I just posted an updated recipe page on something called Eretz Israel Cake. Joan Nathan published the recipe in her cookbook, The Foods of Israel Today. I've made it three times now, and the latest was possibly the best cake I've ever made. The ingredients include marzipan, dates, and lots of oranges -- touted as the taste of the land of Israel. Of course, under a different twist of history it could just as well be Land of Palestine Cake.

I made it for a potluck dinner we had to discuss Sandy Tolan's remarkable book, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. Seemed like an appropriate thing to bring.

I've long had a section on the website here with a collection of recipes, mostly cribbed from cookbooks with minor annotations. One reason is just that it gives me easy recourse to look up old favorite recipes, especially when I'm travelling and don't have access to the usual cookbooks. But I've only updated the cache occasionally, and right now it's in limbo between two designs and indexing schemes. A lot of things should be there but aren't, but if you rummage around you'll find some very good recipes -- mostly international (Spanish, Turkish, Indian, and Chinese are staples here) plus a few down home favorites (like my mother's chicken and dumplings).

I also have a website section for books -- another longterm, slow-evolving project, although I've been giving it a lot more attention lately. The link above to The Lemon Tree puts you there. I originally started collecting comments I had written on books I've read, but that soon evolved into collecting quotes (with or without annotation). Most of these have been posted at one point or another in the blog, but they're more accessible in the books section. The page on The Lemon Tree should give you a pretty broad sense of the book.

The books section currently lists 35 books on Israel. I've read two-thirds of them (plus a few others, some showing up in other categories). A couple more are on my shelf, and a few more are books that I've written something about based on a review (e.g., Dennis Ross, who is very, very low on my reading priority list). Tolan's book is especially good for how it personalizes the conflict, but also for the extreme rigor of its writing. Avi Shlaim's The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arabs is probably the best general history up to 1998 or so, but it misses the Barak-Sharon destruction of the Oslo Peace Process. Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost: The Four Questions has a lot of insight into the politics of perpetual war in Israel, although subsequent events have overtaken him as well. I don't think anyone has taken full account of how morally corrosive the Bush administration, with W's dead certain faith in the clarifying power of force, could have been to Israel. (The news today from Iraq, along with Bush's musings on the need to confront outlaws, are one more instance of this mindset.)

At some point I should add cookbooks to the books section, and cross-reference the recipes. Nathan's cookbook is rife with Israeli propaganda, as well as Israeli glosses on mostly middle eastern recipes, plus a few specialties of Arik Sharon's wife. Still, the Eretz Israel cake is a wonder. Like Bashir and Dahlia's lemon tree, it's something we all can savor.

Evidently the number one obstacle in Israel to any sort of peace deal with Abbas isn't the opposition Likud or the rump-Sharonist party of Ehud Olmert but the new leader of the Labor Party, also Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Helena Cobban recently had this to say about Barak, and I think it's worth quoting at length:

In the west, Ehud Barak is generally widely thought of as a relative "peacenik" among Israeli political leaders. In 1999, when he was head of the Labor Party, he was indeed elected PM on a strongly pro-peace platform. ("I will complete the negotiations with the Palestinians within 6-9 months," etc.) He failed miserably. In fact, he was hustled at the speed of light out of being the IDF's chief of staff into being head of Labor, and never had time to learn anything at all about politics or diplomacy along the way. Hence, the coalition that he headed in Israel fell apart in almost record time, because of his total lack of political skills. The "peace process" fell apart disastrously, too, bringing us in short order Sharon's disastrous September 2000 visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque, the outbreak of the Second Intifada, and Sharon's amazing triumphant re-entry into national leadership just 17 years after the Kahan Commission had said he should be banned from high office for life.

Along the way, Barak did make what could be described as two "drive-by, quickie" attempts at peacemaking. One with Hafez al-Asad, which failed miserably because of Barak's arrogance and duplicity (and Bill Clinton's complicity with both those aspects of Barak's behavior.) That failure almost certainly helped kill Hafez al-Asad. After that one failed, Barak turned those same attributes in Yasser Arafat's direction, forcing him to the completely ill-prepared Camp David 2 summit from which both Barak and Clinton emerged vociferously and in a quite one-sided way blaming Arafat.

My best friends in the Israeli peace movement heap a lot of blame on Barak for killing the Israeli peace movement at that point. By successfully spreading the (significantly inaccurate) story that he had made Arafat a "generous offer" and that Arafat had turned it down out of hand, Barak spread the idea very broadly in Israel and the US that the Israelis had "no partner for peace" on the Palestinian side.

Israel's Labour Party has always been a flawed vehicle for any hopes of concluding a just and sustainable peace. One problem with the party since its inception has been the extremely incestuous relationship between its leadership and that of the Israeli military. Some of the IDF's retired generals have become voices of good sense regarding the need for peacemaking; but many more of them have not. People like Ephraim Sneh, Binyamin ("Fouad") Ben-Eliezer, and Ehud Barak have taken into the party's upper echelons the mindset of bulldozers and bullies. They are also very much aware of the huge interests many of their friends and former colleagues have in the success of Israel's massive military-industrial complex.

A lot more could be said about Barak. I think his low point was after all but throwing the 2001 election to Sharon, he asked Sharon to return the favor and make him Defense Minister. Now he's finally made it, under Sharon's successor. He probably thinks of that as some form of vindication. More likely Olmert's just trying to figure out how to blow off the shotgun deal that Rice is trying to rope Olmert and Abbas into. He may figure that if anyone can sabotage a deal it is Barak. After all, Barak not only opposed Oslo from the start; he took a fall as the most incompetent Israeli Prime Minister ever just to kill Oslo in the end.

Hillel Cohen: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration With Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008, University of California Press)

The Nation (Mar. 24, 2008), Neve Gordon has a long review of Cohen's book. Gordon introduces the subject by drawing on examples of Israel's targeted assassination program which has to date killed over 400 Palestinians. The following quotes are from Gordon's review.

