Benjamin Franklin once observed that those who would trade their liberties for security will wind up losing both. James Madison stated that no nation can preserve freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare. Few can question that America’s Founding Fathers epitomize true conservatism. There is something seriously wrong in America today precisely because the elites from both political parties have forgotten about Franklin and Madison and ignored their wise counsel.

IPS - The year 2012 marks the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophic uprooting of the Palestinians and the dismemberment and de-Arabization of Palestine in 1948. The name “Palestine” was wiped off the map. Some five hundred villages and towns disappeared; markers of the Palestinian presence on the land that had survived the Crusades were obliterated to make way for a new militarized European immigrant-settler community.

A tipping point is where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way. Those of us who have been arguing for a sane United States foreign policy in the Middle East have well understood that the odds on shifting the prevailing narrative have been heavily against us thanks to the overwhelming resources possessed by a powerful domestic lobby. Ten years ago in America, it was impossible to place even a letter in a mainstream newspaper or magazine that was in any way critical of Israel. Apart from Pat Buchanan, no one on television provided a critique of Israel and its policies. In the U.S. media, Israel was ever the beleaguered little democracy surrounded by savage Arabs.

But then, all of a sudden, the conspiracy of silence began to break down.

International Herald Tribune - BEIT IJZA, West Bank — One of the first statements under oath that I took for Al Haq, a human rights organization I helped establish, was from Sabri Garaib, a farmer from Beit Ijza, a Palestinian village ten miles northwest of Jerusalem. I remember sitting on the porch of his house overlooking the garden and the low, undulating hills planted with wheat and barley that spread out on all sides. All 112 acres, I was told, were in danger of being expropriated by the new Jewish settlement of Givon Hahadasha.