Could there be anything more wildly hypocritical and ultimately self-defeating than waging a �war on terror� in which the primary tactic involved our troops kicking down residential doors in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities, thereby subjecting trembling, weeping, innocent women and children to . . . absolute terror?

Imagine shouting, shoving soldiers from half a world away suddenly bursting into American homes while our families watched TV.

Wouldn�t convincing us that the tremendously frightening foreigners with guns knocking over furniture and rifling through our belongings were actually �good guys,� and we the �bad,� be an impossibly tough sell?

In fact, wouldn�t seeing our kids cry in total fear compel us to become country-liberating insurgents, even if that impulse hadn�t previously arisen?

As amazing as it is, something actually exceeds the madness, and utter moral depravity, of how we�ve attempted to �liberate� Iraq.

Picture much the same scenario in Palestine in 1948, but with Jewish soldiers, or paramilitary irregulars, entering Arab homes in the Holy Land.

Those intruders not only presaged the American pillage in Iraq, but essentially told those whom they were victimizing, �It�s our God-given right to seize your property, in furtherance of the creation of new Israel, and you must leave at once.�

In some instances, Palestinian homes were abruptly transferred to Jewish ownership and use, but more often they were completely razed, along with adjoining orchards, to make way for fresh construction and settlement by merciless occupiers whose action -- through an obscene ethical perversion -- was justified simply because its perpetrators survived the Holocaust.

Whole Palestinian towns were forcefully emptied, and their historical identities wiped out. They then became Israeli, with entirely different names.

At bayonet point, tens of thousands of people -- having majority roots running centuries deep -- were cruelly driven into exile in strange surroundings, where abject poverty became an unrelenting, unbearable burden.

For 60 years, that surpassing injustice has continued, intensified by additional occupation and oppression stemming from Israel�s territory-taking Six Day War of de facto conquest in 1967.

In haughty defiance of repeated United Nations resolutions demanding the recognition of Palestinian rights, Israel concretized apartheid rule, imposing the harshest imaginable measures and conditions on a populace made to experience a repressive second-class status that no human beings could, or should, endure . . . without rebellion.

But when they do rebel, whether through the use of thrown stones or crude bombs and rockets, they�re slandered as �terrorists.�

Never mind that, in a comparative ratio of deaths and injuries suffered by one side at the other�s hands in this ongoing travesty, Israel has been responsible for about 100 casualties for every 1 claimed by Palestinians. That ratio was almost exactly repeated in Gaza during the past month.

We Americans need to step back and see what�s really happening.

For the past six decades, Palestinians have been engaged in a freedom fight necessitated by Israeli action of much more acutely causal influence than anything motivating our own Revolutionary War. �Taxation without representation� is a very anemic reason for taking up rebellious arms, compared to what Palestinians must so destructively face.

To gain our independence, we did such unsavory things as tar and feather Tories who sided with England. However, you won�t find our uniformly glorified Patriots termed �terrorists� in US high school history texts.

Within minutes of planes terribly crashing into New York�s Twin Towers on 9/11, many of us understood that, thereafter, any and all freedom fighters on this planet -- particularly Palestinians -- would unfairly be called terrorists to propagandistically denigrate and diminish their causes.

And to obscure the generally far greater neocolonial/imperialist abuses, including American and Israeli state terrorism, that are the underlying reason for desperate, sometimes atrocious acts carried out by those who�ve been systematically denied the democratic space within which to gain liberation by peaceful, nonviolent means.

Addressing Gaza specifically, it was Israel that imposed an unrelieved blockade of such damaging humanitarian consequence that UN relief officials said it was virtually genocidal.

It was Israel, on Nov. 4, 2008, that broke the cease-fire by dispatching an assassination team into Gaza, resulting in several murders.

It�s Israel that preposterously denies targeting civilians, when televised video reveals Israeli explosives raining down on whole neighborhoods in imprecise, widening cones of fiery devastation. Human Rights Watch and qualified experts say that weapon was white phosphorus, an awful incendiary whose use on personnel, whether military or civilian, is banned by international law.

It was Israel, according to the Red Cross, which prohibited access to Gazan dead and wounded for many days.

Undeniably, Israel�s brutal onslaught against Gaza recreated Warsaw Ghetto carnage, with only name changes marking any fundamental distinction.

Israel has shown itself to be a dreadful monster, outwardly strong but completely deficient in basic morality, totally undermining the global sympathy past persecution has imparted on the Jewish cause.

Thankfully, more and more Israeli people, and Jews everywhere, are recognizing the stark truth that a bloody Zionist knife is slicing their own throats. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peace give us reason to hope.

May we soon see the day when Herzl and Weizmann�s supremacist/colonizer/exclusionary aberration is expunged from Judaism, allowing a great religion to fully reclaim its finest ideals.