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(p. 24):

Army of Shadows chronicles a tragic chapter in the people's history of Palestine, one that many Arab scholars have refrained from writing because it contradicts the dominant ethos of Palestinian national unity. Zionists have abstained from recording it as well because it undermines their claim that the Palestinians were able to unify and fight against the establishment of a Jewish state after the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947. Cohen reveals that many Palestinians signed pacts with the Zionists during the 1948 war and that some even fought with the Jews against the Arab armies.

Collaboration is a very thorny issue, primarily because of its corrosive blend of betrayal, exploitation and deceit, so it's not surprising that Army of Shadows created a stir when the Hebrew edition was published in 2004. Both liberal Jews and Palestinians found the book difficult to digest because each group found its side portrayed in unflattering terms. Many Jewish readers were upset by Cohen's revelation that the prestate Zionist intelligence agency, Shai, and the Jewish Agency's Arab bureau exploited almost every honest Jewish and Palestinian relationship to advance narrow Zionist interests. There were, Cohen notes, many Jews who desired only friendship or good business relations with Palestinians but were eventually identified by the Shai, which used them to collect information and enlist Palestinian collaborators. The Jewish Agency even helped establish and finance Neighborly Relations Committees, which initiated mutual visits and Jewish-Palestinian projects, ranging from pest control to the sending of joint petitions to the Mandatory government. The rationale for the creation of these committees was not only to enhance coexistence but also to recruit informers.

Ezra Danin, head of the Shai's Arab department from 1940 to 1948, identified twenty-five occupations and institutions in which Jews and Palestinians mixed company, among them trucking, shipping, train and telecommunications systems, journalism, Jewish-Arab municipalities, prisons and the offices of the British Administration. He proposed that the Jews in these walks of life enlist Arab collaborators, adding that "such activity should be similar to the way the Nazis worked in Denmark, Norway, and Holland -- touching on every area of life." Cohen explains that this approach was different from that of the British intelligence, which allowed only political and military organizations and subversive bodies to be targeted as pools for potential informers. This revelation, besides shedding light on some of the ruthless tactics employed by the intelligence agencies, helps explain why, from Zionism's very beginnings, it was almost impossible for many Jews to develop loyal relationships with indigenous Palestinians.

Army of Shadows also disturbed Palestinian readers because it reveals for the first time the extent of Palestinian collaboration with the Jews during the Mandate period and the ensuing 1948 war. Some Palestinians were opportunists who collaborated with the Zionists to make money or advance their careers -- these were primarily land brokers and people seeking administrative jobs. Others were mukhtars [village leaders] who wished to advance their regional or village interests or, in cases of internal competition, to solidify their leadership with the Zionists. Still others can be characterized as Palestinian patriots who simply disagreed with the dominant national leadership. Finally, there were those who had Jewish friends and did not view Zionist immigration as a catastrophe. The problem, though, as Cohen points out, is that regardless of the motivation, collaboration contributed to the fragmentation of Palestinian society at a time when its very fate was being determined.

(p. 26):

Cohen documents numerous cases of Palestinians refusing to attack Jews. This unwillingness to do battle pervaded the country. In December 1947, Cohen writes, "the inhabitants of Tulkarm refused to attack Jewish towns to their west, to the chagrin of the local Holy Jihad commander, Hasan Salameh. Sources in Ramallah reported at the same time that many were refusing to enlist, and reports from Beit Jibrin indicated that 'Abd al-Rahman al-'Azzi," the head of a very influential family, "was doing all he could to keep his region quiet. The villagers of the Bani-Hassan nahiya southwest of Jerusalem decided not to carry out military actions within their territory, and the people of al-Mahila refused to request from 'Abd al-Qader al-Husseini to attack the Jewish neighborhoods of Mekor Hayyim and Bayyit va-Gan." In these places as well as in many others, fear of the Jewish forces was the source of reluctance; and in still others it was friendship that had survived many years of national strife. "Palestinian Arab interest in fighting the Jews seems not to have been very high," Cohen concludes.

The review also discusses a second, still untranslated, book by Cohen called Aravim Tovim (Good Arabs), which carries the stories of Palestinian collaborators into the 1948-67 period. As Gordon points out, Israeli use of collaborators continues to the present day. Gordon concludes with an example (p. 28):

Today a request to exit the Gaza Strip to receive medical treatment, visit a dying relative or study in the West Bank or abroad is often contingent upon one's willingness to collaborate. In early January a number of patients were referred from Gaza -- where they could not receive medical treatment -- to Maqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem, and received permits to leave the region. At the border, though, they were interrogated by Israeli security service officers, who demanded that they become collaborators. According to Hadas Ziv of Physicians for Human Rights, Israel, those patients who refused had their travel permits annulled and were sent back home. While these patients managed to resist the temptation to collaborate, despite their medical ills, others do not. The persistence of collaboration is a result of not only the historical processes Cohen eloquently describes but also the harsh conditions under which Palestinians currently live.

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Every occupation has depended on collaborators, and every insurgency has found it necessary to dissuade collaboration, often with violence against their own people. William Polk's Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, has numerous examples (including a chapter on Palestine). In the worst cases, the struggle between insurgents and collaborators reaches the proportions of a civil war -- Iraq is one such case. But even where the violence level is relatively mild, collaboration leads to an immense psychic rift within a people -- France under Nazi Germany and its Vichy client state is a good example where the resistance was never as strong as one liked to remember, in large part because the taint of collaboration never faded away.

One thing that Bush et al. certainly did not think of when they invaded Iraq was what would ultimately happen to the thousands of Iraqis they were able to recruit to try to secure the occupation. They really needn't have thought back any further than Vietnam. Tens (or maybe hundreds) of thousands of Vietnamese who had foolishly allied themselves with the US occupation sought refuge here after the war. Thus far the US has allowed no more than a few dozens of the millions of displaced Iraqis to immigrate here, but as the US presence ends, the moral pressure to provide sanctuary will only increase. Will our kneejerk nativists welcome those Iraqis with the flowers Bush expected awaited the Americans in Baghdad?

