I guess we must welcome this vote today as a positive move, even though it seems likely that Sharon's motives are bad. The intention is pretty clearly to give very publicly something almost useless, which can nevertheless be presented as a big concession. Thus reducing the pressure for anything more significant.

Gaza will have no port, no airport, no crossable border with anywhere bit Israel, which will control all movement in and out. Its really just a big prison camp. But they should perhaps be able to move about inside - which is better than now.

US support for, and massive funding of, the Israeli government in its atrocities against the palestinians is the running sore from which much of the worlds trouble is growing, and the US population is being manipulated by the mega-rich media moguls so that they do not know the truth, and/or are so frightened they will agree to anything.

The pretext that Israel faces any real military threat is utterly false. Israel possesses more than 200 nuclear warheads, ballistic and cruise missiles to deliver them, and three submarines with nuclear capability so that even a surprise total strike would meet massive retaliation from patrolling submarines.

Israel refuses to acknowledge that it possesses any of this, and has never signed any of the international treaties accepting restraint. Nor as it ever submitted to any inspection.

Some think it highly likely that Israel has instantly deployable biological and chemical weapons, and may even have the banned "neutron bomb". It has not signed anything renouncing such things, and nothing has ever been inspected.

No significant threat to the State of Israel is even vaguely credible, but this fact needs to be kept concealed from the US population. The worst Israel has to fear is an occasional assault by puny vulnerable pink bodies with explosives strapped to them. Distressing and newsworthy, but not statistically any threat at all to its survival. Little more than a pathetic effort from the terminally powerless and desperate.

Only an independent palestinian state with its own international borders, its own ports and airports, and initial economic support to get it on its feet, can staunch this wound upon the world.

All the murderous and totally illegal settlers in palestinian territory need to go home to Israel. They could maybe stay if they obeyed palestinian law, and did not demand the retention of Israeli troops to protect them and apartheid roads for only them, but this seems unlikely. ( I use the word "murderous" based on the numerous accounts I have seen of settlers killing, maiming and threatening palestinians, with no response from the law to arrest or punish the perpetrators.)

The reason the settlers won't leave is that their leaders are religious fanatics. They have been taught that they have the right to take every inch of palestine by force from its inhabitants, because of an alleged pronouncement from their tribal god several thousand years ago.

Most groups at the time had similar tribal gods who told them things like this, and how "chosen" they were. Those other gods and their pronouncements are lost - this anachronism accidentally remains to contaminate our modern world.