hurt the Israelis symbolically, or to
steal from them some distant and less guarded settlement, but to return
in triumph to their true home, and the land of their most ancient
fathers. Given to them by Allah himself.....

Palestine!

The Green Earth Pact, as it was called, had been enacted (and
unanimously approved) by the United Nations, to insure the peace and
neutrality of the beloved home planet of all humanity, which had so
narrowly escaped war's destruction and environmental catastrophe during
the Nuclear Age. Among other clauses designed to protect the fragile
environment, so long and senselessly abused, it specified that no more
than one-hundred military vessels of any given nation, and these of
limited size and destructive capability, were to enter the parochial
Solar System at any one time, and that no more than half that number
could engage an Earth orbit or rest upon the Moon. And except in
sudden crisis of defense, absolutely none were allowed to pierce the
upper atmosphere.

And so one hundred Palestinian vessels were sent, mostly fighters,
manned not by the best trained pilots and soldiers, but by the most
fervent believers, and those with the deepest grudge. Under the
pretext of diplomatic and training purposes they came, believing
against all Satan's whisperings that if once, by their own actions they
could retake that sacred land, some miracle of God would allow them to
keep it.

Half remained at the legal distance, the other half locking in around
the Earth. After visiting with the Soviets, the Syrians, and the
Saudis, betraying their true purpose to none, the fifty vessels broke
suddenly from orbit and rushed down upon the tiny speck of land known
as modern Israel ---before that Palestine, before that Judea, and so
on back into the dawn of history, when it had been little more than a
forbidding desert, endlessly fought over by tribes and Empires until it
was hard to say (and still harder to care) who had been there first, or
why.

In one sense at least, the modern Israelis had not changed from the
turbulent and close-knit times of the 1950's and 60's. When it came to
defense, they took nothing for granted. At the instant the first
Palestinian fighters began to dive, they had released their own fifty,
more sophisticated craft, and in conjunction with the best ground
batteries on the planet Earth, cut short the brave but foolish attack.
No prisoners were taken.

For the next several da