Postscript: I was wrong about Polk having a chapter on Palestine. The lineup: America (vs. England), Spain (vs. Napoleon), Philippines (vs. US), Ireland (vs. England), Yugoslavia (vs. Nazi Germany), Greece (vs. Nazi Germany, England, US), Kenya (vs. England), Algeria (vs. France), Vietnam (vs. France, US), Afghanistan (vs. England, Soviet Union), and Iraq.

Trita Parsi: Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007, Yale University Press)

I wound up marking a huge number of quotes in Parsi's book, so some sort of executive summary is in order. The book doesn't really cover the latest sabre rattling, but offers much necessary background to understand what's happening, not least the superficial and cynical opportunism exhibited by all three powers.

One striking thing is the relative continuity of interests shared by Iran under the Shah and under the Islamic Republic. These relate to deep-seated national values: resentment against British, Russian, and (more obliquely in the Shah's case) American imperialism and the reduction of a proud empire to second- or third-class status in the region and the world; the even deeper rivalry between Iran and its Arab neighbors, reinforced by language, culture, and the Sunni-Shia religious divide. The main differences between the two periods are that after the Shah was overthrown the US became much more hostile toward Iran (broken up by stretches of malign neglect), and under Khomeini Iran's attempts to project regional influence were mostly couched in religious terms.

The US attitude toward Iran shifted in 1953, when the CIA staged a successful coup against Iran's democratic government (the Shah had been installed by the British in 1944, but his powers were limited), and again in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown. Before 1953, British control over Iran's oil industry left the US on the sidelines with no particular role, although US oil companies had started to operate in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. After the coup, the Shah developed into one of the most megalomaniacal rulers of recent years, especially in the 1970s with oil prices booming and Iran given a favored role as a US proxy under Kissinger's geopolitical scheme.

The main thing Americans remember about Iran is that during the revolution Iranian student seized the US embassy and held Americans hostage for over a year. The Carter administration was frustrated by the hostage crisis. Ronald Reagan turned this to his advantage, securing the release of the hostages as soon as he took office. Reagan enjoyed a secretive relationship with Iran leading to the embarrassment of the Iran-Contra affair, but he also tilted toward Iraq in its war against Iran. Since then the US has veered between indifference and outright hostility, the latter tracking Israel's changing attitudes toward Iran.

Parsi maps out Israel's changing relations with Iran, showing that Israeli attitudes had more to do with Israel's own strategic power interests than with whatever Iran was or was not thinking or doing at the time. In particular, he shows how Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu at various times took pro- and anti-Iran stances depending on other factors. Rabin, for instance, despite a long history of supporting Israel's "peripheral strategy" that favored good relations with Iran, turned hard against Iran while working on the Oslo peace process -- with the Palestinians no longer in play as Israel's existential enemy, Rabin ratcheted up tensions with Iran to keep Israel stocked with a critical enemy. Netanyahu, hoping to dismantle Oslo, took the opposite tack, dismissing Iran as a threat while emphasizing the Palestinians. Later on, with Oslo routed, Netanyahu became the prophet of Iranian doom. The two US-Iraq wars both resulted in Israel ratcheting up rhetoric against Iran. Both Iraq wars threatened to undermine the special US-Israel relationship because both times the US found itself in need of Arab allies than and unable to make much use of its alliance with Israel. Stirring up trouble between the US and Iran helped bolster Israel in America's eyes. (Although in the latter case, one might argue that US neocons were so far ahead of everyone in opposing Iran that the Israeli support was merely helping out.)

One conclusion we should draw from this is that Israel has from the very beginning thought of nothing but continuing its conflict. The reasons for this may have varied over time, but whenever Israel makes a step toward peace they immediately undermine it with a counterstep toward more war. One example is how Oslo was matched with Rabin's exacerbation of Iran. An earlier example was how the 1979 agreement with Egypt was followed by the 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon. All through history, Israel has primarily viewed its relationship with Iran in terms of conflict: the reason Israel supported Iran both under the Shah and later during the Iran-Iraq war was for Iran's strategic value against Israel's Arab enemies. As Arab countries have dropped out of the conflict, Iran was seen as more of a threat in its own right, even though Iran's ideological and rhetorical position against Zionist Israel has been consistent. The fact that Iran has almost never acted against Israel in any concrete way has never mattered.

Another thing worth noting here is how Israel's neediness interferes with trying to construct a realistic American foreign poicy. The US has done things to Iran that we should be ashamed and apologetic for: overthrowing Mossadegh, arming the Shah, arming Iraq in a war with Iran that left over a million dead. There's also smaller items, like the Iranian airliner the US shot down. Iran's own record has more than a few blemishes on it, but there have been opportunities to put these things to the side and rebuild a constructive, respectful relationship that would help both countries. Certainly the US would benefit from a civil working relationship with Iran when dealing with major problems in Iraq and Afghanistan, but our inability to separate US interests from Israel's demands has made that impossible. Instead, the confluence of Bushist and Sharonist war mongering keeps driving Iran into a corner, making them more wary and more dangerous -- despite all the belligerent threats coming from Bush's hawks, probably more than anyone responsible in the US military wants to bite off for now.

Parsi's book is notable for showing us the full history of these relationships, and how nonsensical the conflicts have become.

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Quotes follow in the extended body.

I'm nowhere near up to date on what's going on in Israel these days. Time is an issue, but the actors and dynamics have gone way past the point of ridiculous lately. Bush was talking today about how now he's got a timetable to settle the whole thing -- how Clintonian to wait to the last minute then fuck it all up! Saw a clip of Rice and Abbas, where Rice is trying to talk Abbas into resuming "negotiations" (whatever those are) that broke off when Israel killed 100 Palestinians in the latest offensive. I should probably read Charles Enderlin's The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada, and Wars in the Middle East 2001-2006, but it's already in need of a major update. As the Vanity Fair article below demonstrates, the Bush years in the Middle East have been way stranger than fiction.

