In a recent bloggingheads.tv episode, Reihan Salam cited a fascinating article from the NY Times Magazine from a few months ago about the Syrian Jewish community. I have been meaning to comment on it since it came out, as it contains numerous points that are worth expounding. In no particular order:

1) The "Edict" is, in some ways, merely a more explicit version of the traditional Orthodox position on conversion. Conversions for external motives are generally not accepted (and, to massively oversimplify, doing so for marriage can be deemed an invalid "external" motive). And traditionally, families would mourn an intermarried party as if he or she had died. The SY Edict parts ways with normative practice, though, in wholly rejecting even the possibility of conversion. And - as the quotes from the article demonstrate - the motivation is based on blood-essentialism. Any religion passed down by birthright must by definition have a heavy blood and clan component, but the possibility of conversion and voluntary acceptance of the "yoke of the commandments" balances that out, keeping the focus on the ideals. The SY Edict decisively tips the balance all the way towards the tribal.

2) And this leads to another trait of the SY community, which is described obliquely in the article: by focusing on blood, other traditional elements of the religious community - such as observance itself - take a backseat in determining identity. For example - as hinted in the article - the SY community famously does not put the same stresses on Torah study for its own sake as the Ashkenazim have done in recent centuries. Nor is there any indication that other traditional demarcations of comunal identity - such as Sabbath observance - have that level of importance in delineating SY boundaries. If the ultimate expression of American Jewish identity is "It's complicated" - a maxim that has launched thousands of books and media careers, as well as paying the college tuitions for the children of a thousand therapists - SY communal identity is as uncomplicated as it gets.

3) Speaking of Torah study, the anecdote about Rabbi Ovadya Yosef is an amazing one. Imagine the Pope coming to a small American Catholic ommunity to vouch for someone, and further imagine that community blithely ignoring his verdict. There are very few examples where that Catholic analogy would work well in a Jewish concept. This is one of them.

4) Despite the universal prohibition of intermarriage, I think that few segments of the American Orthodox population (outside of the most chareidi) would truly cut off all personal contact with an intermarried family member for decades on end (and yes, this likely does contribute to the increase in intermarriage). In order for the SY Edict to work, parents have to be willing to buy into it enough to impose the consequences on their children. And they are. (The carrots of the elaborate communal welfare state help they buy-in.)

Who can resist one of these quizzes?

Left Wing Modern Orthodox: 57%
Right Wing Modern Orthodox: 86%
Left Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 44%
Right Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 10%

Congratulations. You're Modern Orthodox all right, but wait! Just when you were ready to live an idyllic happily-labeled life they announce Left Wing and Right Wing Modern Orthodoxy. What the heck is up with that? Maybe you need to rethink and refine some of your positions, and then take the test again so I can put you in a little box.

Not shocked by the result, although I did quibble with a number of the questions. I'l skip the little box, thanks.

Our beloved Renegade Rebbetzin some cogent thoughts about her family's relative position and how they are forced into a persistent status of relative penny-pinching. Her descriptions of her (well-meaning) congregants' clueless comments on the subject deserve to be immortalized in any compilation of "The Thoughtless Things People Say (Volume XLVII)."

A related thought: I think RR is also touching on an explanation for another important phenomenon she's discussed before: why educated, MO-type women of our generation rebel against the "rebbetzin" label and unpaid responsibilities that come with it. While a lot of it has to do with the rebellion against the old European model and the presumed brain-death that comes with it (not that that's necessarily true, but the perception of June Cleaver in the shtetl, with many more children, summs it up), much of it also has to do with the fact that if the rabbi's wife works at a well-paying job, the financial stresses she aptly describes can be somewhat alleviated. (Another factor, of course, is the external validation that comes with "using" those advanced degrees.)

It's hard to be surprised when those who have the ability to avoid those stresses, choose to do so. But it does lead to a communal shortage of "rebbetzins."

A few years ago, during the initial contretemps over female "congregational interns," one of the women involved was quoted as saying something along the lines of (I don't have the exact quote) that her goal for that program wasn't the inauguration of female rabbis, but of women who would be appropriately recognized and compensated for performing the communal duties that rebbetzins have performed in the past. Regardless of one's feelings about that particular experiment, it seems that a shul (even one that doesn't want the kiss-of-death label of "progressive") should recognize the communal benefits of having a rebbetzin, and pay accordingly for those services. Then maybe RR could afford some better Chanuka presents.

On the other hand, most shuls don't have two nickels to rub together for a fire in case of a power outage (for reasons good and bad, also touched on in RR's post). So RR and her cohorts probably shouldn't include it in their budgets anytime soon.

In other disengagement posts, please read OOSJ for the best summary of the real stakes - far more important than who holds Gaza at any given time.

And I think Prof. Jeffrey Woolf has the best ideas for how to properly commemorate the exiting residents of Gaza.

(I can't let one thing pass, though. The first commenter to Prof. Wolff's post linked above argues that the proper response to the disengagement "should be a fight to the finish and not a total surrender." In the same comment, he then argues that the Religious Zionist community should, in the face of seemingly implacable opposition from an enemy (the larger secular society), voluntarily dismantle all yeshivot hesder and completely disengage from the army like the charedim. I'm not sure if the commenter sees the irony in those two arguments.)

Yes, I'm overdue to post on the hitnakut (disengagement) from Gaza, and we're all running out of time. (Can there be a more productive way to spend Tisha B'Av afternoon?). In lieu of a substantive post, I want to throw this question out to Ben, Prof. Wolff, OOSJ and all other interested parties.

Much of the anti-disengagement rage is directed at the defective nature of the plan's adoption. At one extreme, you have the argument that it would have been much more unifying for the country to have assented in a referendum (I strongly agree). At the other extreme, you have arguments that Israel has completely repudiated democracy by adopting the plan. Much of the criticism that I've seen has leaned more towards the latter extreme. But there's another way to look at things. Currently, the anti-disengagement forces can use the lack of a referendum to rationalize that the broader public may actually support their position. That may provide solace in the immediate crises, but is likely to have long-term costs.

Let's assume for a minute that Sharon had submitted the plan to a referendum, and invested some effort in campaigning for it & explaining why he thought it'd be best for the country. And let's assume further that the referendum would have passed by a comfortable margin, which is a pretty reasonable assumption. (Yes, I have seen arguments that the majority of the country does not, in fact, support the disengagement, and would not back it in a referendum. To be blunt, I think that people who believe that are deluding themselves.)

Would a referendum defeat have made it easier for the current disengagement opponents side to accept the plan? Or would it lead to even greater alienation from the larger society? If the editors of the New York Post were temporarily transplanted to Israel, Ma'ariv's headlines might describe a convincing referendum defeat as "ISRAEL TO YESHA: DROP DEAD." Would Rav Medan take some solace in the voting public's assent to the plan, or would his sense of betrayal at the hands of the secular elites be extended to the general public? I don't know what Rav Medan himself would do (though I know people who could ask him), but I suspect that many of his allies, admirers and followers would face the same dilemma. I suspect that the latter may be true. And that is pretty frightening, because those public sentiments will eventually be expressed in a way too unequivocal to be ignored or rationalized away.

I believe that Religious Zionism, its ideals and followers are resilient enough to withstand the crisis of disengagement. (I think that many of those who argue otherwise are predisposed to doubt Religious Zionsim's legitimacy, whether from the secular left or from the charedi right.)
But the procedural flaws in the Israeli government's adoption of the plan - and there were many - shouldn't be used as a rationalization to assume broader support for the Religious Zionist agenda than actually exists. That will only hurt efforts to influence society along Religious Zionist lines.

Here's an interesting post from an interesting blogger, arguing that the choice of a chancellor on the part of the Jewish Theological Seminary (the flagship institution of the Conservative movement) is very important...for Orthodoxy.

Without trying to narrow the very wide theological and Halakhic gaps between CM and MO/RZ Judaism, it is clear that a more self-confident leadership of both groups, even if it moves them further apart, is needed if contemporary world Jewry is to come to terms with some of the major issues that we will face over the next 50 or so years.

And our children and grandchildren will suffer the consequences.

I'm not sure I buy it, but it's worth thinking about.

In case you weren't depressed enough today, check out this cheerful profile in the Telegraph about a Palestinian female would-be suicide bomber.

Wafa had been sent on her mission by the Abu Rish Brigade, the small militant faction with links to Fatah. She did not, she said later, regret it, though she stressed that her decision had had nothing to do with her scarring. "My dream was to be a martyr. I believe in death," she said. "Today I wanted to blow myself up in a hospital, maybe even in the one in which I was treated. But since lots of Arabs come to be treated there, I decided I would go to another, maybe the Tel Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. I wanted to kill 20, 50 Jews …''

And what about babies? Would you have killed babies and children? she was asked. "Yes, even babies and children. You, too, kill our babies. Do you remember the Doura child?"

A fellow female prisoner, convicted of aiding a suicide attack, was also featured:

Her fellow prisoner, Kahira Saadi, from Jenin, is one of the jail celebrities. A mother of four, aged 27, she was held responsible for an attack in which three people died and 80 were injured. Zipi Shemesh, five months' pregnant, and her husband, Gad, were among the dead. They had gone to an ultrasound appointment and had left their two daughters, Shoval, seven, and Shahar, three, with a babysitter. They never came back.

When? "I don't remember the exact date, only that it was Mother's Day. That's why I prepared him some flowers."

Keep reading for the punchline.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

OK - I'm the last one to point this out, but this is a truly extraordinary blog. No, I don't know if this author is for real, but it certainly sounds authentic (I do have my suspicions about certain other bloggers purporting to show the seamier side of Orthodoxy). No time to reflect on the ramifications now, but there are many. I certainly won't dismiss the term "shidduch crisis" as blithely as I might have been tempted to do in the past.

This was written when Arafat's death was announced, but I hadn't gotten around to posting it until now.
Finally, Yasser Arafat's death has been announced (we'll see when it actually occurred).

The most accurate oversimplification of Arafat's life is that he possessed a warped Midas touch: everything he touched turned to chaos and void.

More some other time.

Can any of my readers, rabbinic or otherwise, advise as to how reliable the hashgacha is of the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of San Francisco?

I'm having trouble reproducing the symbol, but click here and scroll down a bit to see it. Mrs. Manhattan has recently seen the symbol on some products and is checking as to its reliability.

Time to give a shout-out to some new Jewish blogs I've encountered over hte last few months.

First is the vacationing Shaigetz, who can best be described as a more thoughtful, more consistently productive (in a blogging sense) and more British version of the dormant Hasidic Rebel. The Shaigetz has some really fascinating comment threads, as well as my nominee for the best title ever for a blog post.

MOChassid hails from the "old country" where I was raised. Living there does strange things to people. In his case, it turned him into a "Modern Orthodox Chassid," who attends the synagogue sometimes known as "Holy Smoke."

Next is the mysterious Ben Chorin ("free man" in Hebrew). Despite his position as a professor at an unnamed university, he clearly has retained a deep and broad intellectualism. I love reading his thoughts on..just about anything, and not just because we cite some of the same influences or because of anything he's written about this site.

Protocols has become something...different. How to describe it? Let's say that... it seems like a very long joke that I just don't get. But I'm not going to denounce Luke Ford too much, because he introduced me to the horribly beautiful Seraphic Secret, a blog written by an Orthodox Jewish screenwriter in Los Angeles mourning the death of his son. Some of the most touching parts of his blog were recently excerpted in a piece in the Jewish Press.

Finally, an introduction and belated Happy Birthday to my old college friend who now lives in and blogs from Israel, Chayyei Sarah. Please do click over and wish her a happy birthday, albeit a belated one.

I don't get as bent out of shape by the NYT's Israel coverage as I used to (such as here and here),for a variety of reasons. One is that the recent moves of the Bush and Sharon governments indicate an acceptance of reality, notwithstanding occasional denial of the same by the NYT editors and reporters.

Another reason is that even certain pieces that seem to be written from a pro-Palestinian perspective, such as David Rieff's profile of Arafat in this week's Magazine section, often backfire and paint the Palestinians in a worse light than may be intended.

Rieff's piece features a studied refusal to provide context for the Israeli moves in imprisoning Arafat in his bunker - you will search in vain for any reference to the orgy of suicide bombings in early 2002 that prompted Operation Defensive Shield and succeeding moves against the Palestinians. (There is one reference to suicide bombings that makes it sound like something the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians, or that it is some natural force unconnected to anything the Palestinians do.) The point of that refusal is clear upon reading the piece, for what comes through - over and over again - is a refusal on the part of the Palestinains who are quoted to accept any responsibility for any part of their own fate.

Such as:

The Israeli government's decision to assassinate Sheik Yassin, the paraplegic cleric who was the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas -- and Sharon's subsequent declaration that Arafat himself should not think he is safe from a similar attack -- only heightened this sense of humiliation. The likelihood that only policy disagreements within the Israeli government, and American opposition to his assassination, were keeping him alive illustrated Palestinian powerlessness to Palestinians in a way that people on the West Bank described to me, over and over again, as unbearable. As one shopkeeper said: ''I have no authority as a father with my children. They know I cannot protect them from the Israelis. And Arafat is our Palestinian father, and the Israelis just toy with him.'' The fading Hebrew-language posters that Uri Avnery's group attached to canisters that serve as a barrier between the Mukata parking lot and Arafat's quarters -- they declare, ''There is someone to talk to'' -- seem from another geologic era.

...Hussain Sheikh, a senior Fatah leader and one of the younger generation that is intensely critical of the Palestinian Authority and in particular of Arafat, put it to me in this way: ''We Palestinians are suffering from two major problems -- Israeli occupation, and corruption. But what outsiders don't seem to understand is that the main obstacle to internal Palestinian reform is the Israeli occupation itself. Reform simply can't be the main item on the agenda while the occupation continues. The national issue has to have priority.''

...Over and over again on the West Bank, I met secular intellectuals and Fatah officials who refused to attack Hamas, even though they made it abundantly clear that the kind of Palestinian state the Islamists imagined was not one in which they would want to live. As one West Bank newspaper editor said, ''You cannot attack Hamas when Hamas is being attacked by the Israelis.''

...In fact, many Palestinians attribute precisely this kind of Machiavellian plot to the Israeli prime minister's decision to isolate Arafat. Above all, they say they believe that it is a way of making sure that American and European demands for reform within the Palestinian Authority never have a chance of being met. One senior Palestinian official, a reformist and a former Arafat loyalist, analyzed the situation in the following way: ''We want internal reforms, but no group can go into battle'' for them. To do so, he said, inevitably means criticizing Arafat. ''But the president's position is now so delicate that you can't criticize him. Arafat has been transformed into a holy icon. Anything that tarnishes his reputation, even for the sake of reform, would be thought of as playing into Israel's hands.''

Mentioning suicide bombings, other than as something that is "foreclosing Palestinian options" with no mention of who is actually conducting such bombings - i.e., giving context to why Israel has been doing what it is doing - would interfere with the chosen narrative of Palestinian helplessness. Rieff may think that his piece is showing the Palestinians in a positive light, but the emphasis on Palestinian passivity and fatalism is the best argument possible against a Palestinian state. For even if such a state were to come into being tomorrow, it would still have Israel as its great opponent and as an ever-present excuse not to implement internal reforms. (Those who persevere with such reforms, such as Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, deserve ten times the media coverage and support given to Arafat and Hamas).

Also, the piece somehow omits mention of how Arafat, notwithstanding his imprisonment, found time to conduct the "political assassination" of the best recent hope for Palestinian reform and salvation, Abu Mazen.

With the context kept in mind, it is hard to read the piece and not be reminded of what Benny Morris has called

a perpetual Palestinian whining—that, I fear, is the apt term—to the outside world to save them from what is usually their own folly. And the whining, more often than not, has been accompanied by mendacity. Thus it was in September and October 1936, half a year into the Arab Revolt, when they secretly appealed to the monarchs of the Arab states to save them from British suppression by issuing a call to the Palestinians to "graciously" halt their rebellion. Thus it was in April and May 1948, when they pleaded for the Arab states to invade Palestine and save them from the Jews (whom they had attacked between November 1947 and March 1948). Thus it was in September 1970, when they called upon the Arab world to save them from the Hashemite regime in Jordan, which they had just assailed and tried to subvert. And thus it is today, when Arafat and his minions, having unleashed terror on Israel's cities, desperately appeal to the West and to the Arab states to save them from Israel's wrath.

Attempts to cover up Palestinian agency in their own problems only increases the likelihood that those problems will continue and worsen.

UPDATE: Great minds think alike! Andrew Silow-Carroll, currently guest-blogging at Protocols, writes at his day job:

The pro-Palestinian movement is perhaps the most patronizing political cause the world has ever known. In the minds of the pro-Palestinian Left, the residents of Gaza and the West Bank are always objects, never subjects. They are passive characters in a drama being staged by Israel and the United States and bear no responsibility, or even ability, to make decisions that will better their own lot. So when Ariel Sharon takes a stroll on the Temple Mount, it was “inevitable” that the “street” would explode. When a youth is denied a livelihood because of security closures, it is “inevitable” that he will strap a bomb to his chest.

Thanks to such inevitabilities, the pro-Palestinian movement has succeeded in nothing over the past 56 years of Israel’s existence but in infantilizing the Palestinians and adding to their misery — and the rest of the world’s.

Lee Smith writes an important piece on Slate about Arab anti-American sentiment:

Of course, Arab displeasure with U.S. leaders hardly started with the Bush White House. As Noam Chomsky pointed out two years ago—or well before anti-Americanism reached its current heights—President Eisenhower talked about the "hatred against us [in the Arab world]" way back in 1958.

...[I]n 1956 the United States handed Nasser his greatest—indeed only—unqualified triumph at Suez.

After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the Israelis, along with the French and British, attacked Egypt. Nasser would have lost the war and almost certainly his life had President Eisenhower not ordered those three American allies to back down. Arranging a victory of that order for Nasser—a victory that made him the Arab world's greatest modern hero—would seem to be about as pro-Arab as you can get, and yet only two years later, Eisenhower was wondering why the Arabs hated us so much. One obvious reason is that by chasing out the two Western powers that had been the region's hate targets for over a century, the United States became a kind of surrogate for anticolonial sentiment, regardless of whether or not it had the same imperial ambitions as France and Britain. In other words, pro-Arab U.S. policies don't seem to put much of a dent in Arab anti-Americanism.

All true. Some more excerpts:

Is Arab anti-Americanism just an irrational phenomenon manufactured by presidents-for-life, kings, and military dictators who rule their countries without legitimate political authority? Yes, but there are also really bad U.S. policies in the Arab world—none of which seem to trouble most Arabs.

...Of course, it is because of Washington's ostensibly unbalanced support of Israel that the United States is genuinely loathed in the region. To be sure, the United States maintains that the state of Israel has a right to exist. At different times, as when the international community recently mourned the deaths of two Hamas leaders whose explicit goal was the destruction of Israel, it is not obvious that the rest of the world believes Israel has a right to exist. Similarly, the Arab and European outrage over President Bush's announcement that Palestinians have no "right of return" suggests that many people outside of Israel and the United States do not really believe in a two-state solution, even if they say they do. When much of the world seems not to mean what it says, U.S. policy cannot help but seem to be totally biased toward Israel.

Read the whole thing, of course.

The last excerpt is especially important: when nothing short of building crematoria in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv will establish the U.S.' bona fide "neutrality" in the Arab world regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is it possible for the U.S. to avoid seeming "biased" towards Israel?

Much, much more on the topic later.

I heard this joke at my rabbi's table over Passover:

When the Jews were in the wilderness after leaving Egypt, God created the manna to eat. It miraculously tasted like anything the person eating it could wish for [according to rabbinical tradition].

It featured many different products, all of which looked very different. But miraculously, they all tasted exactly the same.

Well, something had to inspire me to post regardless of how crazily busy things are.

Megan McArdle asks:

The word mitzvah is often translated loosely as "good deed". Some things that observant Jews consider to be mitzvahs, however, would not ordinarily be classified by gentiles as "good deeds", such as saying certain prayers over food.

My question is this: does the reverse hold true? Are their things that could be classified as "good deeds", but that would not be mitzvahs?

The answer to Megan's question is actually a relatively simple "yes," because the premise is incorrect.

"Mitzva" is better translated as "commandment," not "good deed." (Loose translations...never trust 'em.) As a theological matter, Judaism makes no claims that the list of commandments that qualify as mitzvot (613 of them) is an all-encompassing list of all possible good deeds.

To make it more complicated, not all obligations observed by observant Jews are "mitzvot." Some may not meet certain criteria that must be met in order to be classified as one of the 613 "mitzvot." (Analyses of those criteria were the subject of many great rabbinic debates and scholarship about 800 years ago, and not everyone came up with the same list. Here's one version, which I haven't checked for accuracy.) Some are a lesser level of obligation, based on rabbinic decrees rather than explicit Biblical requirement - or, more technically and commonly, rabbinic extensions of biblical obligations. (Not all obligations are created equal. Think of it as a "first-level" obligation as opposed to a "second-level" obligation.)

Megan's example of food blessings is actually a pretty good one: most of them are not Biblical-level and thus do not rise to the level of "mitzvot," but they are still obligatory.

You may be asking: "well, aren't those second-level, rabbincally based obligations..less obligatory?" Sort of, as best illustrated with respect to Sabbath prohibitions: all prohibitions can be violated in situations of life-threatening danger, but you can take liberties with the "second-level" rabbinic prohibitions when faced with lesser levels of exigency. So you really need to know what is prohibited on which level in order to know what you can permit in what circumstances. Rabbinics isn't a full-time profession for nothing.

Finally, on a meta-level, the question of whether the universe of Jewish obligation (on all levels, not just the 613 "mitzvot") encompasses all conceivable "good deeds" is...a good question. The mysterious master of the "Four Questions" conspiracy once published an article on the subject, whose conclusion was essentially "It depends on how you define your terms." But it is at least conceivable that the answer is "no."

So Megan's question has a one-word answer: "Yes."

One year ago, Rachel Corrie crouched in front of an Israeli bulldozer and was crushed to death. Ruhama Shattan, an Israeli writer, delivers a proper memorial:

I want to thank Corrie for the explosives that flow freely from Egypt to Gaza, via the smuggling tunnels under the Gaza homes that she died defending.

Perhaps her help in fanning the flames of violent anti-American sentiment led to the October 2003 bombing of the Fulbright delegation to Gaza to interview scholarship candidates, killing three. There will be no new crop of Palestinian Fulbright scholars this fall.

Ouch. But not nearly enough.

Apparently the Palestinians recently used a 10-year old boy (without his knowledge) to try to carry an explosive belt (to be used by a suicide bomber) into Israel:

Abdallah Quran, of the Balata refugee camp east of Nablus, makes a living by transferring bags from one side of the road block to the other. He told the soldiers that every day after school, where he attends the fourth grade, he takes his cart to the Hawara barricade to help invalids and women transfer their bags in his cart, while they wait in line for the security checks.

"A few people piled on their bags, and I waited for a few more because I get paid for every bag. A few people put their bag on my cart, and I don't remember who put the bag with the bomb," he said.

Avraham Bronstein provides an awesome example. I'm a sucker for great Purim Torah (Eli Clark-style), and this sounds almost realistic enough to be real. You don't have to drink too much to reach the level of ad de'-lo yada, if the issue is distinguishing between reality and satire.

Today's NYT has one of those only-in-New York-pieces glorifying the excess of (some) examples of the "bris" ceremony (and reception).

As referenced in the piece, the bris is traditionally done on the eighth day after birth (Genesis 17:12). But some people apparently are motivated to modify the tradition a little:

Rabbi Adam Mintz, who describes his congregation of 900 families at the Lincoln Square Synagogue on the Upper West Side as "modern Orthodox" and is president of the New York Board of Rabbis, said he doesn't think the world will end if a bris is postponed for the sake of the party. "Any mohel will tell you Sunday is the most popular day, and even among the Orthodox, people are choosing the date that's most popular," he said. "We have an in-house caterer, so 90 percent have it at the synagogue and 10 percent have it at home."
(Emphasis added.)

I assume that Rabbi Mintz was either misquoted or that the reporter misunderstood the import of his statement. From a halakhic standpoint, the only reason an Orthodox family could properly postpone the bris past the eighth day would be due to the baby's health concerns or the like - not merely for the sake of a party! (Priorities, anyone?)

I have a feeling that Rabbi Mintz has already lodged a complaint to Mr. Okrent or another editor at the Times, or he's getting an earful from his congregants as we blog.

(As an aside, the prior paragraph in the piece notes that some people - not necessarily Orthodox - prefer to postpone the bris for the sake of convenience, but then quotes a caterering manager giving examples of people who do the actual bris on the eighth day but have a reception at a more convenient time. That is much less problematic even from an Orthodox standpoint.)

UPDATE: Well, I was right. Rabbi Mintz has apparently circulated an e-mail, which is reproduced on Protocols. In the interests of publicizing the clarification, I will do the same:

I wanted to take this opportunity to apologize for the implications of my quote in the New York Times this morning. As you have probably guessed, as part of a longer interview, Alex Witchell asked me why Sunday has become a popular day for brises even among the Orthodox. I proceeded to explain to her when we allow for the delay of brises and the fact that the custom has developed, at least in certain circles in America, to be more flexible when rescheduling a delayed bris. Therefore, Sunday is often the day in which these brises take place.
I called Ms. Witchell and asked that a correction be printed in the New York Times. She explained to me that this was not "correction material" as there was no fact that was incorrect, only an impression that was created by the article.
I argued but did not convince her.
In the end, I am confident that Jews will not draw this unfortunate conclusion from the article and that both rabbonim and mohalim who advice parents on the timing of the bris will explain the misrepresentation of my quote.
May the spirit of ve-nahafoch hu transform this unfortunate episode into an important lesson for us all.
A freilechen Purim

Adam Mintz

(Emphasis added.)

So Rabbi Mintz's statement only referred to flexibility in rescheduling a bris when a delay had already been necessary for other reasons - not simply a matter of picking a more convenient time for a party. That's a much more accurate statement.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Times has issued a correction:

An article last Wednesday about the growing trend among American Jews to celebrate the circumcision ritual of the bris outside the home or synagogue and with increasing elaborateness included a quotation from Rabbi Adam Mintz of the Lincoln Square Synagogue in Manhattan that referred imprecisely to his attitude about the timing of the rite, ordinarily carried out eight days after birth. He says that in remarking, "Sunday is the most popular day, and even among the Orthodox, people are choosing the date that's most popular," he did not intend to suggest that a bris could be postponed for the sake of holding a party at a convenient time — but rather that if it had to be delayed on justifiable grounds, there might then be flexibility in scheduling.

Go wish Allison Kaplan Sommer a mazal tov on her pregnancy. But be very, very scared of one reason she gives for her decision:

MORE LINKS AND HITS. I mean, why do we bloggers do ANYTHING? I figured that all of the congratulations and comments are good for a few notches on the Ecosystem. And nothing I write seems to merit an Instalanche. Maybe procreating will do the trick.

The scarier thing is that after you've blogged for a while, the argument seems reasonable...

Rarely have I ever read an interview as discomfiting as this Ha-aretz interview with Israeli historian Benny Morris. Morris, for the unfamiliar, was one of the pioneering "new historians" in Israel whose work was dedicated to exposing the flaws of the first generations of Zionists - most notably, arguing against the consensus of conventional Israeli history that the Palestinian refugee problem was solely the Palestinians' fault. Unlike many of his cohorts, Morris has also recognized the Palestinians' rejectionism, and how it belongs to both "history" and "current events."

In any event, this interview discusses the findings of his recent research into Israeli conduct during the 1948 War of Independence, and his conclusions.

Some things to discomfort Israeli partisans:

...What you are telling me here, as though by the way, is that in Operation Hiram there was a comprehensive and explicit expulsion order. Is that right?

"Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here."

And some things to disturb facile supporters of "peace processes:"

Besides being tough, you are also very gloomy. You weren't always like that, were you?

Aren't your harsh words an over-reaction to three hard years of terrorism?
"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction. I don't see the suicide bombings as isolated acts. They express the deep will of the Palestinian people. That is what the majority of the Palestinians want. They want what happened to the bus to happen to all of us."

And these excerpts aren't even close to the most incendiary parts. It goes without saying: read the whole thing.

During my latest blog absence, I failed to comment on the bizarre recent article by Tony Judt, in which he advocates the suicide of Israel. (And "bizarre" is giving him the benefit of the doubt.)

As is usually the case, others have responded far more ably than I could or would have - most notably Leon Wieseltier and David Frum.

In his response to his critics, Judt shows that he is an example of the all-too-common species of intellectual who delights in tossing out outlandish and/or objectionable ideas and claims persecution when asked to think through the ramifications. (Link via Nelson Ascher.)

For a quick primer on the difficulties with Judt's preferred solution of a "bi-national state," check out Imshin's translation of an article in Yediot Acharonot.

And as long as you're at her site, check out this item she wrote in September:

Contrary to popular belief, Israel is not to blame for the situation ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza strip find themselves in. I know we are all in this together and Israel has certainly made many mistakes and done cruel things. Many things were done (and are still being done), that could be avoided, or maybe done in a more humane fashion. This is regrettable and should be seriously looked into and fixed. But these things are not representative of the whole picture. When seen out of context they look horrific, but this is not all there is to this.

So forgive me for not agonizing about the Palestinians all day, every day. I am sorry for them. They have terrible leaders who have been holding them down and leading them astray, and they have no way of getting rid of them. I can't change that. I have my say every four years, sometimes more often than that. I'm sorry the Palestinians don't have the same privilege. On second thoughts, maybe I'm not. They probably wouldn't elect anyone who would want to make peace with us.
(Emphases in original.)

Newly permalinked Naomi Chana has recently experienced some frustration with her Torah-study class in her synagogue:

[H]ere is an abridged list of things I could have said yesterday but didn't:

- "Blessing is not the same thing as prayer."
- "Also, blessing is not the same thing as arguing for direct divine intervention, but if you go on for much longer I'm going to be praying for God to pull the fire alarm."
- "We were talking about Abraham, remember? And this book we call the Torah?"
- "Could we please not rehearse free will vs. predestination before doing some background reading? And by 'we,' I mean 'you.'"
- "I don't care what you believe in. Really. Truly. Honestly. With all my heart and soul and might."
...
- "Ah, yes. Just the time to mention Islam. Some of us try to actually make a connection to the text, but I see you're brave enough not to bother with that."
...
- "I'm sorry, this is 'Torah study.' The 'share your Personal Spiritual Journey Unasked-For' class is next door."
...
- "You do not have a clue. You would not have a clue if an angel of the Lord appeared to you and told you that you were going to give birth to a clue after ninety years of barrenness."

There's more.
I wouldn't mind having her in my shiur. Yes, even in Orthodox synagogues, shiurim can get hijacked by the spiritual kin of Ms. Chana's co-participants.

To the third tier of the Jewish Press' list of "Favorite Websites." Next step: "Honorable Mention!"

Thanks for the tip, Mom! You and Grandma always knew I'd amount to something, someday. And thanks to author and reader Jason Maoz for the kind words; please keep coming back.

A Shana Tova to all. Thank you so much for reading. I will do my best to make this year more worth your while.

Edward Said passed away today.

I'm not qualified to judge his scholarship, though the fact that two of his biggest targets were Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami doesn't inspire confidence. And I'm not going to dwell on his complicated relationship with his past , his unique variety of "political protest", or even his general Palestinian activism.

In a 1999 profile, A.O. Scott wrote :

More than anyone else in his generation, Edward Said has sought to embody an unfashionable, perhaps obsolescent idea of the intellectual--immersed in culture and committed to politics, placing "criticism over solidarity," speaking truth to power, and steering clear of gods that fail.
(Emphasis added.)

I'd argue that few if any intellectuals of his generation can truly be said to have been more devoted to "gods that fail." Said spent much of the 1970s and 1980s advocating for a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians. But when faced with the possibility that such a solution might actually be possible, Said became a fierce enemy of the concept and the means of its realization. Rather than agitating for a way to make the Oslo Accords better, he denounced Yasser Arafat as a dictator and a sellout. (The "dictator" part was certainly true, but Said's sudden discovery of those tendencies after a long history as an Arafat adviser does not speak well of his powers of observance.) Rather than trying to work against Arafat to build a better Palestinian society during the Oslo years, he became a leader of the intellectual resistance to the whole two-state enterprise. His proposal was a "secular, binational state" - an idea that only makes sense in the ivory tower. It is well known that the Palestinians supported Yasser Arafat's refusal to accept the Palestinian state offered at Camp David, believing they could get all of Israel. They were encouraged in this hope by intellectuals such as Said:

The intellectual guardians of Arab nationalist orthodoxy--Said, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, Egyptian cultural leader Saad Eddin Wahbe, Egyptian editor and pundit Mohamed Heikal--have never accepted the fact of Israel; they cannot envision a world without the rallying cause of anti-Zionism. Nothing could have been more infuriating to them than the sight of Yasser Arafat, the embodiment of Palestinian nationalism, shaking hands with Yitzhak Rabin, Israel's late prime minister. They never forgave Arafat for bowing to what Ajami calls "the logic of brute, irreversible facts." To them, the 1993 Oslo accords meant settling for a sadly truncated form of Palestinian self-rule without extracting an Israeli admission of wrongdoing. Indeed, Said and other rejectionists showed a perverse glee when Israel's dovish Labor Party was defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. Here, again, was a world they could understand. "Men love the troubles they know," Ajami witheringly observes.

The terror war waged against Israel over the last three years is a direct result of such fantasies - the refusal to engage reality based on enthrallment to "gods that fail." And nobody embodied that peculiar type of "intellectual" better than Edward Said.
Fortunately, he can no longer avoid accountability for the consequences of his actions.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn does it better, quoting something he wrote not long after 9/11:

Take away all the infidel products and you’d be left with a loser in yak-wool boxers standing in a cave shouting to himself. Osama had an infidel watch (Timex Ironman Triathlon), infidel fatigues (army-surplus US battle dress), infidel hand-mike, infidel camera. This is presumably an example of what Professor Edward Said, the distinguished New York-based America-disparager, calls the “interconnectedness” of the west and Islam. The Prof deplores the tendency, in the wake of September 11th, to separate cultures into what he called “sealed-off entities”, when in reality western civilisation and the Muslim world are so “intertwined” that it’s impossible to “draw the line” between them.

This pitch isn’t getting a lot of respect. “The line seems pretty clear,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review. “Developing mass commercial aviation and soaring skyscrapers was the west’s idea; slashing the throats of stewardesses and flying the planes into the skyscrapers was radical Islam’s idea.”

The Jewish Week has a short profile of Rena Sofer, one of the stars of NBC's new series "Coupling" - a show which supposedly "follows the mating habits of six friends who stop having sex only long enough to talk about it."

Rena Sofer will have come a long way since her days as a yeshiva girl in New Jersey.

It’s not a likely career path for a former student of Achei Temimim, a Lubavitch grade school in Massachusetts, or the Frisch High School in Paramus. Sofer’s father, Martin, is an Orthodox rabbi, as anyone who peruses her online biography or recent media interviews will learn.

I wonder if Frisch will be publicizing Sofer as one of its alumni - probably not, unless she wants to make a large donation.

Sofer’s character, Susan, is “a beautiful and sexy go-getter with an uninhibited attitude toward life and the world of romance,” according to network publicity.

I don't think that was on Frisch's curriculum.

Here's the wedding invitation of Chanan Sand and Nava Applebaum:

(Thanks to Ephraim Shapiro for the image.)

Apparently the Jerusalem Post is in great disarray and has been for a while, with matters seemingly reaching a crisis point following its recent editorial advocating the killing of Yasser Arafat. Allison Kaplan Sommer, a former reporter for the JPost, has the scoop (and click here for more). We look forward to reading her tell-all memoirs of her time at the JPost - sounds like she has a lot of dirt to dish.

