Gaza is the most densely populated area on earth.  It is a narrow strip of 360 square kilometers with a population of 1.4 million and growing.  It is everywhere surrounded with watch towers, an electrified fence, an occupation army controlling all entry and exit, a naval blockade by sea, and unchallenged attack helicopters and drone aircraft armed to kill overhead.

Some call Gaza a ghetto, but such analogies are not quite accurate for there is essentially no precedent in history for what Gaza is today.  Everywhere under seige and under Israeli military encirclement Palestinian Gaza is sui generis -- the result of fleeing refugees at the time of Israel's birth in 1948 who ended up on this strip of desert waste-land which Egypt came to 'administer' until 1967.   Essentially it is today a large open-air prison for its inhabitants -- most of whom can never leave -- where basic freedoms we Americans cherish and take for granted have long vanished.

This week a former President of the United States publishes a book that will link the word "Apartheid" to the Jewish State of Israel in a way far more public than ever before.  What the Israelis have done in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank since Jimmy Carter's days in the White House has brought forth this damning accusation.

Palestine: Apartheid or Peace is the title Carter has chosen for his latest foray into this Middle East quagmire.  For he himself seems to have reached a point of desperation, worried that the situation in the once Holy Land may be approaching the true point of no return and that the conflict between Israel and the Arabs will continue and escalate in the years and decade ahead.

With the much-touted but actually quite cynical Israeli 'withdrawal' last year, Gaza has become a kind of free-fire zone.   Withdrawn were about 7000 Israeli "settlers" who had commandeered nearly one-third of the land for themselves, plus the soldiers who protected them. 

But the basic realities of life for Gazans under the reconfigured Israeli military occupation have actually gotten considerably worse.   Basic living conditions within the Gaza ghetto-prison have significantly deteriorated.  'Targeted killings' (i.e., assassinations) are common-place as are attacks by tanks and artillery on Palestinian refugee camps.   Regardless of how the Israelis try to spin things it is the Israeli Army that rules Gaza; no one comes or goes or even survives without the Israelis making the decisions.

Maybe Americans can better appreciate the situation in Gaza with a few cold death statistics. 

In just the first ten days of this month, adjusted for population size, more than five times as many Gaza Palestinians were killed by Israeli missiles, tanks, and machine guns than the number of Americans who were killed on 9/11 in what we think of as "the worst act of terrorism" we ever experienced.  

In Gaza remember this situation has gone on now for years continually getting worse and worse -- as hard as imaging this may be for those who have never crossed through Israeli Army "checkpoints" into this made-made caldron of human despair.

For those of us who have visited the Palestinian 'occupied territories' since the 1970s, for those of us who have watched and witnessed things deteriorate into today's conditions, the apartheid realities of what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians have become more and more evident.  Jimmy Carter's now very public use of that term may come as a surprise to many Americans, but not to people in the Middle East, not to officials of the United Nations, and certainly not to the Palestinians.  From these realities stem the vicious hatreds, the cries for revenge, and the suicide bombers that have now spread to other Middle East locales.

Furthermore, it also needs to be understood, what the Israelis have done would never have been possible were it not for the billions of dollars yearly our Treasury and American Jewish organizations have kept flowing to embattled Israel.  This on top of the unprecedented amounts of the most advanced military technology sent by the Pentagon.  And this on top of the unprecedented political cover continually provided by our government to the Israeli government -- including more U.N. Security Council vetos on behalf of Israel than all other vetos combined, the latest just last weekend.

Also earlier this month the former Apartheid Prime Minister of South Africa, P.W. Botha died.  He passed into history as the last hard-line South African white leader who ordered such horrific killing and pillaging attempting to try to keep in place a militant racist society condemned worldwide.  In the end, thanks to those who took over from Botha and the release of Nelson Mandel from 27 years in Apartheid's prisons, a basic transformation of South Africa took place in 1994 probably preventing what many feared would be a horrendous race war.

When it comes to Israel, we Americans can't get away any longer with pretending we are observers and "peace-makers".  We are very much the complicitous party with Israel in what has been and is being done; hardly the 'even-handed' party we attempt to portray ourselves to be.

We are quite simply Israel's patron, protector, and excusor.  We have continually allowed and made possible repeated, systematic, and gross Israeli violations of international law.   Over the years we have provided the small Jewish State more than a $100 billion in funds and more high-tech military weapons than to any other country.   In a sense we have been Israel's pusher, continually shooting up the Israelis with guns, money, and bravado making them believe they could continue to defy the international community forever because the Americans were always there to side with them and protect them.

Moreover, at the same time we have repeatedly promised the Palestinians for more than a generation -- as well as the international community -- a real, dignified and sovereign State of their own.  Yet time after time, peace conference after peace conference, President after President -- with each new one trying to take credit anew for making again, if not fulfilling, the same old now badly tarnished commitments -- our promises have been at best inconsistent with our actions.

And so...if there is any one single thing the new Congress and the newly humbled American President can do in the Middle East to demonstrate that we, as the world's leading superpower, are now determined after all these years to actually make our policies accord with our professed values and our expressed words... it is to tell the Israelis that the day of reckoning has finally come to be.

It is time for Israel, and for the United States, to finally fulfill U.N. resolutions going back to the beginning -- from 1947 to 1967 to the present day -- and to finally bring into being a Palestinian State coupled to a fair and reasonable settlement for the more than 3 million Palestinian refugees still lanquishing in the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan.

If and when this major historical step toward true justice and reconciliation is finally taken then the Israelis can rightly insist, as can we, that the time has also come for full diplomatic recognition of Israel by the Arab League and from the individual Arab states.

And then it will be time, urgently and before it is too late, to reverse the extraordinarily dangerous arms race now erupting throughout the Middle East and act to make the entire region -- one so rich in history and culture and religion as well as oil -- one completely free of weapons of mass destruction.   The situation where Israel has an estimated 500 sophisticated nuclear weapons while all the rest of the countries in the region have none cannot continue much longer.

For if we do not act soon to bring about these results then alternatively the likelihood of a conflict of Biblical proportions -- and which some Christian Evangelicals will insist is in fact Biblically mandated -- will hang over the Jewish people of Israel, over the peoples throughout the Middle East, and over our own country and the entire world as a nuclear sword of Damacles.

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* Mark Bruzonsky is a journalist who has visited Israel and the Palestinian occupied territories more than a hundred times in the past 30 years.  He was the first Washington Representative of the World Jewish Congress and he has been a consultant on the Middle East for many organizations including the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where together with the Deputy Director he published the book Security in the Middle East - Regional Change and Great Power Strategies.  He is now the Publisher of MiddleEast.Org and can be contacted at MAB@MiddeEast.Org.