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David Rose: The Gaza Bombshell. Major piece: with access to confidential documents, Rose reveals how Bush, Rice, and Elliott Abrams hatched a coup attempt where Muhammad Dahlan attempted to seize control of Gaza, and failed, leaving Hamas more firmly in charge of Gaza, more heavily armed than ever. Much of this had been previously reported, although the extent of Rice's direct control is better documented. Also noteworthy that neocon David Wurmser resigned over the operation. While the operation failed to secure Gaza for Fatah (Dahlan, and Rice), it did manage to push Hamas away from their nonviolent political path back to armed resistance, and it greatly amplified the divisions between Fatah and Hamas, both having much more blood on their hands. This is ultimately Bush's fault, not just for egging Israel's hawks on and for identifying Dahlan as "our guy" -- Bush's initial faith in the clarifying power of a show of force underlies everything he's done in the Middle East.

Helena Cobban: Condi's Anti-Hamas Plot: The Vanity Fair Version. More comments on the David Rose article above.

Arthur Neslen: Inside a Failed Palestinian Police State. Whereas Gaza is currently more in the news, Neslen reports from Ramallah on how Fatah has managed to cling onto power -- one common comparison is to "France's Vichy regime under German occupation." Likudniks are no doubt chuckling at the sight of Fatah tainted as collaborationists and Palestinians killing each other, but anyone with the slightest interest in promoting peace ever should realize that peace can only be made by leaders who enjoy the respect of their people. (On the other hand, that's probably why Olmert, with his 0% approval rating, has managed to cling to power.)

Uri Avnery: Israel in Deadly Denial. Simple, sane Q&A piece, in contrast to all the madness flying around.

Tony Karon: U.S. Policy is Gasoline on the Gaza Fires. The best piece I know of on where this all sits, probably because Karon's previously covered every wretched step along the road (cf. his links in the piece). On Rice's explanations as to why no one should talk to Hamas:

Ah. Cease-fire talks would "legitimize" Hamas in the eyes of the Palestinian people. Right. [ . . . ] A cease-fire would "make it look" like Hamas is the entity with which Israel and the West should be negotiating? What planet are these U.S. officials on? What's the point of peace talks if they don't involve the party that, on the Palestinian side, is doing most of the fighting? Mahmoud Abbas commands no forces currently fighting Israel, so, simple logic would dictate that the Palestinian entity with whom a truce will have to be negotiated will have to be Hamas. You know, like, duh!

Also some sharp lines about Martin Indyk's reasoning about why no one should talk to Hamas. Ties back into the Vanity Fair article. Karon singles out the part where Rice orders Abbas to dissolve the Hamas-led government: "And they think talking to Hamas is going to erode this man's legitimacy!"

We went to what was billed as "A Taste of Interfaith Dialogue" last night, at Covenant Presbyterian Church in the suburban sprawl out west. Up front was a panel of 11 of 12 people who went to Israel in December. The group was "interfaith": three Jews (the rabbis of the Reformed and Conservative synagogues, and the executive director of the Mid-Kansas Jewish Federation, evidently also a rabbi and an Israeli citizen); two Muslims (a cop and an engineer who works for the city, the former a Sunni from Kuwait, the latter a Shi'a from Iran); Presbyterian and Methodist ministers, plus assorted Christian laiety. The trip was at least partly occasioned by the question of whether the Presbyterian church should divest from business involved in Israel's occupation of Palestinian Territories. The three rabbis who went on this trip spend much of their time here politicking for Israel. They raised funds for the trip. Given their prior experience in Israel, they should have been effective guides and minders.

The session started with two passes around the table, where each talked about their favorite moments during the trip. Most of the Christians talked about their awe at the holy sites, retracing the steps of Jesus. The rabbis, somewhat condescendingly, talked about being touched by the depth of the Christians' experiences, asserting their common religious experience -- one went so far as to describe Christianity as Judaism's "daughter religion." The muslims talked about the fellowship of the group, how they recognized that we are all one people. This polite, feel good facade fractured as soon as the first question was raised. It was: in your travels, were you able to experience anything that let you empathize with the state Palestinians find themselves in? The Arab-American policeman, who teaches Arabic and advises police departments throughout the state on Arab issues, who as he put it is "in the security business," spoke first, and that's all it took for the conflict to take over the discussion.

I didn't take notes, but I think only one subsequent question was not on the conflict. The rabbis did their best to hold their ground -- the Conservative one (originally from South Africa) was combative, the others conciliatory, one lamely arguing that there are only shades of gray in the conflict, the other (in a rare moment of self-examination) admitting his inability to hear the same human complexity from Palestinians that he easily discerned in Israelis. The discussion remained at a friendly level, with much agreement to disagree. What struck me wasn't the details, let alone the arguments, but the simple fact that the legendary Israeli hasbara, practiced in this case by skilled pros on a well-meaning but relatively naive group of mere Americans, had failed to work its magic.

In the end, the interfaith lesson is simple: getting us to agree that we are all the same under God is easy; reconciling that agreement with the Occupation is not.

The full title of Sandy Tolan's book is The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East (2006, Bloomsbury). The Arab is Bashir Khairi, who was born into a prominent Palestinian family in al-Ramla, an Arab town that was forcibly evacuated by Israeli soldiers in 1948, its residents made to march as refugees to Ramallah, a West Bank town controlled by Jordan until 1967, when it too was occupied by Israel. The Jew is Dalia Eshkenazi, born in Bulgaria, her family emigrating to Israel in 1948, where they moved into the same house that the Khairis had been forced from. The lemon tree grew in the backyard of the house, planted by Bashir's father, a familiar bond for both. In 1967, Bashir was finally able to briefly return to al-Ramla, find his family house, and find Dalia in the house. They two people provide a prism through which Tolan tells the story of the conflict. Like everything else, the pair are not true mirrors of each other. They share a common bond, but their experiences are profoundly asymmetric. Dalia comes off as a well-reasoned member of Israel's peace block. Bashir, on the other hand, finds himself allied with militants, and spends most of the post-1967 years in jail or in exile.

The quotes hardly do justice to the book, especially to the personal aspects of the story. By focusing as he does, Tolan brings the story down to human scale, but in reducing it the story becomes one arbitrary thread among many. The book does not achieve, or even suggest, a happy ending, but then neither does history. But the point is to understand the problem, not to make it easier than it is. Dalia's Einstein quote seems to be thrown out as a challenge, not achieved in the book, but out there waiting for someone to rise to it.