The following is part of an e-mail dedication from the head of Otzmah Project of Emergency Medical Volunteers that involves physicians being on call for Israel. Of course, the late Dr. Applebaum was instrumental in this project as well.
The complete e-mail can be found in the first comment here.

The anguish and anger expressed by a number of, you following the murder Dr. David Appelbaum z" l and the recent acts of terror of these last 48 hours remind us of the task at hand. Dr. David Applebaum z"l, Director of the Emergency Department at Jerusalem's Shaarei Tsedek's Hospital, was well known to us. This event dramatically reemphasized that terrorists don't discriminate. They want "only" to exterminate the State and the People of Israel, no matter who you are, - it's enough of an excuse for them that you're Israeli - or rather quite bluntly: that you're a Jew or are friendly to the Jews thus becoming a "legitimate" target.
For over fifty years the State and the People of Israel have struggled for survival. In the last two years an increasing number of people have begun to understand that we don't fight only here for own physical survival. We fight against is Barbarism, Darkness, Evil and for Civilization. The difference between Civilization and civilizations/cultures is very simple: in a Civilized Society every single human life is valuable. So long as the mothers of Palestinian terrorists will express their joy at the news that their son has committed a homicidal bombing, killing indiscriminately, as seen on the media, our fight will go on. We will keep fighting for ourselves, our families and our people, but also for all civilized people who hope that the future of mankind will be a "human future", not a barbarian one.
Today is September 11th. For the last two years we are no longer alone in this fight.
As it has been the case for the past three years, the medical services of the state of Israel are coping quite adequately with waves after waves of terror attacks. We are probably once again at the beginning of one of these murderous waves. The coming days are going to be uneasy ones. The State of Israel is once again on full alert. But things are somehow different that in the past. The American intervention in Iraq and the continuous presence of the American and coalition forces there has shuffled dramatically the cards in the Middle East. The threat on the existence of the State of Israel has been considerably diminished, and the eventuality of a generalization of the conflict with the Palestinian terrorists to a global Arab-Israeli war is currently very low. What remains is the threat of daily terror and the threat of a "mega-terror" event.
What is the task of the Emergency Medical Volunteers? The current assessment is that there is no real probability of a general call-up in the coming weeks/months. However these events must remind us that we have to maintain our efforts to widen the pool of EMV volunteers, to screen and train more and more volunteers, and to check that our new operational procedures will run smoothly. By doing so we will also demonstrate to the Israeli people that we care, and are concerned, by our active involvement by what is happening. It may be a small thing to you but it sends a strong message. From now on, each of the upcoming EMV training courses will be given the name of a member of the Israeli medical services who became a victim to the terror of the last years; sadly the list is not a short one. Therefore the next course, due to begin on October 26, will be dedicated to the memory of Dr. David Appelbaum z"l.

Here's a story about plans for a new emergency alert system in the American Jewish community:

It is believed to be the first crisis alert system serving a specific community in the United States.
The project, called Secure Community Alert Network, or SCAN, includes the leading Jewish organizations in the nation, as well as hundreds of Jewish community centers, federations and educational institutions.
...Hoenlein said in an emergency, SCAN will immediately notify about 150 contacts across the country via e-mail, pager, telephone and fax. SCAN will not stop signaling until the message is received. The contacts can then alert their memberships.
“We will activate this in a crisis, as circumstance demands,” Hoenlein said, stressing that the network “will be used on rare occasions” and not for general information.
An advisory team of law enforcement and Jewish officials will determine when SCAN will be activated.
Hoenlein noted that Jewish communities in South Africa, England and Australia have such alert systems, saying “it’s a good question” why American Jewry has lagged behind.

The network is apparently contracting to use certain communications technology that has previously only been used by the government and military.
This looks to be a fascinating experiment in creating small-scale information networks, and I'd expect it to be replicated if it works well. The story doesn't say, but it doesn't seem like the information flows from the bottom up. But a network on this scale should be able to accomodate such information flow.
This network could make the job of government easier in an emergency. Congratulations to the Jewish Week for picking the story up; it should attract more attention.

Buried in this human-interest piece about Nava Applebaum's grieving fiancee is the following shocking tidbit:

When he heard from his sister that people feared Nava had been hurt in the bombing, he went to Shaare Zedek Hospital, where some of the victims had gone and where her father was the head of the emergency room.
He and many family members waited there for news of Nava, already knowing that her father, David Applebaum, was dead. The two had gone together to the caf for coffee.
In response to how he felt about the news that the man responsible for the attack was among the 343 Palestinian prisoners released this summer, Sand said, "I never believed in peace. I knew it was a mistake, I didn't believe the lack of peace could impact me so much."
(Emphasis added.)
Has anyone else seen this information about the bomber's identity as a just-released prisoner? And if it's true, can anyone in good conscience criticize Israel for not releasing more prisoners over the summer as a "confidence-building measure" (that was, of course, not even included in the "road map")?

I'm having a lot of trouble getting over the killings of Dr. Applebaum and his not-to-be-married daughter. (Apparently Dr. Applebaum went to high school with my father-in-law.) In this day, has civilization advanced farther than the case of Dr. Applebaum? And when you consider that the Palestinians have consistently refused the benefits the rest of the world has tried to give them in favor of killing people like Dr. Applebaum, aren't those who support the Palestinians over Israel supporting the negation of civilization? Keep in mind, Dr. Applebaum and his daughter weren't just killed by a Palestinian terrorist. Their deaths were celebrated by Palestinains in Gaza.
Try this one, NY Times. One side in the "encounter" devoted his life to healing the victims of illness and terorrism, and was about to marry off a daughter raised in the same tradition. The other aimed to destroy the life so devoted, and was widely applauded by his own side for doing so.
Civilization, and its negation.

UPDATE: Apparently the terrorist in question may have been released before the summer's hudna-inspired release. It still doesn't exactly support the argument for future "confidence-building measures." (Thanks to commenters on Protocols for the link.)
ANOTHER UPDATE: Protocols has done some additional research (i.e., contacting the author of the JPost story) and the results don't engender great confidence in the Post story.

Check out this piece on the Upper West Side community of 20-something single Modern Orthodox - the "Metrodox:"

"No matter where one grew up -- their background, their religiosity -- the Upper West Side has become the hub for the post-college single Jew," says Isaac Galena who, along with his twin brother Seth, run the Metrodox Web portal, bangitout.com. "Most Jewish communities, if not all, have a tendency to make Orthodox single people in their 20's feel like freaks. As if there is something seriously wrong with them since they aren't married by the age of 23. The Upper West Side serves as a community that embraces people in singlehood. It makes them feel as though they belong and serves almost as a fun support group and a stepping stone during this interim period."
As Galena will tell you, an interim period implies that eventually the Metrodox will find a mate, get married, and graduate to greener, probably more suburban, pastures.
So, what's the dating scene like? Picture a Jewish Melrose Place. With thousands of young Jews packed into the same neighborhood, Metrodox dating has become a phenomenon all to itself. Consider this: Jewish singles from all across America travel to the Upper West Side just to go on dates.
One out-of-state 28-year-old male who, for obvious reasons, wished to remain anonymous, told Jewsweek he traveled to New York 13 times in one year alone, and has gone out on more than 100 dates with Metrodox girls. Asked why he didn't just move there, he had this to say: "If I lived in the Upper West Side and saw hundred of available Modern Orthodox women at synagogue, I wouldn't even know where to begin. It would literally be overwhelming and I'm afraid, like many who live there, I would just get jaded."
If desired, a typical Metrodox male could go out with a different girl every night of the week -- for an entire year. There's an entire cottage industry around Web sites that cater to the Metrodox's dating needs including jewishcafe.com and frumster.com. And once somebody gets engaged, they can post pictures and mazal tovs online at Onlysimchas.com. Some Metrodox check the site twice a day.

I've always looked at the Upper West Side community as an ideal place for a short visit, but I'm very thankful to have not had to live there for an undetermined length of time. It is indeed a fascinating place - many people really do navigate the dating scene while following the halakhic rules, while many others invent rationalizations that even Bill Clinton would have been ashamed of. For details on the latter, check out this entry by Allison Kaplan Sommer. For examples of the former and latter, see this story by an old friend.

Check out JPost correspondent Douglas Davis, writing in the Spectator on the "right of return," the Israeli fence/wall and why each is so important:

Offered an independent Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza, a share in Jerusalem and a limited return of refugees to Israel, Yasser Arafat’s response has been the violence that has convulsed Israel for more than three years. The frequent complaint of the West’s political and media classes, that Palestinian violence is a function of ‘frustration and rage’ over the lack of progress to peace, is ill-founded. On the contrary, the most intense spasms of violence have accompanied the most positive movements on the diplomatic front.
The reason is that a large body of Palestinians have still not reconciled themselves to the two-state solution. More specifically, they have not, despite the Oslo accords, come to terms with the existence of a Jewish state on what they call holy Muslim soil. The Palestinians remain as opposed to the existence of Israel today as they were when the Peel Commission recommended partition in 1936 and when the UN voted for it in 1947.
In Israel, by contrast, successive leaders, including the much-demonised Ariel Sharon, have warned Israeli voters to prepare for ‘painful concessions’ if a real opportunity for peace presents itself. No Israeli doubts that such ‘painful concessions’ would involve Israel’s evacuation from most, if not all, of the West Bank and Gaza Strip to make way for the birth of Palestine.
The reason the Palestinians have not run with the ball is that they are convinced that they have far more to gain by playing for time. On present trends, say the demographers, Palestinians will outnumber Jews in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River — Israel, the West Bank and Gaza — by 2020. At that point, Israel will cease to exist as a democratic and Jewish state.
Why accept a truncated two-state solution in the West Bank and Gaza when the one-state solution down the road will deliver Israel, too? Not by suicide bombers or conventional military means, but by the simple expedient of eroding Israel’s Jewish majority. All the Palestinians have to do is breed for victory: make love, not war, and transform their womenfolk into what Arafat calls his ‘biological bombs’.
...When I raised the one-state idea this week with a senior Palestinian academic who has been in active contact with Israelis for years, he responded with a curious question: ‘Do we really need another state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan?’ He went on, ‘It would be much easier for the Palestinians to fight for equal rights rather than for another state.’ If he accepted a two-state solution now, he said, it was simply to ‘accommodate the Zionist desire for a Jewish state, not because I believe it is just’. As if Jewish national aspirations were uniquely illegitimate.
Few events have so galvanised Palestinian anger as Sharon’s decision, supported by an overwhelming majority of Israelis, to construct a fence roughly along the Israel–West Bank divide. From Israel’s perspective, the fence is designed simply to separate the populations and keep Palestinian terrorists away from Israeli throats. But while Israel insists it is an interim security measure that does not prejudge the outcome of negotiations, the Palestinians are convinced that the fence represents a unilateral Israeli attempt to impose a border, seal the two-state solution and destroy the goal of achieving a demographically driven one-state solution.
...The problem for Israelis, even those who might otherwise have been inclined to accept the Cook/Hain concept of a binational state, is that there is no precedent for secular democracy among any of the existing 21 Arab states. Nor does the Palestinian Authority give cause for hope that its own future state will deliver a democratic, pluralistic utopia. Rather, it stresses ‘the Arabness of Palestine’ and the intrinsic place of Palestine within ‘the Arab nation’ (it is difficult to understand, in light of such language, persistent Palestinian complaints of Israeli ‘racism’ when it seeks to safeguard its existence as a Jewish national home).
If the Palestinians today pay lip service to the notion of the two-state model, it is as a tactic, a matter of appeasing international supporters. The ‘phased plan’, explicitly enunciated by Palestinian leaders in the past and spoken of in more nuanced terms since Oslo, stipulates that whatever territory Israel surrenders will be used as a platform for further territorial gains until the ‘complete liberation of Palestine’ is achieved.
The Palestinians remain wedded to Arafat’s notion of a ‘biological bomb’ and committed to the ‘right of return’ for the refugees (along with unlimited generations of their progeny) not only to a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, but also to Israel itself. They know, as Israelis know, that it is a recipe for Israel’s destruction.

Also, check out Steven Den Beste's expert deconstruction of Hamas' latest threats. It's too long to excerpt, but worth the read.

This Sunday will be the 10th anniversary of the ill-fated Oslo accords. The Jerusalem Post has two good reflections on its ramifications. First is the appropriately titled "One Cheer for Oslo," by Calev Ben-David:

I can be counted among the Israeli majority that once supported Oslo with cautious hopes, but now has no choice but to ultimately regard it as a failure, at the very least for having failed in its primary goal of attaining a "final-status agreement" between Israel and the Palestinians at anywhere near its original five-year timetable.
Having said all that, there is still at least one positive aspect of Oslo worth noting, and not just in the negative-lesson sense of having learned that Arafat is no "partner for peace."
...Protecting Jewish settlements and keeping the roads open were one thing; but increasingly fewer of us understood the need to keep a presence in the heart of Palestinian population areas, or to maintain control over the minutia of their daily lives. How was this helping to stop the rising tide of terrorist attacks? Not the massive suicide bombings of today, but broad-daylight individual assaults in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem that were still shocking at the time.
Why was it necessary to keep a firm grip on every inch of the territories, when doing so still hadn't stopped an unprecedented wave of soldier kidnappings/slayings by Hamas? (I vividly recall taking part in the massive army sweep around Gaza in 1989 to search for the bodies of the ill-fated Ilan Sa'adon and Avi Sasportas.)
...But despite all of Oslo's declared intentions, for most Israelis it was never really about giving the Palestinians a state or even arriving at a peaceful final settlement. It was about Israel beating a tactical retreat out of a no-win situation in the Palestinian-populated areas of the territories, under what it thought the best-possible terms at the time - sort of an Israeli equivalent of the Paris Accords that enabled the US to end its disastrous involvement in Vietnam.
Although our hopes for working out a real peace agreement with the current Palestinian leadership have been dashed, the crucial underlying assumption behind Oslo - that Israel cannot rule over the Palestinians, not for their sake, but for ours - still holds no less true today. That's why even as we now search for other ways to move ahead - be it finding alternative negotiating partners to Arafat, building the security fence, or eliminating Hamas and Islamic Jihad on our own - no one outside the extreme right and settlement movement seriously suggests returning to a pre-Oslo position in the territories.
So on September 13 I'm prepared to give only one cheer to Oslo: It was at least the first step, even if not in quite the right direction, toward an Israeli disengagement from the territories.
Where do we go from here? I'm not so sure. But it doesn't take a road map to know it can't be backwards.

The second piece is Daniel Pipes' postmortem:

WHAT WENT wrong? Many things, but most important was that the deal rested on a faulty Israeli premise that the Palestinians had given up their hope of destroying the Jewish state.
This led to the expectation that if Israel offered sufficient financial and political incentives, the Palestinians would formally recognize the Jewish state and close down the conflict.
The Israelis therefore pushed themselves to make an array of concessions, in the futile hope that flexibility, restraint, and generosity would win Palestinian good will. In fact, these steps made matters worse by sending signals of apparent demoralization and weakness.
Each concession further reduced Palestinian awe of Israeli might, made Israel seem more vulnerable, and incited irredentist dreams of annihilating it.
The result was a radicalized and mobilized Palestinian body politic. In speech and actions, via claims to the entire land of Israel and the murder of Israelis, the hope of destroying Israelis acquired ever more traction.
Thus did the muted Palestinian mood at Oslo's start in 1993 turn into the enraged ambition evident today.
When intermittent Palestinian violence turned in September 2000 into all-out war, Israelis finally awoke from seven years of wishful thinking and acknowledged Oslo's disastrous handiwork. But they have not yet figured with what to replace it. Likewise, the US government, with the collapse of its Mahmoud Abbas gambit last week, finds its road map diplomacy in disarray. It now too needs new thinking.
In the spirit of Oslo's 10 anniversary, I propose a radically different approach for the next decade:
Acknowledge the faulty presumption that underlay both Oslo and the road map (Palestinian acceptance of Israel's existence).
Resolve not to repeat the same mistake.
Understand that diplomacy aiming to close down the Arab-Israeli conflict is premature until Palestinians give up their anti-Zionist fantasy.
Make Palestinian acceptance of Israel's existence the primary goal.
Impress on Palestinians that the sooner they accept Israel, the better off they will be. Conversely, so long they pursue their horrid goal of extermination, diplomacy will remain moribund and they will receive no financial aid, arms, or recognition as a state.
Give Israel license not just to defend itself but to impress on the Palestinians the hopelessness of their cause.

Both Pipes and Ben-David are right.

It is almost impossible to comment upon this story:

Dr. David and Debra Applebaum and Zvi and Tamara Sand were to accompany their 20-year-old children Nava and Chanan to the bridal canopy in Jerusalem on Wednesday night, with hundreds of guests celebrating the event.
Instead, on Wednesday morning, thousands of mourners friends, doctors, nurses, patients, classmates, and admirers stood stunned at the Shamgar Funeral Home and said good-bye to David and his daughter Nava, two victims of Tuesday night's suicide bombing at Caf Hillel, which killed seven and wounded at least 30.
If Dr. Applebaum had not been at the Germany Colony cafe to have a heart-to-heart talk with his beloved daughter, he would undoubtedly have received a beeper message about the attack. He would have dropped everything, even on the eve of her wedding, and rushed to Shaare Zedek Hospital.
As director of the emergency department for more than a year, he had treated hundreds of terror victims and saved many lives. But the 50-year-old, American-born physician and his daughter died on the spot. He was identified by an Arab physician who worked at Jerusalem's Terem Urgent Care Clinic that Applebaum had founded in 1988. They never made it to Shaare Zedek's emergency room.
The staff had just finished treating a severely wounded victim, who died, when they first heard about the Applebaums. The stress of dealing with their own grief was helped by the fact that the number of wounded 11 or 12 was lower than in other attacks, director-general Jonathan Halevy said.
When Applebaum's death was confirmed, there was a gasp in the emergency room. People hugged each other and shook their heads in disbelief. Nava's intended, Chanan, fainted upon hearing of the deaths and had to receive medical attention.
"It was clear to me from very early on that when David Applebaum didn't show up, and I knew he was in Jerusalem and he hadn't called, that a terrible tragedy had occurred," Halevy said.
"Confirmation of my suspicions came shortly. Thousands of Jerusalemites owe Dr. Applebaum their lives. This is a terrible loss."
It was Halevy who managed to persuade Applebaum to return to the hospital, where the emergency physician had spent his initial years in Israel before establishing the Terem clinics, which pioneered community-based urgent care here and reduced the burden of less severe cases on hospital emergency wards.
Applebaum, born in Detroit, raised and educated in Cleveland, came on aliya with his wife, a Bible scholar and teacher, along with the eldest of their six children, in 1981. He had received rabbinical ordination at Yeshiva University, and was a student of the late Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik.
Nava, a graduate of the Horev girls high school, was doing her National Service with Zichron Menahem, a voluntary organization devoted to children with cancer. From morning until late in the day, she spent time with the youngsters, and only a few weeks ago she accompanied a group of them on a trip to Holland.
"She had an incredible smile, and she was an incredible girl," said one of her Horev classmates. "She studied biology because she wanted to help find a cure for cancer."
When Debra and her five remaining children, Natan, 24; Yitzhak, 22; Shira, 18; Shayna, 15; and Tovi Belle, 12, learned of the deaths, they tore their clothes as required by Jewish tradition and hugged each other, said Rabbi Shubert (Eliezer) Spero, Debra's father.
In his eulogy, Spero said: "God gave man the ability to cry, sob, and shriek. But sometimes the tragedy is so painful that the mind shuts down."
...As he spoke, former Horev Yeshiva head Rabbi Mordechai Elon hugged Nava's never-to-be bridegroom, Chanan, who had met Nava two years ago. A Horev graduate and a student at Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva before doing his army service, he gently placed the wedding ring he had bought for the ceremony on the blue velvet cloth covering her shroud.

Click here for a more in-depth profile of Dr. Applebaum. And what was this doctor doing before his daughter's wedding?

Earlier this week, Dr. David Applebaum, director of ER at Shaare Zedek Hospital, flew to the US along with director-general Jonathan Halevy.
Applebaum decided not to turn down an invitation from New York University; hundreds of doctors and potential donors wanted to hear how Shaare Zedek has coped with mass medical catastrophe during the bloody years of the current wave of Palestinian violence.
Applebaum felt it was his duty to go, even though his daughter Nava was getting married on Wednesday night, some 30 hours after his return. It was important to him to show people abroad how Israeli medical professionals had learned to save the lives of the critically wounded, he said, and to raise funds for expanding and improving the hospital's overburdened emergency facilities.
While in New York, Applebaum turned on a computer and went into the internal Web site that gave him a real-time view of the goings on in the Jerusalem emergency room.
"You see, even without me, the emergency department is functioning like clockwork," he told Halevy. "The average wait to see a doctor is 16 minutes."
His staff in Jerusalem those who knew him from his tenure in the 1980s and those who worked under him in only the last 15 months will have to learn permanently to continue meeting his strict standards without him.

Keep in mind that the terrorist intended to kill these people. Their lives were the opposite of everything represented by Palestinian terror. I'm not going into the topic at length now, but it is worth noting that Palestinian nationalism followed a history of Jew-killing, not the other way around.

And here's one comment, by the Jerusalem Post editors:

The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative.
No one seriously argues with the fact that Arafat was preventing Mahmoud Abbas, the prime minister he appointed, from combating terrorism, to the extent that was willing to do so. Almost no one seriously disputes that Abbas on whom Israel, the US, and Europe had placed all their bets failed primarily because Arafat retained control of much of the security apparatus, and that Arafat wanted him to fail.
The new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, clearly will fare no better, since he, if anything, has been trying to garner more power for Arafat, not less.
Under these circumstances, the idea of exiling Arafat is gaining currency, but the standard objection is that he will be as much or more of a problem when free to travel the world than he is locked up in Ramallah.
If only three countries Britain, France, and Germany joined the US in a total boycott of Arafat this would not be the case. If these countries did not speak with Arafat, it would not matter much who did, and however much a local Palestinian leader would claim to consult with Arafat, his power would be gone.
But such a boycott will not happen. Only now, after more than 800 Israelis have died in three years of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks, has Europe finally decided that Hamas is a terrorist organization. How much longer will it take before it cuts off Arafat? Yet Israel cannot accept a situation in which Arafat blocks any Palestinian break with terrorism, whether from here or in exile. Therefore, we are at another point in our history at which the diplomatic risks of defending ourselves are exceeded by the risks of not doing so.
Such was the case in the Six Day War, when Israel was forced to launch a preemptive attack or accept destruction. And when Menachem Begin decided to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. And when Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield in Palestinian cities after the Passover Massacre of 2002.
In each case, Israel tried every fashion of restraint, every plea to the international community to take action that would avoid the need for "extreme" measures, all to no avail.
When the breaking point arrives, there is no point in taking half-measures. If we are going to be condemned in any case, we might as well do it right.

UPDATE: Here's the New York Times' profile of Dr. Applebaum.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here's another profile of the family.

During the run-up to the war in Iraq, many columns were written purporting to explain the links between the "neoconservatives" allegedly responsible for forcing the country into war. Some of those pieces seemed to be entries in a contest for "Most Uses of the Word 'Strauss' in a Piece on Current Events, No Matter How Tenuous the Connection May Be."
It can now be revealed: the "neoconservative" conspiracy was merely disinformation for the real Jewish conspiracy at work. Operating semi-publicly on the internet, four former bochurim from a certain yeshiva in the West Bank (a settlement! The first indicator of evil...) have started blogs. Can the presence of four bloggers who attended the same West Bank yeshiva at the same time indicate anything other than a deep, dark conspiracy? Obviously not.
The title "Four Horseman of the Ablogalypse" may be taken, and it's not a Jewish concept anyway. I accordingly have named this conspiracy the "Four Questions" (if that doesn't sound ominous enough, think Steve Ditko).
I was sent out by our master, the mysterious HRA"L, to test the murky waters of the blogosphere. Having found them welcoming, I gave the all-clear for my former study partner, a newly minted rabbi and a programmer with a gift for detailed recreations of the ancient Temple.
(Cool graphics for our conspiracy along the lines of these are welcome.)
The four agents are in place, and the next stage of the conspiracy is about to unfold. Stay tuned...

Earlier this week, the NYT ran a front-page article with the following headline:
"Israelis Worry about Terror, by Jews against Palestinians."
The article cited the concerns of the Israelis about the likelihood of Jewish terrorism, and the steps taken to prevent it.
Avraham Bronstein of the great Protocols blog had the reaction that I figured many pro-Israel types would: “another example of moral equivalence.” In this case, though, he and they were wrong, for the following reasons:
1) The article put the concerns in the proper context:

...Israel has not confronted a Jewish militant group of any size for nearly 20 years.
...One of the few points of agreement is that attacks by Israeli civilians against Palestinians are rare. According to B'Tselem, 32 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli civilians in the last three years. At the same time, 328 Israeli civilians have been killed by Palestinians inside Israel, and 190 more in the West Bank and Gaza.

2) Yes, Jewish terrorism is vastly less prevalent, less encouraged by the larger society, and more punished after the fact than the Palestinian variety. As such, it is less representative of Israeli society than its Palestinian counterpart. But the events themselves, and the perpetrators thereof, are no less evil. And there is no reason for the media not to pay due attention to such evil where it exists. Jewish-based suggestions to the contrary are, in my opinion, merely based on the all-too-common impulse to cover up bad news.
3) Most importantly, the headline itself was, in its own way, publicity that Israel should have paid for in its struggle against Palestinian terrorism:
"Israelis Worry about Terror, by Jews against Palestinians."
Israel is worried about the prospect of Jewish terrorism, and is trying to prevent it (even arresting the father of a murdered baby).
The same day this headline appeared, the Palestinians showed that they were not nearly as worried about terrorism, nor were they making such efforts to prevent it - in fact, they celebrated it.

I’d previously written that the “road map” process seemed perfectly designed to repeat every mistake made during the Oslo process and reject every lesson to be learned from such mistakes. Others made similar arguments, most notably Charles Krauthammer.
I had also thought that terrorists might attack hotels in the U.S. where Jews were celebrating Passover. I was wrong. I prefer being wrong about things like that.
This attack was a very big deal. The Passover Massacre, aside from culminating a massive terror onslaught in the spring of 2002, was perfectly calibrated to push the most sensitive buttons of the Israeli populace. By massacring a group of Holocaust survivors celebrating the formative experience of the Jewish people (literally, per the book of Exodus), the Hamas terrorists made it clear that their war was one of extermination rather than for territorial gain. As the Israeli papers quoted from the Haggada in the wake of the attack: “In every generation, they rise up to destroy us.”
This attack was similarly calibrated: a massacre of children who had just departed the holiest site in Judaism that Jews can visit (I’m not going to get into the Temple Mount issue now).
I think it is only a matter of time before another massive assault on the terrorists begins. Hopefully, Arafat’s deportation or death will be part of it. (Some Israelis think that Powell’s request for Arafat’s help was to help prepare the diplomatic ground for such a step. Let’s hope.)

Jay Nordlinger has a good joke about Israel. (Scroll down to the end.)

People … operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence –as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

- E-mail from Red Sox owner John Henry, quoted in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (pp. 90-91)

Growing up Orthodox in America almost invariably involves living in a cocoon. Absorbing the knowledge and folkways of an Orthodox-based lifestyle requires constant immersion and reinforcement, which results in a degree of separation from the rest of the world. To take the most obvious example, most self-professed Orthodox Jews would not dream of sending their children to anything other than 12+ years of Orthodox day school. And the necessity of living in the vicinity of such a school, along with synagogues, kosher food supplies, etc. creates an environment where kids grow up primarily (though rarely solely) associating with other Orthodox Jews.
For all but the most fanatically oriented segment of Jewry, the cocoon must be left at some point; few people can or wish to earn a living wholly within the cocoon. When is the “right” time to do so? For many Orthodox Jews graduating high school and considering where to attend college, this question is paramount. And there typically is no shortage of people volunteering for the conservative role of conscience, whispering messages of fear and caution.
21st century America, where a self-professed Orthodox Jew can come within a few hanging chads of the Vice-Presidency, has in many respects never been an easier place to be Orthodox. Yet as the larger society has grown more accepting of difference, Orthodoxy-style, the sense of fear over the prospects of preserving an Orthodox way of life (on both the individual and communal levels) has only grown for many people.
(Of course, the two factors are linked, and the link deserves its own discussion. And that discussion - for which the term “magisterial” should have been invented - has already been written by Dr. Haym Soloveitchik. Go and study. End of digression.)
With regard to the question of college and cocoons, some segments of American Orthodoxy have been discussing a pamphlet that has been widely circulated via the Internet. It is a well-written, well-reasoned journal of fear. It comes down squarely on the side of maintaining the cocoon through college. The piece is a worthy contribution to the discussion, though not nearly as important as its authors believe.
As an aside, the authors are imprecise in their initial definitions. While the pamphlet refers to “secular college,” the authors clearly don’t mean that term literally, as they approve of commuting to colleges other than parochial ones and living at home; the piece isn’t solely a brief for Yeshiva University. Thinking of the question as “cocoon v. non-cocoon” rather than “secular v. parochial college” makes the pamphlet more comprehensible, and the authors clearly assume that their readers will understand the distinction. But I thought I’d explain it for my readers who aren’t already familiar with the discussion.
I’m not going to further discuss the larger theological issues raised by the pamphlet or how certain details glossed lightly (at best) in the pamphlet can make all the difference in the Orthodox student’s college experience, nor will I base a critique on my own anecdotal experiences, for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post. (Full disclosure: I graduated Columbia College in 1995, and as for how it affected my religiosity, literally only God knows - though I’m sure that hasn’t stopped people’s speculations, to which they are welcome.) Rather, I’m going to focus on a few specific aspects of the authors’ arguments.
Despite an explicit disavowal of scientific rigor, the pamphlet’s authors clearly make several empirical assumptions. First, they assume that the experience they describe is paradigmatic and reflects the experience of at least a substantial number of Orthodox students on such campuses. Second, they assume that the intellectual and social temptations they describe accurately describes the causation of the deteriorating observance of such students. Third, they assume that those temptations are either unique in fact or effect.
The third assumption is most notably reflected when the authors argue that “The challenges facing Orthodox students in secular universities are wide–ranging, complex, and far more ominous than anything they might later encounter in the professional or business world.”
I will refrain from making a cheap comment about how that assessment of the professional or business world was made by two Ph.D students who (by their count) have spent a total of 22 semesters on campus. It is actually a very serious point, which contributes to the other two assumptions as well.
The authors know the stories of the students who succumb in the fashion they describe. It is very likely that the following students’ experiences don’t make the same impact:
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy and observance was tenuous at best before college attendance, and who violates most of the 613 mitzvot before the end of freshman orientation;
- the student who attends YU or commuter college and rebels or otherwise becomes disillusioned, which may be held in abeyance during college but not for long afterwards;
- the student who samples the forbidden fruits during college but returns to a full-fledged identification with Orthodoxy afterwards (whether for social or other reasons), and most importantly;
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy does not suffer in college (regardless of the choice) but does suffer attrition afterwards, due to the pressures of the “professional or business world.”
It is natural for those whose lives are spent in the context of campus to focus on college as the most formative experience of a student’s life. It is the focus of their own experiences, and it makes up the sample of their observed students’ experiences. (It also makes sense that high school teachers would have an exaggerated sense of the impact of college; they may be acutely aware of what happens to their alumni immediately after graduation, but how often is that leavened by a longer-term context? And it is also natural for high school teachers to attribute a sharp, sudden deterioration in a student’s observance to the outside temptations of college, rather than a pre-existing weakness of commitment.) And it is natural to over-generalize from one’s own experience. (If “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God,” as set forth in Proverbs 9:10, the second part of wisdom is not giving excessive credence to what you see.) The result is that the authors’ perspective is very limited; the lack of context creates an exaggerated assessment of the relative risks. Even if the authors’ description of the risks to Orthodox students is 100% valid, the relevant question is “Compared to what?” This is a purely subjective statement, but I think many Orthodox-raised people in the “professional or business world” (including ones who left the cocoon for college) would disagree that the risks in that world are easier to handle than the ones on the college campus.
And despite the disavowal of scientific rigor noted above, the authors clearly assume that the experience they describe is widespread. Yet without further context, it is impossible to know if that assumption is correct – all we have are dueling anecdotal, subjective experiences, formed in a limited context and prone to distortion.
A good study will be far more valuable to the discussion than a thousand screeds. It shouldn’t be impossible to do. Without that kind of evidence, though, discussions such as the pamphlet are of limited utility at best.

Mark Lilla has a fascinating piece in the New Republic, arguing that European distaste for Israel is rooted in the latter's devotion to the nation-state while European elites swear fealty to the ideal of transnationalism:

It is not the idea of tolerance that is in crisis in Europe today, it is the idea of the nation-state, and the related concepts of sovereignty and the use of force. And these ideas have also affected European intellectual attitudes toward world Jewry, and specifically toward Israel.
...Anyone who pays close attention to how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is handled in the European press, and even in intellectual journals, will see this frustration expressed on a regular basis. I do not think this can be ascribed solely to European pro-Arabism, just as American press coverage cannot be attributed entirely to the feelings of Jewish Americans for Israel. I am convinced that at a deeper level the differences have something to do with the way Americans and Europeans think about political life more generally today, differences that Robert Kagan has highlighted in his powerful little book Of Paradise and Power. While it may not be true that Americans are uniformly Martian (Woodrow Wilson was not Belgian, after all), Kagan is correct that the European consensus today, from left to right, is thoroughly Venutian in spirit. This causes occasional friction with the United States, but it is a source of fundamental disaccord with the Zionist project. For Zionists today are indeed from Mars, par la force des choses.
Even European sympathy for the Palestinian people, which is understandable and honorable, has an oddly apolitical quality to it. One would think that those concerned about the future of the Palestinians, and not simply about their present suffering, would be thinking chiefly about how to remove them from tutelage to terrorist and fundamentalist organizations, and how to establish a legitimate, law-abiding, and liberal political authority that could negotiate in good faith with Israel and manage Palestinian domestic affairs in a transparent manner. But there is almost no intellectual awareness in Europe of the political obstacles to peace that exist among the Palestinians, nor has there been much encouragement of political reform. To judge by what is written, the European fantasy of the future Middle East is not of decent, liberal nation-states living side by side in peace, but of some sort of post-national, post-political order growing up under permanent international supervision. Not Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shaking hands, but Hans Blix zipping around Palestine in his little truck.
Anyone schooled in the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is well aware of the political pathologies of the nation-state and the idolatry that it invites. The legitimacy of the nation-state should not be confused with the idolatry of the nation-state. But for many in Western Europe today, learning the grim lesson of modern history has also brought with it a forgetting of all the long-standing problems that the nation-state, as a modern form of political life, managed to solve. The Zionist tradition knows what those problems were. It remembers what it was to be stateless, and the indignities of tribalism and imperialism. It remembers the wisdom of borders and the need for collective autonomy to establish self-respect and to demand respect from others. It recognizes that there is a cost, a moral cost, to defending a nation-state and exercising sovereignty; but it also recognizes that the cost is worth paying, given the alternatives. Eventually Western Europeans will have to re-learn these lessons, which are, after all, the lessons of their own pre-modern history. Until they do, the mutual incomprehension regarding Israel between Europeans and Jews committed to Zionism will remain deep. There is indeed a new Jewish problem in Europe, because there is a new political problem in Europe.

Read the whole thing.

A few noteworthy blogs by those with whom I share tribal loyalty.
First, a certain Hasidic Rebel writes from an unidentified Hasidic community in New York. His perspective and curiosity combine to bring some fascinating diversity to the blogosphere. Read, for example, his account of a Saturday night mini-scandal (but for whom?).
Next, coming from an enterprising group of students (or, as they like to call themselves, "Elders") at Yeshiva University, is the wonderfully named Protocols blog. The writers hope to build upon the success of Paul Wolfowitz's cabal in taking over the Bush Administration, and extend the domination of the Elders of Zion over the whole world. Based on their posts, that should be an easy task. They have the right role models (if the link doesn't work, it's the post from 5/13 at 4:18 P.M.). Seriously, they have far more intellectual curiosity than most of my peers who went to YU - kol ha-kavod!
Finally, my old yeshiva study partner ("chevruta"), who is now an assistant rabbi at a major Manhattan synagogue and was always a born blogger (his old e-mail newsletters earned him a cult following long ago), has finally taken the plunge and started his own blog. As far as I know, this is the first entry by an Orthodox rabbi into the blogosphere. (And if he's reading this, the name "RabbiPundit" is still available.)

