PALESTINE: a word that echoes loss perhaps, and important precisely because of loss, in these times. When the Israeli Merkava tanks entered Gaza at the end of June 2006, the world ached hearing that words echo return. You see, advancing Israel seemed to say, those Palestinians might think they have their own state and government, but it is all just fiction!

Maybe the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is right after all. In one of his poems he wrote