I started putting these quotes together shortly after reading the book, then got sidetracked and resumed much later, leaving the later quotes rather bare. Doing a fair job would entail much re-reading, and would no doubt result in many more quotes. This is one of the best books to read on the subject. Comes with extremely meticulous notes at the end.

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In 1937 Britain's Peel Commission recommended partitioning Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab regions, with the separation enforced by forced transfer. The Zionist leadership embraced those recommendations. The Arab leadership rejected them, and soon launched an armed revolt, which lasted from 1937-39 until the British crushed it. Afterwards, Britain treaded more carefully, discarding the Peel Commission recommendations and instituting policies to forestall further revolt by limiting Jewish immigration -- the change of policy was detailed in the famous "White Paper." As it turned out, 1939 was a very bad time to shut down one of the few avenues open for Jews to escape from Nazi-dominated Europe. The Zionist debate in 1937 prefigured much of the ensuing history (pp. 18-19):

The Zionist leadership accepted Lord Peel's recommendations despite internal dissension. Many Jewish leaders did not want to give up the idea of a Jewish homeland across the whole of Palestine, and some leaders even considered Transjordan,t he desert kingdom across the Jordan River, as part of an eventual Jewish state. For them, acceptance of the Peel Commission's report was a major compromise, and their disagreement reflected ideological divisions that would manifest for decades. David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Mapai Party and the most influential of the Zionists in Palestine, had argued in favor of the plan. At the core of the Peel Commission plan was the idea of transferring the Arabs, a concept that had been advanced for decades by fellow Zionists. In 1895, Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had written that in purchasing land from the indigenous Arabs for a Jewish homeland, "we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country . . . Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

Forty years later, during Lord Peel's investigation, Ben-Gurion had instructed Jews who met with the commission to recommend the transfer plan. After the release of the commission's report, the Zionist leader wrote: "We have to uproot from the roots of our hearts the assumption that it is not possible. Indeed it is possible. . . . We might be losing a historical chance that won't return. The transfer cause, in my view, is more important than all our demands for additional territory . . . with the evacuation of the Arab population from the valleys, we get for the first time in our history a real Jewish state." A year later, Ben-Gurion would declare, "I support compulsory transfer." Others sympathetic to the Zionist cause had warned against such measures. Albert Einstein and Martin Buber, for example, had long advocated what Einstein called "sympathetic cooperation" between "the two great Semitic peoples," who "may have a great future in common."

The Arabs were as stunned by the Peel Commission's proposal as Ben-Gurion was excited. The Arab Higher Committee, led by the mufti of Jerusalem, promptly rejected it, not only because of the transfer plan, but because of the partition itself. The Arabs would fight for a single, independent, Arab-majority state.

The note about Buber and Einstein points out a missed opportunity to forge a compromise between Jews and Arabs in favor of a state that would respect both while rejecting British colonial rule. One thing I don't know what to what extent such an understanding may have been supported by Palestinian Arabs. In some ways it was implicit in their one-state position, which at the time would have been a little less than one-third Jewish. Such a state could even have welcomed fairly large-scale Jewish immigration without becoming majority Jewish. But two things worked against any such position: continued British rule depended on keeping Jews and Arabs in opposition, and the Zionists were overwhelmingly dominated by people like Ben-Gurion who desired a Jewish-majority state on as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible.

At the end of the 1937-39 revolt (p. 21):

In May 1939, it appeared to some Arabs that the sacrifices of their rebellion had brought a political victory. With British forces still heavily engaged with the rebels, and with the situation in Europe creating tens of thousands of Jewish refugees, the British government released its White Paper, accepting many of the demands of the Arab Rebellion. The British agreed to strictly limit Jewish immigration and to tighten restrictions on land sales in Palestine. Most important, the White Paper called for a single independent state. Many Arabs in Palestine saw in the White Paper a practical solution to their problem. But Hajj Amin al-Husseini, speaking for the Arab Higher Committee, rejected the White Paper. His word carried the day in Arab Palestine, even though it was made from exile: the ex-mufti had fled Palestine nearly two years earlier, wanted by the British at the height of the Arab rebellion. The ex-mufti's decision was unpopular with many Palestinian Arabs, who believed they had missed an opportunity.

The new British policy marked a sharp change from the Peel Commission plan of only two years earlier. The White Paper was a major concession to the Arabs. For the Jews of Palestine, it was an abandonment of British support for a Jewish national homeland promised in the Balfour Declaration, at a time when the situation for Jews in Europe was growing more perilous. Within weeks, the Jewish paramilitary squads were attacking British forces, planting explosives in Jerusalem's central post office, and carrying out attacks on civilians in Arab souks. The White Paper, it was clear, had shaken Jewish-British relations in Palestine. "Satan himself could not have created a more distressing and horrible nightmare," David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary.

By the turn of 1940, the British authorities had finally defeated the Arab Rebellion through what they called "severe countermeasures": tens of thousands jailed, thousands killed, hundreds executed, countless houses demolished, and key leaders, including the mufti, in exile. In the cities, Arab men had taken off their keffiyehs and replaced them once again with the fez. The Palestinian national movement was deeply divided and utterly unprepared for any future conflict.

But the "single independent state" was promised some ten years in the future, and in the end was not delivered. During the White Paper period, the Zionists were able to build their militias to the point where they were able to prevail in the civil war of 1948. Britain not only did nothing to stop them; Britain furthered the partition by encouraging Transjordan to occupy the West Bank, and Britain had a hand in implementing transfer by shipping Palestinians, especially from Jaffa, as refugees to Lebanon.

Britain's strategy was lose-lose, with Jews turning on them for abandoning the Zionist dream, while keeping the Arabs in opposition by denying them any political power. Yet Britain never could abandon its colonial mentality, so they kept helping the Zionists even as they were assaulted by major acts of terrorism. Britain was so committed to divide-and-conquer rule that they never considered trying to reconcile the two groups. Nor did they consider the alternative of permitting Jewish emigration to anywhere else in Britain and its empire where it would have been much less politically charged.