Barry Rubin details how Yasser Arafat is systematically undercutting any attempts at reform by Abu Mazen.
We have a decade-long track record of what happens when diplomats ignore such facts in the interest of pursuing a "peace process." Will they ever learn?

Check out this fascinating piece in today's NYT about a search in Iraq:

In one huge room in the flooded basement of the building, American soldiers from MET Alpha, the "mobile exploitation team" that has been searching for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in Iraq for the past three months, found maps featuring terrorist strikes against Israel dating to 1991. Another map of Israel highlighted what the Iraqis thought were the locations at which their Scud missiles had struck in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. The strikes were designated by yellow-and-red paper flowers placed atop the pinpointed Israeli neighborhoods.
Team members floated out of the room a perfect mock-up of the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, as well as mock-ups of downtown Jerusalem and official Israeli buildings in very fine detail. They also collected a satellite picture of Dimona, Israel's nuclear complex, and a female mannequin dressed in an Israeli Air Force uniform, standing in front of a list of Israeli officers' ranks and insignia.
Of even greater interest to MET Alpha was a "top secret" intelligence memo found in a room on another floor. Written in Arabic and dated May 20, 2001, the memo from the Iraqi intelligence station chief in an African country described an offer by a "holy warrior" to sell uranium and other nuclear material. The bid was rejected, the memo states, because of the United Nations "sanctions situation." But the station chief wrote that the source was eager to provide similar help at a more convenient time.

As Best of the Web points out, this would seem to further disprove commonly-heard claims that Saddam was unlikely to cooperate with Islamic fundamentalists (or that such cooperation would only come about due to the Bush Administration's threats of war; note the May 2001 date). But why were they searching this building in the first place?

What began today as a hunt for an ancient Jewish text at secret police headquarters here wound up unearthing a trove of Iraqi intelligence documents and maps relating to Israel as well as offers of sales of uranium and other nuclear materials to Iraq.
...The search began this morning when 16 soldiers from MET Alpha teamed up with members of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group headed by Ahmad Chalabi, to search for what an intelligence source had described as one of the most ancient copies of the Talmud in existence, dating from the seventh century. The Talmud is a book of oral law, with rabbinical commentaries and interpretations.
A former senior official of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's secret police, had told the opposition group a few days earlier that he had hidden the ancient Jewish book in the basement of his headquarters. The building had been badly damaged by coalition bombing, said the man, who is now working for the Iraqi National Congress, but he was still willing to take a group there to recover it. MET Alpha hesitated. Its mission was hunting for proof of unconventional weapons in Iraq, not saving cultural and religious treasures. But Col. Richard R. McPhee, its commander, decided that the historic Talmud was too valuable to leave behind.

Can't you see the narrative taking hold? First, the story was that the U.S. military guarded the oil wells while neglecting the National Museum, thus encouraging looting and the loss of Iraqi cultural treasures. Add to that the story that while doing those things, the U.S. was also searching for an ancient copy of the Talmud. (That crazed Jewish neoconservative cabal is at it again...)Somewhere, Noam Chomsky is writing his next book.
(Yes, the links in the previous paragraph will take you to debunkings of those Baghdad-style urban legends, not to the initial peddling of those stories. Think of it as the next generation of Fisking. And as always, technicalities of factual and temporal discrepancies will be easily surmounted in formulating the narrative.)

Joshua Muravchik criticizes the road map on grounds similar to the ones I used in my earlier post - only much more eloquently than I did, which is to be expected (after all, the man does this for a living):

...Postmortems of Oslo, notably by the chief U.S. negotiator, Dennis Ross, have focused on America's failure to insist on full compliance with the terms of the agreement, especially on the part of the Palestinians, a failure that was driven by the pressure to meet predetermined timetables. Precisely to avoid repetition of this mistake, the Bush administration has characterized the road map as "performance driven." But that is scarcely compatible with a breakneck dash around the map's multiple clover leaves.
...The still deeper flaw in the road map's premises is the presumption that with the terms of settlement fairly apparent, all that is needed is a guide for getting there. In the final analysis, however, the missing ingredient for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is not a blueprint of the destination, nor is it the route. The missing ingredient is a decision by the Palestinians and the other Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst and to live in permanent peace with it. Despite all the Palestinians have suffered these two and a half years, public opinion polls show that a clear majority of them support continuing the intifada and suicide bombing and that about half say that the goal should be the "total liberation of Palestine," in other words, the elimination of Israel. The other half of the Palestinians say they want a two-state solution. When that half grows and becomes dominant, then and only then, will real peace be possible.
...The simple reality is that the moment the Palestinians make a wholehearted turn toward peace, no road map will be necessary.

There is plenty of speculation that the recently unveiled “road map” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents a cynical attempt to curry international favor and/or paper over the conflict, rather than a serious attempt to solve it.
I certainly hope so; that would be the most positive spin on the “road map.” It would be much more disturbing if the administration actually believed that the approach embodied in the road map actually represented the best options for peace.
The last two decades of Arab-Israeli peacemaking has provided policymakers with many examples of what works and does not work. The road map seems like a perfect distillation of what doesn’t work, “uncontaminated” by what does.
One of the biggest pitfalls of the Oslo-based peace process was the prevalence of those two words: the belief that peace can be produced via a negotiating process. Under that view, the two words were conflated: the perfection of the process was viewed as synonymous with the attainment of peace, and the continuation of the process was regarded as the sine qua non of any peace-seeking effort. The process thus became and end in and of itself. Thus, continued Palestinian terrorism, anti-Jewish propagandizing, arming of innumerable “security forces” and other violations of the Oslo accords were minimized so as to keep the process on track. The core issues – Jerusalem, the “right of return,” even settlements – were kicked down the road, lest they intrude on the process before they were ripe for resolution. And when President Bush essentially disavowed the entire Oslo-based approach in his June 24 speech, he was attacked for not putting forth a peace plan – after all, his speech didn’t come with an attached negotiating framework.
The problem was that the Palestinians’ fundamental rejection of Israel’s legitimacy did not vanish due to the negotiating experiences of the 1990s. The problem was that the Oslo-based process did not succeed in removing the incentives for the Palestinians to conduct terrorism, or for the Israelis to fight terrorism. And the proposed “road map,” on its face, does not solve these problems either. More technically, those problems are linked to the parties’ most fundamental strategic decisions, which are beyond the scope of any negotiating process to affect. While the road map is ostensibly “performance-based,” the map itself gives no indication that 3 out of the “quartet’s” 4 members would require stricter performance from the Palestinians than they did throughout the 1990s. Indeed, at certain points the map strains credulity in its insistence on symmetry:

At the outset of Phase I:

Israeli leadership issues unequivocal statement affirming its commitments to the two-state vision of an independent, viable, sovereign Palestinian state living in peace and security alongside Israel, as expressed by President Bush, and calling for an immediate end to violence against Palestinians everywhere. All official Israeli institutions end incitement against Palestinians.

(Emphasis added.)
I’m not familiar with any Palestinian-leaning equivalent of MEMRI that provides constant examples of anti-Palestinian hatred in Israeli politics, media and schools. So on its face, either the a) such Israeli rare, non-official examples are deemed equivalent to the massively prevalent Palestinian ones, or, more likely, b) the whole thing is a crock, which does not bode well for the allegedly important judging of “performance.” (After all, it’s so unfair to hold the parties to different standards…) Now, I understand that it’s not recommended for diplomats to make a habit of trumpeting the moral superiority of one side in a negotiation. But at the same time, it would seem advisable for a plan supposedly based on performance benchmarks to avoid requirements that are utterly divorced from reality.
And even more fundamentally, the most contentious issues are left for Phase III, in the apparent assumption that they will be easier to solve at that point – in total contravention of the available evidence. If the Palestinians decide to give up terror and reach a genuine peace with Israel, any one of the peace plans on the State Department’s shelves will work – even the road map. If that decision is not made, no peace plan will work, no matter how perfect the negotiating process.
Now, it’s important to note that many of the choices made by international diplomats throughout the 1990s were defensible at the time. They didn’t have the benefit of the hindsight we now possess. But there is no defending a tenacious refusal to learn from mistakes. For the record, I supported the Oslo accords through the Camp David negotiations and until the Palestinian campaign began in October 2000. But I was – along with an awful lot of people who are smarter than I was or am - mistaken about a number of fundamental assumptions that underlay the enterprise. One of the best arguments for the peace process in the 1990s was encapsulated by Franklin Roosevelt’s supposed advice to Raymond Mobley:

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.

Even if that advice was apocryphal, I’m pretty confident that Roosevelt’s advice was not: “Try something, and if it doesn’t work, keep trying the same damn thing over and over again.”
The infamous “neoconservatives” are often attacked for promulgating grand theories about the Middle East regardless of the empirical evidence. It is remarkable how perfectly that criticism fits many champions of the Arab-Israeli “peace process.” As Colin Powell recently said after a recent suicide bombing in Tel Aviv:

We can't let these sorts of incidents immediately contaminate the road map or contaminate the process that we are now involved in.

As seen from that quote and from the “incitement” point above, it seems that the champions of the “road map” have certain differences with reality. Rather than negotiate those differences, though, they seem to single-mindedly press ahead, sure that the other party will bend to their designs and regardless of the costs…

The preliminary indications for the Quartet's insistence on performance is not encouraging. Ha'aretz recently reported:

With the swearing-in of the new Palestinian cabinet on Wednesday came a presidential order from Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat for the establishment of a national security council to oversee all the PA's security mechanisms, including the counter-security apparatus, the uniformed police and the civil guard.
In keeping with the definition of powers of the Palestinian government, these security mechanisms are supposed to fall under the authority of PA Interior Minister Mohammed Dahlan. The move violates one of the clauses of the U.S.-backed 'road map' for Middle East peace, which calls for "all Palestinian security organizations [to be] consolidated into three services reporting to an empowered Interior Minister."

As a colleague of Eugene Volokh commented:

The road map has been public for less than 48 hours, and Arafat has already broken it.
...If the Bush Administration does not respond swiftly and firmly to this direct flouting of the road map, the entire process is dead. US policy should be clear: it will withdraw the road map and refuse to engage in any negotiations unless the Council is immediately terminated. The US should also immediately send a new military and civilian aid package to Israel. Criminologists have long argued that it is the certainty and swiftness of punishment, not its severity, that count. Here's a chance to test the theory with Arafat, the Palestinian arch criminal. Anything less essentially condemns the region to more violence.
The interesting question at this point is not whether Arafat will do all that he can to subvert the road map (and thus subvert Abu Mazen). It is, rather this: is there anything that Arafat can do that will convince his European backers that he isn't interested in peace and is committed to terror? Or is it just that they don't care?

There is an obvious temptation not to scuttle a promising initiative based on a disagreement over the structure of the Plestinian bureaucracy. But the lessons of the last decade are clear: failing to do exactly that will only lead to further violations and further violence, and the initiative will be destroyed anyway.
The answer to the question of Volokh's correspondent is far more important than the structure of any negotiating framework. Naturally, the parties would rather not discuss it.

P.S. I've read an awful lot of pieces on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and here are my picks for the best of the lot: this overview of the real underlying issues by David Brooks, this assessment of the Camp David and Taba negotiations by David Malkovsky and this evisceration of the "peace process" worldview by Jonathan Rauch.

In an excellent recent post about why religions often have different criteria for membership than the larger society might prefer, Megan McArdle wrote:

There isn't anyone with the authority, as far as I know, to tell you you aren't a member of one of those faiths. You can be expelled from a congregation, to be sure, but no minister can declare that you are not a Presbyterian, no rabbi strip your Jewishness from you. When they hear a bishop telling someone to stop calling themselves Catholic, it sounds like that bishop telling that person to stop proclaiming their beliefs.
It's a little more complicated than that, however. For one thing, unlike most mainline protestant denominations, or any Jewish ones, Catholics are pretty firm on what beliefs you have to embrace to be a member. [Aren't the Orthodox Jews pretty strict? -- ed. Yes, but as far as I know, technically, you don't have to believe in anything they say, as long as you obey the Law.]

Megan is almost completely mistaken about Judaism, especially the Orthodox variety. Yes, we are pretty strict about our requirements.
First, it is true that Judaism views membership as an entrance into a roach motel: you can check in, but you can't check out. (This is, by the way, one reason why Jews historically discourage prospective converts before even beginning to consider them; with respect to those who aren't going to be able or willing to fulfill all their new requirements, we're doing them a favor.) That being said, though, there are two main problems with Megan's points:
1) First, Judaism does recognize that you can do certain things that put you outside the pale and cause you to be considered, in many respects, as being outside the Jewish community. (One example of such exclusion is that such a person, if male, would not be allowed to count towards the quorum required for a public prayer service ("minyan").) What do you have to do in order to achieve this feat? The most common example in the halakhic sources is "violating the Sabbath in public," but public professions of heresy will do nicely as well. For a decent overview of heresy in Judaism, click here and scroll down. From the same source, about which I don't know much, click here for an overview of Jewish priciples of faith.

(Digression #1: Nowadays, do Orthodox Jews apply the status of "public Sabbath violator," with the accompanying communal exclusions, to everyone who doesn't observe the Sabbath in accordance with Orthodox standards - i.e., the overwhelming majority of Jews today? No, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this discussion - we can take it up in the comments. The point for these purposes is that there is something you can do that puts you outside the Jewish communal pale, even if it technically doesn't remove your Jewishness. End of digression.)

2) In general, Judaism does in fact require you to believe certain things. If you missed the link, click here for an overview.
Nevertheless, Megan's misperception is pretty common. Where does it come from? I can think of a couple of reasons:
A) The closest source for the anti-dogmatic view cited by Megan is the work of Moses Mendelssohn. I am not an expert in Mendelssohn's work, but I do know that his views have never gained wide acceptance within Orthodox thought. It is thus misleading to say that, as far as the Orthodox are concerned, Mendelssohn's views on dogma represent "Judaism."
B) Codifications of Jewish dogma (most notably, this one) only became popular in medieval times, as a response to widespread Christian (and Muslim, I think) works of dogma. Those codifications were usually seen as worthy efforts, but were outside the mainstream works of halakhic scholarship - where the intellectual action has been for over 2,000 years. Those codifications' impact on halakhic practice was relatively minimal, and while Maimonides' "13 principles" have become the most commonly accepted codification of Jewish dogma, even those principles have not been universally accepted within Orthodox Judaism.
C) Most importantly, the extreme non-dogmatic view is built on a certain truth, as hinted at above: most of the intellectual energy of Orthodox Judaism is dedicated toward analysis of the system and details of halakha, rather than the fine points of belief. But that doesn't mean that belief is optional; the emphasis instead reflects the following points:
(i) Why, exactly, would you buy into the halakhic system in the first place if you don't believe that it reflects the will of God?
(ii) There is a famous Talmudic statement that says, essentially: "Even if you are not performing [an obligation] for the right reasons, perform it anyway, beacuse one who does so will eventually come to do so for the right reasons." ("Mi-she-lo lishma, ba lishma.") That statement reflects several truths as a guidline for dealing with issues such as a temporary faith crisis, but it is far from a sanction for dispensing with faith altogether.

Debate invited...

Here's an interesting article about a new Hebrew translation of Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed," as well as a good summary of why Maimonides is a useful role model for rabbinic leadership today:

Regarding the book's relevance for today's generation, Kleinberg admits that "tackling the challenge of Greek philosophy is not a burning issue in the present era. Nonetheless, great importance should be attached to the presentation of a model that we are not so familiar with in our generation: another breed of rabbinical scholar, namely one who, in addition to being an expert on contemporary scientific and philosophical literature, seeks to cope with it and with the relationship between that literature and the Jewish religion."
In this context, Schwartz notes the long tradition of Jewish works that seek to bridge the gap between Judaism and contemporary thought: from the days of Rabbi Saadia Gaon's "The Book of Beliefs and Opinions" in the 10th century, through "The Guide of the Perplexed," to Nachman Krochmal's "Guide to the Perplexed of Our Age" in the 19th century and to Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, who tried to bridge the gap between Judaism and 20th-century Western philosophy.

Yossi Klein HaLevi explains the case against Amram Mitzna:

In the last two years, a new post-ideological majority has emerged that is ready to consider almost any measure to ensure security and also ready, in principle, to make almost any territorial concession for genuine peace. That majority of hard-line pragmatists lives between the insights of the first and second intifadas - that we cannot occupy the Palestinians and we cannot make peace with them.

However improbably, Sharon managed to refashion himself from the symbol of our divisiveness into the embodiment of the centrist consensus. Sharon exchanged the wholeness of the land for the wholeness of the nation, becoming our most passionate advocate of national unity.

There's more, all of which should be read.

From an article in today's NYT about the first Israeli to fly aboard the space shuttle:

The delays gave Colonel Ramon more time to personalize his journey into space. While other Jews have gone on space flights, he is the first to request an all-kosher menu. (NASA found a supplier, and all the food in his sealed meal packs is kosher.)
Colonel Ramon describes himself as a secular Jew, but he said that in space he would try to observe Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, if it did not interfere with his duties. Shabbat, observed every seventh day, normally goes from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. This raised the question of when the day of observance occurred in orbit, since the shuttle circles Earth every 90 minutes. The astronaut consulted a group of rabbis, who developed a consensus that the day of rest should be observed based on times at his launching point, Cape Canaveral.
Before becoming an astronaut, Col. Ramon was part of the group of Israeli pilots who destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, thus preventing Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Thomas Friedman makes many good points in his most recent column. I especially liked the following:

The Palestinians still act as if they believe they can get more out of Israel by making Israelis feel insecure rather than by making them feel secure. After a while, you can't call this a mistake. After a while, you have to ask whether it reflects a conviction that a thriving Jewish presence in the middle of the Islamic world is simply not acceptable to them.

Y' think? What gave it away?

More seriously, the Ari Shavit quote seems on-target as well:

"I compare it to open-heart surgery. Israelis know that if we don't do it, if we don't separate, we will die. But if we do it in a rushed or messy way, we will also die. So when Mitzna calls for separation, 70 percent of Israel agrees. But when he says he is ready to do it unilaterally, if necessary, or to negotiate with Arafat, or even to negotiate under fire while the Intifada goes on, most people refuse to go along. It feels wrong to them in their guts. So they want a left-wing surgery to be carried out by a right-wing doctor. The problem is, Sharon won't carry out that surgery. He is so committed to the settlements that he built, he appears to be paralyzed."

I have a problem with Friedman's usual conclusion, though:

But if there is no separation, by 2010 there will be more Palestinians than Jews living in Israel and the occupied territories. Then Israel will have three options: The Israelis will control this whole area by apartheid, or they will control it by expelling Palestinians, or they will grant Palestinians the right to vote and it will no longer be a Jewish state. Whichever way it goes, it will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish democracy.

Friedman seems to be coming out in favor of unilateral separation as a last resort, even if the Palestinians won't make a reasonable agreement (hardly a crazy scenario). But won't that essentially entail some of the same things as Friedman's parade of horribles? Building and policing a really good border, keeping a seething Palestinian population out of Israel, etc. will entail some pretty nasty things - possibly including expelling some Palestinians from their current homes. Surely that would be seen, by Friedman as well as the rest of the world, as the equal of the "transfer" hatefully advocated by Israel's current extreme right-wingers. (I'm not getting into the question of whether expelling the Palestinians could conceivably be compatible with Israel's democratic character - just pointing out that "separating" doesn't make the question go away.)

I've been meaning to write about the NYT's most recent fatuous editorial on Israel for a while. It's not their most objectionable effort, and it concerns a British conference that is so forgettable that it never even got to the "news" stage (despite the best efforts of the Palestinian liars-du-jour).
What impressed me about this editorial is that it is so obviously taken from the "template" files. The template has the following structure:
1) The most recent terrorist atrocity deserves to be condemned,
2) Israel "has every right to respond swiftly and firmly to Palestinian terrorist outrages,"
but
3) Whatever response Israel is actually using at the moment is excessive and counterproductive, usually because
4) It threatens to undercut some initiative that promises to reduce violence, despite the failure of the last 47,000 inititatives to do so.
Examples of such promising initiatives and the Times' prescriptions thereof include the Saudi "peace plan" and a Beirut summit thereof. And as an illustration of points 1-3, you can't get much better than this high-minded editorial after the Passover Massacre and this hissy-fit thrown after Sharon refused to listen to instructions (extensively Fisked here).
As evidence that the editorial was from the NYT's form:
1) Look at the sentence in the last paragraph:
"Israel's military response to the latest twin suicide bombing, which killed 23 people in Tel Aviv on Sunday, has so far been restrained." It seems tacked-on and completely out of place with the rest of the piece's tone.
2) The piece doesn't even mention a major reason the Israeli government prevented the Palestinians from attending the conference: the fact that the British government had announced its intentions to meet opposition candidate Amram Mitzna while snubbing current Foreign Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. In other words, screwing the British was a feature, not a bug - it was a response to a British diplomatic snub.
It would have been completely defensible to editorialize against the Israeli government's motivations; it's not crazy to argue that the move was counterproductive. But the Times' editorial doesn't even mention the basis for the Israelis' actions! After all, it's not in the form.

For those of us fortunate enough to not personally know a victim of the latest terrorist atrocity in Israel, it is hard to imagine anything more that could further increase pessimism about an eventual settlement.
As usual, the Palestinians are up to the task.
Via Tal G., I saw this article in Ha-aretz about Mohammed Dahla, founder of the Palestinian legal advocacy group Adalah. Dedicated to advancing the cause of the Palestinians through legal means, Dahla would seem emblematic of the segment of the Palestinian population most likely to work for peace with Israel.
Until you see what his idea of "peace" is based on:

In the meantime, it's metropolitan Tel Aviv. Gedera to Hadera. And Mohammed Dahla, my friend and my rival, says to me: Look at this architecture - it's so foreign, so alien to the place. It's as though some kind of invasion force emerged from the sea and landed on the beach. Without any sensitivity, without any connection to the land. As though the immigrants who arrived don't feel the land and its past. And you build with dizzying speed. You build arrogantly and high, and glued - absolutely glued - to the earth.
Look at the road signs, Dahla says. Most of them are in Hebrew and English, without Arabic. Because what you want, after all, is for a tourist from the moon to be able to come and wander around the country and believe that it really is a Jewish country. That there really is a Jewish state here. But I'm in your way. I and a million other Arabs are in your way. That's why it's so complicated for you with us. And in order to be able to continue with this adorable fiction of a Jewish-European state, you are trying to hide our existence. To erase our geography, our history, our identity. Now you are even trying to erase our parliamentary representation.
Does the idea of a Jewish state truly lack all justification? Don't the Jews have the right to self-determination within the boundaries of June 4, 1967? Mohammed says that the Jewish public now living in the country has the right to self-determination. But one can understand why the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan in 1947. And one must understand that there is no balance of rights here. There is no balance of our right v. your right. And that is because at the point of departure, the young lawyer Dahla says, the Jews had neither legal right, nor historical right, nor religious right. The only right they had was the right of distress. But the right of distress cannot justify 78 percent [of Mandatory Palestine becoming Israel]. It cannot justify the fact that the guests became the masters.
At the end of the day, it is the natives, not the immigrants, who have a supreme right to the country. Those who have lived here for hundreds of years have become part of the land, just as the land has become part of them. We are not like you. We are not strangers and we are not wanderers and we are not migrants. For hundreds of years, we lived on this land and we multiplied on it. Therefore, no one can uproot us from it. No one can separate it from us. Not even you.

In case his view of the Jewish presence in the land isn't clear, here's the kicker:

Then he tells me about his breaking point. It was during one the talks with Beilin, in Oslo, when they requested that the compensation that Israel would give the Palestinian state serve it in the same way that the German reparations to Israel served it. That was all they asked. It was a kind of gentle hint, not quarrelsome. But, nevertheless, Yossi Beilin's Israelis went wild. Because of that sentence the talks broke down. They returned empty-handed. Without even the shadow of historical justice.

This is further proof that David Brooks was right when he identified the driving factor behind the current war:

The Palestinians know that they cannot threaten the existence of Israel in a material sense. Israel's GDP per capita is over ten times that of its Arab neighbors, and its military might is unquestioned. But the Palestinians can hope to undermine the moral legitimacy of the Jewish state. More than anything, it now seems, this is what they want: for the Israelis to capitulate intellectually and morally; for the Israelis to admit that their state was founded on a crime; for them to apologize for what their existence has done to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians will not, it now appears, stop fighting until the Israelis acknowledge the justice of the Palestinian cause and absolve the Palestinians of all guilt for the terrorism perpetrated in their name. They're like a man in a bitter feud whose enemy's opinion begins to matter more to him than anything else: He craves his enemy's admission of guilt. To secure this, the Palestinians are willing to endure another century of refugee camps, road closures, violence, and conflict.
In other words, the Middle East conflict has been polarized and simplified. The whole dispute hangs on a simple question: Is Israel a criminal state? Arab populations have swung behind the idea that it is, and the Jewish population has swung behind the idea that it isn't. Not since 1948 has the issue been so stark and each side so unified. There is simply no middle position on this central question, and so all those who were trying to span the divide between the two peoples—the businessmen who want to trade with the other side, as well as the peace activists who want to build bridges—have found that the ground has vanished from under their feet.

And if the Israelis so capitulate, they will be helpless to resist Palestinian demands for the "right of return," autonomy for the Galilee and all the other items enumerated in the Ha-aretz piece that would destroy Israel as a Jewish state. In Dahla's view, this is the goal of any peace agreement.
And Dahla's demographic is that of the educated elite, in whom the Israeli peace camp placed such high hopes during the Oslo period. Reassuring, isn't it? If you want to know why Ariel Sharon is almost guaranteed to win re-election this month, look no further.
P.S. I suspect that Dahla might be the "Palestinian peace activist" featured in this Hirsh Goodman column which I blogged a while ago.

It seems that science is growing closer to being able to grow meat in a lab.
The piece is pretty fascinating. As Jonah Goldberg points out, the propsect of meat without animals raises fascinating questions:

...I am curious what the animal rights and eco-types would say to the proposition of lab grown meat -- assuming they could get past their deep luddism. After all, the suffering of farm animals would be sharply curtailed if not eliminated. Forests wouldn't need to be cleared for cattle and billions(?) of acres of forest land around the world could be allowed to revert to wilderness, improving the quality of our air and water.
Of course, even if we perfected the technology overnight (which we wouldn't), there are some obvious downsides: millions of farm animals would probably have to be killed since their would no longer be much economic utility in feeding them. Worse, billions of people around the world would have their traditional social, political and economic arrangements shattered. Our attachment to the land would be even more attenuated. Whole new quasi-religions and political movements would develop around the need to eat "authentic" meat. Anyway, it's an interesting topic for lazy-day pondering.

All true. But those questions pale in comparison to the most important one of all: would such laboratory-grown meat be kosher? Would stakes genetically from cattle and bison, without the intermediate steps of existence as a living animal and shechitah, be kosher? What about grown pork - would the non-existence as an actual pig be enough to render it kosher?
I need to research this issue a little more closely.

What if Christmas was a Jewish holiday?
Have you ever wondered what the classical halakhic sources would say regarding the laws of the holiday?
Me neither. But someone has:

4. THE TREE MUST BE BRIGHT GREEN. BRIGHT RED, or a mixture of green and red, IS ALSO ACCEPTABLE FOR A XMAS TREE,11 BUT BROWN IS NOT. THERE MAY BE ONE BROWN SPOT NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE TREE,12 BUT IN THE TOP HALF OF THE TREE, EVEN ONE BROWN SPOT WILL INVALIDATE THE TREE. A TRULY PIOUS PERSON WILL MAKE SURE TO BRING ALONG A XMAS TREE EXPERT WHEN HE GOES TO LOOK FOR HIS TREE.13

The authors of this piece really know their stuff. (A special prize goes to whomever knows why the above paragraph is a mixture of capital and lowercase words. Click here for a hint.)
The funniest part of the piece, by far, is the Hebrew letter of approbation from Santa Claus.

(Via Megan McArdle.)

The Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar, by way of complaining that the Israeli attacks have destroyed the capacity of the Palestinian security forces to keep an allegedly imminent peace, writes in Ha-aretz:

Assume for a second that Amram Mitzna is elected prime minister and a few months later signs an agreement that puts an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Also assume that his government does evacuate the isolated settlements and the Palestinians agree to leave Gush Etzion and of course the Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem...

Eldar reminds me of the economist in the following desert-island joke:

Three guys are alone on a desert island: an engineer, a biologist and an economist. They are starving and don't have a thing to eat, but somehow they find a can of beans on the shore.
The engineer says: let's hit the can with a rock until it opens.
The biologist has another idea:
"No. We should wait for a while. Erosion will do the job."
Finally, the economist says:
"Let's assume that we have a can opener".

This could be extrapolated into a larger point about those who assume that electing Mitzna or some other unilateral Israeli gesture short of suicide will magically erase the events and ramifications of the last two years. I'll leave it at this for now.

Hanna Rosin has an excellent piece on the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the movement to have universities divest from Israel:

The ultimate aim is to turn Israel into the South Africa of the '80s, the universal campus pariah.
In response, the Hillel crowd has gone "Dershowitz" (that's ballistic in Yiddish), one-upping the Palestinians by getting thousands more students and faculty to sign a counterpetition calling the divestment movement anti-Semitic, part of the toxic stew of Jew-baiting that's been brewing since Sept. 11. Harvard President Lawrence Summers called the protests "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
Is Summers right? The divestment movement drifted over from Europe pretty tainted, and not by Muslim radicals. There, some of its lefty proponents are still naked in their bigotry, foaming against the Shylocks of their imagination. Take one M.L. Sinnott, a scientist at the University of Manchester who helped organize academic and scientific boycotts of Israeli scholars. Stephen Greenblatt, as head of the Modern Languages Association, wrote to one of Sinnott's colleagues objecting to their having fired two researchers merely because they were Israeli. And here is what Sinnott wrote back:
"From the 'claptrap' of your open letter," he began, "one would imagine Israel to be an inoffensive Mediterranean Sweden rather than a voelkisch polity whose atrocities surpass those of Milosevic's Yugoslavia." He then progresses to Zionism as the mirror image of Nazism, Jenin as Kristallnacht, the "breathtaking power" of the Jewish lobby, and, of course, the media, "either controlled by Jews or browbeaten by them."
Then, more depressingly, there's José Saramago, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner who this year traveled to Ramallah with the Euro-Mumia crowd and found it a "crime comparable to Auschwitz." He then eloquently traced the state's "pathologically exclusivist racism" to "Deuteronomy" to the story of David and Goliath—in short, to the Torah itself.
Israel has its share of human rights violations and even a massacre or two in its history (Jenin not among them, as it turns out). But Kristallnacht? Auschwitz? That such outlandish analogies would pop into both of their heads independently can only mean the template of Scary Omnipotent Jew is already there, buried. Apparently, it takes only a divestment movement, or else four beers and a warm pub, to give it life.
In a 1987 Dissent essay, Paul Berman runs through all the possible explanations for the anti-Zionism of the intellectual left. With every one of the charges against Israel—"white settler colony," "weapons trader," mistreats minorities—you can name many other countries that are infinitely worse. So some part of the inordinately critical focus on Israel must be due, he concludes, to a certain hostility to Jews. Berman boils down the phenomenon to the "Anti-Imperialism of Fools," a takeoff on an August Bebel phrase particularly apt for this year's divestment movement: The radical left, who in this case are spillovers from the World Bank protests, boil their target down to one easy, ugly enemy that is in reality a tiny, relatively insignificant Mediterranean country instead of focusing on world-class imperialists like China and Russia or for that matter world-class human rights abusers.

It is hard to improve on Summers' denunciation of the divestiture movement. It should be noted, though, that the new president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, has followed Summers' example of properly prioritized candor:

As President of Columbia, however, I want to state clearly that I will not lend any support to this proposal. The petition alleges human rights abuses and compares Israel to South Africa at the time of apartheid, an analogy I believe is both grotesque and offensive.

This is a welcome development, especially for those of us who attended Columbia in the 1990s. The times they are a-changing...
Also, check out an example of "going Dershowitz," by Mr. Dershowitz himself.

There's one problem with the conclusion of Rosen's piece, though:

There even ought to be a legitimate way to object to Israel's very existence on purely political grounds. But so far, it seems, no one has managed to do it.

The usually sensible Eugene Volokh agrees:

For instance, the quick retort that "How can you oppose the existence of a Jewish state without being anti-Jewish?" has always struck me as odd -- one can oppose the existence of a Basque or Quebecois state without being anti-Basque or anti-Quebecois.
The sentiment expressed by Rosin and Volokh is untenable because it is anachronistic. Before the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, it was entirely possible to argue, free of anti-Semitism, that the Jews' sufferings did not warrant the establishment of a new state on geopolitical grounds. Once the state was established, opposing its existence is identical to desiring its destruction, with the guaranteed suffering accompanying that result (as Volokh notes in the same entry). The costs of not enacting a new state are necessarily more indeterminate than the costs of destroying a pre-existing one. It is possible to oppose the enactment of a new state for Basques or Quebecois without being anti-Basque or anti-Quebecois, but it is an altogether different matter to oppose the existence of such states after they are formed. An easy shorthand for such people would be "anti-Basque," "anti-Quebecois" - or "anti-Semitic."

In the New Yorker article cited below, the Hasidic political operative's style is described as follows:

He greeted many of them with bear hugs, unless they were women, in which case he spoke without touching them. ("They understand," he said. "It's my religion.")

Is that, by itself, sexist conduct? Randy Cohen certainly thinks so. Cohen, whose "Ethics" column in the New York Times Magazine was previously most noted for reserving its strongest criticisms for SUV owners, argues that a female real-estate owner whose agent declined to shake her hand for religious reasons should tear up the contract with that agent due to the sexism of the agent's practice.
Apparently I wasn't the only one who found Mr. Cohen's advice a bit overwrought:

Ironically, Orthodox feminists have found themselves in the unique position of defending a tradition that the Ethicist calls “sexist” and offensive.
...Needless to say, Cohen’s answer elicited waves of e-mails on the Times’ online Forum, and among Jews in private chat lists.
One reader posted: “Touch me or you’re fired — a perfect example of sexual harassment.” The TeaneckShulChat list on Yahoo posted Cohen’s response to his critics: “I understand that the prohibition against touching derives from sexual modesty, but so do most of the proscriptions in sexually segregated societies, from the chador to allowing only men to vote.”
Said Adena Berkowitz, a feminist activist and long-time member of the UJA-federation Medical Ethics Committee: “I continue to be amazed how too often tolerance only runs in one direction and in fact soon become intolerance. What would Mr. Cohen like next: to have the Justice Department bust up Orthodox synagogues because men and women sit separately?”
Blu Greenberg, president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, added, “tolerance to the right always seems to be in shorter supply. Pluralism means you sometimes have to stretch and understand the other person’s convictions.”

The punishment couldn't possibly be more fitting for someone who espouses the hard-edged PC "ethics" pushed by Cohen: a delegation from the Orthodox Union "was to meet this week with Cohen and Times editors “to sensitize the Times on this issue,” according to OU officials." Perhaps they will also give him sensitivity training regarding SUV owners.

