Ship of fools // By Ben Frankel

do-gooders would be thrown in jail, tortured, or executed by Hamas and Hamas supporters such as Iran, the Taliban, and al Qaeda-supported regimes for what we may delicately call their life-style choices. How many women-rights or gay rights and free-speech activists on the ships heading for Gaza ever protested the manner in which women or gays or politically independent individuals are being treated by Hamas and its spiritual and religious brethrens?

3. Another advice to Israel: End the occupation

At the end of the day there is no escape from one conclusion: Israel must end the occupation of the Palestinian people. The continuation of the occupation after forty-three years is becoming more difficult and more untenable every year.

Israel made a strategic mistake — a profound categorical mistake — by moving Israeli settlers, now numbered around 300,000, into the Palestinian territories after it occupied these territories in the 1967 Six Day War.

It is one thing to occupy your adversary’s territory with military forces because you do not trust him or his intentions. The United States occupied Germany and Japan after the Second World War until it could ascertain the democratic and peaceful credentials of the post-war regimes in these two countries. Austria and parts of Finland were occupied, too, because of their collaboration with the Nazis. The United States and it allies, however, did not subsidize the move of hundreds of thousands of Americans to settle in Germany and Japan. The United States also did not summarily confiscate land, disenfranchise thousands of Germans and Japanese, built roads on which only Americans could drive while Germans and Japanese had to use dirt roads instead, and erected hundreds of check-points in which Germans and Japanese spent hours every day — all for the purpose of protecting the settlers who moved in.

The Palestinian community is now divided in two: The West Bank is controlled by the Palestinian Authority, while Gaza, since the summer of 2007, is controlled by Hamas. There is no reason why Israel should not allow — indeed, promote — the emergence of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank. In any event, the Palestinian Authority has already announced that by the fall of 2011 it would unilaterally declare the independence of a Palestinian state in the West Bank — and it is very likely that most of the countries in the world will recognize this independent Palestinian state.

Nothing will contribute more to