(pp. 45-46):

By the end of the war in 1945, Bashir had turned three and the battle for the future of Palestine had reawakened. A quarter million Jewish refugees flooded the Allied displaced persons camps in Europe, and tens of thousands of Jews were smuggled out of the DP camps to Palestine by the Mossad, predecessor of the present-day Israeli spy agency. Most of this immigration was illegal under the British rule in Palestine. The authorities began to intercept boatloads of European Jews and intern them at Cyprus, off the coast of Lebanon. With its White Paper six years earlier, the British had imposed strict immigration limits in the face of the fears, demands, and rebellion of the Palestinian Arabs.

As the details of the atrocities in Europe began to emerge, however, the image of stateless, bedraggled Holocaust survivors in the Cyprus internment camps was seared into the mind of the Western public, and Britain was pressured to loosen its policy. U.S. president Harry Truman pressed Britain to allow one hundred thousand DPs into Palestine as soon as possible, and to abandon restrictions on land scales to Jews -- measures to increase tensions with the Arabs of Palestine. Arabs argued that the Holocaust survivors could be settled elsewhere, including in the United States, which had imposed its own limits on settlement of European Jews. The Zionists, too, were intent on settling the refugees in Palestine, not anywhere else. In February 1947, when the ship Exodus arrived in Palestine's Haifa port, British authorities refused to bend their immigration limits, denying entry to the 4,500 Jewish refugees and forcing them to board other ships and return to Germany. A French newspaper called the ships a "floating Auschwitz." The incident shocked the Western world and deepened support for the Zionist movement.

(pp. 49-50):

On the recommendation of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, the UN General Assembly had voted, thirty-three states in favor, thirteen opposed, with ten abstaining, to partition Palestine into two separate states -- one for the Arabs and one for the Jews. A UN minority report, which recommended a single state for Arabs and Jews, with a constitution respecting "human rights and fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race, sex, language or religions," was rejected. [ . . . ]

The Khairis were in shock. Under the UN partition plan, their hometown of al-Ramla, along with neighboring Lydda and the coastal city of Jaffa, was to become part of an Arab Palestinian state. The plan stipulated that 54.5 percent of Palestine and more than 80-percent of its cultivated citrus and grain plantations would go to a Jewish state. Jews represented about one-third of the population and owned 7 percent of the land. Most Arabs would not accept the partition.

If the partition plan went forward, al-Ramla would lie only a few kilometers from the new Jewish state. At least, Bashir's parents thought, it could have been worse; under the UN plan, the family would not be strangers on its own land. Still, what would happen tot he Arabs in what was now to be Jewish territory? The partition would place more than four hundred thousand Arabs in the new Jewish state, making them a 45 percent minority amid half a million Jews.

The Palestinians rejected the UN Partition Plan. The Zionists saluted it, but when Israel declared independence, they did so without recognizing the UN Partition Plan borders, and immediately went on the offensive to expand its territory and to drive many Arabs into exile. Israel's offensive was to include Jaffa, al-Ramla, and Lydda.

(p. 56):

After the massacre by Irgun forces in Deir Yassin, the specter of that militia penetrating al-Ramla had city leaders in a state of near panic. They sent urgent cables to King Abdullah and to the commander of his Arab Legion, John Bagot Glubb, pleading for immediate help and invoking fears of another slaughter. One voice cried, "Our wounded are breathing their last breaths, and we cannot help them."

Abdullah, however, had received similar pleas from Arabs in Jerusalem, begging him to "save us!" and warning that Jewish forces were scaling the walls of the Old City. The king wrote Glubb that "any disaster suffered by the people of the city at the hands of the Jews, whether they are killed or driven from their homes, would have the most far reaching results for us." He ordered his commander to Jerusalem. On May 19, Glubb rolled into the Holy City to confront Israeli forces with a force of three hundred men, four antitank weapons, and a squadron of armored cars. On Arab-run Radio Jerusalem, commentator Raji Sahyoun had promised "our forthcoming redemption by the hand of Transjordan" and the "scurrying" and "collapse" of the "Haganah kids."

Abdullah's secret agreement with the Jews did not envision this fighting. It was designed to accept a Jewish state within the UN partition boundaries while the king took over the West Bank and most of the state designated for the Arabs, including al-Ramla and Lydda. Now fighting on the ground made all of this uncertain. Yet Arab Legion forces did not cross into territory allotted by the UN partition resolution to the Jewish state.

Ben Shemen served as a gateway for Moshe Dayan's assault on al-Ramla (p. 61):

The battalion was coming from Ben Shemen, the Jewish settlement just to the north. For weeks the open community with access to its Arab neighbors in Lydda had been transformed into a fortress surrounded by barbed wire and concrete pillboxes. Earlier, Dr. Ziegfried Lehman, the Ben Shemen leader, had objected to the militarization of his community. The people of Ben Shemen had purchased cows and even bullets from their Arab neighbors as recently as May. But Lehman's opposition was in vain, and he had left Ben Shemen in frustration.

(pp. 64-65):

When the Arab delegation arrived, Israeli soldiers woke up the region's civilian security chief, a man named Yisrael Galili B. (The B was to distinguish him from the other Yisrael Galili, the longtime chief of the national staff of the Haganah.) Galili B greeted the men and proceeded with Palmach troops to a small meetinghouse on the kibbutz. There they ironed out the terms of surrender: The Arabs would hand over all their weapons and accept Israeli sovereignty. "Foreigners" -- Arab fighters from outside Palestine -- would be turned over to the Israelis. All residents not of army age and unable to bear arms would be allowed to leave the city, "if they want to." Implicit in the agreement was that the residents could also choose to stay.

Galili B would soon learn that other plans were in the works for the residents of al-Ramla: "The Military Governor told me," Galili B wrote, "that he had different orders from Ben-Gurion: to evacuate Ramla." Orders to expel the residents of al-Ramla and Lydda were given in the early afternoon of July 12. The Lydda order, stating, "The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age," was given at 1:30 P.M. by Lieutenant Colonel Yitzhak Rabin.

