Israel at the brink.

• Position: Israeli-Palestinian relations - Column

The picture of the Israeli helicopter gunship raining bullets down on Palestinian protesters just about said it all.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised a hard line, and now he's delivering it. It was his obstinacy that precipitated the crisis on the West Bank and Gaza in September. It is he who has dragged his feet on the Oslo accords. It is he who has made it policy to confiscate Palestinian land, to promote additional Israeli settlements, to rub Palestinian faces in the dust. It is he who is responsible for the scores of deaths in September.

The U.S. government bears responsibility as well. It provides $3 billion in aid (including $1.8 billion in military aid) to Israel every year, making that country far and away the largest recipient of our foreign-policy largess. For the last thirty years, the U.S. government has winked and nodded at the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and the repression of the Palestinian people. And it was the U.S. government that engineered the lopsided Oslo accords that left the Palestinians only the smallest scraps of self-rule.

Sure, the Clinton Administration preferred Shimon Peres to Benjamin Netanyahu. Peres knew a good deal when he saw one. But Netanyahu is blind to the benefits. He is so intoxicated with the rightwing dogma of superiority that he cannot serve as a rational leader of his own people, much less a loyal sergeant of the U.S. empire.

The puppet has loosed his own strings, and now...