Israelis have long ruminated over the paradox of their situation: If they maintain control over the Palestinian territories in the service of the idea that Jews should govern the entire "land of Israel," they will need to figure what to do with the Palestinians. Israeli hard-liners argue for expulsion or "transfer," but that step would be internationally unpopular. Another option is to deprive the Palestinians of political rights, but this "apartheid" approach would also draw international opprobrium. A third option is to make the Palestinians citizens - something Israel has already done with Palestinians who did not flee their lands in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war - a step in keeping with the desire of the majority of Israelis to maintain a full-fledged democracy.

The problem is that there so many Palestinians. As it is, Burg argued in an interview this month, "Between the Jordan [River] and the Mediterranean [Sea], somewhere between next year and two years' time, there will be born the first Palestinian ... [of] the Palestinian majority."

"What do you give up - assuming you can't have them all - land, system, or majority?" asks Burg, a balding, blue-eyed, and fit man who speaks English with an accent that has often been likened to Arnold Schwarzenegger's. Burg's answer: "I'll never give up democracy, I'll never give up the Jewish majority. With difficulties and pain, I compromise the land."

Even more hawkish Israelis, such as Mr. Olmert, are now willing to voice this view in public. Olmert gave an interview, published a week ago, in which he too intimated that Israel would have to remove settlements and cede control much of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Why? "Above all hovers the cloud of demographics," he told columnist Nahum Barnea of Yedioth Ahronoth. "It will come down on us not in the end of days, but in just another few years."

Burg's article did more than address the inevitability of Palestinian population increase. He attacked the current Israeli government as "an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers," and he had this to say about the actions of the Palestinians: "Israel, having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism." This sort of "understanding of baby killers" - in Mr. Meridor's phrase - is considered heresy in Israeli mainstream debate.

For Burg, the time has come for the Israeli left to begin to say such things. Until a little over a year ago, Burg's Labor Party was in a coalition government under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Perhaps as a result, voters roundly rejected Labor in recent elections. "People were so angry at us," Burg says. "They didn't want even to look at us."

Now, says Daniel Ben Simon, an Israeli journalist who has written sympathetically about Burg's father-in-law, "Three years after the intifada, the awakening of the Israelis has started."

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