(p. 78):

The new Soviet support for a Jewish state meant that the Bulgarian government would back emigration of those Jews wishing to leave. Georgi Dimitrov had just returned from a meeting int he Kremlin, where Stalin had reminded him, "To help the Jews emigrate to Palestine is the decision of the United Nations." Dimitrov immediately conveyed this message to Jewish Communists who saw the UN partition vote as a defeat. "The Jewish people, for the first time in their history, are fighting like men for their rights," Dimitrov told his Jewish comrades in a Politburo meeting in March 1948. "We must admire this fight. . . . We used to be against emigration. We were actually an obstacle to it. Which made us isolated from the masses."

(pp. 83-84):

Despite the conflict, many Jewish intellectuals in Palestine had argued that Israel's long-term survival depended on finding a way to coexist with the Arabs. Moshe [Eshkenazi] was part of a Zionist organization that had advocated a binational democratic state for all the people of Palestine. The binational idea had taken root in the 1920s with the formation of Brit Shalom, or Covenant for Peace, which advocated "understanding between Jews and Arabs . . . on the basis of the absolute political equality of two culturally autonomous peoples. . . ." Part of this philosophy was based on a desire to preserve "the ethical integrity of the Zionist endeavor"; part of it was practical. Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Brit Shalom, declared, "I have no doubt that Zionism will be heading toward a catastrophe if it will not find common ground with the Arabs." The spiritual father of coexistence was Martin Buber, the great religious philosopher from Vienna, who had long advocated a binational state based in part on "the love for their homeland that the two peoples share."

(p. 89):

On August 16, Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN mediator, dispatched telegrams to fifty-three countries, appealing to them "to divert to me at Beirut . . . any such stocks" of meat, fruit, grains, or butter already on the high seas. The UN considered the situation in Palestine a "large scale human disaster." By this time, the UN estimated, more than 250,000 Arabs had "fled or have been forcibly expelled from the territories occupied by the Jews in Palestine." (Later figures would be three times the early UN estimate.) "Never have I seen a more ghastly sight than that which met my eye here, at Ramallah," Bernadotte wrote in September. "The car was literally stormed by excited masses shouting with Oriental fervor that they wanted food and wanted to return to their homes. There wer plenty of frightening faces in the sea of suffering humanity. I remember not least a group of scabby and helpless old men with tangled beards who thrust their emaciated faces into the car and held out scraps of bread that would certainly have been considered uneatable by ordinary people, but was their only food.

(pp. 95-96):

Count Bernadotte continued to advocate a division of historic Palestine between Israel and Transjordan, "in view of the historical connection and common interests of Transjordan and Palestine." Under this plan, the Khairis and other refugees would go home to al-Ramla and Lydda -- not to an independent state, as many Palestinian Arabs had fought for, but to an Arab state that would fall under the rule of Abdullah and his kingdom of Jordan. (After the war, the "Trans" was dropped and Abdullah's kingdom was known simply as Jordan.) Large parts of the Negev would be returned to the Arabs; the Jews would keep the Galilee and Haifa. The Lydda airport would be "a free airport" for all; Jerusalem, as the November 1947 UN resolution had outlined, "should be treated separately and placed under effective United Nations control." As for al-Ramla and Lydda, Bernadotte's blueprint declared that the towns "should be in Arab territory."

The mediator's proposals were based on what he saw as the political realities of the day. "A Jewish State called Israel exists in Palestine," he wrote, "and there are no sound reasons for assuming that it will not continue to do so." Bernadotte also stressed another point that would have been of great interest to Ahmad, Zakia, and the tens of thousands of refugees sleeping on the ground in Ramallah: "The right of innocent people, uprooted by the present terror and ravage of war, to return to their homes, should be affirmed and made effective, with assurance of adequate compensation for the property of those who may choose not to return."

The next day, Count Folke Bernadotte was killed in the Katamon quarter of Jerusalem. An assassin walked up to Bernadotte's UN vehicle, thrust an automatic pistol through the window, and shot him at close range. Six bullets penetrated, one to his heart. A statement from the extremist Jewish militia group the Stern Gang claimed responsibility, calling UN observers "members of foreign occupation forces." David Ben-Gurion, Israel's prime minister, detained two hundred members of the Stern Gang, including one of its leaders, future prime minister Yitzhak Shamir, and ordered the other extremist Jewish militia, Irgun, led by another future premier, Menachem Begin, to disband and turn over its weapons to the Israeli army. The Irgun ceased to function as a separate military unit, and Ben-Gurion's fight to consolidate the militias was now virtually complete. Begin, no longer in charge of his own militia, began to convert the Irgun into a political party, the Herut, which two decades later would form the basis of the Likud Party.

(p. 126):

Throughout 1965 and 1966, Fatah, along with a new group called Abtal al-Awda (Heroes of Return), launched dozens more attacks from the West Bank and Lebanon on mostly isolated targets inside Israel. The attacks sharply raised anxieties in the Jewish state, and, as designed, sparked tensions between Israel and its Arab neighbors.l By late 1966 these attacks and the Israeli reprisals, had drawn a reluctant King Hussein deeper into the conflict, and closer to the point of no return.

Before dawn on November 13, 1966, Israeli planes, tanks, and troops attacked the West Bank village of Samu, blowing up dozens of houses and kiling twenty-one Jordanian soldiers. The invasion, especially in its massive scale, shocked even some supporters of Israel. U.S. officials immediately condemned the attack. In Washington, the head of the National Security Council, Walt Rostow, in a memo to President Johnson, declared that the "3000-man raid with tanks and planes was all out of proportion to the provocation" -- in this case, a Fatah land mine that had killed three Israeli soldiers on November 11. Rostow said of the Israelis, "They've undercut Hussein. We're spending $500 million to shore him up as a stabilizing factor. . . . It makes even the moderate Arabs feel fatalistically that there is nothing they can do to get along with the Israelis no matter how hard they try. It will place heavy domestic and external political strain on King Hussein's regime. . . ."