Andrew Sullivan has an outstanding article in the Sunday Times on the natural correlation of anti-Semitism with current leftist anti-war politics:

Summers' argument was a simple one: why has Israel been singled out alone as worthy of divestment? Supporters cite its continued occupation of the West Bank. There's no question that Israel's policies in that regard are ripe for criticism, and to equate criticism of that with anti-Semitism is absurd and despicable. Similarly, it's perfectly possible to argue against Israel's domestic policies without any hint of anti-Semitism. But to argue that Israel is more deserving of sanction than any other regime on earth right now is surely bizarre. Israel is a democracy; it is multi-racial; Arab citizens of Israel proper can vote and freely enter civil society; there is freedom of religion and a free press. An openly gay man just won election to the Knesset. In any other Middle Eastern country and the Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank, he'd be in jail, executed or crushed under a pile of rocks. There is simply no comparison with apartheid South Africa, where a tiny ethnic minority denied the majority any vote at all. Compared to China, a ruthless dictatorship which is now brutally occupying Tibet, Israel is a model for democratic governance. And, unlike China's occupation of Tibet, Israel's annexation of the West Bank was undertaken as a defensive action against an Arab military attack. Or compare it to any other country in the Middle East, from Syria's satrapy in Lebanon, to Mubarak's police state, to Iraq's barbaric autocracy or Iran's theocracy, and it's a beacon of light. To single Israel out for condemnation and divestment, while ignoring all these others, is so self-evidently bizarre that it begs an obvious question. What are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about? Where are the divestment campaigns for China or Zimbabwe?
The answer, I think, lies in the nature of part of today's left. It is fueled above all by resentment - resentment of the West's success, resentment of the freedom to trade, resentment of any person or country, like Israel or Britain or the U.S., that has enriched itself by means of freedom and hard work. Just look at Israel's amazing achievements in comparison with its neighbors: its vibrant civil society, its economic growth, its technological skill, its agricultural miracle. When you think about all Israel has achieved, it is no surprise that the resentful left despises it. So, for obvious reasons, do Israel's neighbors. If they had wanted, the Arab states could have made peace with Israel decades ago, and enriched themselves through trade and interaction. Instead, rather than emulate the Jewish state, they spent decade after decade trying to destroy it. When they didn't succeed, rather than seek reasons for their own backwardness and failure, rather than engage in the difficult task of reform and renewal, the Arab dictators and their pliant propaganda machines simply resorted to the easy distractions of envy, hatred and obsession. Al Qaeda is the most dangerous and nihilist manifestation of this response. Hezbollah is a close second. But milder versions are everywhere. And what do people who most want to avoid examining their own failures do? They look for scapegoats. And the Jews are the perennial scapegoat. Now that the Jewish people actually have a country to themselves, the anger and hatred only intensifies.
This attitude isn't restricted to the Middle East. In the West, parts of the left, having capitulated to moral relativism and bouts of Western self-hatred, have seized on Israel as another emblem of what they hate. They're happy to have Saddam get re-elected with 100 percent of a terrified vote, happy to see him develop nerve gas and nuclear weapons to use against his own population and others. They're happy to watch Syria's rulers engage in regular massacres; or the Saudis subject women to inhuman subjugation. This they barely mention. After all, these countries form part of the "oppressed" developing world. But Israel's occasional crimes in self-defense? They march in the streets. Telling, isn't it?
Ask the average leftist today what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. Ask him what he is against, and the rhetorical floodgates open. That tells you something. Similarly, ask the average anti-war activist what she is for with regard to Iraq, what exactly she thinks we should constructively do, and the stammering and stuttering begins. Do we just leave Saddam alone? Do we send Jimmy Carter to sign the kind of deal he made with North Korea eight years ago? Will pressuring the Israelis remove the nerve gas and potential nukes Saddam has in his possession? Will ceding the West Bank to people who cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center help defang al Qaeda? They don't say and don't know. But what they do know is what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the "racist" war on Afghanistan, and on and on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder some have started selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park.
This negativism matters. When you have a movement based on resentment, when you have a political style that is as bitter as it is angry, when your rhetoric focuses not on those who are murdering partiers in Bali or workers in Manhattan, but on those democratic powers trying to defend and protect them, then your fate is cast. A politics of resentment is a poisonous creature that slowly embitters itself. You should not be surprised if the most poisonous form of resentment that the world has ever known springs up, unbidden, in your midst.

For more on the subject, see David Brooks' great article on the anti-bourgeois attitudes driving resentment of the U.S. and Israel.

Ha-aretz discusses the question of "what if Rabin had lived?" The author quotes a Netanyahu ally, who observes:

Had Rabin lived, he said, he would "most likely" have lost the elections to Netanyahu, who had a big lead in the opinion polls - even before the wave of suicide bombings in March 1996. "The Labor Party would then most likely have replaced Rabin with Ehud Barak and history would have played out the way it has."
Elitzur said the claim by many on the left that "the world would have been fundamentally different" had Rabin not been killed, was an attempt by the supporters of the Oslo accords to explain away the great failure of the process which Rabin led. "But in the end I don't think history would have been different. Yigal Amir did not change Oslo. The failure of Oslo was not the result of Rabin's absence."

There is much truth in those observations. Netanyahu led Rabin by 22 points in January 1995 and by 23 points in April 1995. Rabin's assassination gave Shimon Peres, by contrast, a big lead in the polls. Having been in Israel at the time, I can attest to the fact tha there was never less opposition to the peace process than in the aftermath of Rabin's murder. What changed the picture was an orgy of bus-bombings by Hamas. (A reading of the list will show that there were a large number of such bombings when Rabin was alive, as well - a large contributing factor to his low poll numbers.)
More importantly, ascribing the failure of the peace process to Rabin's murder ignores the proximate cause of the war of the last two years: the refusal of the Palestinians to compromise on the demands which they entered the Oslo process, most notably the "right of return." That final phase of bargaining would have arrived regardless of whether Rabin had lived, and I haven't seen a good argument that Rabin would have made any difference in the Palestinians' refusal to cross that line.
It is a natural tendency to assume that the most dramatic events were the most pivotal events, as well. But that is not always the case.

Today is the seventh anniversary under the Hebrew calendar of the murder of Yitzhak Rabin. I mostly agree with thisthis Jerusalem Post editorial:

[W]e believe it is both idle and disreputable to speculate what Rabin would have done had he lived. At the very least, his memory should rise above partisan squabble.
...What is inarguable is that Rabin's legacy goes beyond the potentialities, illusions, and mistakes of Oslo. It goes, rather, to his participation in the 1941 Palmah raid into Syria; his role in freeing 200 illegal immigrants at the Atlit detention camp in 1945; his role in opening the road to besieged Jerusalem in 1948; his historic tenure as chief of staff in 1967; his distinguished ambassadorship to the US; his first turn as prime minister, during which the successful raid in Entebbe was carried out in 1976; the peace he signed with Jordan in 1994. As much as Oslo, all of these heroic chapters in Israel's history are a part of Rabin's legacy, and they must not be forgotten.
What is also fairly clear is that Rabin thought of himself, above all, as a champion of Israel, and that everything he did, Oslo perhaps above all, followed from that self-conception. This is very different from being, as Peres seems to be today, a disinterested advocate of "peace" or some other supranational interest. It means making loyalty to the Jewish people in their homeland the supreme criterion, which at times might entail striking peace treaties, at other times going to war, but never putting a mere idea ahead of the flesh and blood of a single Jew.
After Rabin's assassination, as Palestinian terrorism mounted, Rabin's epigones in Labor spoke of "making sacrifices for peace," even as those sacrifices entailed hundreds of Jewish dead. But blood sacrifices for "peace" was a logic alien to Rabin. To him, ideas existed in the service of men, not the other way around.
In coming years, as hagiography gives way to history, it will be fitting for Israelis to examine Rabin's life and legacy in a colder, more sober light. And indeed, the record is far from spotless. As with other martyred statesmen, from Gandhi to Kennedy, the reality of the man never fits the storybook version, and Rabin will merit close scrutiny no less than the others. This also is to the good. And Rabin's ghost, as blunt and unpretentious in eternity as he was in life, will smile on approvingly.

Barry Rubin plays the game and offers some answers.

This Jerusalem Post article argues that the U.S. should revive the old "Jordanian option" of returning the West Bank to Jordan, and sweeten the deal for Jordan by giving it the lower two-thirds of Iraq. The remainder of Iraq would become an independent Kurdistan.
Without getting into many of the problems of that scenario (especially for Turkey, which would not want an independent Kurdistan on its border), I'll just say that the scenario is extremely unlikely; the Hashemites want more Palestinians in their territory, having learned the futility of trying to deal with Arafat back in 1970. I think it's more plausible that Jordan would be willing to give up some territory as part of a new Palestinian state, if that meant they'd be able to shed Palestinians along with the territory. The article is an audacious attempt to meet some real concerns (the viability of Jordan, the inability to trust the Palestinians with a state, but unlikely to actually occur. The writer himself indicates that the idea isn't presently being considered.

Meryl Yourish enraged by items such as this Harvard Crimson article defending the anti-Israeli divestment movement at Harvard.

I wish that this poll of British writers was in fact a skit. It certainly reads like one. Unfortunately, I think it's serious. (Thanks to Diane E. for the link.)

This item is very portentious; Hamas seems to have taken over the Gaza Strip:

Many senior Palestinian Authority security officials in the Gaza Strip have gone underground, fearing retaliatory attacks from Hamas activists following two days of clashes.
"Commanders of PA security forces are afraid to sleep in their homes," sources in the Gaza Strip said. "Many of them have stopped showing up at work."
..."Today the PA's power is effectively restricted to some neighborhoods in Gaza City," explained an academic living in Gaza's Sheikh Radwan neighborhood. "The fact that the colonel was kidnapped from this neighborhood is a slap in Arafat's face."
"Arafat has to face the fact that his forces have lost control over the majority of the Gaza Strip," said the Gaza academic. "The people here have more sympathy for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, because they believe they are their authentic representatives."
On Monday, a furious Arafat issued instructions to send 3,000 policemen to arrest suspects in the officer's murder at Nusseirat refugee camp. But only 400 policemen participated in the mission, which ended in failure after hundreds of civilians and Hamas gunmen blocked their way.
What makes matters even more complicated for Arafat is the fact that the killing took place shortly after 14 people were killed by the IDF in Khan Yunis.
Hamas leaders were quick to vow revenge against Israel. But, with the same breath, they also attacked the PA, accusing its top officials of helping Israel in its efforts to quell the intifada. Their veiled message to the Hamas gunmen is that the PA is also an enemy.

This may clear the way for more Israeli strikes in Gaza.

UPDATE: See James Bennet's piece for the New York Times for more. The "Arab Revolt" in the late 1930s ended in failure and spurred a near civil war of recriminations; it appears the current war started by the Palestinians is following the same pattern.

This important item in Ha-aretz states that Saddam has transferred over $15 million to Palestinian families over the last two years, and trained many Palestinian terrorists:

Rakad Salim, the Secretary-General of the pro-Iraqi "Arab Liberation Front" organization in West Bank, who was arrested by Israel last week, told his interrogators that he had close connections with the Iraqi Ba'ath party.
According to the Shin Bet report, Salim said he met with Saddam Hussein two years ago, and that Saddam himself had decided to transfer funds to Palestinian families, as well as setting the various amounts of money.
The funds were then transferred through a branch of an Iraqi bank in Amman to a Jordanian bank in the city, and from there passed to a branch of the Jordanian bank in Ramallah, where the group had an account.
...The Shin Bet report states that Salim held regular meetings with representatives of Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in order to plan terror attacks. Furthermore, the Shin Bet said, Salim had served as political advisor to Yasser Arafat. He added that the PA was also involved in the transfer of funds.
The Shin Bet said that Palestinian ministers, mayors and members of the Palestinian Legislative Council took part in ceremonies to hand over the Iraqi money to the families of victims, including the relatives of suicide bombers.
...Over the past two years, the Shin Bet has arrested 16 Palestinians who underwent training in Iraqi military camps. Most of those were under the direction of Abu Abbas' Baghdad-based Palestinian Liberation Front. Sources in the security establishment said that Iraq has clear intentions of increasing its involvement in terror attacks in the territories.

This is one reason why people aren't crazy to suggest that an invasion of Iraq will help salve the Israeli-Palestinian war, rather than inflame it further.

Newsweek's editor-in-chief of its Arabic edition is in favor of the upcoming war on Iraq, for the following reasons:

Some Arabs are proud of Saddam’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. The more the Bush administration tries to prove that Saddam possesses those weapons, the further it gets from achieving its goal of winning converts to its cause. But the irony is that only an actual invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam would produce a radical shift in public opinion, changing the terms of the reference of the public debate.
For now, the rhetoric used to convince American public opinion does not work at all to convince Arab public opinion. In fact, this rhetoric has become a source of inspiration for Arab sloganeering. This is in part the result of widespread anti-Americanism. But, more importantly, it’s a result of the fact that the Arabs are living part of their daily lives in a dream world. They sink into a political dream world, fed by the backlash to American rhetoric that is eagerly seized upon and spiced up by Arab intellectuals. The leaders of the Arab world are afraid to dispel or challenge those dreams, since they have no way to justify their own ineffective governments. As they see it, they have to employ doublespeak. In terms of the current crisis, this means publicly rejecting a strike against Iraq, while privately insisting that it should be a painful and final blow to a ruler and regime they all despise.
The Arabs need shock therapy, some kind of tremor that would bring them back to reality and away from their political dreamscape. Egypt’s loss in the 1967 war against Israel was the sort of shock that did away with the nationalist slogans prevalent since the July 1952 revolution carried out by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. If the 1967 shock laid the ground for the spread of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalism, the “Saddam Shock” might be what is needed to launch the era of pragmatism. The Islamist mantra has not been dropped yet, but it was tested in the Afghan war and did nothing for its supporters except spark a few demonstrations here and there, which soon died out.
... But if the Afghanistan war has embarrassed the Islamic movements, there are at least two things that have prevented the collapse of the Islamic credo. The first is that, in purely operational terms, Osama bin Laden’s attack against the United States was successful and very painful, and it changed the face of America. The second is the uncertainty about the fate of bin Laden, the lack of clear-cut evidence that he was killed by American firepower. The mystery surrounding bin Laden’s fate has given the Islamic movements a chance to regain their balance. The fall of the Taliban was not a major coup for America, but the uncertainty about what happened to bin Laden is considered a coup for his supporters.
Nonetheless, the American war on terrorism will continue to weaken the Islamic movements. Most Arab regimes are only too happy to use this opportunity to further diminish their influence. I believe that the Islamic movements realize that it would be a mistake to support Saddam Hussein at this stage, and that they will not repeat the mistake they made when they supported him after the invasion of Kuwait.
Saddam’s fall will cause the Arabs to be shattered psychologically. Political depression will set in. I do not rule out the possibility that some Arab regimes will suffer from domestic unrest, triggered by public outrage. Those regimes will find themselves face to face with their people, forced to deal with domestic issues after the United States succeeds in shutting down the last despot who maintained the illusion that Arab slogans can nurture a people. If Washington should also succeed in making the Arab countries mediators in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than parties to a broader Arab-Israeli endless war, then the region will really be transformed.

Khaled Abu Tomaeh recently wrote an extensive and gripping article in the Jerusalem Post about how the second intifada, supposedly a spontaneous outbreak prompted by Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, was in fact extensively planned by the Palestinians following the breakdown at Camp David:

In conjunction with the political offensive, which began almost immediately after Camp David, the PA was also preparing for a possible military confrontation with Israel. PA security officials interviewed in the local media openly talked about a looming armed confrontation. Some even warned that the PA areas would be turned into a "graveyard" for the IDF if Israel decided to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their statements came in response to remarks made by former IDF chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz, who warned that Israel would use tanks and jets if the Palestinians launched an armed offensive.
...As the Camp David summit was under way, Arafat's Fatah organization, the biggest faction of the PLO, started training Palestinian teenagers for the upcoming violence in 40 training camps throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Some PA officials and newspaper commentators also started calling for the adoption of the Hizbullah strategy, which, they believed, led to the withdrawal of the IDF from southern Lebanon a few months earlier. Hizbullah leaders, including secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, appeared on Arab satellite television networks to mock Arafat and his negotiators, arguing that Palestine could be liberated only through the use of force, and not at summits like the one held in Camp David.
BY NOW the atmosphere in the Palestinian street was one of "the eve of war." PA ministers and representatives stepped up their criticism of Israel and the US as part of the PA's efforts to refute accusations that it was responsible for the collapse of the Camp David talks and that the Palestinians had missed yet another historic opportunity.
PA-appointed imams in West Bank and Gaza Strip mosques began referring to Israel as "the Zionist enemy" and urged all Muslims to mobilize for the war against the "infidels." In the words of one Gazan preacher, "All weapons must be aimed at the Jews, at the enemies of Allah, the cursed nation in the Koran, whom the Koran describes as monkeys and pigs, worshipers of the calf and idol worshipers."
Other imams spoke of the need and duty to liberate Palestine from the Zionist aggressors. This time the talk was not only about liberating the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Now the demand was for Jerusalem, Jaffa, Haifa and Ashkelon.
...An August 3 [2000] poll conducted by the independent Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicated that two-thirds of Palestinians supported a new intifada against Israel. This was the first time since the signing of the Oslo Accords that a majority of Palestinians said they supported violence against Israel.

In other news, Mr. Toameh has apparently had his life threatened by a senior aide to Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Ahmed Qurei in response to a different story for the paper. The aide has been arrested.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Palestinian terrorists took advantage of the lifting of a curfew in Jenin, Tulkarm and Hebron to carry out several murderous attacks over the last few days, including today's killing of several people in a Tel Aviv bus bombing.

This must be seen to be believed:

The picture on the top of the dress is of Mohammed al-Durah, apparently killed by Palestinian gunmen.

First, this is evil, and the Jewish terrorists responsible for it (or whoever else the guilty party may be) should be punished mercilessly. (Had there been any fatalities, I'd support the death penalty.) No "but" is applicable to the perpetrators.
That's all that should be said, and I know it's not worth it to waste cyberspace on this guy, but Eric Alterman really pushed my buttons with this post:

Ariel Sharon cannot or will not control the Jewish settler/terrorists. Perhaps he should be exiled from Israel and replaced with a leader of the Palestinians’ choosing. Also, the homes of the families of the Jewish settler terrorists should be blown up and their families should be exiled. Also, all the Jewish settlers who look like they might be terrorists should be jailed without trial and tortured. These people, after all, just don’t value human life the way we do.
Assuming Alterman is being grossly tongue-in-cheek, his real point is one of moral equivalene. And he's right to a degree; there is no moral difference between an Arab and a Jewish terrorist. But (and it feels ridiculous to have to point this out, but Alterman obviously does not get it) - the fact that individuals on both sides commit immoral acts do not mean that the two societies are morally equivalent.
When the Israelis:
1) grant extensive government support to groups like those who planted the bombs in question;
2) feature mothers who exhort their sons to kill themselves as long as they kill other innocent people as well (click here for another one)
(NOTE: The horrifying video links may no longer be working; I will attempt to update the links if this continues. Click here for a photo of Hamas family values.); and
3) feature waves of suicide bombers whose families are paid off by Iraq and Saudi Arabia (thus representing enemies (a) who are non-deterrable by conventional means and (b) whose families have a substantial incentive to encourage their career choice; see #2 above - the two unique factors behind the idea of destroying houses and/or exiling family members),
then Alterman can be taken seriously when he assumes a moral equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian societies. Until then, the correlation with and links between Palestinian society and its terrorists are far greater than those on the Israeli side, and our foreign policy deserves to reflect that disparity.
Recognition of the differences between Israeli and Palestinian society would seem to be a necessary precondition of an intellectually sophisticated approach to the conflict in the Middle East. But Alterman refuses to credit these nuances, preferring to see a black-and-white world where all are equally responsible for evil. Alterman's approach is appallingly simplistic. Is he channelling the spirit of the current president, whom he despises so? At least Bush correctly identifies black and white...

THE ISRAELI NEOCONSERVATIVES: Here's an article describing how many prominent Israeli leftists have been mugged by the reality of the last two years.
Meanwhile, TIME magazine reports that up to 98% of the known Hamas military operatives in the West Bank have been killed or captured since the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield. Who said force would only be counterproductive? Perhaps it isn't "increasingly clear that the costs to broader Israeli interests far outweigh whatever short-term security benefits this military operation may be yielding."

LOOKING FORWARD: Another great James Lileks piece. It's worth it just for the picture at the beginning of the article, but the writing's good, too. His conclusion is absolutely right:

I curse the terrorists for their horrible triumphs, but those bastards cannot even begin to count the ways in which they failed.
(Emphasis in original.)

ALICE IN WONDERLAND ALERT: The Economist has an article sympathetically describing Arab discontent with America.
The article is in step with much of the Economist's coverage on Israel-Arab relations. But in one sentence, they outdo themselves:
"Instead of trying to douse extremism, says Raghida Dergham, who reports incisively from New York for a liberal daily, Al Hayat, the Bush administration has seemed intent on inflaming it."
(Emphasis added.)
According to MEMRI, this "liberal daily" has featured a Syrian columnist, Mu'taz Al-Khattib, who wrote on September 30, 2001 that: 1) 4,000 Jews had been absent from the WTC building on September 11; 2) a prescheduled interview of Ehud Barak by the BBC was proof of Israel's involvement behind the attacks;
On September 24, 2001, this "liberal daily" also published (according to MEMRI) a certain Saudi Prince Mamdouh bin Abd Al-Aziz, president of the Saudi Center for Strategic Studies, who wrote the following:

Anyone who even skims through The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Pieces on the Chessboard, or the book The World is a Pawn in the Hands of Israel, and follows current events, becomes convinced that the Jews are behind the world's current 'terrorized' atmosphere.... These three books concur that there is a Zionist conspiracy ... [the goal of which is] to channel everything, as much as possible, towards the interests of world Jewry, primarily those among them called 'Allah's Chosen People'....
Objectivity demands that we ask whether the disasters that have struck at the heart of the Arab and Islamic world over many long years were mere coincidence, or were the result of a conspiracy.... I have no doubt whatsoever that many Arab Islamic countries and organizations, both religious and pan-Arab, that acted in good faith, were infiltrated by the Jews....
In fairness, Al-Hayat has apparently also published a number of articles arguing against suicide bombings, at least on tactical grounds (click here and here for translations). So relative to its competitors, Al-Hayat may indeed be "liberal." However, what does it say about a society where even a "liberal" publication publishes items like the two excerpted above?
P.S. The Economist article also has the following money quote:
“Take Israel out of the equation,” says a businessman in Jeddah, “and, poof, we’ve basically never had a problem with America.”
That sentence just begs to be read in multiple ways.

9/11 AND AGUNOT: Under Jewish law ("halakha"), if a married man disappears, there are extremely high standards of proof that must be satisfied before the man can be declared dead and his wife allowed to remarry. In the aftermath of 9/11, these issues had to be dealt with. Here's an article from a December issue of Ha-aretz describing the issues and the status of the efforts to deal with the widows' situations, and here's an article from today's Ha-aretz stating that all such men had been declared dead under the halakha.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON REFUGEES AND RESETTLEMENT: Here's a useful primer.

HITTING HOME AND HEARTH: I ate at this place many times.

COEXISTENCE GROWS IN BROOKLYN: Here's an interesting article on how a large number of Muslim immigrants (mostly Palestinians, according to the article) have moved to Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and found some measure of satisfaction. According to the article, the neighborhoods' popularity is not coincidential:

She says the two communities share a lot more than it appears at first glance. "People are religious, modest, keep kosher, and the family is the center of their lives," she explains.
... "Politics killed the similarities between the two peoples," says Browne. "If you take out the political element, the two people can live in peace along side each other and be good neighbors."
...She is well aware of the political views of most of the Jews of Boro Park and Flatbush. But during a conversation with her she tries to steer clear of any comments that might be interpreted as criticism of her neighbors. "The vast majority of Arab immigrants came to the U.S. to find work and improve their quality of life. This wasn't religious immigration, but economic immigration, and they integrate very quickly, on their way to reaching for the American dream." She emphasizes, "Coexistence can flourish under conditions of equality and circumstances that grant everyone practically the same opportunity."

THE ECONOMIST TELLS US WHAT IT REALLY THINKS: The Economist's distaste for Israel was recently dissected by the Jerusalem Post, a piece which drew this response. I wasn't convinced by the magazine's self-defense. But even if I had been so tempted, this online account of the fallout from the Shehade killing would have ended any such thoughts.
As might be expected, the article argues that the killing meant that Israel was unwilling to take the chance that the oh-so-promising "ceasefire" efforts would come to fruition. Even they can't deny the following:
[J]ust prior to the attack on Gaza, Hamas’s spiritual leader, Ahmad Yassin, had made some sort of offer to end suicide bombings, though it is not clear what he wanted in return, or what he meant precisely by this. He seemed to have demanded Israel's withdrawal from the recently reoccupied Palestinian cities, release of recently detained Palestinian prisoners and an end to the assassination of Palestinian leaders, in return for a halt to bombings inside Israel proper. He made this offer after prodding from the PA and Saudi Arabian and European diplomats. No Israeli government would have been able to agree to such a deal, which would have left soldiers and civilians in the occupied territories targets for attack.
Notwithstanding that accurate conclusion, the article concludes that mysterious "others"
argue that Mr Sharon’s government should have deferred Mr Shehada's assassination to test an initiative that may not have brought a total end to violence but might at least have prevented the continued slaughter of innocents—whether these are travelling in buses in West Jerusalem or sleeping in their beds in Gaza City.
So the proposed ceasefire, which would have left all Israeli targets inside the West Bank and Gaza as fair game, would have prevented "the continued slaughter of innocents." Killings of Israeli settlers would thus not qualify as "slaughter of innocents." Ergo, Israeli settlers, regardless of whether or not they are peaceful civilians, are not innocent and are deserving targets of murder.

SHOULDER TO SHOULDER: Amir Oren argues in Ha-aretz that the reaction to Israel's killing of Shehade shows that U.S. sees itself as fighting the same enemies as Israel, to an unprecedented degree:

Washington's strongest expression of support could be found in the American announcement to the UN Security Council, that from now on it would only accept censure of Israel in the Palestinian context in conjunction with condemnations of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. And fellow Security Council member Syria was once again asked to expel the terror command headquarters from Damascus.
The Shehadeh affair showed that there has indeed been a fundamental shift in America's approach to the region: For the first time in their histories, Washington and Jerusalem are now fighting the same enemies. Before September 11 and before Yasser Arafat's decision to continue to cling to terror, the front had never been this united. During the Cold War, America's cool calculations of the "Israel - asset or burden?" balance sheet dipped against Israel (for strategic considerations) no less than in favor of Israel (for political considerations), and even though, since the days of David Ben-Gurion, Israel has been firmly in the American camp, it was never too interested in clearly assigning the role of enemy to the Soviets.
...In a lecture he delivered earlier this year, the CIA's deputy director of operations, Jim Pavitt, explained American intelligence's failure to penetrate Al Qaeda - the failure to penetrate the agents who are so critical for the supplementing of electronic data-gathering. It is a zealous and almost familial organization, said Pavitt; aliens would not be absorbed in any way. "I personally doubt that anything short of one of the knowledgeable inner circle personnel or hijackers turning himself in to us would have given us sufficient foreknowledge to have prevented the horrendous slaughter that took place on the 11th," said Pavitt.
This is why Pavitt and his colleagues are so astounded by the intelligence and operational triumphs of the Shin Bet and the IDF in thwarting terrorist attacks. President Bush has outlined the fight against terror, as a major effort, to the entire American system. The institutionalization of this fight - including the recent formation of an Office of Homeland Security - is drawing in its wake governmental agencies and officials whose sympathies are not usually with Israel.
He also cites a little comic relief which I had never heard before:
Terrorism has been considered an American adversary since the '70s, but then it was perceived simply as another, secondary arrow in the Soviet quiver. Typical of that era is the weekly terrorism report prepared by the CIA around Christmas of 1974: PLO head Yasser Arafat praises a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv (Chen Cinema, Popular Front); there are concerns about a possible assassination attempt on prime minister Golda Meir during a visit to New York and Canada; and the CIA warned that "a new organization, the composition of which is not known, that calls itself `The Ebenezer Scrooge Martyrs' Group,' is plotting an attack on the annual courier flight operated by the Government of North Pole, and its prime minister and chief courier, S. Claus." In that oh-so-innocent era, this amusing bit of levity was considered acceptable. Osama bin Laden wiped the smirks off their faces.

MORE EXPLANATIONS: Here's an outstanding analysis of the reasons behind the Israeli attack on Shehade.
Also, I cannot believe that anyone is taking seriously the reports that had Israel not attacked, a cease-fire would have been imminent. As
Amos Harel writes in Ha-aretz:

Regarding the timing, defense officials indignantly rejected the suggestion that the assassination was deliberately timed to disrupt a possible Tanzim initiative for a unilateral cease-fire. They noted that Hamas was not a party to this idea in any case - and certainly Shehadeh, the organization's most extreme member, was not involved.
But even the Tanzim was far from deciding to adopt the idea, they added. Mohammed Dahlan, the former head of the PA's Preventive Security Service in Gaza, did propose it, the sources said, but his influence on the West Bank-centered Tanzim was small, and the defense establishment had received no information indicating that the Tanzim had decided to accede to this suggestion.
Palestinian sources also admitted that the initiative was not making much progress, "since it would be necessary to corral 30 local cell leaders into it." A senior defense official said Palestinian reports of the initiative were largely psychological warfare.

MORE ON "COLLATERAL DAMAGE:" N.Z. Bear criticizes Eric Alterman's attempts at warbloggering (from which he has been backtracking somewhat), praised here yesterday.

Alterman may be morphing into a warblogger, but thus far he’s not a very good one. It's not a tough call at all. The responsibility for the death of Sheik Shehada --- and the civilians killed --- lies with the Israeli military. They carried out the attack. They bear the responsibility for its consequences, for good and ill.
This doesn’t mean the attack was morally wrong. If the planners of the attack judged that by killing this one man --- and the civilians around him --- they would be saving hundreds of innocents down the line, then it was morally justifiable. But to imply that the “ultimate responsibility” for Shehada’s family lies with anyone other than the IDF is exactly the same twisted moral calculus that terrorists like Shehada use to justify the murder of Israeli citizens. “The Israelis have left us no choice", they say, "we have no other options but to use these tactics!”
When a terrorist blows himself up on a streetcorner and murders a score of Israeli civilians, what do we hear? It is the fault of the Israelis; their oppression of the Palestinian people has left them no choice! And now, when the IDF’s actions have resulted --- accidentally, and yes, that does make a difference, but resulted nonetheless --- in the death of civilians? It is the fault of the Palestinians, of Hamas, because, in Alterman’s words, “ If you ask for war, you are asking to have your civilians slaughtered, unless you can keep the war on the other side’s turf. Well, Hamas asked.”
This is barbaric nonsense. We can’t afford to fall into that trap, or to play those moral equivalence games. There are always choices. We are the side that accepts the consequences of our choices, and takes responsibility for the morality of our acts. We do not cry out that the enemy forced us into our tactics: we act to defend our interests with the force of arms, and with the force of our own conscience. Sometimes this will lead to the death of innocents: and this we must accept as a responsibility which we bear with regret.
But we don’t simper and attempt to pin blame on our enemies for deeds done with our own hands.
If Alterman is trying out for the warblogging team, he’s going to need to learn that just crying for blood doesn’t make the cut. The reasons matter. In fact, they’re everything.

I think that there are some problems with Mr. Bear's analysis. Bear emphasizes that he is not saying that Israel's actions were unjustified, but I think his emphasis on "moral responsibility" begs the question. What Bear seems to be saying is that Israel bears moral responsibility for the deaths of the civilians, but he is not saying that Israel's actions were morally unjustified. But isn't that the same question? (Think of how ridiculous it seemed for Janet Reno to "take responsibility" for the deaths at Waco, while the idea of her suffering any adverse consequences wasn't even considered.) If Israel's actions were morally justified, then what does it mean to say that they were "morally responsible?"
As I read Bear, he is saying that it's mainly an exercise to ward off moral flabbiness, because taking responsibility for our own actions forces us to perform the moral calculations ensuring that each action we take is correct. By contrast, saying "they made me do it" and abdicating responsibility for your own actions ensures that you will never undertake those necessary moral calculations, and thus have a strong likelihood of acting immorally.
The problem I have is that a Palestinian-style abdication of responsibility, justly decried by Bear, is in and of itself a moral argument - it is a statement that "the evil we face is so great that any action we take is justified in response." (That argument can't be dismissed as always being invalid, because it may be true in cases of genocide. Hiroshima is a justifiable option when the altrenative is Auschwitz. Of course, the Palestinians' obsessive terrorism is bringing them closer - though not yet there - to being the justified victims of such a response, rather than the justified perpetrators. But I digress.)
Basically, I think Bear's argument is close to a distinction without a difference. There is no reason to say "they made me do it," but the issue is not especially important if the action was, in fact, justified.

ALL QUIET ON THE NORTHERN FRONT? Dennis "Peace Process" Ross warns that Syria and Iran may be conspiring to open up a second front between Israel and Lebanon, as well as working against efforts to stop suicide bombings inside Israel:

With a constant stream of supply from both the Iranians and Syrians, Hezbollah is building a formidable arsenal of highly mobile rockets.
Longer-range Katyushas are the mainstay of the arsenal, but the Syrians are supplementing these weapons with the Syrian 270mm rocket.
What makes these rockets so potentially destabilizing is their range. The rockets Hezbollah used to possess could only threaten the immediate border area of northern Israel. While bad enough from an Israeli perspective, the new rockets have ranges stretching over 70 kilometers. Israel's industrial area below Haifa will now be within the sights of Hezbollah rocketeers. Does anyone think Israel will tolerate such attacks? Can there be any doubt, should one be fired, that Israel would go after not only Hezbollah but Syria as well?
Hafez Assad was no slouch when it came to threatening Israel. But he controlled the flow of Iranian arms to Hezbollah, and he never provided Syrian weapons directly. He certainly did not mind Hezbollah keeping the pressure on Israel, but he was not about to let Hezbollah drag him into a war with Israel either.
But Bashar Assad seems to lack his father's sense of limits. As if providing weapons to Hezbollah was not enough, he is also procuring spare parts for Iraq from Eastern Europe. That's something new; his father sought Saddam Hussein's demise, not his strengthening.
What could the younger Mr. Assad be thinking? The logic is difficult to grasp unless one looks at the increasingly close connection he has been developing with Hezbollah and Iran. Iranian officials routinely stop in Damascus both before and after visiting Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah. Iran is pushing Hezbollah to cooperate more with Hamas in the war against Israel. Recently, the Israelis have arrested Hezbollah operatives in the West Bank.
Iran is also pushing Hamas very hard to continue the suicide bombings in Israel. As I heard from Israelis and Palestinians, recent efforts by the Palestinian Authority officials in Gaza to convince Hamas to stop terror attacks against Israelis appeared to be making headway until the Hamas leadership in Gaza got explicit instructions from the Hamas leadership outside--with considerable Iranian pressure--to persist with the bombings. The same was true for the Islamic Jihad, whose leader Ramadan Shallah resides in Damascus and was equally insistent that the bombing must continue.
Iran and Syria clearly want the conflict to continue between Israelis and Palestinians. Perhaps they believe Israel will lose its resolve and gradually be weakened to the point of collapse. They seem prepared to fight to the last Palestinian to produce such an eventuality. Perhaps they fear American determination to go after Saddam Hussein, believing if he goes, they will be next. Their reasoning might be that the more the situation between Israelis and Palestinians embroils the region, the less the U.S. will be capable of going after Saddam.
While plausible, neither of these explanations can account for the buildup of longer-range rockets in southern Lebanon. Perhaps here we can see another connection to their fears of American military action to replace Saddam. Just as Saddam tried to transform the war in 1991 away from being the international community against Iraq into an Arab-Israeli conflict, it is possible that Iran, Syria and Hezbollah believe that a second front must be opened up once the U.S. begins to act against Saddam. If they cannot head the action off, they might hope to make it more difficult to sustain with a second front.

