YOU have to be at the end of an Israeli gun in occupied Palestine to feel the grim effect of American support for Israel, and you have to be living in the United States to feel the depth and intensity of the pro-Israeli attitudes on the part of both administration officials and the many experts and talking heads on the Middle East crisis.

The statements made by leaders and officials from President George Bush downwards are reported around the world and get to the public in other countries. What doesn’t get through is the slant in the 24-hour coverage of current developments in Ramallah and other towns attacked by Israel. The commentary shallowly and almost exclusively concentrates on the violence and the suicide attacks; it hardly ever touches the crucial, underlying problem of Israeli occupation.

There are exceptions, of course. There have been reporters interviewed from the battle zone who have underlined the savage conduct of Israeli soldiers in their house-to-house and room-to-room searches of Yasser Arafat’s headquarters. But few journalists or experts really manage to bring out this fact of usurpation of land and everything else that goes with it — the sense of belonging, of owning, of sustenance, of life itself — which is at the root of the Palestinian anger and desperation.

There is no one to question the humiliation that is being inflicted on Arafat and other members of the Palestine Authority who have been confined to a couple of rooms in their devastated headquarters and get electricity and water at the pleasure of Israeli security forces. If Arafat can still use a mobile phone, that seems to be a privilege granted by the Israelis and from the podium of the White House briefing room it can be suggested, without anyone considering it ludicrous, that the Palestinian leader can use this phone to call upon his people to stop violent activities.

There are subtle differences in nuance in the statements made in the past two or three days by the White House and by the State Department. But looking at the underlying message, it all appears so much like play-acting, with a slightly temperate tone adopted by state to deflect criticism of the prejudiced view of the White House.

The entire debate has been reduced to whether or not the US should become more actively engaged in the Israel-Palestine dispute.

As far as the Palestinians are concerned, America is already heavily engaged — on the side of Israel, which it backs with money and military supplies. America is no longer an objective interlocutor, and even if it becomes more diplomatically engaged, the Bush administration effort would certainly be to ensure that the Palestinians are sold as short as possible.

Engagement cannot be for its own sake, but must have a clearly defined objective, and if that is seen as establishing peace on Sharon’s terms, then it would be self-defeating. Experts brought in to talk on television have been bending over backwards to see a rational explanation for Sharon’s actions and to attribute irrationality and obduracy to Arafat.

There is need both to address the fundamental problem of occupation, which entails Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders, and to make the mediation effort more broad-based by involving Russia, China, Europe and Arab countries. And somebody in the administration should at least have the guts to point out that Israel (like India in the case of Kashmir) is using the foil of the “war against terrorism” to confuse issues of illegal occupation, self-determination and liberation from colonialism.

One of the tactics used to create such confusion is to define the Palestine struggle in religious terms and thus make the official US line more acceptable to the Americans, who are being slowly nudged towards a more fundamentalist and religious way of thinking by the Bush administration. Suicide bombers are always depicted as religious fanatics, without anyone bothering to feel the anger that drove them to this ultimate act and that was built up within them by being witness daily to the bulldozing of the houses of their friends and family members and of having to live with oppressive Israeli rule for as long as their young lives existed.

As Ziad Asali, chairman of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, pointed out in an address at the Secretary of State’s Open Forum last week, there are malevolent voices that speak of a clash of civilizations. This, he said, must be avoided at all costs: the Palestine issue is a secular issue, and must be dealt with through a secular approach.

Of course, there are groups among the Palestinians who wish to turn it into a religious issue (just as our own brave Mujahideen turned Kashmir into a religious dispute, perhaps fatally for a just solution), but should the US also approach it from that perspective just because it suits the present administration’s ideology? Should it seize upon Osama bin Laden’s late conversion to the Palestine cause as justification to lump the Palestinians and the Al Qaeda together?

The US might, in time, find that it might be making the same mistake that it committed when it opposed Nasserism and Arab nationalism and sowed the seeds for the rise of religious militancy. Many Arab secularists have been opposed to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and could have been valuable allies in the search for a secular settlement, but the Bush administration, by its one-sided approach, has already forfeited their support. Not for the first time, you miss the moral authority of the Non-Aligned Movement.

IT will be 23 years on April 4,2002, since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged after a trial of doubtful judicial propriety. It would be well to examine the circumstances that led to this tragic event that is likely to haunt Pakistani politics for a long time.

Bhutto selected General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq for the post of Chief of the Army Staff when General Tikka Khan had completed his term of duty in this appointment on March 1, 1976. On assuming this post, Zia-ul-Haq superseded a number of officers senior to him in service. He attracted Bhutto’s attention when as a Divisional Commander, he in