but useless word games.

All we can do today is prevent further tragedies and bequeath to the younger generation a bright horizon and hope for a new life. Let us convert animosity and the 'honing of our swords' to mutual recognition, respect and direct dialogue."

These are only some of the depressing facts that come to mind when I hear people talk of the need to include Islamists in Egypt’s political life. My heart sinks at the prospect of giving these throwbacks to the Dark Ages a say in how we should run our lives when I think of their attitude to women, say, or Copts, groups to which they accord a status only slightly higher than that of prisoners of war or slaves.

Allowing a political party formed on a religious platform to participate in Egypt’s political life is tantamount to lighting a match in an ammunition depot. Whether its platform is Muslim or Coptic, a religious party would open the gates of Hell, ushering in an era of political instability, economic stagnation and educational and cultural regression. Moreover, there is no such thing as a religious party, only parties made up of men of religion.

Despite my strong feelings on the subject, however, I find the harsh and often illegal treatment to which they are subjected unacceptable and a crime against humanity. It is also self-defeating in that it hardens attitudes on both sides. In fact, the only way to resolve our problem with the Islamists is through dialogue, by opening channels of communication and engaging in a frank interchange of views. Debating the issues is the only way to transform a religious party in the long term into a civil political party that subscribes to the main tenets of democracy: acceptance of the Other, rotation of power, respect for other religions and for women. The transformation will be complete when political Islam abandons its distorted understanding of our religion, an understanding rooted in the Middle Ages and reflecting the mentality of Bedouins bred in a harsh and unforgiving desert environment. Civil society is entitled to protect itself from any group that remains locked in a time warp and would have us all retreat with it into a distant past.

Speeding up political, economic and educational reform is the only way to reduce the illogical popularity of Islamism in the world. Once people in Muslim societies start to reap the benefits of freedom and participation, coupled with a marked improvement in their economic and living conditions and real educational reform, their admiration for Islamist groups will wane and they will realize that their welfare will not come at the hands of groups whose leaders are fanatical, narrow-minded and out of touch with the requirements of the age.

Despair, deplorable living conditions, feelings of injustice, the harsh realities of life and rampant corruption constitute the ideal environment for converts to the ideology of political Islam, which offers ‘hope’ in an atmosphere of hopelessness. But offering hope is one thing, making good on the offer quite a different matter. The Islamists are selling dreams [mirages] and promises [false] that they have a formula to cure all of society’s ills. In reality, however, they lack the credentials, not to mention the competence, required to undertake such a task. As someone who has spent many years at the head of a large institution, I find it hard to see what the source of their competence can be. Progress is a modern management concept that can be achieved by Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists as long as its elements are available. These elements are political, managerial, economic, educational and humanistic, regardless of religion or nationality.

The new political term that begins this year and runs for six more years must and can put an end to the Islamists’ dream of coming to power and destroying all prospects of stability and prosperity in Egypt for centuries to come. This can only be realized if all political, economic and educational reform initiatives come together in such a way as to render the mirage presented by the Islamists no longer attractive by ensuring that the reasons for its appeal have been eradicated from our reality.

“Tarek Heggy is one of the most creative and prolific writers in the Arab world. His writings probe the political and social limits and present a refreshing message of self-reliance that challenges the prevailing sense that regional ills are largely made abroad”.

(Professor Shibely Telhami, Maryland University, USA).

God have mercy on the simple Muslim citizen. He is the victim of conflicting and often contradictory religious fatwas [Islamic decrees], all of which claim to be genuine and based on God’s words and the Prophet’s Sunnah. These fatwas reach an astounding level of contradiction over the very same issues.

Let’s consider one such issue: women’s position, her social and political role, and what she should and should not do. There is a fatwa that bans women from driving that is based on taking preventative measures to protect women against potential harm, and ‘sad al zarai’ [the postponement of an issue that would cause upheaval if immediately enforced] – or so those upholding this believe.

Earlier this month 31 women were chosen among the members of the administrative bar and government lawyers in Egypt, those who issued the fatwa holding that women have the right to be appointed in the judiciary and to even rule within their capacities. Proponents have an abundance of evidence and arguments to back this claim.

A few weeks ago a decree was issued in Libya banning women from traveling outside of the Libyan borders if unaccompanied by a legal guardian despite the fact that the head of the state does not travel except when he is flanked by a large number of female bodyguards all of whom travel without their legitimate escorts.