DEPARTMENT OF "HELL FREEZES OVER:" I never thought I'd be endorsing a piece by Eric Alterman, much less reproducing it in full. But credit must be given where due. Here are his thoughts on the Israeli killing of Sheik Salah Shehade, the Hamas arch-terrorist:

I don’t know if killing the military chief of Hamas, together with his family, is an effective military measure-as surely someone will rise to replace him and it will make a lot more people angry, perhaps even angry enough to become suicide bombers. It may not bring Israel and the Palestinians any closer to peace or mutual security. But I don’t have a moral problem with it.
Hamas is clearly at war with Israel. Hamas feels empowered to strike Israeli civilians inside Israel proper and not just on the war zone of West Bank. Sheik Salah Shehade could have protected his family by keeping away from them. He didn’t and owing to his clear legitimacy as a military target, they are dead too.
So tough luck, fella.
War is hell.

The irony gets even richer when you consider this Jerusalem Post item, which argues that the killing of Shehada's family may indicate a shift in Israeli strategy:

Top generals said that had they known innocent people would likely be hurt they never would have approved the strike.
Come on! Really!?
This is the same IDF that has been praised for excellent intelligence involved in dozens of targeted interceptions of terrorists over the past two years.
These claims are dubious. And besides, what was the military thinking? That it could send in a fighter bomber and blow up a man's house and only he would be killed?
The strike on Shehadeh which killed his wife and children and other apparent innocent civilians is a turning point in Israel's war on terror.
This marks a definite change in policy and the question remains whether this change will boomerang and lead to the deaths of more Israelis in revenge attacks by Hamas.
...Perhaps the IAF was ordered to deliberately target the family of the Hamas leader as a warning to others. And this is something that has to be taken into account.
And why not? The government has finally started thinking that it had to do something to deter terrorism and is taking actions against family members of terrorists.
It demolished the homes of those who were involved in the Emmanuel bus ambush, and it has declared its intention to deport family members of terrorists.
Not even Alterman implies that the Israelis meant to kill his family as a matter of policy. Imagine: Eric Alterman goes easier on the Sharon government than a Jerusalem Post columnist!
I doubt the attack really represents a major change in policy; it seems more likely that the civilian deaths were a result of an unholy combination of mistaken estimates of civilian presence and desperation to finally get him (see this piece for an account.)
Also, check out Amir Oren's article on why killing Shehade was good policy for peace:
[C]ompared to him, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin is a moderate. The old considerations, from the days of Yihiyeh "the engineer" Ayash, about whether the assassination ignited a cycle of provocation and reaction, may still be true in principle, but have lost their practical meaning. Last week in Washington, former Shin Bet chief Yaakov Perry said that Ayash - most of whose attacks were committed during Perry's stint - needed three months to recruit and prepare a suicide bomber, operationally and ideologically. Now it takes hours. Mohammed Dahlan, reacting by phone from Ramallah, said that in the past, the people who send the suicide bombers into action had to look for bombers. Now the bombers are looking for people to send them.
With so many soldiers ("bomb-fodder") in the Palestinian death cult, the impact of the loss of a general like Shehade may well outweigh the marginal increase in volunteers and/or motivation for terrorism.
UPDATE: John Podhoretz points out that Israel's actions were permitted under the Geneva Convention.

"BETTER LATE THAN NEVER" DEPARTMENT: Amnesty International has condemned "all attacks by Palestinians armed groups against Israeli civilians since September 29, 2000."

THE POWER OF FIFTH COLUMNS, OR "WHEN WINE ENTERS, SECRETS EXIT": Hirsch Goodman has a fascinating column about a dinner he had with a Palestinian "peace activist:"

We have known each other for quite a few years and I have always had deep respect for his views, hence the importance I attach to what he said that night, despite the three glasses of wine that went down with his meal.
The Zionist experiment, he told me, is over. The Palestinians have discovered a strategic weapon: suicide bombers. Once anathema, they are now considered heroes. The shahids (martyrs), once seen as religious fanatics, are now nationalist freedom fighters. Moreover, he continued, they are growing in legitimacy all the time. The Arab world understands them and even some Europeans seem to. The Israelis have F-16s, the Palestinians, suicide bombers. The equivalency is obvious to all.
Now, he continued, there are thousands out there waiting in line to kill as many Israelis as they can, to make your lives hell on earth. They belong to no organization, but want revenge and are prepared to die for it. You think you are going to stop them by punishing their parents. You are wrong. You won’t even know who they are or where they came from. Nothing will be left of them.
We are going to hit you everywhere we can: gas stations, theaters, parks, wedding halls. You will know no happiness. It will be one funeral after the next.
And then, while you are reeling, the 1.5 million Palestinian allies, the Israeli Palestinians, our brothers and your enemy, will rise up as well. They are just waiting for a sign from us. They know you better than you know yourselves. They speak your language and know every street in every one of your cities. They are familiar with every nook and every cranny. And they will join at the right time. Make no mistake about it.
And then what does Israel do? Transfer? Can you imagine CNN and the BBC reporting live as the Jews transfer truckload after truckload of Palestinians over the border? Your country will lose all legitimacy. The Arab world will go to war against it. You will be a pariah, worse than South Africa under apartheid. Your generals will be tried for war crimes. The world will impose sanctions. Your F-16s will run dry of fuel.
Your people will leave in droves, especially professionals.
The Zionist experiment is over.

With "peace activists" like these, who needs terrorists?
Buried in this declaration of war is the true lede, the elaboration of Israel's greatest vulnerability: the chance that Arab citizens of Israel will actively join the Palestinians and fight against Israel.
It is apparent that the Palestinians do not control their Israeli cousins in the manner fantasized by Goodman's peace-loving dinner companion. (The same way it is apparent that Al-Qaeda does not yet have nuclear weapons; if they can use this weapon, what are they waiting for?) But if the Arab Israelis ever did start aiding terrorism on a large scale (something which has been fairly rare up to now), engaging in sabotage or otherwise fighting against Israel, that would have the potential for destructive consequences beyond the reach of the current conflict.
In my opinion, Israel would be able to, if the situation deteriorated sufficiently, effect a quasi-"transfer" (especially if it is a matter of moving Palestinians within the West Bank and/or to Gaza) and survive (especially if it is accompanied by the evacuation of isolated, indefensible settlements). But if Israel ever had to send tanks against or attempt to expel up to a fifth of its own citizens, that would be another matter entirely. That scenario is the Palestinians' true nuclear weapon; it is fortunate that they do not appear to possess it.

THE ECONOMIST'S FIRST PRINCIPLES: Here's a report on the reflexive anti-Israel atttitudes of the Economist.

ISOLATIONISM: Yossi Klein Halevi has another great article in TNR regarding the consequences in Israel of near-total international condemnation. One point is particularly noteworthy:

A benign or at least neutral international climate is a key precondition for Israeli willingness to take risks for peace. Though it's widely assumed that the Oslo process restored Israel's diplomatic standing, the sequence of events was actually the opposite. Only after the former Soviet bloc, China, India, and much of the Third World renewed diplomatic relations with Israel in the early '90s, following the Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, did Israel feel safe enough to begin negotiating with the PLO.
...International detractors who turn every Israeli act of war into a war crime and subject the Jewish state to a level of moral judgment not applied to any other nation are inciting the very hard-line forces they deplore.

BABY STEPS? Remember the terrorist baby picture? In TNR, Spencer Ackerman outlines the horrifying aspects of the various Palestinian responses to the furor surrounding the photo:

Last month former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak created quite a ruckus--among intellectuals, anyway--when he suggested that Palestinians have a cultural predisposition to dishonesty. Writing with Israeli historian Benny Morris in the New York Review of Books, Barak declared that Palestinians "are products of a culture in which to tell a lie ... creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
Critics pounced on the statement, accusing Barak of "the vilification of an entire people." And yet Barak's portrait of a Palestinian culture that places little premium on truth might be the most flattering image of Palestinian society currently available.
After all, the competing snapshot is one of a suicide bomber in Pampers.
...The interesting reactions came from the Palestinians--wildly divergent as they were. Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat did what the PA does best when confronted with unpleasant truths: accuse Israel of manufacturing them. As with the discovery of the Karine A munitions ship, as with the records of financial support from the PA to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades found in Arafat's Ramallah compound during Operation Defensive Shield, Erekat called the photograph "lies that [the Israelis] use to cover their own crimes, the murder of our children." Stopping short of claiming the picture was fraudulent, Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo accused the Israelis of "using this photo to justify Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and to go on with their occupation of the Palestinian territories."
But then the baby's family weighed in. After first denying relation to the infant shahid, Redwan Abu Turki acknowledged both his grandchild and the authenticity of the photograph, even as he claimed the get-up was nothing but a joke. "The picture was taken just for the fun of it," he shrugged. After all, in the streets of Gaza and Jenin, suicide bombers are heroes. Wondered the baby's uncle, "What's all the fuss about?"
...If Erekat and Abed Rabbo feel compelled to lie about the Abu Turki picture of the baby bomber, it is because they realize just how repulsive the concept really is. Far more horrifying will be the day when a Palestinian leader looks at a picture of an infant strapped with dynamite and, rather than denying its veracity, doubles over in convulsive fits of hysterics.

SHAPE UP OR... Fouad Ajami, in his usual poetic way, tells the Palestinians to break with their destructive nostalgia. He also points out the essential truth of Oslo
For nearly a decade, under the Clinton presidency, and the unwritten rules of the peace of Oslo, the regime of Yasser Arafat was granted undue indulgence. The man winked at terror, aided and abetted and committed it, but he was Pax Americana's man, and he was seen as the best of a bad lot. It was either Arafat or the deluge, we were told.
But it was Arafat and the deluge. We couldn't have a democratic Palestine, the logic had it; we had better settle for a stable Palestine. The bargain did not work. Arafat was skilled at taking the furies and the failures of his regime, as well as the wrath of his people, and diverting it, away from himself, toward Israel and its American benefactor. He had young men and young women aplenty willing to commit terrible deeds: He would feed this cult of "martyrdom," the merciless suicide bombers, and now and then, under duress, issue tepid condemnations of terror that he himself had exalted and called forth.

SOMEONE GETS IT: Ari Shavit has some intriguing thoughts on the Bush speech in Ha-aretz, arguing that Bush is applying his distaste for the "soft bigotry of low expectations" against the Palestinians.

A PICTURE WORTH NO WORDS: Further evidence of the psychotic death cult possessing the Palestinians.

PARTIALLY ON VACATION: Joshua Marshall checks in from vacation to object to the Bush speech, comparing it to "cheap donuts."
Marshall states:
The highlight, the shot in the arm, of this exercise is supposed to be the US endorsement of a Palestinian state, or rather a provisional state.
That comment presupposes that the purpose of the speech was to give the Palestinians a "shot in the arm." While the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post persist in that misunderstanding, the rest of the speech served strong notice to the contrary. The speech was much more akin to an intervention, with the aim of forcing the Palestinians to confront the hopelessness of the current path. Hopelessness is the key. In the words of Joe Katzman, "until the Palestinians lose all hope, they must not be allowed to have it."
Marshall also says:
The rub to the proposal is that the Palestinians can have their state - or rather their provisional state - only if they get rid of their current leadership. So they can rule themselves if they choose leaders acceptable to the United States and/or the Israelis. Not to be knee-jerk about this, but isn't that almost the definition of colonialism, the antithesis of what it means to have your own state? The essence of sovereignty or statehood is that you pick your own leaders.
I think Marshall would agree that a Palestinian state under current leadership would be, to put it mildly, a danger to Israel and to the interests of the United States. Were that state to be in existence, Israel and/or the US would be justified in invading it and terminating its sovereignty when faced with such a threat. I don't see why preventing such a state from coming into being is worse, whether you call it "colonialism" or "self-defense." Sovereignty is not an absolute right; it can be infringed when a nation poses a threat to its neighbors, and may forfeit its right to exist when it poses a threat to the existence of another.
Marshall's retort would probably be this sentence from his piece:
But that's the law of power and violence. And that law more or less gives the Palestinians free rein to continue their own campaign of unbridled violence.
No, it doesn't.
Leaving aside the relevance of comparative morality (i.e., if there is a contest for survival betwen two entities, and only one of them has a deliberate policy of murdering innocent civilians, the choice of which one to support is not especially difficult), the existence of a Palestinian state has never been predicated on violence. Just the opposite - two words: Camp David. The Palestinian's turn to violence was in rejection of a peaceful alternative, and no "law" permits violence in the face of such an alternative.
I don't think Marshall meant everything I'm accusing him of, but his piece lends itself to that interpretation.
Take it up again when you get back from hiatus.

BUSH TO ARAFAT: "DROP DEAD": I was fortunate enough to hear President Bush's magisterial speech while driving home yesterday.
I think the President's speech was the best one on the subject since...since the statement of "Whatever decision Minister Dayan makes, I wish him good luck" (or similar words to such effect), allegedly made by then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Israeli emissaries seeking assurances that the U.S. would not intervene if Israel would pre-emptively launch what became the Six-Day War. I cannot think of any public addresses that compare to it; certainly the amount of recognized realities in the speech far exceeded the recommended dosage for the digestive system of your average State Department official. But this site has a long-standing belief that free-riding is the best policy. Accordingly, in lieu of an extended exposition on the subject, I direct you to the following:
1-3: Steven Den Beste, who has outdone himself again in three separate posts: an overview, a discussion of the ramifications for the Arab world generally, and an argument why the speech should be viewed as an ultimatum paving the way for a larger war. I think the last piece may be more wishful thinking than intended policy, but let's hope it's true.
(As an aside - why is that something to be hoped for? Well, just to pick one example, is there another way to change a region with these types of kindergarten graduations? Tal G. provides an English translation of an article on the affair, along with a link to the Hebrew original.)
4-7: Start your Joe Katzman reading with this analysis of Palestinian strategy. (Unfortunately, the Stratfor piece referenced in the article is no longer freely available.)
Continue with this scenario as to how the current conflict could widen into something much, much bigger. Then see this piece about the abyss towards which the Palestinians and most other Arab states are careening, as well as this one.
8: This Stratfor item, freely available for now, discusses the ramifications of the speech for Saudi Arabia and the larger fight against Al Qaeda. It is a good summary of the Saudi motives behind their promotion of the Palestinian cause and attempted dissuasion of the U.S. from an invasion of Iraq.
9: David Brooks has a good short summary.
10: In Ha-aretz, David Landau got off the best soundbite: "Yasser Arafat, the seemingly immortal leader of the Palestinian national movement, was politically assassinated Monday by President George W. Bush."

I RULE! I won't be able to post again until Monday night. But in the meantime, you may amuse yourselves by reading the first (as far as I know) "Warblogger Watch" nasty takedown of yours truly. The post to which they refer now looks even better. I may respond to them in greater detail when I return.

BACK AGAIN: Sorry for the lack of posts. There's so much I want to write regarding the recent orgy of terrorism that the Palestinians have unleashed on Israel. I have finally been moved to finsh - more or less - the following post which I've been working on for a long time. Much more in the morning.

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME, OR BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR: Will a Palestinian state actually serve U.S. interests? It seems to me that the assumptions to that effect fall away if you think things through about how things will occur in the real world, as opposed to the fantasy world of a campus protest rally or a U.N. conference. Here’s why:
1) How will a Palestinian state come about?
Massive U.S. intervention and sponsorship. The intifada of the last two years has destroyed any trust between the two sides, and the reversion of the Europeans and the U.N. to their conventional role as abettors of genocide has ruined their chances of playing any constructive role (other than staying in Israeli hotels, as the tourism industry has collapsed). The new Palestinian state will be labeled “Made in the U.S.A.”
2) Will the Palestinians get everything they want in their state?
Given that polls suggest that they want the elimination of Israel, not likely. Even under their stated goals of 100% of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, any Palestinian state likely to come into being in the next few years would involve some or all of the following:
A) Israeli annexation of some of the larger settlements close to the Green Line (if you think Ma’ale Adumim or Efrat are going to be dismantled, think again) – thus, less than 100% of the West Bank being given to the Palestinians;
B) An extremely minimal “right of return,” if any, that leaves Arafat in the position of having to tell the refugees “no, you can’t go back to the house in Jaffa which you fled over 50 years ago.”;
C) Official demilitarization (which will be flouted, but that’s another issue), lack of power over airspace, and other such limitations on what most nations rightfully consider perks of statehood.
Also, the new state is likely to be an economic basket case for a while after its formation (especially if Arafat and his Merry Kleptomaniacs are in a position to access any of the international aid money). Its proximity to and economic dependence on Israel, and the fact that Palestinians have a reputation as being among the most entrepreneurial of the Arab peoples, would bode well for its economic well-being in the future, there is no question that it will take a while for the state to be economically viable.
3) How will the Palestinians rationalize the fact that their state does not match their expectations (fantasies)?
Presumably – and likely stoked by Arafat, if he is still in charge, as a defense against charges of “sellout” – by focusing on what they did not get and resolving not to forget about it, that such things will be gotten in the future. The Palestinians have shown that they can remember with the best of them.
In a typical negotiation, having one side say “we’ll get’em next time” might be encouraged as a way to get that side to agree to an imperfect deal this time. That is because in a typical situation, that party will usually either (a) try to win the points “next time” in a semi-respectable fashion, or (b) the immediacy of the unmet concerns will dissipate as the party focuses on dealing with what was achieved. Will either be true in this case?
4) What will be the result of that rationalization?
Two complementary results:
A) The Palestinians will be mightily disappointed, and will blame those they deem responsible.
B) Since they got what they did get after a two-year orgy of murder – the Hizbullah-in-Lebanon strategy having worked again – they will be sorely tempted to think that pushing further will yield the rest of what they want.
The Palestinians could focus on trying to make their situation better. Or they can focus on blaming the parties they deem responsible for taking away their dreams. Undoubtedly there will be some of the former, but there is 50 years’ worth of precedent that says an awful lot of energy will be focused on the latter.
According to Michael Isikoff in Newsweek (to which I can no longer find a link), supposedly Bill Clinton’s Camp David proposals included a requirement for all parties to declare that the settlement was a final resolution of all their disputes, and that neither party had any remaining claims. (The idea was also pushed by Charles Krauthammer at the time.) Clinton understood that if the Palestinians were to be allowed to pocket their gains and simultaneously retain claims to whatever they had supposedly “compromised” away, then the settlement would only set the stage for future conflict. Can you see the State Department allowing this future point to get in the way of a deal in the present? I didn’t think so, either.
Aside #1: The tendency to focus on the negative will be amplified by a permutation of what Mickey Kaus has called the “Feiler Faster Thesis” – that the ramifications of news and information get processed much faster today than in less technologically advanced times. In this case, the new Palestine’s failure to immediately thrive economically will be treated as a disaster – even if its growth & development were to be impressive in historical terms, as it may be with its proximity to Israel and all the international aid that will slosh around. Combine that with an inertial media that will be slow to give up reporting stories about the Palestinians’ misery, and you have a recipe for a nascent nation that will continue its habit of accentuating the negative.)
Aside #2: I’m not going to get into the likelihood that the Arab nations will work to undermine the possibility of a thriving Palestinian polity, which is strong – read the chapter of Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs titled “The Orphaned Peace” if you don’t believe me; you’ll never look at the “Saudi peace proposal” the same way again.
To recap: The formation of a Palestinian state, in anything resembling the manner which seems most likely at present will mean that U.S. will be seen as responsible for a situation which simultaneously makes the Palestinians feel betrayed and encourages them to hope for getting everything they want if they just push harder.
So:
5) What will be the near-term result of creating a Palestinian state under anything resembling current conditions?
Undoubtedly, the Palestinians will be encouraged to launch more terrorism against Israel. Regardless of how unsympathetic to Israel the State Department seems sometimes, I can’t imagine how even they would deem that situation to serve America’s interests in the region.
More importantly, since (as far as the Palestinians are concerned) the U.S. will have become a “betrayer” of Palestinian interests, and with the efficacy of terrorism having been proven, the Palestinians will also have great incentive to use terrorism directly against America.
In sum: The creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions will lead to increased terrorism – certainly against Israel and quite probably against America.

A PALESTINIAN FAMILY: Today's NY Times has a chilling account (and equally chilling photo) of another mother who only wants the best for her son:

Just what the Israelis were up against was suggested by a videotape, released by the militant group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the attack, showing the Palestinian killed in the clash, 23-year-old Muhammad al-Abed.
He is seen holding hands with his mother, Naima al-Abed, then gently kissing her on the head, and placing his green fighter's headband with an Islamic inscription over her white scarf. "I am not losing you because you are going to paradise," the mother tells her son on the tape. "Our message to the Israeli occupiers and killers is that this is our land. And our sons that we love are no more dear to us than our land. Their blood will redeem it."

FROM THE HISTORIAN'S MOUTH: Here's an excellent interview with Michael Oren, the author of Six Days of War, a new history of the Six-Day War.

THE FACE OF (FUTURE) BATTLE: I'm late to this story, but if anyone hasn't already seen it, you must read - sitting down and on an empty stomach - about the incarnation of evil, in the form of the "people" who are responsible for this girl. If reading the account doesn't give you enough nightmares, Steven Den Beste has a picture of the girl.

I COULDN'T HAVE SAID IT BETTER MYSELF: It's good when someone like William Safire makes most of the arguments I would have made against a "provisional" Palestinian state, only more eloquently:

1. Statehood, even if qualified as provisional or interim, confers a degree of sovereignty. That means control of borders, the ability to make treaties, and to import arms from Iraq and by sea from Iran.
2. Partial statehood would give Arafat control of an airport. A plane loaded with fuel or explosives could hit a major Tel Aviv building within three minutes, too quickly for Israeli jets to scramble. Ritual condemnation would follow.
3. Any form of statehood would limit Israel's ability to search out bomb factories and arrest terrorist leaders. What is now a tolerable sweep into disputed territory would be denounced in the U.N. as invasion pure and simple. That would trigger European economic boycotts and draw Arab allies into a wider war.
Why, then, offer Arafat's autocracy this pre-emptive prize? State Department Arabists claim it would show "movement" away from solid Bush support for Israel and, in the still-dovish Shimon Peres's phrase, offer a "political horizon" to Palestinians. But some of us see recognition of an unreformed P.L.O. as offering a taste of triumph to jihadists from Netanya to New York.

...What about Mubarak's "timetable" for full statehood, with a down payment of the 40 percent of the West Bank and Gaza now under Palestinian control, including almost all the Arab population? That is similar to the territorial timetable dreamily agreed to at Oslo, which assumed that regular concessions of land would lead to mutual trust and peace. Instead, Israel's calibrated concessions led to Arafat's insatiable demands and ultimately to war. A timetable for a state of Palestine would become a deadline for Israeli negotiators.

A friend recently joked that the Bush Doctrine has been altered as follows: for every terrorist regime toppled by the U.S., a new one must be created in its place.

UPDATE: The editors of Newsday object from the opposite perspective:

There is something absurd about the idea of declaring a provisional state before a defining its borders and resolving the fate of Jewish settlements existing within them. Even the symbolic usefulness of such a declaration would evaporate in the heat of the profound issues that would need to be settled to make it work.
And what does "provisional" mean? That it might be dissolved if things don't work out? That's a recipe for Palestinian rage. The only sensible provision - and one on which Bush and Sharon justifiably insist - is that no meaningful negotiations on a Palestinian state can even start unless suicide bombings and other forms of violence end. On that, everyone must agree. Bush is right, for now, to focus U.S. efforts on pragmatic ways of reducing violence and pressing the Palestinian Authority for reforms.

Adding together the Safire and Newsday criticisms, you see the following: The ill effects of a "provisional" Palestinian state will persist, while the benefits will evaporate quickly. Another winner from the State Department.

DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL INSECURITY: Is Colin Powell merely playing the good cop (as far as the international community & media are concerned) or does he actually believe the BS he is shoveling? I used to think that it was primarily the former (see this article for a good summary of why) but based on Ari Fleischer's criticism of the idea for a "provisional" Palestinian state, I'm not so sure.
Regarding the idea, I find it hard to see any benefit to it. Will it make negotiatins over the shape of the new entity less intractable? No. Will it encourage intransigence on the part of the Palestinians? Almost certainly. And if (when) negotiations fail and the Palestinians resume terrorism (assuming they stop for the negotiations), will the state be "cancelled?" I didn't think so either.
Much more on the subject later.

WORTH THE WAIT? Sorry for the absence of posts. Here's today's must-read: a speech by Charles Krauthammer on the Messianic roots and failings of the "peace process." You can also follow a link on the page to listen to the speech in streaming media. (Via Charles Johnson.)

ENDING THE CONFLICT? Here's a poll indicating that a majority of Palestinians see the elimination of Israel as the goal of the intifada.

ABOUT TIME: Charles Johnson has the scoop: the European Union has stopped funding the Palestinian Authority in response to the lawsuit of a terrorism victim. Who said lawsuits have no beneficial consequences?
UPDATES: This Ha'aretz piece (via Tal G.) has more details; it does not mention the lawsuit, attributing the decision to Israel's persuasive skills (or, more likely, evidence that became to much for even the EU to ignore). Also, this report idnicates that the suspension of funding is only anticipated to last until June 19. If that is correct (far from certain; the Ha'aretz piece does not say so and it may be more reliable than the Arutz Sheva report), it's too bad; being cut of from the EU's largesse could be the killing-blow to the PA.

DUELING AMBULANCES: Try this juxtaposition on for size; I don't think it's one the New York Times will be using as a story basis anytime soon.
First, check out this moving story about Israeli teenage girls who volunteer for ambulance duty in Jerusalem, and how they deal with having to respond to terrorist attacks on a regular basis.
Second, check out this account of a Palestinian terrorist who tried to escape detection by traveling in an ambulance.

THE FOUR SINS OF THE JOURNALISTS: Tal G. notes the transcript of an address given by the editor of Ha'aretz to the World Editors' Forum in Belgium. It begins with this:

First, the good news: Abu Ali's nine children are alive and well - as well as children can be among the ruins of the Jenin refugee camp. Please deliver this news to all of your friends who may have read, a few weeks ago, Abu Ali's mournful declaration: "All my nine children are buried beneath the ruins." Abu Ali's photograph was spread across a double page in a very distinguished and influential European magazine, under the title: "The survivors tell their story."
Israeli tanks and bulldozers had entered the camp, Abu Ali recalled. He went out to fill his car, telling his nine children to meet him at a nearby intersection. But the Israeli forces blocked his way back, and it was a week, he told the reporter, before he could return to the ruins of what had been his home. "It smells of death here," he is quoted as saying. "I am sure all my children are buried beneath the rubble. Come back in a week and you will see their corpses."
The reporter and his editors did not wait a week and published the tentative story as is. They were not satisfied with the extent of the tragedy that they could see with their eyes and legitimately depict in their copy. The desire to hype the story blunted their healthy journalistic instincts to doubt and double-check any story before publishing it.
While preparing this address, I made some inquiries about Abu Ali's case. First, final numbers indicate that three children and four women were killed during the fighting in the Jenin refugee camp. Second, Abu Ali's children were not among them. And third, the magazine did not bother to tell its readers of this relatively happy end to its story. Perhaps because they are tired of writing editor's notes on Middle East stories.
The past 20 months of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four fundamental sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance. The story of Abu Ali conveniently exemplifies all four.

OLDIE BUT GOODIE: I just found an old post from Alex Whitlock which still remains true:

In 2000, Barak offered more than what most Israelis were willing to concede and it was rejected by the Palestinians. Barak himself was electorally deposed for his efforts and replaced with someone considerably less diplomatic. In 2002, a plan proposed by Saudi Arabia was rejected by both the Israelis and Palestinians as insufficient. These circles just don't meet. So even leaving aside whose demands are more reasonable, war at this point is inevitable.
"But still," voices cry out, "we must try something. We cannot let the violence and bloodshed continue." Carried with this plea is the implied, but not often expressed and therefore rarely challenged, question of "what harm can there be in trying?"
Again, leaving out the moral implications who is right and wrong, there is procedurally much harm to be done in trying. Israel's actions are, for the most part, a top-down operation. If Sharon orders an attack, it's carried out. If Sharon orders his men to pull back, they do. If they do not, it is within Sharon's power to relieve them of their duties. Sharon, as the head of a state and commander of an army, is held accountable for his actions.
Palestinian actions, on the other hand, are considerably more de-centrilized. The fighters on the Palestinian side are not soldiers in a hierarchal army. They are instead an independent network of agents who take orders from several locations. Therefore, it is possible that even if Arafat is truly a peace-loving individual, he is powerless to stop the actions of Hamas and similar independent entities. Therefore, to the extent that Arafat does want peace, he is incapable and therefore not always accountable for the actions of his people. That means that to effectively create peace, we would not only need the approval of Arafat, but we would also need the approval of the leaders of each and every one of the independent entities that has declared Israel its mortal enemy. In the past, we have generally left it to Arafat to get his people in line and he has been unable, or unwilling, to do so. Indeed, Hamas and Hizbollah have claimed that nothing short of the elimination of Israel would satisfy them.
That, to say the least, is unacceptable to the Israelis. Therefore, by asking Israel to step down and being incapable of making the Palestinians step down, we are creating a strategic environment very favorable to Palestine. So even by trying to be objective and to not take sides, we are de facto taking the side of the Palestinians. It is within our rights to do so if we choose, but we are unable to expect the Israelis to simultaneously accept our opposing position and do as we ask them to.

NOT A BANG, BUT A WHIMPER: The Israelis have pulled out of Ramallah.Steven Den Beste explains why their current tactics vis-a-vis Arafat are probably mistaken:

What they said to him tonight was this:
We are no longer interested in public displays of horror at the bombings and empty denunciations of them. Offers of arrests and imprisonment of the attackers in Palestinian revolving-door prisons do not wash. The only thing we will accept will be a cessation of attacks, so from now on when we suffer, you will also suffer personally, Chairman Arafat. We're going to visit you wherever you are after every attack from now on and shell the place. We won't be directly trying to kill you, but we're not going to try very hard not to, either, and one of these times you're going to get your wish and become a martyr. But if indeed that is not your wish, then the only way to prevent it is to actually stop the bombings. Nothing less will do. You're playing Russian Roulette now, and every bombing attack on us from now on represents a chance that you'll hit the jackpot and get your 72 virgins.
It isn't going to work. Those who are planning the bombing don't give a shit what Arafat says, or whether he's harmed. That's the reality: Arafat only controls some of the bombers. The only way he actually can stop the attacks is to start a Palestinian civil war by committing his forces to a real attempt to suppress Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah.
...And in the mean time, this represents yet another attempt by Israel to attempt to deal with Arafat. It still places Arafat at the center of the stage, as the one essential man in the diplomatic circus. It embraces the fallacious idea that it is still possible to accomplish something by communicating with Arafat, even if the communication is delivered with tank gunfire.
Tonight was "diplomacy by other means" but it was still an attempt to deal diplomatically with Arafat. No progress will be made until Arafat is actually off the stage, one way or another.

Den Beste also makes the best case for killing Arafat, at long last.

APPEASEMENT AT FOGGY BOTTOM: The State Department is rumored to have a draft "political horizon" which goes even beyond the Clinton plan, calling for the evacuation of all settlements in return for a declaration that Palestinian refugees will not be settled within Israel. (Even the Clinton plan called for the retention of a few settlements close to the Green Line, such as Ma'ale Adumim and the Etzion bloc.)
Tal G. in Jerusalem has an appropriate response:

I find that offensive.... if the Palestinians violate more agreements and murder more civilians, will the State Dept. then sweeten the deal even more?
Arafat's response to the draft will be: "Yes, except for the part about the refugees. ... and except for any other obligation on the Palestinian side. You can't ask a people to give up their rights after all."

AN APPROPRIATE RESPONSE: Hirsch Goodman, an editor of the Jerusalem Report who has been a persistent critic of Sharon and Netanyahu, had the following exchange with a Norweigan radio host while the battle of Jenin was raging:

"How," I was asked, "is the Israeli media covering the massacre in Jenin?""Are you so sure there is a massacre in Jenin?" I replied.
"Of course I’m sure, I read it here in our morning papers and see it on television: Hundreds have been killed. It’s a massacre."
"You think Israeli troops would commit a massacre?" I asked.
"It looks like it," he responded.
"Are we on air live?"
"Yes," he said.
"Well f... you," I said.

Regarding the Norweigan boycott of Israeli products in reaction to the non-existent "massacre," Goodman states:

The Europeans, and the European press in particular, owe Israel an apology. They lied. There was no massacre in Jenin. There was probably less collateral damage in almost two weeks of fighting in dense urban areas than in one day of NATO bombardment of Belgrade. It took 18 months of violence and almost 500 killed, two-thirds of them civilians, before Israel went into Jenin. The allies did not wait that long before they reduced Milosevic’s Yugoslavia to rubble.
So if there is going to be a boycott, perhaps Jewish caterers should stop serving Norwegian salmon and Danish herring and Belgian chocolates and French champagne, and Jewish tourists choose other destinations for their vacation this year. As for those Germans who seemed only too happy to start Jew-bashing again, perhaps there is still some work to be done on that Holocaust thing. Remember?

MORE STATEMENTS OF THE OBVIOUS: From today's Jerusalem Post editorial:

The urgent task is not to define the political horizon but the opposite: All talk of horizons, all conference preparations, all envoy missions, all time line preparations should simply stop. Because if they do not stop, the message is that the more Israelis are murdered, the more the world will run around looking for something to give the Palestinians so that they will stop.
The lesson of the failure of the 2000 Camp David summit and the subsequent Palestinian terror offensive is that peace cannot be achieved by satisfying Palestinian grievances. Camp David was the ultimate experiment in providing a political horizon. It failed. It failed because there is no fixed set of Palestinian demands short of Israel's destruction.
This does not mean there can never be peace with the Palestinians. Egypt and Jordan also had unlimited grievances, and potentially still do, but they made peace for lack of better alternative. In the pivotal case of Egypt, peace came not, as many argue, because Egypt was able to restore its honor from the trouncing it received in 1967, but because the 1973 war was once again a massive military defeat.
In other words, the real "political horizon" is the elimination of an alternative to making peace. This is what the current war with the Palestinians is about, and the sooner we win it, the sooner the clouds blocking the political horizon will disappear.

THIS AGAIN? Israeli troops are surounding Arafat's offices in Ramallah again.
I hope the Israelis aren't going to surround his offices and hope Arafat surrenders, or drops dead of a heart attack, or that the U.N. will pass a resolution allowing his exile. The lesson of his last siege, I think, is that if you're going to go after the guy, don't flinch. Otherwise, don't bother with him; just concentrate on actions which may actually have a practical impact - i.e., killing and arresting terrorists. Don't make the guy a martyr again unless you're willing to go all the way.
I still have a fantasy of missiles simultaneously going through the windows of Arafat, Sheik Yassin and the head of Hizbullah. (If that's the plan, perhaps the Israelis should wait for some "peace advocates" to rejoin Arafat and share his fate.)

