The greatest differences between the Israeli Labor and Likud parties are stylistic. Even so the current marginally competent Palestinian "leadership" remains easily taken in by the Good Cop/Bad Cop routines of Israeli public relations. Having agreed for self-serving reasons to Oslo terms that were closer to surrender than accommodation, those who continue to follow Yasser Arafat have little to offer but hopes that a return to Labor in the future will result in seriously new policies. But this is a fraudulent and deceptive hope not grounded in history or reality; moreover it is a hoax upon the Palestinian people by some of their own.
     A few days ago, while touring Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had the following to say:

"PEOPLE HAVEN'T LIVED HERE FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS.

LOOK AT THESE HILLS. HAVE WE DEPRIVED ANYONE OF

ANYTHING? BARREN LAND. YOU KNOW WHAT, IF WE

HADN'T COME HERE IT WOULD HAVE STAYED BARREN LAND

FOR ANOTHER 2,000 YEARS."

     True, Labor uses different rhetoric and tries to hide its real intentions of forcing the Palestinians into living on the equivalent of Reservations and Bantustans. But the larger reality is that this policy of settlements was instigated by the Israeli Labor party in the form of the "Allon Plan", the colonization of the crucial greater Jerusalem area was pursued even more vigorously by Labor than Likud, and the intention of both mainstream Zionist parties is to use "Jews-only" roads, concepts like "autonomy" and "self-rule", and the equivalent of color-coded "pass laws" to disenfrancise the Palestinians from the great majority of the area called the West Bank and covered by numerous U.N. resolutions including #242.