A senior religious authority in Qom, Grand Ayatollah Yousef Saanei, loudly proclaimed to Asharq Al-Awsat recently that women have the right to lead men in prayers and to hold the office of president and even the Wali al Faqih [guardian jurist]. Yet even within a single religious group there exist contradictory stands depending on the time and place. Back in the forties, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt issued a fatwa that prohibited women from uncovering their faces or working in mixed gender governmental departments. Furthermore, the MB denied women judiciary and prosecution procedures and their involvement in politics was considered to be blatantly inconsistent with Islam. The MB backed down on its stand and since, women’s names started to appear on the party’s lists in Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere. And yet simultaneously, we find the Muslim Brotherhood voting against women’s rights in the Kuwaiti parliament.

So what is the simple Muslim to do when he discovers the seething contradictions have reached their peak and that every position and its opposite claim are based on Quranic text and the Prophet's Sunnah!

Poor contemporary Muslim; how is he to raise his family in the storm of fatwa contradictions? How can he manage his money in what, according to significant Islamic authorities, are commercial banks that are not usurious and who instead prescribe dealing with the so-called usurious ones! How can he travel when there are those who prohibit traveling to the ‘infidel’ countries except in cases of extreme necessity! Some will permit listening to music while others will consider it a vice. Yet, they are all among the highest echelons of the Muslim clergy – all of whom believing they derive their authority from God’s Book and his Prophet’s Sunnah!

This problem grows on a daily basis and we cannot guess where it will end up

by Ahmed Al-Rabei

"ON a windswept winter day last week, just before afternoon prayers, three gunshots rang out across the damp sand dunes of northern Gaza. Mohammed Yousef was just about to climb the minaret of the beach mosque to summon the faithful when he heard the distinctive crack of a Kalashnikov, a sharp, violent, intrusion that has become a soundtrack for the turbulent Gaza Strip, especially this month.

He hurried outside, looking first down a rubbish-strewn strip of beach that leads to the Mediterranean, then left towards a low-set concrete fence. Just inside a narrow entrance lay the crumpled body of a small woman, wearing a green Islamic gown and a full black veil. Her blood seeped into the puddles of sandy water around her head. Mohammed didn't bother with an ambulance. He need not have bothered with the police.

The dead woman was Dalal al-Behtete, a young woman from a struggling family in central Gaza. Seven other women have met the same violent and lonely fate across Gaza during a 10-day stretch this month. According to their assassins, their deaths gave them honour that their conduct in life had not. All the women had been accused of immoral behaviour. Some had been labelled prostitutes; others were branded for fraternising with men outside their immediate families.

So-called honour killings have been carried out here in the past, but even in this ramshackle, anarchistic and fractured society, women have never before been hunted down so blatantly.

Gaza, more so than anywhere else in the Palestinian territories, has been a feudal battleground of countless agendas, historical enmity, ideology and greed. Historically, clans and tribes have ruled the roost here, with factionalised militant ideologies running a close second. But the balance appears to have shifted during the past six months. Strict observance of Sunni Islam seems to have encouraged a fundamentalist trend that is making a play for influence, through the rigid enforcement of radical Islamic law espoused by the global jihad network that follows the bin Laden world view.

Sharia law appears to have drifted into Gaza, alarming Muslim and militant groups alike and sharply rattling the neighbour across the security barrier, Israel.

Change had begun in Gaza long before its women began to fall. Late last year, several internet cafes and music stores were bombed. In February, six pharmacies in the southern town of Rafah were also attacked because they persisted in selling Viagra to youths. In the past year, the name of a new group, first heard of after the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit last June, persistently has been linked to the unrest.

It calls itself the Army of Islam and consists of self-styled morality warriors who claim links to al-Qa'ida. Hamas, the most powerful of the militant groups and a joint partner in the new unity government, steadfastly denies that al-Qa'ida has established an organised presence in Gaza. If it is true that al-Qa'ida has done so, it cripples Hamas's claims to be fighting for a Palestinian state alone and not being standard bearers of the global jihads.

Saha Rijab had never heard of the Army of Islam until she was dragged by her hair and tossed into a car by masked men with assault rifles hours before Dalal was murdered. From her hospital bed in central Gaza, she agrees to tell Inquirer of the ordeal that has left her legs riddled with bullets and nearly led her to become the eighth victim of Gazan women's most terrifying month.

"I was taking clothes to my female neighbour and I had to pass my cousin's house to get there," she says, wearing a yellow-knitted cardigan and a brown hijab. "My cousin was inside and saw me passing and he opened the door and came outside. I didn't look at him and he slammed the door against the wall."

Saha's cousin, Wael Rijab, is the head of the Hamas executive force in the northern Gaza Strip, the vanguard of the militant group's strike power and a key player in the blood-soaked factional in-fighting of the past three months. He has accused his cousin of immorality for the past five years, seemingly because of her preference for jeans, tops and sometimes flowing hair instead of the Islamic jilbab. Just as damaging was his accusation of treachery; she was an avowed supporter of the Fatah movement that Hamas deposed in elections 14 months ago. Both groups have since been entangled in a struggle for power in Palestinian society.