LET'S SEE THE U.N. DO SOMETHING USEFUL: In the New Republic, Hillel Neuer proposes sending U.N. peacekeepers to Israel to act as human shields for the victims of terror rather than for the terrorists:

Throughout their post-Camp David jihad, Arafat's gunmen have repeatedly hid behind civilians, stashed weapons in mosques, and smuggled explosives through Red Crescent ambulances. Why, they even boast of it--not to our Western ears, of course, but to AL-JAZEERA and the Arab press. (For English transcripts, see www.memri.org.) How long before homicide bombers, bound for Tel Aviv to explode student cafés or Passover seders, would don blue helmets and drive white jeeps marked with black lettering reading "U.N."?
And we've seen this sort of behavior before. A year-and-a-half ago in Lebanon, after Israel's withdrawal was certified by Kofi Annan as complete, Hezbollah gunmen abducted and murdered three Israeli soldiers by posing as a U.N. border patrol. Found inside the abandoned Hezbollah vehicles, next to weapons and explosives, were U.N. insignia, uniforms, and license plates.
But it's not only the peacekeepers' passive potential to harm Israel that makes them so attractive to Jerusalem's enemies. More pernicious is the United Nations' active mischief. History demonstrates that these missions--typically conceived by the same unholy Euro-Arab axis that decided it was a good idea to award certified terror-sponsor Syria with membership on (and now the presidency of) the U.N. Security Council--are invariably biased against the Jewish state.
Consider the actions of Terje Larsen, the United Nations' Mideast mandarin. When asked last June by Israel's defense minister about a U.N.-filmed video of the Hezbollah abduction, an indignant Larsen tore into his counterpart, emphatically denying existence of any cassette. A week later the United Nations in New York acknowledged that, um, yes, there was a video. And more recently, Larsen--who has never quite managed to raise his voice against Hezbollah's mockery of international humanitarian law, nor against the Palestinian murder and maiming of thousands of Israeli civilians--pronounced himself "horrified" by Israel's anti-terror operation in Jenin. All this from a U.N. man who says he is "profoundly a friend of Israel." Imagine the views of his many colleagues who are profoundly not.
...So if the world wants to send monitors, by all means let them come. Let them come in droves. Let thousands come and circulate randomly among Israelis in all the country's blood-stained public places--Jerusalem's cafés, Netanya's hotels, Haifa's buses. In Jerusalem, let Larsen and friends eat pizza at Sbarro's, let Kofi and crew have coffee at Caffit. Have the monitors wear plainclothes and work shifts set by the Israelis. And then, throughout Israel, ask them to live as Israelis do.
Human bombs? Meet human shields. If Arafat and Hamas wanted to kill more Israelis, they'd have to risk killing representatives of their beloved international patron. Chances are they wouldn't do it. And if they did? Well, then the international community might finally come to understand just how dastardly the Palestinian terrorists really are--and allow Israel to exercise its legitimate right to self-defense.

WELL-SAID: On today's addition to the list of suicide bombings in Israel since the second intifada began, the following statements from Ha'aretz seem appropriate:

Based on what's being said both within the PA and by other Palestinian public figures, it seems that the condemnations and disgust with the suicide attackers are a genuine reflection of the immediate mood. But that is still a long way from the moment when the Israeli public will be persuaded that the Palestinian people and its leaders are indeed turning their back on the terrorist ways nurtured over the past years. Many now speak of the need to foil such attacks and prevent them, but that's not enough if a large segment of the Palestinian public continues to glorify terrorism and sanctify its perpetrators.
As long as the terror groups are not denounced and real pressure is not applied to end their activities, the people of Israel will find it difficult to take seriously condemnations by the PA. Security reforms in the PA are a necessary step for making the war on terror more efficient, but Palestinian public opinion also needs to change. Even those who believe that it's not Israel's business to reorganize the PA, have the right to expect that the PA be a responsible, representative organization that can be a true partner for political dialogue.

DOCUMENT REVIEW: Ze'ev Schiff reviews what Israel has found in the documents seized during Operation Defensive Shield.

NOT TO KICK A DEAD HORSE, BUT... For all those who are tempted to subscribe to Camp David revisionism, this extended interview with Shlomo Ben-Ami, the dovish foreign minister under Ehud Barak, should be sobering.

A GOOD GUIDING PRINCIPLE: In response to the most recent suicide bombing in Israel, here is a great example of a "yes,but..." statement of equivocation from Hanan Ashrawi:

"On our side, the people who do it are people who are individuals or small groups who are driven to desperation and anger by the Israeli activities, whereas when Israel does it, it does it as a matter of policy," she told the BBC.
"We don't see the same horror as the result of the massive killing of thousands of Palestinians."

For those who are not as gullible as the BBC, Steven Den Beste has the
definitive take-down:

The "individuals or small groups" to which she refers are the PFLP and Hamas, both of which are large and well organized and well financed. But she's trying to claim that suicide bombings aimed directly at Israeli civilians going about their everyday lives is the same as Israeli military operations which are directly targeted at Palestinian militants who actively plan attacks against Israel.
There is evidently no difference at all between arresting and deporting top officials of al Aqsa Brigade and breaking into a five year old girl's bedroom and blowing her brains out as she slept.
And then there's Ashrawi's last statement. One good reason we're not seeing horror about "massive killing of thousands of Palestinians" is that there haven't been "massive killings of thousands of Palestinians."
What there have been are inept attempts by the Palestinians to fool the world into thinking there were such massacres in Jenin even though there weren't any. What she's really bitching about is that we refuse to be gullible and to swallow Palestinian fabrications and propaganda.
I've reached the point where I assume that anything that any high ranking Palestinian says is a lie unless I see independent evidence supporting it. Ms. Ashrawi has not convinced me to change that policy.

A wise policy.

ROBERT THE POSEUR: Responding to Robert Wright's superficial treatments of game theory as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian war gets tiresome after a while. (I've tried it a couple of times already, and it doesn't seem to have worked.) So instead, check out this infinitely more sophisticated treatment of exactly the same topic by Douglas Turnbull.

AN OASIS: Jonathan Chait has an absolutely fabulous article in Slate explaining why the Israeli incursion into the West Bank was successful, and why the media cannot admit it. Here are some excepts:

Last week a suicide bomber killed 15 Israelis outside of Tel Aviv. Here is how a New York Times editorial reacted: "But as was sadly demonstrated again yesterday, no amount of military action can stop the suicidal madness. That can only happen if there is Palestinian moderation, Israeli restraint and progress toward an equitable settlement."
You have probably read sentiments along these lines so many times that this reasoning sounds sensible. But it's complete nonsense. First of all, the bomber came from the radical group Hamas, which openly rejects any peace with Israel and tends to strike anytime progress toward peace appears imminent. So, far from deterring suicide bombings by Hamas, an "equitable settlement" would likely have provoked more. Second, prior to Israel's offensive in the West Bank, suicide bombers were striking at nearly a once-a-day rate. Since then, they've struck at a rate closer to once a month. Third, last week's attacker came from the one location (the Gaza Strip) that Israel didn't target. Imagine if the government gave flu shots to residents of every state except New York. If a flu epidemic then hit New York, would it demonstrate that flu shots can't stop the flu?
When intelligent people (like the Times editors) believe something so wildly wrong, it's usually because they're in the grip of a theory that helps them to ignore real-world evidence. In this case, the theory is that Palestinians resort to terrorism out of despair. The corollary to this theory is that all Israeli military action will inevitably backfire since it simply makes Palestinians more desperate and angry. For those who believe this—a group consisting of most liberal newspaper editors, the foreign policy establishment, and virtually the entire outside world­—the case against Israeli military action (such as the recent one in the West Bank) is simply an a priori truth.

Most notable is the following:

For the sake of argument, though, let's suppose that Israeli military crackdowns did increase the number of Palestinians willing to engage in suicide bombing. It still wouldn't necessarily follow that crackdowns lead to more bombings. Why not? Because the number of suicide attacks depends upon more factors than simply the number of willing martyrs. Successful suicide bombings require plenty of other ingredients: the capacity to get past Israeli security (which necessitates training and, probably, fake identification); the ability to fashion hidden explosive devices; and the explosives themselves. Yes, some bombers use homemade ingredients, but they're far less effective than the professional-grade stuff—such as the explosives that the Palestinian Authority imported from Iran. The choke-point in the production line is almost certainly not the number of volunteers. It's the other ingredients. And it's those ingredients Israel has tried to cut off, by arresting or killing terrorist leaders, seizing bomb-making equipment, and sealing off its borders.
Of course, this isn't a perfect defense. But the other strategy—placating the Palestinians to the point where none of them are willing to serve as suicide bombers—is almost certainly worse. Even if an Israeli charm offensive could convince an overwhelming majority of Palestinians to reject suicide bombing, even a tiny minority of holdouts—say 100 or 200 volunteers a year out of a population of nearly 4 million—could sustain a massive terror campaign. Trying to protect Israel from suicide bombers by dampening Palestinian despair rather than fighting terrorism directly, then, is sort of like safeguarding your house by trying to give every potential burglar in town a well-paying job rather than installing an alarm.

This is all true, and almost completely ignored.

UPDATE: A great Charles Krauthammer article makes almost the same points:

There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So says -- to take an almost random sample -- The Post (March 26), Sandy Berger (March 29), George Mitchell (April 1), Colin Powell and Kofi Annan (April 10), Colin Powell again (April 21).
...It is wrong.
After the Passover massacre, Israel launched its offensive into Palestinian territory. The most dramatic effect has been a reduction in terrorism. It is no accident that while Israel suffered seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover, there has been but one successful suicide bombing in the past month. There will surely be others. But the frenzied wave of terror that pushed Israel over the edge has been stopped.
Why is the level of terror down? Because terror does have an infrastructure, and attacking and degrading it makes it harder for terrorists to operate, as the United States proved in Afghanistan. During Israel's offensive, hundreds of bomb makers, gunmen and trainers were captured. Others are on the run. Huge caches of illegal weapons and explosives were seized or destroyed. Can they be replaced? Perhaps, but it will take time. It took Arafat eight years to build this arsenal. He will not be able to replace it in a day.
More important, Arafat's forces were everywhere defeated. As the only functioning military authority on the West Bank today, the Israeli army can now make lightning raids, relatively unmolested, to prevent terrorist operations. For eight years, Palestinian terrorism had the protection (and, in many cases, the active assistance) of Arafat's Palestinian Authority. That sanctuary is no longer.
...Arafat assumed that Israel was losing the will to fight back with anything more than pinpricks -- and more important, that even if Israel did strike back, the world (i.e., the United States) would stop it.
He was wrong. He has now suffered a serious defeat.
Just days ago, it was conventional wisdom that the Israeli operation had backfired because it had dramatically boosted Arafat's popularity. This was nonsense from the beginning, the usual mistaking of victimhood for power. In fact, Arafat was practically scorned by his people when he ventured out for what he thought would be his triumphal post-Ramallah tour. The crowds were sparse, the people indifferent and he did not even venture into the Jenin camp, knowing that he would be heckled, jeered and possibly worse.
Why? Because he lost. His security services have been shattered. He can no longer protect the terrorist shock troops. He is shorn and he knows it.
Why do you think the United States is now talking about "reforming" Arafat out of the leadership of the Palestinian Authority? Why are Arab leaders privately endorsing such reform? A sudden conversion to constitutionalism? Operation Defensive Shield left Arafat gravely weakened. Arab leaders are not sentimental.
The fire will cease in the Middle East not when a piece of parchment is signed (remember Oslo?) but when the Palestinians conclude that they are no longer winning, that the Israelis are not going to give up and go away, as they did from Lebanon. Israel's offensive has begun to restore the deterrent that Israel forfeited with its unceasing concessions under Oslo and its precipitous withdrawal from Lebanon.

THE UNBIASED MEDIA: Here is a story about the photographer for the L.A. Times who made her way into the Church of the Nativity. Apparently she has a history of getting involved in her stories.

OUR TOLERANT CAMPUSES: Meryl Yourish has a horrifying description of an anti-Jewish riot at San Francisco State University. Joe Katzman has some good suggestions on how to respond.

THE OBVERSE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES: From a link by Steven Den Beste, an outstanding piece from Thomas H. Lipscomb arguing that the confinement and release of Arafat is part of an elaborate plan by the U.S. and Israelis to destroy the effectiveness of Arafat and the Palestinian intifada.
If you assume that results with which you agree are the product of an elaborate plan, you run the risk of the same oversimplifications of reality as those who see consipracies in everything. In this case, I think "muddling through" is a more likely explanation for the Bush Administration's actions than a detailed plan. But Lipscomb is right about many of the effects of the Israeli incursion - especially relating to Iraq. Whatever objections the Stae Department may have had at the time, the Administration probably appreciates that it will be much harder for the Palestinians to strategically escalate the violence and attempt to wring leverage out of their supposed ability to delay or prevent military action against Iraq.

A GOOD INSIDE SHOT: As much as I rip the NY Times, they deserve plenty of credit for this week's cover story in the Magazine: a profile of an Israeli squad operating in the West Bank during Operation Defensive Shield. The actions of this squad are the best antidote to a U.N.-style compulsion to find war crimes in anything Israeli soldiers do.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: From Tom Segev, a left-wing Israeli journalist:

The Zionist movement worked for 30 years to lay Israel's national infrastructure, and when David Ben-Gurion declared its independence, the state already existed de facto. Arafat, too, symbolized and organized the national struggle of his people, but in contrast to the leaders of the Zionist movement, he neglected almost entirely the civilian infrastructure of the state he wants to establish. So we have to take with a large grain of salt the contention that Operation Defensive Shield brought about the destruction of the Palestinian Authority's civilian infrastructure: there wasn't a great deal to destroy. Arafat did not bring a national administration with him from Tunisia, and in the eight years that have passed since he was allowed to return, he surrounded himself with a relatively small oligarchy of salaried individuals, many if not all of them in uniform and bearing arms. His government is corrupt and despotic. The majority of Palestinians did not benefit in any way from his return or from the peace process; in many cases their life took a turn for the worse.

THE "INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY:" James Lileks has a great take-down of the United Nations.
He also disses the Palestinians' incessant and fictitious claims of "massacres:"

In the long run, it really doesn’t pay to inflate your losses. You become the Boy Who Cried War-Crimes. If every action is a massacre, an atrocity, a sin against civilization, and the world “community” responds to every military feint as though you’d Groznied the joint to dust and dental fragments, then eventually your adversary has no incentive to exercise restraint. I’m not saying Israel will, or should, do a Dresden on the Gaza Strip. But if they will be hated and chastised no matter what they do, what holds them back from a truly ruthless extirpation of their enemy? Will the Norwegian unionists double their searches of produce trucks, looking for Jewish cabbages as well as carrots? Will the UN pass condemning resolutions printed in really big red letters on heavier paper? Will the Vatican envoy stand on a ladder so he can hold Arafat’s hand even higher? Will demonstrators in Berlin strap six pieces of fake dynamite around their daughters’ waists instead of three?

THE FACTS ARE UNPLEASANT THINGS: Richard Cohen really dislikes Ariel Sharon, and thinks that the bombing in Rishon le-Tzion has destroyed his credibility.
Why?
[I]n saying the bombing proved "the true intentions of the person leading the Palestinian Authority," he was insisting on what most of the world -- anyone with a TV set, that is -- suspects cannot be true.
...It's hardly possible that he gave an order -- even in the most complex code -- while a prisoner.
...What about since? Still, not likely. Unless the vaunted Israeli intelligence services have become inept, I would assume that they had Arafat under surveillance the entire time. I assume his phone is tapped. I assume his car is bugged. If he had a pacemaker, I assume the Israelis could turn it off.
It is, of course, remotely possible that Arafat either gave the order for the bombing or looked the other way. But Sharon did not make such a case. He offered no proof -- nothing to overcome our skepticism.
It's probably true that Arafat wouldn't have minded Hamas waiting a few more days before resuming their lives' work. But in terms of "looking the other way" - how about letting Hamas roam free, calling for "millions of martyrs" and calling the Israelis "terrorists, pigs and Nazis?"
It's not, mind you, that I don't believe Arafat is a terrorist and has in the past either initiated or acquiesced in suicide bombings. It's rather that this time Sharon seems only to be rounding up the usual suspects.
Maybe we should wait until Sharon actually does something before deciding whether or not he is "rounding up the usual suspects." If he were to send forces into Gaza to attack the strongholds of Hamas, that would be aimed at different suspects than Operation Defensive Shield, which was mainly aimed at the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. Nuances, anyone? I forgot - this is Sharon we're talking about.
Nonetheless, Arafat had nothing to gain by permitting a suicide bombing at this time. He must know how Sharon will retaliate. He must know that Sharon is perfectly capable of snatching him and sending him back into exile. At a minimum, Sharon could destroy whatever the Palestinian Authority has left -- and that ain't much.
He must also know that Sharon has been dying to do so for a while, and has been prevented from doing so by the U.S., egged on by the Europeans and Arab countries. Why would he expect one more suicide bombing to change that? He has already survived innumerable "last chances;" what's another one? (Via InstaPundit, here's the best summary of the situation.)
These bombings make everyone crazed. The rending of flesh, the unspeakable horror of bodies vaporized, make us all a little nuts. But we cannot let go of what we know. Suicide bombings are virtually nonexistent when Israel and the Palestinian Authority cooperate on security matters. A meaningful peace process discourages terrorism.
That is intuitive. But is it true?
Take a look at this chronolgy of suicide bombings from 1994-1997
when there was a "meaningful peace process." (And Netanyahu can't be blamed, because only the attacks from 1997 took place during his term. Hmm..there were fewer attacks in that year than in any of the three preceding ones. Must be a coincidence....)

THE QUESTION NEVER ASKED: James Klurfeld has the precise answer for those who see Sharon as the root of all evil in the Mideast:

Yes, in the past, Sharon has shown himself to be a man of terrible excess. He often had to be rescued by his military superiors, especially the late Moshe Dayan. Dayan understood and used Sharon's talents as a warrior. But he also understood that Sharon often did not know when to stop. Sharon's invasion of Lebanon is only the most well-known example.
But too many people have projected Sharon's past behavior onto Israel's recent military operation to end terrorist attacks on its civilian population. The military incursion into Palestinian cities was not a Sharon operation; it was an operation of the entire Israel Defense Forces that was supported by the widest possible political spectrum in Israel. If dovish Shimon Peres were prime minister, he would have done no differently.
A government's first responsibility is to protect the safety and welfare of its citizens from outside attack. Israel - and Sharon - waited months before responding militarily to the Palestinian suicide attacks. Sharon did not send in the troops after a discotheque with dozens of teenagers was blown up last summer. He did not respond with Israel's military might all through the fall and winter as suicide bombings became the order of the day. It wasn't until the Passover massacre in Netanya that Israel, not just Sharon, said enough and turned to the tanks and bulldozers. What nation would have done differently? What nation would have waited that long?
Now the question about Sharon is what he will do next. Does he have a plan? Does he understand that the settlements, many of which he built himself, have become an obstacle to peace? These are the issues that President George W. Bush explored with Sharon this week in Washington. Clearly, the resumption of suicide bombings inside Israel Tuesday plays into his proclivity for confrontation.
But there is a further question that Sharon himself asks and for which there is no easy answer. That is, does he really have a partner with which to negotiate? The assumption behind the peace process, from Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1978 to the Oslo Accords in 1993 to Bill Clinton at Camp David in the summer of 2000, was that the Palestinians would end the conflict if the right peace offer was made. But when former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made that offer, or at least something very close to it, Arafat not only rejected it but turned to violence in violation of his solemn pledge on the White House lawn.
I was surprised and disappointed, as were many others who believed in the peace process. Sharon was not. His reading of Arafat might have been the correct one from the beginning.
And, if that is true, what does that say about the anti-Sharon crowd?

THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM AT GUANTANAMO: How perversely funny is this? 13 of the worst terrorists holed up in the Church of the Nativity cannot find a country willing to take them in. Kind of makes you wonder why Israel is expected to let them roam free...

A WEEKLY TONIC: After tragedies like yesterday's massacre of 15 people in a pool hall in Rishon le-Tzion, you get tired of reading the same old claptrap from those who refuse to acknowledge reality. It is good to find someone unafraid of acknowledging the ramifications of such tragedies, like Michael Kelly:

[V]arious senior Bush administration officials were taking to the newspapers and the Sunday public affairs talk shows to pressure Sharon to, as Secretary of State Colin Powell delicately put it, "recognize who the Palestinian people look to as their leader," no matter "how disappointed we've been with him over time."
Yes, we have been a little disappointed, haven't we? You give a fellow a perfectly good peace process, not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize; award him much of the land he demands and a $90 million monthly budget; let him build an armed force on Israeli territory; and, finally (as America's former top negotiator, Dennis Ross, recently revealed in a remarkable Fox News interview), get both the president of the United States and the prime minister of Israel to promise him all of Gaza and nearly all of the West Bank as an independent and joined Palestinian state, with a right of Palestinian return to that state, plus a multibillion-dollar reparations fund -- and what does he do? He goes to war against you. Yes, a disappointment to us all.

FIRST, LET'S KILL ALL THE REPORTERS (WARNING: THAT WAS NOT MEANT SERIOUSLY): As long as we're criticizing the NY Times, The Idler has a damning analysis of the Times' coverage of the Palestinian terrorist attacks in March and April.
Second, from Charles Johnson, Daniel Gordon has a chilling account of a trip through Jenin with some notable journalists.

THIS IS (UNFORTUNATELY) MORE LIKE IT: I was at the annual Salute to Israel parade in Manhattan yesterday, an event far more heavily attended than in recent years. It was a good experience; considering the circumstances, the crowd was in reasonably good cheer.
I also noted a counter-demonstration over two blocks at the beginning of the parade route, strategically placed for maximum TV coverage. The parade began at 11:00 A.M. By the time we left at about 2:30, the counter-demonstration had largely petered out.
The editors of the New York Times seem to have missed the parade.
In describing media coverage of the Washington rally for Israel last month, James Lileks wrote:

To those of us who followed the story via mainstream press reports and blog updates, the story of the rally was the rally itself - its size, its tenor, the quickness with which it was assembled, and the lack of foaming hatred. Was Wolfie’s boo-fest the most distinguishing characteristic? No - unless you believe that conflict determines the story’s angle. And most reporters think that’s the case - not because they agree with the dissenters, but because they’ve been trained to look for the story in the dissent. Thus if a rally of 100,00 people is largely peaceful but has a brief skirmish with police at the margins as the crowd disperses, the headline and lede graf will be “Arrests mar hopes for peaceful rally.”
It’s the stupidest rule of journalism, and one of the most devoutly believed: The detail that contradicts the general impression often contains the truth of the event.

On today's front page, the Times had a large photo of the rally, but not just any picture.
The photo was taken behind the pro-Palestinian rally, and taking up most of the foreground is a poster which says "End Israel's Occupation in Palestine."
The Israel portion of the parade is only visible in the backround.
What makes the picture nonsensical is the caption:
"On Parade for Israel
Hundreds of thousands of people lined Fifth Avenue in Manhattan yesterday for a parade commemorating Israel's 54th anniversary. The boisterous but peaceful event also drew several hundred protestors."
So - the caption for the photo provides the (wholly appropriate) context; the protestors numbered several hundred while the parade participants were thousands of times that number. In other words, the caption completely subverts the story told by the photo.
In its own way, this mismatch between photo and caption is the true successor to the idiotic headline which inspired a contest last week.
Other papers are flagrantly biased and leave it at that, omitting any contrary facts. The Times' special talent, in my opinion, is in its skill at describing the facts which undercut its chosen positions while simultaneously refusing to face the ramifications of those facts.
UPDATE: Obviously, this post got results.
The Times issued the following correction under the heading "Editor's Note:"

An article yesterday about a parade in Manhattan marking Israel's 54th anniversary reported that 100,000 people had registered to march and hundreds of thousands more lined Fifth Avenue in support. The article also said that anti-Israel protesters numbered in the hundreds.
A front-page photograph, however, showed the parade in the background, with anti-Israel protesters prominent in the foreground, holding a placard that read, "End Israeli Occupation of Palestine." Inside the newspaper, a photo of a pro-Israel marcher was outweighed by a larger picture of protesters, one waving a sign that likened Zionism to Nazism.
Although the editors' intent in each case was to note the presence of opposing sides, the effect was disproportionate. In fairness the total picture presentation should have better reflected The Times's reporting on the scope of the event, including the disparity in the turnouts.
Nevermind...

MORE GOOD STUFF FROM THE POST: Charles Krauthammer has another excellent column regarding the truth of Jenin, and the ramifications of the world's indifference to it. Citing a list of recent Palestinian terrorist attacks, he notes:

These are massacres -- actual, recent massacres. Massacres for which the evidence is hard. Massacres for which the perpetrators claimed credit. Where was the Security Council? Where was the Kofi Annan commission? Where was the world?
The United Nations' excuse will be that these murders were perpetrated not by states but by groups. But this is nonsense. The Palestinian Authority is a recognized government. The links of its top leadership to these murders is precisely the kind of question that warrants investigation. Yet the very idea that the United Nations would investigate Palestinian massacres is absurd.
The fact that such an undertaking is unimaginable is what has made the past several months so deeply, despairingly troubling. The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion.
...Palestinian apologists wave away this double standard with the magic mantra of "occupation."
More nonsense. Twenty-one months ago, Israel offered a total end to the occupation, ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to the first Palestinian state ever. The Palestinians turned that down and took up the suicide bomb. By the Orwellian logic of today, the Palestinians are justified in perpetrating one massacre after another to end an occupation that Israel offered to remove almost two years ago.
For the "international community," as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong -- the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich.

Why can't the New York Times have any such clarity on its editorial pages?

IN DEFENSE OF MUDDLING: The irreplaceable Jonathan Rauch describes why muddling through the Middle East crisis is the best policy for now:
There are moments that call for emergency action and a clear and unified government policy. The terrorist attack on America was such a moment. The current crisis in the Middle East is not. In the Middle East, now is the time for muddling through, extemporizing, and sowing a certain amount of constructive confusion. Now is the time to zig and zag. Now is the time, above all, not to be panicked by doomsayers.
He also outlines the problems that would be raised by introducing American "peacekeepers" on a large scale, which most advocates of that policy ignore:

The day American and other foreign forces landed in Palestine, any militant with a dime's worth of sense would know exactly what to do: Test the peacekeepers by attacking Israel with suicide bombers, rockets, mortars, or whatever works. Something like that, recall, happened in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Palestinian militants exchanged blows with Israel over the heads of a United Nations peacekeeping force. (The U.N. force, by the way, is still there and has suffered 245 fatalities to date.)
If peacekeepers allowed Israel to respond militarily to strikes from Palestine, the war would be on again, this time with hapless peacekeepers diving for cover in the middle. On the other hand, if the peacekeepers restrained the Israelis, they would effectively shield the aggressors, as foreign forces ended up doing in Bosnia.
In any case, surely the only way to hold off an Israeli response would be for the peacekeepers to promise to hunt down the bombers themselves. If they kept that promise, they would turn the Israeli-Palestinian military conflict into an American-Palestinian military conflict -- an outcome that Osama bin Laden would dearly love. More likely, they would squabble about what to do, taking halfhearted measures and creating an endless "coalition crisis." The militants would love that, too. After a while, Israel would get fed up and roll its tanks to the border, causing a diplomatic or even military showdown between Israel and the peacekeepers. By this point, the militants would be beside themselves with glee.

Robert Kagan made similar arguments in a recent article.
I think that Rauch is on to something in his dismissal of the talk of "emergency." Much of the urgency, in my opinion, exists in the minds of those in the media, on the Israeli left, in the U.N. and State Department - who were looking forward to a once-in-a-lifetime peace settlement and are instead confronted with the prospect of returning to what passed for a quotidian situation in the region, of constant-but-manageable hostility with no imminent prospects of resolution. They are panicked over the death of hope. But hope for something which does not exist is mere fantasy, which is a poor basis for policy. And it blinds the "hopeful" to the real point, which is that the event which was most likely to stop the death spiral of the region was Ariel Sharon sending Israeli troops into the West Bank.

THEY SHOOT THE CORPSES, DON'T THEY? Apparently the Palestinians have beenstaging fake funerals in Jenin.

A BETTER WAY FOR THE U.N. TO SPEND ITS TIME: Yossi Klein Halevi outlines what the U.N. should try investigating for a change.

BLACK IS NOT WHITE: James Lileks has another phenomenal piece today on, among other things, why those who compare Sharon to Hitler are saying far more about their lack of moral and intellectual capacity than about the Middle East:
Aphorism #1: Nothing is ever black and white, but if the other side says it is, then you’d better operate on that principle.
...When the citizens of Israel are told daily by their press and TV that the Arabs are subhumans who must be destroyed, then Sharon will be like Hitler. When Arabs must wear crescents on their shirts, Sharon will be Hitler. When stadiums full of Jews bay for the blood of the Arabs, and pour out in a torchlight parade to kick and beat and shave the beards of devout Muslims, Sharon will be Hitler. When the organizing principles of the Jewish state are war against neighbors, territorial conquest and the extirpation or subjugation of all non-Jewish peoples, the Sharon will be Hitler. When the mosques are burned and the minarets toppled and the babies thrown in the air and speared on bayonet point, Sharon will be Hitler.
As it stands, there is not an Arab member of the Knesset who even worries that the door to his office will have its locks changed overnight.
...What makes the Sharon = Hitler construction so unforgivable isn’t just the dilution of the true horror of Nazism. The very idea suggests that its possessor has succumbed to moral imbecility. Hitler was devoted to the destruction of the Jews. Not the subjugation of a people for a political purpose, but the destruction of an entire race. And who preaches that today? I was listening this morning to a talk show host broadcasting from Israel, and he was noting what he saw on Israeli TV, and Palestinian TV. (Did Hitler allow an all-Jewish radio station to broadcast in Berlin in the 40s? Just asking.) The Palestinian TV had an interview with a psychiatrist about what to do if your child wants to be a martyr. He was generally against the idea, but the show was interrupted by ads featuring Arafat shouting Martyrdom! Martyrdom! Martyrdom! (The anti-globo folks would prefer this to an ad for Coke, I guarantee you.)
...There was the murder of the five-year old girl by Palestinian operatives. Shot to death in her bed. Shot to death in her Mickey Mouse sheets. Shot to death by a man who could look a child in the face and rejoice in her shattered skull. I know there are some people who believe that Israeli soldiers intentionally kill children, and that killing five-year olds is Israeli state policy. Believe what you want. Just find me the Israeli paper that celebrates this action. Find me the wall poster that salutes this brave soldier. Sing me the song that glorifies this murder as an active of devotion to G-d. Then tell me this:
Who is the greater threat to this child pictured below? It’s either the nation that withdrew from the Sinai, withdrew from Lebanon, admits Islamic Movement politicians to its deliberative body and would gladly make peace with any nation not sworn to destroy it - or it’s the culture that hangs the grenade around the necks of its children.
You decide. Let us pretend, for the sake of argument, that it’s actually a case of black and white.

BRUCE BANNER WAS ALWAYS A WIMP: Via InstaPundit, Meryl Yourish sets out the "Stan Lee Solution" to the Middle East crisis, starring the Incredible Hulk. I think her proposals are more realisitc than anything floated by the State Department on the topic.

ANOTHER NOBEL PEACE PRIZE WINNER SPEAKS OUT: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the 1984 winner, recently compared Israel's policies towards the Palestinians to apartheid, saying that he saw "the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about."
He also blamed the "Jewish lobby:"

People are scared in this country, to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what?
The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists.
Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Damian Penny provides an accurate rejoinder:

Think about that for a second: Archbishop Desmond Tutu compared the "Jewish lobby" to Hitler, Stalin and Idi Amin. And like many Palestinian sympathizers, he's upset about the "humiliating" checkpoints and roadblocks set up by the Israelis. Might I make the radical suggestion that the Israelis wouldn't need roadblocks if the Palestinians weren't sending so many suicide killers?
Apartheid was based on racism. Israel's security policies are based on the fact that the Israelis are surrounded by 300 million people who want to kill them. Are you incapable of telling the difference, or do you simply not care?

THIS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ANY NEGOTIATION OUTSIDE ARAFAT'S COMPOUND IN RAMALLAH: This article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a Palestinian kindergarten is one of the most chilling pieces I've read in a while:

Six days a week, kindergarten teacher Samira Ali El Hassain tells her class of 30 5-year-old boys and girls what makes the world go round.
"Here is how an egg becomes a chicken," she says to a student. "Here is how to draw a circle," she tells another.
Hassain then quizzes the class about a previous, more serious lesson. "Who are the Jews?" she asks.
The children know the answer by heart: "The enemy!" they reply in unison.
"And what should we do to them?" Hassain asks in a voice that is as casual as when she discussed chickens and eggs.
"Kill them!" the children cry out.

It only gets worse.

WHAT IS THE U.N. GOOD FOR AGAIN?David Tell describes its main pastime: investigating, passing resolutions and otherwise making a nuisance of itself towards Israel:

IN 1948, when the armies of five surrounding Arab dictatorships invaded tiny, newborn Israel--in what the secretary general of the Arab League announced was a "war of extermination" against "the Jews"--the United Nations sat on its ass. And did not send a fact-finding mission.
But, oh, how the U.N. has been making up for that oversight ever since. For more than 50 years now, the Jews have been its favorite subject.
Among the nearly 200 nations represented at the U.N., only Israel has ever been assigned special--reduced--membership privileges, its ambassadors formally barred, for 53 straight years ending only recently, from election to the Security Council. Meanwhile, and right up to the present day, that same Security Council has devoted fully a third of its energy and criticism to the policies of a single country: Israel. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which regularly--and unreprovingly--accepts delegations from any number of homicidal tyrannies across the globe, has issued fully a quarter of its official condemnations to a single (democratic) country: Israel.
...No fewer than four separate administrative units within the U.N.--two of them directly supervised by Kofi Annan's governing secretariat--do nothing but spend millions of dollars annually on the production and worldwide distribution of propaganda questioning Israel's right to exist. The "Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and other Arabs of the Occupied Territories," for example, "investigates" Israel's continued "practice" of "occupying" not just the territory taken in the 1967 war, but also the land within its internationally recognized, pre-1967 borders.
....Maybe the U.N. picks on Israel simply because it can. Or maybe, just maybe, there is a darker impulse at play.
...In curricular materials published by the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Education, "Objective Five" for high school history teachers reads as follows: "The student will understand why the people of the world hate the Jews." It is a question for the ages. Zionism may no longer be racism at the United Nations. But anti-Semitism is forever.

THE UGLY EUROPEANS: Charles Krauthammer scores again with his analysis of why the Europeans have reverted to their historic roles as abettors of genocide:

What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.
This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state.
What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well . . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."
Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize -- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.
The French were the vanguard of this modern anti-Semitism that can tolerate the Jew as victim but not as historical actor. It was 35 years ago at the outbreak of the Six Day War that Charles de Gaulle cut off French support for Israel, denouncing its audacity in fighting for its life over his objections. But he did not stop there. He later went on to famously denounce the Jews as "an elite people, sure of itself and domineering."
The rejection of docility -- "sure of itself" -- was Israel's real crime 35 years ago. It remains Israel's crime today. Israel's recent three-week Operation Defensive Shield, the boldest and most justified Israeli military offensive since the Six Day War, provokes precisely the same reaction, though not always expressed with de Gaulle's candor.

ONE OTHER THING THE SAUDIS WOULD RATHER WE FORGET: Via Best of the Web, those who are tempted to take the "Saudi peace proposal" seriously can refer to this story after the collapse of the Camp David talks about the role of the Saudis and Egyptians, our supposed friends, in scuttling any chance for a peace agreement that might actually have had a chance of success. (At least it looked that way at the time.) It can reliably be assumed that if the Saudi proposal ever became the focus of serious attention, it would be "clarified" with all sorts of deal-breakers faster than Yasser Arafat gravitates to a CNN camera. When will people understand that the Arab regimes want the conflict to continue, not end?

THE CHURCH OF THE TERRORISTS: Steven Den Beste has an outstanding historical overview of sieges, and outlines the likely outcomes of the Bethlehem siege.

WHY ARIEL SHARON IS THE RIGHT LEADER FOR THIS TIME: I had been meaning to link to this Victor Davis Hanson piece for a while, about the utility of single-minded military men during times when war is unavoidable. Hanson makes some excellent points about the necessity for leaders like Sharon, whom he compares to Ajax, the great warrior of the Trojan war. But perhaps his most intriguing point is the following:
Most Israelis will learn that peacemaking will come easier for his absence. The Europeans in time will be wily enough to say, "Sharon did it, not the Israelis." And so in his lifetime, Mr. Sharon will get no credit and much blame.
What the anti-Sharon crowd does not understand is that peace is more likely due to the fact that Sharon was the one who sent the troops into the West Bank, rather than Rabin or Barak. The heirs to the latter, once they gain power in Israel, are more likely to have their peace plans taken seriously for not being Sharon.

