TIT, MEET TAT:

In the hard-line rightist Likud party Charter of 1973, the first article reads: "Between the Sea and the River Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty." Following the Hamas attack, Israeli settlers illegally occupying Arab land on the West Bank have launched violent attacks on Palestinian farmers there. As one of them told a BBC Today reporter last week, his aim is to remove all Palestinians from the "River to the Sea".

The slogan is the purest expression of ultra Zionist ideology. Students of the tortured history of Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land will know the contortions, reverses and zig-zags of those living on ancestral and historic lands, as well as land bought legally by Jews from Europe a century ago.

But of all the oddities of the chronicle of the ups and downs of the conflict, nothing is stranger than a classic rightist Zionist slogan being turned into a chant expressing the Islamist desire to drive all Jews out of the land of their ancestors.

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