"I kept walking and gave my neighbour the jilbab, then came back home," Saha says, with her shocked 12-year-old son sitting beside her. "After that I took a taxi to the shop to buy fruit and some militants from the Hamas executive force were sitting in a Mitsubishi with darkened glass. Their windows were half open and they were looking at me.

"I was scared but I decided to just keep walking to my street. What else could I do?

"I was 20m away from my home, then their car moved and another one arrived; the cars started moving closer to me. They opened the door. They were masked and they were running after me, the driver and two others. I was a few metres away from a clothes shop, but they reached me and put their hands on me. They dragged me by the hair and clothes and pushed me inside the car. They blindfolded me and they tied my hands.

"When I took the blindfold off I was in a street full of taxis. They said: 'Where are you going?' And I said: 'I am going to my street, I swear to God.' They said: 'You know God and you dress like this?' I said: 'I know God better than you.' They said: 'Are you Fatah or Hamas?' I said: 'I am Fatah', and they replied: 'We spit on Fatah."'

Then they announced their allegiance as followers of the Army of Islam and told Saha she should dress liberally only for her husband.

She retorted: "This is politics and you are trying to avenge something. I have nothing to do with it. If this is just about the way I dress I will start wearing the jilbab.

"They said: 'We will beat you and force you to say, 'I had sex with my son.' Then they covered my eyes again. I could hear the sound of the sea and their mobiles were ringing all the time. We went to a market and they said: 'So, you promise you have not been in contact with any other men?"'

Terrified and haunted by the recent deaths of other women, Saha drew little comfort from the next words she heard: "OK, don't worry. We will take you home."

She was right to be wary. Minutes later, she tells Inquirer, the car stopped and she was thrown outside into the dirt. She wriggled furiously to free herself as the first bullet thudded into the bone just below her knee. Two more pierced her lower legs before the gunmen sped off.

At the Jabaliya police station, which notionally investigates crime in the north of the Gaza Strip, five officers usher us inside the dingy office of the lead junior officer. Two officers sit behind a desk, and others sit on old foam mattresses on single beds along the wall. There is no computer, let alone a typewriter, no files or cabinets, not even a notepad. The officers received about 30 per cent of their annual salary last year and have no operational budget of which to speak. But it isn't their dearth of resources that has left them hamstrung; it is the impossible task of taking on the perpetrators.

"What could we do even if we wanted to?" asks an officer, who refuses to be named. "We are ruled by the tribes and we will not fight the Hamas executive force."

In the case of Dalal, after escorting her body to the morgue and advising her distraught father of her death, the police will play no further role. Justice, if it is delivered, will be played out Gaza-style, in a cycle of vengeance.

But with the rising power of the so-called Army of Islam, even that seems unlikely. Dalal and three other women murdered during the 10-day stretch - Ibtisam Mohammed Abu Genas, Samira Tohami Debeki and Amany Khamis al-Hussary - were victims of killers who claimed the ideological backing of the fledgling group, even if the murders stemmed from bids for family honour.

The deaths pose a significant issue for the new unity government on many fronts, especially Hamas. No one in the uneasy Fatah-Hamas alliance wants to be seen to be linked to extremism, especially of the Salafi-Islamic kind.

Israel has long feared that Gaza will be turned into a platform for al-Qa'ida and the consortium of international jihadis that have emerged in its likeness. Creeping sharia law at the border is a worst-case scenario for the Jewish state; it fears it will lead to imported and intensified jihadism.

For Hamas, the links appear to be just as troubling. Saha says she recognised her tormentors as being members of the Hamas executive force.

Soon after Inquirer's visit to Dalal's grieving family, our translator receives a phone call from a cousin confessing to the murder. In a menacing tone, the man says he too is an executive force member and warns us not to publish the dead woman's story.

"These are the worst days ever here," Saha says, knowing well the risks she faces for speaking out.

"Hamas believes that women cannot be the ones who lead. So long as Hamas is in Gaza, the situation will keep developing."

"A good friend of mine, Edva Naveh of Sha'arei Tikva in Samaria, made an interesting observation recently concerning the gang of Beduin youths who, according to their indictment, committed a series of rapes in the Galilee area. She was struck by reports in the Hebrew media - YNET, for instance - saying that the rapes were perpetrated as a form of nationalist vengeance against IDF operations in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The Post headlined its March 1 report: "Police make new arrests in 'terrorist rape' case."

Now if it's true that these were "terrorist rapes," Edva wondered why feminist organizations in Israel which devote themselves to combating rape, harassment and trafficking in women appear to have ignored the entire matter.