THE OLIVER STONE OF THE RESPECTABLE MEDIA: Michael Lind takes on the "Israel lobby," using his usual reductionism: the idea that even absent interest-group pressure, the U.S. might be more inclined to gravitate towards the only democracy in the Middle East rather than suicide bombers and their allies is nowhere to be found in Lind's article. For a more nuanced view of the "Israel lobby," see this article from the Economist, of all places.

THE COUNTER-REVISIONISM: Dennis Ross gives his account of what happened at Camp David and Taba.
First, at Camp David:

[A]t Camp David we did not put a comprehensive set of ideas on the table. We put ideas on the table that would have affected the borders and would have affected Jerusalem.
Arafat could not accept any of that. In fact, during the 15 days there, he never himself raised a single idea. His negotiators did, to be fair to them, but he didn't. The only new idea he raised at Camp David was that the temple didn't exist in Jerusalem, it existed in Nablus.

Regarding Taba and the final Clinton proposals:

Arafat came to the White House on January 2. Met with the president, and I was there in the Oval Office. He said yes, and then he added reservations that basically meant he rejected every single one of the things he was supposed to give.
...He [was] supposed to give, on Jerusalem, the idea that there would be for the Israelis sovereignty over the Western Wall, which would cover the areas that are of religious significance to Israel. He rejected that.
...He rejected the idea on the refugees. He said we need a whole new formula, as if what we had presented was non-existent.
He rejected the basic ideas on security. He wouldn't even countenance the idea that the Israelis would be able to operate in Palestinian airspace.

And in conclusion:

[F]undamentally I do not believe he can end the conflict. We had one critical clause in this agreement, and that clause was, this is the end of the conflict.
Arafat's whole life has been governed by struggle and a cause. Everything he has done as leader of the Palestinians is to always leave his options open, never close a door. He was being asked here, you've got to close the door. For him to end the conflict is to end himself.

This from the man who worked on the "peace process" full-time for most of 12 years.

GROW UP: Jonathan Rauch rips the infantilism behind much of the conventional wisom on the Middle East, calling it the "Mommy Model." He points out that the problem is that the current conflict is built on a rational understanding of the stakes. I can't quote any part of it; every word should be read.

ROBERT THE WRONG: Belatedly, Robert Wright joins the school of the Camp David revisionists and defends Arafat's behavior there. He credits his main source: this article in the New York Review of Books by Robert Malley (a former assistant to the President for Arab-Israeli affairs) and Hussein Agha (a professor at Oxford who, according to the NYRB article, " has been involved in Palestinian affairs for more than thirty years and during this period has had an active part in Israeli-Palestinian relations.")
Wright's article is wide-open to the following critiques:
1) First, the ad hominem point: Bill Clinton, Dennis Ross and Shlomo Ben-Ami (the ultra-dovish foreign minister in Barak's government) have all defended the conventional wisdom laying the blame for the Camp David failure at Arafat's feet. Somehow, I think they might be in a better position to judge than a hitherto anonymous White House staffer. And more seriously, since the article was co-written by a Palestinian activist, it should be treated with at least as much skepticism as the conventional account. Yet Wright assumes the truth of the article's assertions without further comment.
More substantively, the following two points:
2) Wright assumes the reasonableness of Arafat's refusal to budge from 100% of the pre-1967 borders. But if that is all that the Palestinians wanted, then how does that betray any willingness to compromise on their part? The only way it does is if you assume that they wanted more than the pre-1967 borders - which means Israel's suspicions suddenly look much more reasonable.
3) Most importantly, Wright mischaracterizes the situation between Camp David and Taba:
[B]y the time of Taba, the whole political environment had changed. In September, Barak had allowed Ariel Sharon to make his famous visit to Haram al-Sharif, which many observers consider the spark that ignited the current intifada. Given the only deepening mistrust between Arafat and Israel, America was, more than ever, a vital guarantor of any deal. Yet President Clinton was by then a lame duck, and comments from President-elect Bush had made clear his limited enthusiasm for Middle East peace brokering.
Arafat may also have been troubled by the fact that Barak seemed doomed to lose upcoming elections to Ariel Sharon, who probably wouldn't honor a Barak-negotiated deal.
Did anything happen in the interim to change the situation? Oh yes - the second intifada, only referred to by Wright in a manner which blames Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount for the whole thing. For those who do not remember, the time between Camp David and Taba included innumerable riots, shootings of Israelis, and the grisly lynching of two Israeli soldiers who got lost in Ramallah.
Wright and his fellow revisionists point to the near-deal at Taba as proof that the Palestinains were ready to make a deal. Well, what if there was reason to think that the Palestinians would sign the deal, take their state, and then launch another war against Israel (ostensibly) over the few millimeters of disputed territory remaining? By Taba, there was two months of evidence for that scenario. Notice that Wright, as Deborah Sontag did in a similar magnum opus of revisionism, glosses over the intifada and does not mention any reason why Barak was likely to lose by the time of Taba - drawing any connection between the two would make Israeli suspicions seem justified. As Robert Satloff noted regarding Sontag's article:
The uprising so transformed the Israeli-Palestinian political context that by the time the two sides were, in Sontag's telling, agonizingly close, it no longer mattered. By January's Taba talks, Barak had the support of just one-third of his people and an even smaller fraction of his parliament. Arafat, for his part, had forged an alliance between his Fatah movement and the radical Hamas opposition. But to discuss the intifada, its roots, and its impact would complicate Sontag's tale of imminent peace gone awry, so she sets it aside.
Hence, Sontag makes not a single reference to how violence--any violence--on the part of the Palestinians violated the founding accord of the Israel-PLO relationship, an exchange of letters between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin four days before the signing of the Oslo understandings in September 1993. (Israel's recognition of the PLO was premised on the organization's written commitment to forswear terrorism and violence and to pursue diplomacy as the only means to achieve its objectives.) Sontag makes no reference to Arafat's nine-month-long rejection of American pleas for a cease-fire or his flouting of understandings reached with Clinton at Sharm al-Sheikh on October 16 and 17, 2000, and with Shimon Peres in Gaza on November 1. She ignores Arafat's speech in Davos on January 28, 2001, when, the day after the Taba talks had ended and with Peres at his side, he lambasted Israel for using "fascist military aggression." Nor does Sontag mention the sacking of Joseph's Tomb, the terrorist exploits of Tanzim leader Marwan Bargouti, or the repeated denials by Palestinian officials, from Arafat on down, of any Jewish connection to the Temple Mount. Any of that would have marred her portrayal of Arafat as a cooperative partner in peace.

While Wright's article is shorter and can thus be excused from citing as many details, it suffers from the same overall fault: the willful blindness to the ramifications of the intifada. Looking at Taba outside of that context is reductionist in the extreme.

ACT I, SCENE XLVI: Jim Hoagland tries to get informal by trying to give a glimpse of how Yasser Arafat would see himself if he was the star of a one-man play:
No one will ever say I did not change. I am chimera, I am quicksilver, I am Arafat. I have had to turn on a dime every hour of my life to survive these murdering Israelis and my Arab brothers, who see me as a threat to them, too.
They are right. All Arab leaders have betrayed me, dissed me, tried to use me, to kill me and to kill the Palestinian revolution that I alone now embody. They will pay in time. Except brother Saddam Hussein. He knows that through it all, down deep, I did not change at all. I owe the guy, and this time I deliver.
Sure, I shed skin after skin. Watched as lieutenant after lieutenant was murdered when they began to upstage me. Jumped from burning deck to burning deck in the 1970s, ran to catch up with the kids' intifada of the 1980s, and hugged Shimon Peres to survive in the 1990s.
At Camp David, Clinton wanted to make me the George Washington of Palestine. But I would have had to sell out my people, in the miserable camps of Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, to become emir of the West Bank. Remember, that was the deal on offer. The money underneath the table was already pretty good -- not as good as what Saddam offers, but more secure.
Those Israeli hacks say I could have achieved my strategic goals without bloodshed with that deal. But they miss the point. Bloodshed is the point. I had to seize, not passively receive. The Israelis now give me total credit for this intifada. History will remember me as warrior, resister, struggler.
I am not a turncoat. Armed struggle has always been my way, my meaning, my religion. The borders of Palestine will be traced in blood, as a great nation's should be. The frontiers will be demarcated and protected by international troops, not by a groveling peace treaty. That is and was my plan. When Israel elected Sharon, to prove to us that brute force could make Israelis secure, it fell into place: We had to show them they were wrong.
These fools in Washington and Europe chase their own tails by debating whether I am a terrorist or not. Did I ever shrink from murder when it was needed? They think if they come up with the right label, like "Enduring Freedom" or "homicide bombers," then everything is fixed. And they say we Arabs are prisoners of rhetoric.

JOURNALISM 101: James Lileks takes journalists to school, using the coverage of the Israel rally in Washington as the lesson plan. And his conclusion is a great use of a picture that says more than a thousand words (not for the squeamish, though).

THE AXIS OF EVIL STRIKES AGAIN: The Israelis have apparently discovered more weapons from Iran and Iraq near Arafat's headquarters.

REPORTERS ARE FROM MARS... Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East correspondent for the Economist, writes in today's NY Times:
... Arab coverage of the conflict is not really much more one-sided than, say, America's gung-ho coverage of the Persian Gulf war. (Or, for that matter, Israeli reporting on the intifada: Most Tel Aviv editors seem to accept Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's view that the press's job is "to give the nation pride and hope.")
Somehow, I don't remember the American press exhorting its military to murder citizens wholesale during the Gulf War. If Rodenbeck really believes that paragraph, it's a welcome window into the mindset driving the Economist's coverage of Israel.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Among other places, James Lileks' site has the infamous picture of the Palestinian man holding up his little daughter with pretend dynamite wrapped around her. Lileks has the following observations:
As others have noted, the cultural attitude on display is an inversion of human decency - heaven is a whorehouse, and children are encouraged to die. It takes a particular sort of moral degeneracy to steep your children in the culture of death rather than shield them from it at all costs. Keep in mind that this picture was taken at a rally in Berlin, so it’s not like this fellow has lately seen in IDF kick down doors in his apartment block looking for martyr factories lately.... This man had to go down to the store looking for materials that would make a good suicide-bombing costume for his daughter, like it’s Halloween and she wants to be Ariel the Little Martyr. He had to tie the dynamite around her little waist; he had to look into those little eyes and answer her questions: what’s this? What’s this, Daddy?
He had two options. He could lie. Or he could tell the truth. I’m not sure which is worse.
What haunts me is the idea that she liked this, and thought it was fun - a day with Daddy! - and afterwards all the relatives came over, and she ran into the room and shouted BOOM!
And everyone laughed.
Isn’t that cute.

GIVE JOURNALISTS A CHANCE? P.J. O'Rourke simultanously argues that Israel was mistaken in barring journalists from Jenin and punctures the self-importance of his guild in his inimitable way:
Journalism is the opposite of pancake makeup and boudoir lighting. The farther journalists get away from you, the worse you look. But attempting to control news during a war is too usual to be labeled outrageous. Stalin didn't ban journalists from Stalingrad. He sent them there. They couldn't refuse. I'd rather be banned. And there was censorship in the Soviet press anyway. The International Federation of Journalists is right. Censorship did not bring peace. Not that peace with Germany would have been a good idea.
...Israel thinks reporters have a pro-Palestinian bias. They do. This is not because of the complex blames and injustices of the region. (Journalists are no better than other liberal-arts majors at doing regression analysis with infinite variables.) But when someone is pounding the stuffing out of someone else, there's more human interest in the unstuffed than in the stuffing pounders. The Sioux were right at the Little Bighorn, but Custer is what sells. Any good reporter would have stuck to Yellow Hair, at least until the last 20 minutes. How do you say, "I'm with CNN" in Sioux?
Also, from my own experience, Palestinians are warm, hospitable and chatty. Israelis soldiers are not. Journalists are as alert to social cues as any other herd animal. We prefer the Palestinians even if they don't invite us to come along on suicide bombings. Reporters thus ignore a basic principle of news: There are two sources you can't trust, those who won't tell their story and those who will.
...And where did the idea of Olympian objectivity in journalism come from? Not from the good liberal-arts majors that journalists are supposed to be. Olympus had its finger in every pie in "The Iliad." The great war correspondents of more recent history were strangers to neutrality. Richard Harding Davis seemed willing to fight the Spaniards in Cuba by himself. Ernest Hemingway styled his World War II press contingent "Hem Force" and liberated several French towns, or at least the wine cellars thereof.
As for shaping public opinion, the media's record is spotty. We practically caused that ignominious war with Spain and then, ignominiously, almost kept America out of the war against the Nazis. Maybe we ended the Vietnam War, but it took us long enough.
...Those of us in journalism who support Israel for being open and democratic were left with a lot of explaining to do, but we also learned a lot. The media learned that war, unlike politics, does not depend upon the media to exist. Reporters were being reminded that they are sometimes dense, prejudiced and self-seeking.

KOSHER CANADIAN BACON: A great editorial in the Canadian National Post regarding a loathsome resolution by the UN Committee on Human Rights:

Ariel Sharon is depicted as a blood-drenched butcher in the European press, although he sacrificed Israeli soldiers in ground assaults to spare Palestinians the indiscriminate aerial bombardments that Arab dictators would have ordered as a matter of routine. Palestinians use ambulances as terrorist taxis, yet Israel is lambasted for searching them. Human rights activists, who are appalled by bloodshed in every other context, reinvent themselves as doe-eyed apologists for terror when it is Palestinian teenagers lighting the fuse.
In fact, the mere act of killing people is redeemed in the eyes of an extraordinary number of people and governments around the world for the simple fact that the victims are Jews. It becomes "resistance" borne of "frustration" and "humiliation." Israeli self-defence is repackaged as "state terrorism."
...These coded phrases are understood by the Muslim nations that introduced the motion and the diplomats who passed it. "Foreign occupation" means Jews. "Armed struggle" means people blowing themselves up in restaurants and markets. Naturally, the UNHRC resolution mentions only the Palestinian deaths, condemns only the Israeli actions. It mentions not at all the hundreds of ordinary Israelis murdered in the course of going about their daily business during one of last month's numerous suicide bombings. Nor does it upbraid the Palestinian Authority for funding and facilitating them.
Israel's commitment to human rights is so clear that its Supreme Court ordered the Israeli army not to bury Palestinian victims from the Jenin refugee camp until an investigation could be conducted -- and the army complied. It is exactly the sort of legalistic gesture the world's human rights lawyers typically applaud. But instead, they take the side of Palestinian gunmen, who have whiled away their time in hiding by putting bullets into the heads of scores of suspected "informants."
...The resolution destroys whatever shreds of credibility were left to the UNHRC after the fiasco of the Durban anti-racism conference. The commission is made up of some of the world's worst human rights offenders. Fewer than half are free countries. Neither the United States nor Israel are on the commission, but 14 Muslim nations are. Naturally, dictatorships and absolute monarchies sided with the Palestinian Authority. The sad shock is that they were joined by supposedly decent nations such as France, Spain, Sweden and Belgium. Europe is abandoning the same people as those who were selected as its victims half-a-century ago. The continent's moral implosion is almost as terrible to watch as the terrorism its leaders yesterday endorsed.
And people wonder why Israel does not take the UN seriously.

GRADING ON A CURVE: Nicholas Kristof's column in today's NY Times noted that the Arab world applies a double standard to Israel:
[W]hile the Israeli brutality in the occupied territories is real, it is small potatoes by Arab standards.
Some 1,600 Palestinians have been killed since the latest round of violence erupted in the fall of 2000. In contrast, two million Sudanese have died in the ongoing civil war here, with barely anyone noticing.
Likewise, Syria blithely killed about 20,000 people in crushing an abortive uprising in the city of Hama in 1982. And Saddam Hussein, who has killed more Arabs than Ariel Sharon and all his Israeli predecessors put together, is somehow a hero for much of the Arab world.

As Andrew Sullivan points out, Kristof ignores the elephant in the room:
If you're a raving anti-semitic paranoiac, defeat at the hands of the Americans is one thing; but defeat at the hands of the Jews is beyond endurance. This is the pathology without which nothing that is now happening in the Arab world can be understood.
Kristof's column has a number of interesting points. Most notably, in describing the rage of the "Arab street" at Israel, he asserts that "there is a tendency among Israel's supporters to assume that the rage must be feigned, but that's a fantasy."
Kristof is attacking a straw-man. I don't think many supporters of Israel assert that the masses are somehow faking rage. Rather, those of us who would have the U.S. and Israel do things which may further inflame that rage are making two different arguments:
1) While real, the rage of the "Arab street" is partly created by and largely stoked by the Arab governments themselves, especially including the "moderate" regimes. Accordingly, those regimes do not deserve protection from the consequences of their policies of incitement, and the U.S. and Israel should not be dissuaded from doing the right thing because of the risks which such governments have brought upon themselves.
2) While real, the consequences of the rage of the "Arab street" will not harm the strategic interests of the U.S. as much as the State Department and media feel; either (a) the danger of "moderate" governments being overthrown is overstated by those corrupt leaders with an incentive to exxagerate the danger (and who in any case have little sense for public opinion in their countries) or (b) even if overthrown, the results to U.S. interests will not be as detrimental as commonly assumed.
Either point is debatable, but Kristof does not engage them.

ON GUN CONTROL AND SUICIDE BOMBERS: Jonah Goldberg expounds on the unwillingness of peace-processors (and their media enablers) to recognize reality.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE.... An e-mail correspondent to Instapundit offers the following observations:

The moral state of things is this:
1. If the Palestinians unilaterally lay down their arms and renounce
violence, they will be given peace, dignity, and their own state.
2. If the Israelis unilaterally lay down their arms and renounce
violence, they will be slaughtered.
3. As far as most of the world is concerned, either outcome would be
satisfactory.

On some days, that seems too generous, as in certain quarters option #2 might be deemed preferable. Take Mark Steyn's word for it:
The "whole world" has a pretty good track record of being wrong, especially where Jews are concerned. Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and never more so than when they're teamed with Chris Patten, Mary Robinson, the European Parliament (which has demanded sanctions against Israel), the German government (which has announced an arms embargo against Israel), the brand-new International Criminal Court (which - in its very first 24 hours! - started mulling the question of "Israeli war crimes"), the Norwegian Parliament (which had a visitor thrown out of the building for wearing a provocative Star of David on his lapel), never mind the members of Calgary's "Palestinian community" who marched through the streets carrying placards emblazoned "Death To The Jews", a timeless slogan but not hitherto a burning issue on the prairies.
...Meanwhile, what have we learned from this last extraordinary month? Not much about the Middle East, but quite a lot about Europe. What happens when Palestinian civilians strap on plastic explosives and head for Israeli pizza parlours? Europe says Israeli checkpoints for Palestinians are "humiliating". Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances permit themselves to be used as transportation for bombs and explosives - and Europe attacks Israel for refusing them free movement.
"Ah, those Jews," an attractive, intelligent, sophisticated Parisienne sighed over dinner with me the other night. "They cause problems everywhere they are."
Actually, they don't. Of the 30 ongoing conflicts in the world today, the Muslims are involved in 28 of them. There are no Jews in Kashmir or the Sudan, so the Muslims make do with Hindus and Christians. What the Europeans call "Muslim-Jewish tensions" on the Continent do not involve Jewish gangs attacking mosques or beating up women in hejabs, only Muslim gangs attacking synagogues and stoning a bus of Jewish schoolchildren.
...The "whole world" is agreed that if anybody has to be blown up it might as well be the Israelis. Ah, those Jew troublemakers: why won't they just lie there and take it?
And he has this bon mot about the current Powell mission:
From Washington's point of view, the peace mission was necessary because of a scheduling conflict over scheduling conflicts: they'd booked the Middle East for a war with Iraq only to discover the joint being used for some other guys' war. In an ideal world, the US would like to restore peace in the Middle East in order to launch a massive conflagration there.

EXCLUSIVE REPORT: Mrs. Manhattan was at the Washington rally in support of Israel today along with over 100,000 of her closest friends. It took them a long time to exit the Metro station to join the rally, and they emerged to discover that the crowd had overflowed its allotted space. So she technically was right next to the rally, not at it. Close enough.
Seriously, the rally was a great display of the power of the "American street," which is far more powerful than the "Arab street" so feared in the State Department.
UPDATE: Best of the Web advises the Arab governments:
Arab leaders, listen up: The American street is enraged, and you'd best ask yourselves: Why do they hate us? If you're honest, you'll acknowledge that we're fed up with your one-sided policies toward the Middle East. And if you're not honest, you risk paying an immense price. America's leaders cannot ignore the anger of the street; if they do, the street may bring down the moderate pro-Arab government currently in the White House. It is long past time for Arab leaders to appease the American street. If they let this crisis fester until Americans get desperate, there's no telling what we might do.

THE CASE FOR PESIMISSM: "Spoons" predicts that Arafat will slip the noose again:
When it comes to saving his own skin, though, Arafat is as canny an actor as the world has ever seen. This is a guy who should have been killed dozens of times over by now. From his involvement in the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in 1972, to his personally ordering the murder of a U.S. ambassador and his aide in the Sudan, to the launching of the current intifada, it's astonishing that neither Israel nor the U.S. killed Arafat years ago. He has survived so long, however, for the simple reason that Arafat understands us better than we understand him. He knows exactly how far he can push us, and how far he cannot. He has become a master of bringing us right to the brink, and them backing off.
...Powell is going to walk out of Arafat's compound with what will be described as major concessions. Arafat will agree to a unilateral cease fire. He will agree to crack down on terrorism. He will agree to condemn suicide bombers to his people, in Arabic (he will not say, however, that such people are murderers and not martyrs, and Powell won't press the issue). He will also "agree" to enter into immediate talks on a political resolution to the conflict. We will hear the words "Tenet", and particularly "Mitchell", several times during the announcement.
Arafat will have effectively slipped the noose, and once again, the ball will be in Israel's court.
"Spoons" is too pessimistic, in my view. Even if Arafat does all of that, the next terrorist attack will reverse the momentum. And even the biggest proponents of the recent invasion of the West Bank have no illusion that the next bombing will be long in coming. So even if Arafat slips the noose this time, it will be re-fitted before long.

NOT A BLAST FROM THE PAST: Another great recent piece by Fouad Ajami on how Arafat is in his element. He points out some essential truths that the State Department would prefer to ignore:

The logic behind Arafat's ruthless method is easily seen. In the cold calculus, the balance of casualties now runs 3 to 1–in 18 months, 1,200 Palestinians have been killed for 370 Israelis. In the first intifada, which erupted in 1987 when Arafat was still away from the land, the ratio had been 25 to 1. The lieutenant who sat in for him at the Beirut summit, Farouk Qaddumi, cut to the heart of the matter. This second intifada is working, he said, because Israel "lost stability and security; psychological problems spread, and unemployment and emigration rose." Arafat aims at Israel's soul–to wear it down, to rob it of the sense of normalcy that has been its impossible dream since the beginning of its statehood.
As a gambler and adventurer averse to the normal work of nations, Arafat made peace with Israel only to break it. He had broken with the Arab world only to return to the Arab councils of power and to take up an old, failed history. He was unloved and distrusted by other Arabs. There was loathing of him in Beirut, a city he had set on fire for more than a decade, and contempt for him in Kuwait for his betrayal of the Kuwaitis in 1990's hour of need. But Arafat hoped that there would be uses for him and a new lease on life. This second intifada is his "gift" to the other Arabs: a macabre celebration of the "martyrs," a diversion from the verdict on the Arab condition rendered by the "boys of September 11" who gave the world a cruel illustration of the furies on the loose in Arab lands.
It was true to Arafat's way and to his history that he would try to hold America's campaign against terror hostage to his war against Israel. America is unloved in Arab lands, this argument runs, and its campaign can proceed only if Palestinian claims are satisfied. But this argument is supreme illusion. America indeed is unloved. In truth, the hatred for it is bottomless. Even if we cast Israel adrift, Arab opinion will cut us no slack.

A DOUBLE-HEADER: Two great piesces from Yossi Klein Halevi. The first one is in today's LA Times:

We Israelis watch the growing outrage against us and wonder whether the world has gone mad. How is it possible, we ask each other, that after suffering an unprecedented terrorist campaign, we're portrayed as bullies for finally trying to uproot the threat? Why does so much of the world seem to get indignant not when Israelis are being massacred and turned into a nation of terrorized shut-ins but when we hit back?
Tragically, the anti-terrorist offensive has caused great suffering and dislocation among innocent Palestinians. Any war that is televised produces horrific images. But the crucial moral difference between the Israeli government and Yasser Arafat's regime is that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians. In fact, rather than use Israel's mighty air power to attack terrorist enclaves, the army has sent infantry into the narrow alleyways of West Bank towns.
There is no fully surgical way to fight the war of survival that has been forced on Israel. Indeed, no national movement has ever fought a dirtier and less justified war than the Palestinians, who could have ended the occupation had they accepted President Clinton's plan and who have since violated every civilized norm--from hiding gunmen behind priests in a holy place to smuggling suicide bombers in ambulances.
...U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has sarcastically asked whether the whole world can be wrong and only Israel right. The same question could have been asked in 1981, when Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. Then, too, the "whole world" condemned Israel as an outlaw. But who today isn't quietly grateful to Israel for having prevented Saddam Hussein from acquiring the bomb?
The Israeli army is performing a similar service for humanity today by establishing the principle that terrorism won't be indulged. Perhaps one day that too will be acknowledged.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the diplomatic siege against the Jewish state is being accompanied in Europe by the worst outbreak of violent anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, with Jews being beaten in Berlin and synagogues burned in France.
...Most Israelis have given up on the Europeans, who are seen here as incurable appeasers. But don't we have the right to expect more of Americans, especially at this fateful time?
Absolutely.
The second piece is in The Jewish Week. He describes the ways Israelis try to cope with the omnipresent threat of terror, with the following conclusions:
Yasir Arafat has inadvertently helped us cope by restoring to us a belief in the basic justness of our cause. Probably not since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Arab armies attacked Israel on its holiest day, have Israelis been less morally conflicted. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, followed by the first intifada of the late 1980s, demoralized and divided us. Now, though, most Israelis believe that we’re fighting for our lives.
“I’ve never felt more certain about why we have to fight,” said a friend of mine, a former paratrooper whose son was drafted recently into one of the army’s elite commando units. “That’s what allows me to sleep at night — when I can.”
Daily life persists; inertia sometimes can feel like victory. It is a relief to recall that not every ambulance siren announces a terrorist attack: Even during war, people are born, get sick and die of natural causes. Last week, I attended a memorial for a colleague, a survivor of the 20th century’s wars who’d managed to remain alive until the age of 82. Near the entrance to the cemetery were posted funeral notices for one of the young victims from Cafe Moment. My colleague’s widow greeted us with a smile. “At a time like this,” she said, “we have to put things in perspective. Michael lived a full life; there are other tragedies to mourn.”
The comfort of an ordinary death.

AGAIN: There has been a suicide bombing in the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem. It is unclear if there have been any other fatalities.

THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THIS MADNESS: I don't have the energy to give this ridiculous Times editorial the same attention I gave to April 9th's iteration, but the editors haven't learned any lesson.
Israel's long-term interest lies in nurturing Palestinian development, not demolishing it. While Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's determination to strike back at terrorists is understandable, Israel's destruction of Palestinian homes, businesses and public utilities is not. Knocking down houses, destroying electricity pylons and interfering with health care, as Israeli forces have done across the West Bank, cannot be justified by any compelling military need.
Um...how about the fact that terrorists are enmeshed within the civilian population, using civilians as human shields and houses as bases? Getting to the terrorists seems like a compelling military need to me, though the Times apparently disagrees.
And while the Times is right that it is in Israel's ultimate long-term interest to have a functioning Palestinian economy, Keynes' aphorism was never more apt. In the long run, Israel will certainly be dead unless it can stop the terrorists now. If the Palestinian economy is a short-term casualty, that is certainly unfortunate, but Israel's primary "long-term interest" is survival.
These gains have been obliterated by the past 19 months of conflict, with the greatest damage concentrated in the past two weeks. Yasir Arafat bears much of the blame. Now Israel claims to have proof that he has not only failed to oppose terrorism but has directly authorized it.
Good. The Times' editors have read their own paper for a change. Is there any ramification of this proof of Arafat's perfidy?
Still, Israeli military tactics are responsible for much of the civilian destruction.
While the ostensible goal of Israel's offensive is capturing terrorists and uprooting their organizations, it has resulted in a prolonged siege affecting hundreds of thousands of civilians trying to go about their everyday lives. Mr. Sharon needs to make it clear to his commanders that Palestinian civilians are not Israel's enemy and that their lives, livelihoods and property deserve respect.
Better yet, with Secretary of State Colin Powell in Israel, Mr. Sharon should belatedly heed President Bush's call for immediate withdrawal. Continuing this offensive may yield more terrorist arrests, but at grievous cost to Israel's long-term interests.
Of course not. Sure, Arafat has been directing terror every step of the way, and he should pay a price, as long as it doesn't interfere with the necessity to get back to the process that led to...Arafat directing terror.

FOLLOWING THE MEMO: It's not quite the 67th paragraph, but buried in the middles of Serge Schmemann's latest dispatch is the following:
The Israeli police said today that they had found a belt with explosives in a Palestinian ambulance during a check at a roadblock inside the West Bank. The ambulance was headed toward Israel with the body of a Palestinian man, the police said, and they found the device alongside him. It was the second time in two weeks that Israel has reported finding explosives in an ambulance.
Any chance this will lead the Times & others to reasses their coverage of the Red Cross' complaining? I didn't think so.

THE FUSE IS LIT: This is big. Very big. I'm not sure even Sharon thought that the bureacracy of terror was this extensive.
I don't see any way Arafat can survive this. No Israeli governmet will or can negotiate with him with a straight face. When Powell's mission fails, this documentation will be exactly what the Bush administration needs in terms of political cover for allowing Sharon to kill or exile Arafat and finish destroying the PA. This will also mute the caterwauling of the Arab governments, most of whom live in fear of their own Muslim fundamentalists and are furious with Arafat anyway for involving Iran in the conflict. After Sharon initially confined Arafat to Ramallah in December, the sympathy from the Arab governments took a notable downturn after the Karine A shipment from Iran was discovered.
Here are links to documents from Bethlehem, Jenin and other documents from Arafat.

WILD HORSES CARRIED HIM AWAY: In yesterday's Ha'aretz, left-wing (even by Ha'aretz's standards) columnist Akiva Eldar attempts to be witty:
Since Israel ran the PA horses out of the barn and put its own horses in place, if the U.S. forces Sharon to pull them out, Powell best make sure that American horses replace them because otherwise wild horses in the form of Hamas and Islamic Jihad will take their place.
Eldar doesn't appreciate the metaphor. In the wake of the collapse of Camp David, Arafat let the terrorist horses out of the barn. And when someone lets horses out of the barn, he may truly desire and try to get them back. (Not that this was ever true about Arafat.) But the one who let them out is nevertheless responsible for the damage they cause, even if he lacks the power to prevent them from doing damage once they are loose.

CREDIT WHERE IT IS DUE: Today's (Wednesday's) Washington Post has a tremendous amount of good stuff on Israel.
First, Charles Krauthammer carves up the intellectual fantasies of those who assert that a withdrawal from the territories occupied in the 1967 war will solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
[F]or two decades, Israel was hectored to comply with U.N. resolutions demanding Israel's withdrawal. In May 2000, it complied. To ensure that there could be no possible residual territorial dispute, Israel asked the United Nations to draw the line demarcating the true Israeli-Lebanese border -- the so-called Blue Line -- then pulled back behind it.
...Hezbollah was not mollified. While its ostensible mission was the liberation of Lebanese territory, it did not disband. On the contrary. It occupied south Lebanon, imported huge new supplies of weapons from Iran and began sporadic cross-border attacks on Israel.
...Not only, therefore, is Lebanon the most dangerous piece of tinder in the region. It is the most instructive. The Arabs claim that their grievance is Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Give it back and you'll have land for peace. Like the Lebanon peace?
Western observers totally missed the irony of the Arab summit whose "Saudi peace plan" ostensibly offered Israel peace in return for full territorial withdrawal. The offer was made in Beirut, capital of a country from which Israel had done precisely that -- fully withdraw -- and received in return a more entrenched, emboldened, heavily armed enemy ready to trigger a general war.
It gets better. To justify carrying on the war after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, Hezbollah concocted a territorial claim on a few acres called the Shebaa Farms. Hezbollah says it is Lebanese territory, and therefore occupied -- a position contrary to the internationally sanctioned Blue Line drawn by the United Nations, hardly a partisan of Israel.
What is the Arab League position on all this? Few Western observers actually read the Saudi peace plan adopted by the Arab League. If they had, they would have seen that the plan demands not just the usual withdrawal from Palestinian and Syrian territory but also from "remaining occupied Lebanese territories."
But there are no remaining occupied Lebanese territories. Thus the Arab League, in precisely the same document -- no, the same breath -- in which it ostensibly offers land for peace, endorses a totally fabricated, post-withdrawal Lebanese land claim that even the United Nations rejects. Why? Because it serves as an excuse for continuing the war against Israel.
Just end the occupation of the West Bank, say the Arabs, and we will guarantee Israel peace. Do you want to see Israel's future if it caves in to that demand? Look at Lebanon...
I don't agree with Krauthammer's assertion that the conflict has the potential to bring Armageddon, but the thrust of his piece is undeniable.
Second, Michael Kelly summarizes the facts that would be denied by those who distinguish between the Palestinina Authority and the terrorists:

[D]uring the current crisis, it has become impossible to maintain the fiction of Arafat as a pursuer of peace (impossible, that is, except for certain members of the news media and the Nobel Peace Prize committee). It has become impossible to deny that he is anything other than, as Sharon said, the architect of the Palestinian war and the dispatcher of Palestinian mass murder.
This is no longer a matter of belief, or rhetoric, but evidence:
• The Karine A. As Robert Satloff sums up in the current issue of the National Interest, Israeli, American and European officials have confirmed that Arafat's Palestinian Authority was the moving force, paymaster and operational supervisor of the attempt, foiled by the Israelis on Jan. 3, to smuggle 50 tons of Iranian-supplied rockets, mortars, anti-tank missiles, assault rifles and C-4 explosives by freighter into Gaza.
The smugglers' ship, the Karine A, was purchased by Adel Awadallah, the head of the Palestinian Authority's procurement arm, with $400,000 provided by Fuad Shobaki, director of the PA's Military Financial Administration and one of Arafat's closest advisers. The buy was supervised by two PA naval police officials, Fathi Razam and Omar Akawi.
• The Al Aqsa Martyrs invoice. On April 2 Israel made public an invoice that was found among documents taken by Israeli troops in Arafat's Ramallah compound. The invoice, titled "Financial Report" and dated Sept. 16, 2001, appears to be a bill to the Palestinian Authority from the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which the United States officially recognizes as a terrorist organization and credits with a series of suicide bombings and shootings. It requests from Arafat's government payment for, among other things, electrical and chemical components for 30 bombs: "We need about 5-9 bombs a week for our cells in various areas." The Bush administration has found no reason to doubt Israeli's characterization of this document as genuine.
• The Tanzim and Fatah payments. These documents, found in Arafat's offices, authorize cash payments to various commanders and active operatives in the Tanzim and Fatah terrorist brigades, which are credited with numerous lethal attacks on Israelis. The authorizations appear to be signed by Arafat himself. Again, the U.S. government has no reason to doubt the legitimacy of the documents.
Most importantly:
It is possible, of course, to make peace with him still. But only by defeating him, and the forces under his command, and negotiating from the point of their surrender. And surrender stems from victory in war.

WARFARE IN THE TRENCHES: This Washington Post article is headlined "Defiant Sharon Losing Support in White House."
A closer read of the article, though, makes it appear that this is merely a continuation of the regular debate between the State Department types on the one hand, who are loath to allow Sharon free reign, and the Cheney-Rumsfeld axis on the other.
First, the decisive action-phobes:
After months of steadfast backing of Sharon by the Bush administration, senior White House aides are beginning to express doubts about whether the Israeli leader can be a long-term partner in achieving the administration's goals in the Middle East.
White House aides also fear that Sharon's intransigence in the face of Bush's repeated demands over the past week for an end to the Israeli attacks could make the president appear ineffective and erode his standing in the world.
As part of the emerging shift of opinion about the Israeli leader, some White House officials are now making a distinction between support for Israel and support for Sharon.
"Sharon is arguably doing what he thinks needs to be done," a senior administration official said. "After he's finished, what's next? The fear is that he knows no other way than being tough."
This might be reading something into nothing, but I find it interesting that the article distinguishes between the steadfast backing of Sharon by "the Bush administration" and the supposedly new questioning by "senior White House aides." Does that imply that those "senior White House aides" did not agree with the earlier steadfast backing? That's probably reading too closely, but it may be true.
A more likely tip-off is the fear that Sharon's actions may make the President appear ineffective in the world. Somehow, I don't think that fear is felt by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. I detect a State Department following its usual instincts.
As another reminder that the headline may be a faction fighting for supremacy within the White House through the press, the article states:
Some administration officials said Sharon has been more receptive to Bush's request than is publicly apparent. "We're being precipitous if we base what we say only on what we see," one official said but would not elaborate.

THE STRONG HORSE RIDES THROUGH JENIN: Seth Gitell dissects the implications of the Israelis' victory in Jenin:
A Hamas official is conceding that a large number of his warriors surrendered their weapons. When these fearsome fighters ran out of ammunition, they stopped fighting. And they were unwilling (or unable) to give their own lives. This would seem to undermine the conventional wisdom about Hamas and other terrorist organizations--namely, that military victory over them is not possible, and that combat only leads to "desperation" and more violence. .
...Israel did not achieve this victory with high-altitude bombing. It put the lives of its own soldiers on the line; literally speaking, it spilled its own blood. In so doing, Israel demonstrated that if its very existence is in jeopardy, as it is now, it is willing to fight man-to-man. In doing so, Israel took direct aim at a key precept of its enemies: that the Israelis are so weak and materialistic that they are unwilling to put soldiers at risk.
In a sense, the message it sends is the exact opposite of Israel's hastened retreat from Southern Lebanon two years ago: Israel is sticking around this time around. And this is crucial, because the conflict between Israel and the Arab world is as much a psychological battle as it is a military one. In recent months, with the onslaught of suicide bombings, Israel's morale has seemed shaky. Sensing this weakness, its enemies have circled like sharks tasting blood. The victory at Jenin changes that psychological dynamic.

1+1=0: Via Instapundit, The Idler collects a number of the high-minded statements made by the NY Times' editors over the last several months regarding Arafat and Israel. It's amazing how many "last chances" a man can get. Why would Arafat think his one whould be any different?

HAPPY YOM HA-SHOAH, EVERYONE! Via Charles Johnson, an editorial cartoon from Arab News that shows just how that paper's readership celebrates the official Holocaust Rememberance Day. A warning: Don't click the link on a full stomach. And make sure you're sitting down.

THE PROBLEM THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED: The Arab-Israeli conflict has long been exacerbated by the unwillingness of the U.S. government to admit or act on certain indisputable truths. One of those truths is described by Michael Mandlebaum:

The Arab regimes bear a large share of the responsibility for the origins and the continuation of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and it is in their power to do a great deal to end it.
Unfortunately, Bush's well-chosen words, and whatever Powell tells the Arab leaders privately, are likely to have little effect. Perpetuating the conflict with Israel serves interests that are more important to these governments than is peace with Israel or the approval of the United States.
...[I]n the year 2000, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on virtually all of the territory captured in 1967, with a Jerusalem shared with Israel as its capital, the leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia urged him to refuse, which he did. The war he started in the wake of his refusal finally triggered the Israeli military operations of the last several days.
...The Arab governments supply Arafat with the money and political support upon which his position as Palestinian leader depends. If they chose to do so, they could pressure him to make peace with Israel or encourage the Palestinians to find another leader willing to do so.
But they have chosen to do neither...
The conflict with Israel is a convenient, perhaps even indispensable, device for each regime to divert the attention of the chief victims of its dismal performance - those it rules. It is also a way to place the blame for their condition on an external enemy - Israel - rather than on those - the rulers themselves - who bear responsibility for it.
Thus, like the Jewish communities that were singled out for blame for plagues and political and economic troubles throughout European history, Israel functions as a scapegoat for the misfortunes of its Arab neighbors.
There's more, all on target.

THIS WEEK'S SIGN THAT THE APOCALYPSE IS UPON US (SERIOUSLY!): Via Rod Dreher in "The Corner," a red heifer has apparently been born in Israel. Red heifers have an important part in purification rituals described in chapter 19 of the book of Numbers which were done in the Jewish Temple.

IT DEPENDS WHO'S COUNTING: In a dispatch for the NYT on the fighting in Jenin, David Rohde notes the following:
In a rare example of public criticism, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross demanded that Israeli forces allow aid convoys access to the area.
Perhaps it's rare for countries other than Israel (and the U.S., for that matter), but I've lost track of how many times the Red Cross has publicly criticized Israel.

THE TIMES LOSES IT ONCE AND FOR ALL: Today's lead editorial is a masterpiece, even by Times standards. It demands a full-length treatment:
The announcement last night that the Israeli military was pulling out of two Palestinian cities was welcome but it was far from clear that it signaled the start of the full, immediate withdrawal from the West Bank towns and refugee camps repeatedly requested by President Bush. Earlier in the day, Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, brushed off Mr. Bush's demand in a defiant speech to the Knesset, insisting that the campaign would end only when its mission had been accomplished.
Check out the text of Sharon's speech, which the editors seem to not have read. In my opinion, the only "defiance" in the speech is Sharon's insistence on repeating facts which the Times would rather ignore.
But see for yourselves.
Perhaps Mr. Sharon does not understand. The president of the United States, speaking out of profound friendship and growing impatience, has asked him to withdraw "without delay." This was not a request made lightly. Mr. Bush has expressed sympathy with Israel's plight and made clear that its security and well-being are of the highest concern. He has sent his secretary of state to the region to try to end the bloodshed. Yet Mr. Sharon says he will remove the tanks and troops whenever it suits him. This is an insult to Mr. Bush and the United States.
It is unbelivable how churlish the Times can get when authorities - especially conservative or Israeli ones - do not obey its commands. Sharon stated that the incursion will continue"until the mission has been accomplished, until Arafat's terrorist infrastructures are uprooted and until murderers holed up in various places are captured." Is that identical to "whenever it suits him?" If so, he has good judgment.
...It is increasingly clear that the costs to broader Israeli interests far outweigh whatever short-term security benefits this military operation may be yielding. Mr. Sharon's actions may be netting some terrorists and some of the terrible tools they employ, but they are inflaming the fury of thousands more Palestinians and millions of Arabs whose governments are being asked by Mr. Bush to press for more responsible Palestinian leadership. The prestige of the United States is on the line in an effort to help Israel, and the Israeli government is doing nothing to make the job easier.
1) Let's see...what has not happened in the last week? Oh yes - there have been no successful suicide bombings since the Israeli operation got underway. That's a pretty broad Israeli interest. Would that have happened without the Israeli incursion? 18 months of experience says no.
2) What if Israel had not invaded? The Times need only consult its newest Pulitzer winner, Thomas Friedman, who recently described how the Palestinians feel that suicide bombings work. Is there any chance the attacks would not have continued and increased? As Friedman noted: "[T]he Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of "desperation" stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie.... President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their "desperate" occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away." Or, as Jonah Goldberg puts it succinctly: "The more hope, the more murder."
So, in sum - the Times would rather have Israel continue to have its citizens murdered in grisly, steadily-increasing terror attacks than inflame "the fury of thousands more Palestinians and millions of Arabs whose governments are being asked by Mr. Bush to press for more responsible Palestinian leadership." As anyone who's ever checked out MEMRI (which does not seem to include the Times editors) knows, those thousands of Palestinians and millions of Arabs had pretty inflamed furies already. A largely successful action to prevent such terror attacks seems worth the cost.
Israel's declared objective is to dismantle the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure, but Mr. Sharon has also targeted leaders and offices of the Palestinian Authority. Israeli gunfire, curfews and military checkpoints have abused the lives, livelihood and dignity of the civilian population.
For all those who still believed that there was a distinction between "the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure" and the "leaders and offices of the Palestinian Authority," the documents recently discovered and publicized by the Israelis should put paid to that concept. If the Times editors had followed the news lately (or even read Sharon's speech cited in its own pages or the work of its own Douglas Frantz), they might have figured it out.
Mr. Sharon says he needs more time to destroy the terrorist network. Israeli forces, however, have already badly damaged the Palestinian civilian infrastructure, with supplies of water, food and medicine disrupted, independent television shut down and residents trapped in their homes. More than 200 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded since Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships rolled into the West Bank on March 29. The refusal of Israeli forces to let wounded Palestinians be removed to hospitals is inexplicable.
1) Elementary logic: Even assuming that Israel has "already badly damaged the Palestinian civilian infrastructure, with supplies of water, food and medicine disrupted, independent television shut down and residents trapped in their homes," why is that necessarily incompatible with needing "more time to destroy the terrorist network?" Presumably the Times feels that it is worth leaving the terrorist network in place rather than inflict the damage on Palestinian civilians. That is understandable, but if you are unwilling to risk civilian casualties, how can you ever attack terrorists who use civilian centers as human shields? I don't see any recognition of the issue.
2) I am reading the "Parody" section (unfortunately not available online) from this week's Weekly Standard, a supposed memo to journalists covering the Israeli invasion. Here are a couple of excerpts:
a) "In the West Bank, [w]e do not care if the terrorist organizers of Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Al Aksa are killed or captured. We will simply not ask that question."
The Times righteously states that "More than 200 Palestinians have been killed and more than 1,500 wounded." Did you notice any attempt to distinguish between terrorist and civilian casualties? Was there any intimation that any of those casualties may have been part of the "terrorist network?" Of course not.
b) "[R]eferences to the terrorist practice of using ambulances to transport explosives shall not be included in the top 67 paragraphs of any story."
The Times goes beyond this directive, not mentioning it at all. Is it really so "inexplicable" that the Israelis are chary about letting wounded Palestinians be transported to hospitals?
It is also true that the Arab states have reacted shamefully to Mr. Bush's efforts. The president asked them to condemn Palestinian terrorism and make clear that suicide bombers are murderers, not martyrs. There has been no response. King Mohammed VI of Morocco, greeting Mr. Powell in Casablanca yesterday, asked the American why he had not gone directly to Jerusalem, as if the Arabs had nothing to account for. In Bahrain, the American ambassador is the focus of fierce protests because at a mock United Nations session there for students, he requested that along with a moment of silence for Palestinian victims, a moment be observed for Israelis as well.
Mr. Powell's Mideast mission was never going to be easy. Even before the Israeli invasion, Arab leaders refused to denounce Palestinian suicide bombings. Mr. Arafat still refuses to call on his people to give up violence.
All true. But what conclusion is drawn?
A wise Israeli leader would use the Bush initiative to show that he stands ready to talk peace with any responsible partner. Instead, Mr. Sharon embarrasses Mr. Bush and gives the Arabs easy excuses.
Let's pretend to be a "wise Israeli leader." Would you rather: a) try to keep your citizens from being massacred, or b) forego the one course of action that can largely succeed in that aim in favor of showing the people described in the previous bolded section that you are ready to "talk peace." That doesn't seem to be a tough decision, but don't ask the Times to make it.
The Times editorials are often suffused with paternalistic conviction that the paper knows best, and all other objections should be stifled for that reason (parents' authority is self-justifying, so they certainly don't have to justify their decisions). When George Bush or Ariel Sharon refuses to understand that the proposed action is for his own good, the paper often gets churlish. All these qualities are on display in this editorial. Rarely, though, are the consequences so dire.
UPDATE: A warm welcome to all those who are visiting for the first time through Instapundit!

AXIS OF EVIL: From Best of the Web, an explosive item (pun not intended) from London's Daily Telegraph alleging that Iraq and the Palestinian Authority have been meeting to plan terrorist attacks:

They have been passed details of a meeting in Baghdad at the end of last month when an Arafat aide is said to have provided a list of strategic sites in Israel and Saudi Arabia that might be attacked in the event of American air strikes on Baghdad. The list of possible targets was presented to officials at the GIA, which is controlled by Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son.
Apart from agreeing to share intelligence, the Palestinians are said to have provided Iraqi security agents with 37 blank passports, obtained from a variety of Arab countries, that might be used by the Iraqis when mounting terrorist attacks.

The article also alleges that one reason that Secretary Powell's first stop is Morocco is because:

it was suggested that one of the purposes of Mr Powell's visit to Morocco was to discuss plans for Mr Arafat's exile. The US is said to have suggested that Mr Arafat should move to Morocco unless he can prove his ability to halt Palestinian violence and co-operate in progress towards peace talks.
Both the Moroccans and the Israelis are reported to have baulked, however, at Mr Arafat's demand for an entourage of 70 Palestinian officials to be guaranteed safe passage with him, including some who are on Israel's "wanted" list as terrorists.

Both points bear watching.

STANDARD RULES: This week's issue of The Weekly Standard has two articles which deserve to be discussed and remembered.

FIRST, THREE CHEERS FOR THE BOURGEOISIE: David Brooks has a monumental piece on why the Arabs and Europeans hate the U.S. and Israel. His thesis, in short, is that the U.S. and Israel are emblematic of bourgeois virtues and material success, and that the Arabs and Europeans are heirs to the tradition of "bourgeoisophobia," which emerged as soon as the bourgeois did. Taking any selection from Brooks' piece runs the risk of oversimplification, but here is a description of the phenomenon:
Bourgeoisephobia is really a hatred of success. It is a hatred held by people who feel they are spiritually superior but who find themselves economically, politically, and socially outranked. They conclude that the world is diseased, that it rewards the wrong values, the wrong people, and the wrong abilities. They become cynical if they are soft inside, violent if they are hard. In the bourgeoisophobe's mind, the people and nations that do succeed are not just slightly vulgar, not just over-compensated, not just undeservedly lucky. They are monsters, non-human beasts who, in extreme cases, can be blamelessly killed.
Brooks argues that:
[T]oday, in much of the world's eyes, two peoples--the Americans and the Jews--have emerged as the great exemplars of undeserved success. Americans and Israelis, in this view, are the money-mad molochs of the earth, the vulgarizers of morals, corrupters of culture, and proselytizers of idolatrous values. These two nations, it is said, practice conquest capitalism, overrunning poorer nations and exploiting weaker neighbors in their endless desire for more and more. These two peoples, the Americans and the Jews, in the view of the bourgeoisophobes, thrive precisely because they are spiritually stunted. It is their obliviousness to the holy things in life, their feverish energy, their injustice, their shallow pursuit of power and gain, that allow them to build fortunes, construct weapons, and play the role of hyperpower.
And so just as the French intellectuals of the 1830s rose up to despise the traders and bankers, certain people today rise up to shock, humiliate, and dream of destroying America and Israel. Today's bourgeoisophobes burn with the same sense of unjust inferiority. They experience the same humiliation because there is nothing they can do to thwart the growing might of their enemies. They rage and rage. Only today's bourgeoisophobes are not just artists and intellectuals. They are as likely to be terrorists and suicide bombers. They teach in madrassas, where they are careful not to instruct their students in the sort of practical knowledge that dominates bourgeois schools. They are Muslim clerics who incite hatred and violence. They are erudite Europeans who burn with humiliation because they know, deep down, that both America and Israel possess a vitality and heroism that their nations once had but no longer do.
...The bourgeoisophobes have no politburo. There is no bourgeoisophobe central command. They have no plausible strategy for victory. They have only their nihilistic rage, their envy mixed with snobbery, their snide remarks, their newspaper distortions, their conspiracy theories, their suicide bombs and terror attacks--and above all, a burning sense that the rising, vibrant, and powerful peoples of America and Israel must be humiliated and brought low.
There is much, much more, and it all should be read.
I have one quibble, though. As anyone who's lived in Israel can tell you, the Israeli economy and attitudes towards social organization are much closer to Western Europe than to the U.S. Israel has come very far from a free-market standpoint since the early 1980s, but it could still use a version of Margaret Thatcher in many ways. So I don't think that anti-bourgeios sentiment is all that helpful in explaining European antipathy towards Israel. (Straightforward anti-semitism probably has more to do with it.)
Other sources for similar arguments are this article in the NY Review of Books by Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma, and this hilarious Mark Steyn piece.

SECOND, THEY CAN COUNTERFEIT THE GREAT TRAGIDIANS: Also, Norman Doidge has an extraordinary article on how evildoers like Yasser Arafat use the consciences of good people for their own ends. Drawing on a fascinating analogy from Shakespeare's Richard III, he argues:
[W]hile conscience allows us to understand ordinary crimes, it actually blinds us before the most extraordinary ones.
...Conscience, when it is functioning well--automatically and without the intervention of reason, so that we do the right thing without thinking--is not simply rational. It is a force, a blunt instrument before which the conscientious person is guilty until proven innocent. As the preventive agency in the mind, conscience blocks first, thinks later. Men like Arafat and Richard know this. That is why both men constantly charge others with crimes--to paralyze them. Both know it doesn't matter whether the charges are false. Richard brazenly accuses Anne of inspiring the murder of her husband, as Arafat accuses the West of causing terrorism.
It is this force inside the psyche of his enemies that the person without a conscience can so effectively enlist as a fifth column. Having himself no such inner force always second-guessing him, he can see it clearly in others--far more clearly than do those who are in its thrall and take each of its charges seriously. Arafat gets endless second chances because the conscience of the West is doing what a conscience does: second-guessing the West's own actions. That is why Arafat is always playing upon the conscience of the West, especially by his endless recourse to "international law" and invocation of "human rights," an utterly brazen ploy coming from a terrorist.

What Arafat, and the Arab countries, do not understand is the extent to which they are playing with fire. When the U.S. "street" understands how their best instincts have been used against them, the reaction will be something which Arabs will warn their children about for many, many generations. Ask Germany and Japan.

A HISTORY LESSON: Victor Davis Hanson offers some perspective on U.S.-Arab-Israeli relations:

Does America's support for Israel contribute to the present unrest, and thus create a destabilizing preponderance of military strength for the Jewish state? Forget for the moment that our current aggregate aid to the Palestinians, Jordan, and Egypt is roughly the same amount as we give the Israelis, and instead think back to the first twenty years of Israel's existence. Then America gave almost no military hardware to Israel — except for a few outdated tanks and some short-ranged missiles. Its Air Force consisted mostly of French Mirages and Ouragans — largess that quickly ceased once the 1967 war broke out.
...The Palestinians now like to cite the unfairness of American-made "Apaches and F-16s" in Israel. Yet when their side had all the material advantages and a staggering edge in weaponry the Arabs still lost.
Has America shown a decided prejudice toward the Israeli side that explains the sudden Arab hostility toward the United States? Not really. An Israeli head of state had never officially been received at the White House until 1964 — nearly 20 years after the foundation of the Jewish State! For most of its early years, Israel depended on support initially from the Soviet Union and later France. Indeed, during the first three Middle East wars the United States sold weapons to nearly every Arab regime and had a military base in Libya. During the 1967 war it essentially supplied no weapons to Israel during the fighting — in dire worry over its military arrangements with many Arab countries and its access to Middle East oil. Nearly forty years ago, as today, Americans were giving Egypt free grain, shipping tanks to Jordan, cozying up to the Saudis, and lecturing Israel on restraint — and the Arab world liked us no better then than it does now.

THE ARSONIST: A great piece by the great Fouad Ajami on Arafat and his preference for conflict over peace.

LET'S HOPE THIS IS TRUE: Via Instapundit, an exceptionally argued piece by David Warren stating that the U.S.' recent moves in the MidEast are designed to prepare the way for the destruction of Arafat. Let's hope.

TERRORIST PREVENTION 101: Apparently today's suicide bomber had been recently released from custody by the Palestinian "Authority."
Meanwhile, Colin Powell - as in the head of the peace-processing State Department - is moving to declare the Arafat-connected Al-Aqsa Brigades a terrorist organization. It's too early to say "I told you so," but it is clear that this is not your Bush father's Administration. I just don't see James Baker-type pressure coming anytime soon.
In addition, Bill Quick also takes up the big picture of the U.S.-Israel-Iraq triangle and looks at the future for the region. It's not pretty. According to the World Tribune article he cites:

The two countries are said to have reached an understanding over the military priorities in any U.S. war against President Saddam Hussein.
The priorities focus on protecting Israel from an Iraqi nonconventional missile attack. The sources said the administration has pledged to provide early-warning alert for any Iraqi missile attack and focus its war effort on destroying Iraqi missile launchers near the Jordanian border. The sources said the understandings were reached during Cheney's visit this week.
...The understandings also include an Israeli commitment to exhibit restraint during any U.S.-led war against Iraq. The sources said the commitment regards a series of scenarios raised by Washington.
In one scenario, Iraq fires missiles tipped with chemical warheads toward Israel. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Iraq has installed chemical warheads on Iraqi Scud-class missiles. But the agencies are skeptical over the effectiveness of the warheads on aging Iraqi missiles, meant to fly more than 400 kilometers.
The diplomatic sources said Israel has agreed to demonstrate restraint in the face of such an Iraqi attack as long as the missiles are launched from Iraqi territory rather than from neighboring Jordan or Syria.

As an aside, wouldn't you love (in a perverse way) to see how the Arab world would blame Israel if the chemical-tipped misslies failed to reach Israel and kiled people in Jordan or Syria? (And if it is the former, how about a joint Israeli-Jordanian force going into Iraq as a response? That would surely blow the minds of the region's bloodhtirsty anti-Semites.)
But back to the article...

For his part, Sharon has sought U.S. understanding for an Israeli military response to a third scenario — that of a Palestinian rocket attack on Israeli communities during the war against Saddam. The sources said Sharon maintains that Israel would then reserve the right to respond with a massive attack that would destroy the PA or exile PA Chairman Yasser Arafat.
The administration appears divided over Sharon's request. The sources said Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have expressed understanding of Sharon's position. But Secretary of State Colin Powell has warned that a massive Israeli response would derail any U.S. military campaign in Iraq.

Zinni should give Arafat a copy of the former paragraph at their next meeting. It really seems that the Bush adminsitration views Arafat as someone whose survival is moderatley useful to them until they can topple Saddam. But that won't be long, and once it happens, Sharon (or Netanyahu) may well be given the green light to destroy the PA once and for all.
Not that it will be a lasting solution, but it may well stop the flurry of suicide bombings. And that's good enough for now.

SOME PASSOVER THOUGHTS ON LIVING IN AND VISITING ISRAEL: Yossi Klein Halevi discusses how "living in Israel is an act of faith." Meanwhile, the popular youth tour "March of the Living" has canceled the Israeli leg of the tour this year.

YES, THAT USUALLY HAPPENS: I know they're doing this in frenzied fashion, but CNN's online editor really fell asleep at the switch for this one:

A suicide bomber set off a massive explosion Thursday in the heart of downtown Jerusalem, police said, killing at least two people and wounding more than 50.
Police said they believed the bomber was also killed.

Let's see... if a "suicide bomber" sets off a "massive explosion," yes, the bomber would usually be killed. The word "suicide" is there for a reason.

CEASE-FIRE ALERT: While the Palestinians supposedly negotiate a cease-fire,yet another suicide bomber attacks in central Jerusalem. The bombing was apparently carried out by the Arafat-connected Al Aqsa Brigades.

THE PRINCE OF PEACE, OR OF DARKNESS? Steven Den Beste has an interesting rumination on the nature of peace:

I want a dark flashlight, please. I want a lamp I can put in a room and turn on and it will make the room dark... Where can I buy that, please? Sorry, not for sale, not even physically possible. To make a room dark, you must find and get rid of all sources of light. But as long as there are any sources of light in the room, it won't be dark.
I would like to buy some peace, please. Where can I buy that? Sorry, to get peace, you have to stop all conflicts, and that means you have to find and remove all the reasons why those involved were willing to fight.

And on the basis of war:

Whatever that reason was to start the war in the first place, it is going to be strong enough to restart it, unless that reason was dealt with in the meantime. In the 1970's they ran into that in Lebanon. The various factions were shelling each other and turning what was once considered the most beautiful modern city in the mid-East into a bombed out wreck, and some western do-gooder would come in and negotiate a cease fire. And the shooting would stop.
For maybe 24 or 48 hours. And then the combat would start again, slowly but with rising ferocity, and within a week they'd be back to "normal". This happened again and again. Over a period of months there was cease-fire after cease-fire, and none of them held. (It ended when one of the do-gooders got kidnapped and held for ransom. After that, no more do-gooders tried to negotiate cease fires.)
The problem was that to the western do-gooder, "peace" was itself the goal, and the way to get it was for everyone to stop shooting. But for those involved in the war, peace was not the goal. And the ceasefire did indeed bring peace but it didn't deal with the underlying grievance which started the war in the first place. So they would start shooting again.
We got a guy in Israel right now trying to get a cease fire between the Israelis and Palestinians. Will he succeed? He might. But it won't last. Both sides would like peace, but they also want more than that, and a simple ceasefire won't give it to them: land. The Israelis have it, the Palestinians want it, and there isn't enough of it for both of them (in their opinion). The Palestinians started this round of the Intifada for a reason, and a cease fire won't satisfy them. (If they had only wanted peace, they wouldn't have started the Intifada in the first place.)
The [pro-"peacemaking" advocate] is making the same mistake that the do-gooders did in Beirut, and assuming that peace itself is what both sides in any given conflict crave. So you can get peace just by stopping the fighting. But if it were possible to have dealt with the deeper issues without fighting, they wouldn't have begun fighting [in] the first place.

Well said.

LESSONS FROM THE DURABN DISASTER: An outstanding article by Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Ca.), a Holocaust survivor and U.S. delegate at the disastrous Durban conference, describing the exact nature of the anti-semitic forces at work there. Two of the most notable features of his piece:
1) He singles out non-governmental organizations ("NGOs") for special blame:

The leaders of the great Western human rights NGOs like Human Rights Watch, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and Amnesty International participated in the NGO Forum in Durban. Shockingly, they did almost nothing to denounce the activities of the radicals in their midst. They made no statements protesting the debasement of human rights mechanisms and terms taking place in front of their eyes and they offered no support to the principled position that the Bush administration took against the singling out of Israel and Jews for attack and criticism at the conference. Instead, they repeated, like a mantra, the ludicrous charge that the Bush administration was using the Middle East issue as a smokescreen to avoid discussion of slavery.
Durban demonstrates that we cannot always assume that all NGOs are focused on advancing universal standards of human rights. When the U.S. government abrogates its role as the leading advocate of pluralism, democracy and human rights, the NGO process can become as polluted as the intergovernmental process.2) Lantos singled out Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights for special blame, and his critique has already gotten results: Robinson has resigned.
As Professor InstaPundit says:

I think it's time to give the UN and Euro crowd what they say they want -- deep U.S. involvement in the U.N. and other multilateral enterprises. Getting rid of Mary Robinson is the beginning of this process. We've let too much crap fester by ignoring it on the plausible theory that it didn't matter. Let's show these folks the respect of taking them seriously -- but let's hold them to the responsibility that entails. U.S. diplomacy needs to look more like Metternich and Bismarck than Albright and Robinson.

THE U.N. RESOLUTION SHOULD BE COMING ANY DAY NOW: According to a German documentary, it appears that Muhammad ad-Dura, the 12-year old Palestinian boy whose tragic shooting death at the begining of the second intifada was captured on TV, was likely killed by Palestinian shooters rather than Israeli soldiers. Somehow, I don't think this news will get quite the media coverage that the original blaming of Israel did.

SPEAKING TRUTH TO (SUPPOSED) POWER: More great stuff from Victor Davis Hanson on the true motivations behind the Israeli-Palestinian war:
Indeed, if the West Bank were to be returned and a general peace declared, there might well be a decade of peace. But then after the hiatus, the madrassas, the autocrats, the theocrats, and the coffee-house intellectuals would, according to their station and methods, all move on to the next round of recovering "all" of "Palestine" — a task made somewhat easier in their mind by Israel's new nearly indefensible borders.
Unlike the Europeans and some others in the West, much of the Arab world does not see distinct and lasting periods of peace and war, but rather interprets the conflict as a continuum — one that will properly and only end eventually with the end of Israel itself.
Why should we put credence in such a pessimistic appraisal of Arab intentions? History supports it. The first three wars were waged when the West Bank was in Arab hands; so why would the premises for the next war be any different from those of 1947, 1956, or 1967, when the goal, as Egyptian General Saad Ali Amer once put it plainly, was "the realization of our common goal — the elimination of Israel"?
The current conflict is surely not over the grievance of dead Muslims — Iraq and Iran make Israelis look like amateurs in that regard. Nor is the lament really over the cruel expulsion of Palestinians en masse — Kuwait garners that prize for expelling a quarter million after the Gulf War. Nor is there much historical precedent of according Palestinians any privileged position based on land lost through war. Compare the current borders of Germany with those of 1914, and then try and make the case for returning soil from France and Poland that was German since antiquity — and the world will answer back with a stern lecture about the wages that a state incurs when it repeatedly attacks its neighbors and loses.
What then can Israel do as the West watches and wonders whether the supply of suicidal murderers will be exhausted before the weary Israeli public concedes? Such a strange place, the Middle East — where Klansmen-like terrorists in hoods, who blow themselves up in Israeli restaurants, and fire machine guns up into the air at funerals, try to pass themselves off as noble, underpowered freedom fighters because their fiery supporters in Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan have learned long ago not to send any more of their own plentiful planes and tanks to destroy Israel.
Most notable is Hanson's undeniable conclusion:
But there is one final consideration for those smug utopian architects in our state department and Europe that is completely forgotten in all this. There will be no second Holocaust. If almost all of the West Bank is returned, as is likely, and in a few years hostilities nevertheless resume as they did during phases 1-3 of the Middle East wars, as is also likely, the battle will be over Israel itself, not Palestinian land. That will be a war Israel will not lose, and it will be fought outside not inside the Jewish state. And that will be a nightmare compared to the current crisis. Those in Europe and in the United States who now lecture about morality will then prove to be not only amoral, but also answerable for far, far more still.

THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN RADICAL A YEAR AGO: Thomas Friedman believes that U.S. troops need to be on the ground in the West Bank to make and keep peace there. The theme of his column is that "this is a shocking recommendation," but it is a statement about how horrific the situation has become that if you've been following developments closely, it isn't crzay at all.
Also, Friedman makes the following point:
What the hawks don't understand is that the escalating friction between the Israeli and Palestinian forces is enabling Palestinians to steadily improve their military skills. This is a natural phenomenon seen in many prolonged wars between a more sophisticated and less sophisticated army. It was the long friction between Hezbollah, a ragtag Lebanese militia, and Israel that eventually improved Hezbollah's skills to the point where it was able to force Israel to withdraw unilaterally from Lebanon, without any agreement, by lowering the casualty ratio between Hezbollah and Israel from 10 to 1 down to 1 to 1.
He's absolutely right, and it points out something that the U.S. learned in Vietnam: the folly of gradual escalation. Part of the effectiveness of force is in its shock value, which is greatly reduced in a situation of gradual escalation. Something to keep in mind for when the next cease-fire fails.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL, VOL. II: Andrew Sullivan speaks for many bloggers when he opines that by pressing Israel for a cease-fire, it is selling Israel out and faltering in the war on terrorism. I agree that from a moral standpoint, the reversion to State Department-style peace processing is wrong. But I think there is much more to the administration's moves, and much less succor to the Palestinian terrorists, than meets the eye. Here's a semi-organized explanation:
1) The Bush administration deserves the benefit of the doubt. The unqualified support they have given to the Sharon government over the last several months, in the face of international opposition and the scorn of media "sophisticates", is more than any recent administration has done - perhaps not since the Johnson administration gave Israel a tacit green light to launch the 1967 war. (For all of Clinton's affinity for Israel, he reverted to the James Baker playbook as soon as Netanyahu was elected; his administration's support for Israel not-so-coincidentally coincided with the intervals in which Israel was most willing to comply with the wishes of international polite opinion. I think it is far more impressive that the U.S. government has supported the man regularly and unfavorably compared to Caligula in the international media (on a good day).)
2) The support being given to Arafat is much less than it seems. In a brilliant piece originally published in July in the Weekly Standard, David Brooks noted that the Palestinians and Israelis were then (and certainly now) at the stage where they were negotiating cease-fires in a way that would force the other side to break them first. The Tenet plan was a victory for Israel in that respect:
It forces Yasser Arafat to perform a series of politically unpalatable tasks—like arresting terrorists and confiscating illegal weapons from his troops—before it forces Israel to do anything politically unpalatable, such as freeze settlement construction on the West Bank. Therefore, Arafat will have to break the cease-fire first and bear the brunt of the ensuing American disapproval.
The agenda that Zinni is now pushing is the Tenet plan. Today's supposed breakthrough - the news that Dick Cheney would be willing to meet Arafat - is, as the Washington Post understands, a politically adept move which returns the onus to Arafat to:
meet certain conditions, including a public declaration that violence by Palestinians must end and that his Palestinian Authority security forces enforce a cease-fire, once it is agreed on, in areas under Palestinian control.
...Israeli officials said neither Cheney nor Zinni had pressured them to make political concessions -- or even discuss possible concessions -- before the Palestinians arrest militants, seize illegal weapons and crack down on groups that have carried out terrorist attacks.
(As an aside, don't expect the NY Times to pick up on any of this, as usual.)
Also, there is little doubt that Sharon has been taking a page from Arafat's book and escalated the Israeli response right before the Zinni visit, so as to create an opportunity for a "concession" (along the lines of the Palestinians reducing the number of shootings on Israelis from dozens to 5 per day).
3) The current situation will be swept away in the whirlwind of what is about to happen. I've seen many journalists couch this scenario in qualifiers so as to not confront the ramifications. But you read this site for descriptions of the ramifications. So:
Israel will be attacked with chemical weapons in the next year.
When the U.S. attacks Iraq, there is little doubt that Saddam will fire whatever he can at Israel, as its nuclear deterrent will lose some effect once Saddam knows he is dead one way or another. (I still believe that it is worth taking him put ASAP, because failure to do so will only strengthen what he can and will fire at Israel and the U.S.) It is entirely possible that the attacks will, like his Scud attacks in the Gulf war, will fail to do much damage, but the storm resulting from the attempt will reshape the region to an extent we can barely foresee. (Not that I won't try.)
A regional war could easily result, especially if Israel retaliates with nuclear weapons. If that happens, the "peace process" will be pushed back at least a generation, and if (as will probebly be the case) the Palestinians join in the war, Israel may wreak destruction that will exceed the wildest fantasies of Al-Jazeera.
Even if a regional war does not result, Israel will be in a totally different position as a result of being the victim of an attack of weapons of mass destruction. And it appears that regardless of what happens, the U.S. will not be using much (if anything) in the way of Arab bases for the upcoming attack on Iraq; not as much of a "coalition" to pay lip service to. Thanks to that (and to the fact that unlike Bush 41, Bush 43's team is "unilateralist" by nature), the U.S. will feel less of a debt to the Arab countries than it did after the first Gulf War, meaning that James Baker-type pressure is unlikely to be applied.
Given all that, it makes sense that Sharon is going along with the U.S. now; it will cost him less than it looks at first and the situation will undergo complete upheaval when the U.S. attacks Iraq.
Have a good night.

THE OTHER SIDE: From the Jerusalem Post, a good piece about how right-wing ideologues in Israel never admit that life may be more complicated than their worldview.

APPEASEMENT IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE: An excellent piece by