(p. 140):

On the morning of Wednesday, June 7, Bashir and his family woke up to a city under military occupation. Israeli soldiers in jeeps were shouting through bullhorns, demanding that white flags be hung outside houses, shops, and apartment buildings; already balconies and windows fluttered with T-shirts and handkerchiefs.

Bashir was in shock from the surreal and the familiar. Another retreating Jordanian army had been replaced by another occupying Israeli force. In 1948, Bashir thought, we lost 78 percent of our land. And now all of Palestine is under occupation. The taste was bitter and humiliating. Not only did the Israelis capture and occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they now held the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. Perhaps most shocking of all was that East Jerusalem, and the Old City with its holy sites, was now in the hands of the Israelis.

(p. 161):

"Okay, Bashir, I live in your home," Dalia said finally. "And this is also my home. It is the only home I know. So, what shall we do?"

"You can go back where you came from," Bashir said calmly.

Dalia felt as if Bashir had dropped a bomb. She wanted to scream, though as his guest she knew she couldn't. She forced herself to listen.

"We believe that only those who came here before 1917" -- the year of the Balfour Declaration and the beginning of the British Mandate in Palestine -- "have a right to be here. But anyone who came after 1917," Bashir said, "cannot stay."

Dalia was astounded at the audacity of Bashir's solution. "Well, since I was born and came here after 1917, that is no solution for me!" she said with an incredulous laugh. She was struck by the total contradiction of her situation: complete disagreement across a seemingly unbridgeable gulf, combined with the establishment of a bond through a common history, in a house where she felt utterly protected and welcomed. At the base of it all, Dalia felt the depth of the Khairis' gratitude for her having simply opened the door to the house in Ramla. "And this was an amazing situation to be in," she remembered. "That everybody could feel the warmth and the reality of our people meeting, meeting the other, and it was real, it was happening, and we were admiring each other's being, so to speak. And it was so tangible. And on the other hand, we were conversing of things that seemed totally mutually exclusive. That my life here is at their expense, and if they want to realize their dream, it's at my expense.

(pp. 211-212):

Dalia, flat on her back in her hospital bed, followed the debate with her eyes. She was struck that Ghiath could not understand her people's longing for the ancient homeland.

"But they were not born here," Ghiath protested. "For example, my Jewish friend, Avraham, he and his father and his forefathers were born here. Their family is from Jaffa. He is a true Palestinian."

So that means, Dalia thought, that I'm not?

"It's a different kind of self-understanding," countered Yehezkel, the religious scholar. "What are you going to do about that? Why do you think Israelis are afraid of you? We are not as afraid of the entire Syrian army with all its weaponry as we are of you. Why do you think that is?"

Ghiath looked at Yehezkel in amazement. Nuha and Dalia remained silent as Yehezkel continued: "Because you are theonly ones who have a legitimate grievance against us. And deep down, even those who deny it know it. That makes us very uncomfortable and uneasy in dealing with you. Because our homes are your homes, you become a real threat."

"Why can't we all live in the same state, rogether in peace?" said Ghiath. "Why do we need two states?"

"Then you think you would be able to go back to your father's house?" Yehezkel asked.

Dalia shifted in her bed. "And what would happen to the people already living in those houses?" she asked.

"They will build new homes for them," Ghiath replied.

"You mean," Dalia said, "they will be evacuated for you to return to your original homes? I hope you can understand why Israelis are afraid of you. Israel will do everything to prevent the implementation of these dreams. Even under a peace plan you will not return to your original homes."

"What do we want? Only our rights and to live in peace."

"Justice for you is receiving back what you lost in 1948. But that justice will be at the expense of other people." [ . . . ]

Dalia said, "I'm not going to explain to you what the yearning for Zion means to us. I will just say that because you see us as strangers in this land, that is why we are afraid of you. You should not think that I myself am free of fear. I have a good reason to be afraid: The Palestinian people as a collective have not accepted the Jewish home in this land. Most of you still consider us a cancerous presence among you. I struggle for your rights despite my fears. But your rights have to be balanced against our needs for survival. That is why you cannot be satisfied. For you, every viable solution will always be lacking in justice. In a peace plan, everybody will have to do with less than they deserve."

(pp. 226-228):

Bashir's first days back in Ramallah were bittersweet. Arafat's embrace of Oslo, together with his pledge to control "terrorism and other forms of violence," had begun to pit the champion of Palestinian liberation against the disparate Palestinian factions that had grown increasingly unsettled about Oslo. To them, accepting Oslo represented a surrender of 78 percent of historic Palestine; even the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, which represented the other 22 percent, Israel didn't seem prepared to hand over. Already the Israeli government had announced plans for thousands of new housing units in East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians envisioned as their capital, and Israeli construction crews were building new "bypass" roads to better facilitate the travel of settlers from the West Bank to Israel. These plans were being undertaken within the Oslo framework, and many Palestinians worried that the new facts on the ground would permanently alter their chances for a viable, sovereign state. These fears were made more acute with the sudden surge in political violence and assassination, which had begun less than six months after the famous handshake on the White House lawn. [ . . . ]

Arafat condemned each suicide attack and, under pressure from Israel and the United States, ordered the arrest of suspected members of militant groups. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were in Palestinian jails, many by order of a secret Palestinian military court for state security established under the Oslo framework. In the first year of the court, several men died during interrogations; many Palestinians accused Arafat of doing the dirty work for Israel. The chairman responded to criticism by closing several newspapers and detaining prominent Palestinian human rights advocates. Edward Said, the Columbia University professor and leading Palestinian intellectual, wrote that "Arafat and his Palestinian Authority have become a sort of Vichy government for Palestinians."

Anger at Arafat deepened as he began granting favors to loyalists who had come with him from Tunis. The chairman himself continued to live modestly, but some of his longtime cohorts in exile built mansions in Gaza, all the more striking for their juxtapostion against the squalor of the refugee camps on one of the most crowded places on earth. One of the mansions, estimated to cost $2 million, was built for Mahmoud Abbas, known as Abu Mazen, who would later succeed Arafat as the leader of the Palestinians. "This is your reward for selling Palestine," a graffiti artist scrawled on the mansion stones. The poor of the refugee camps, whose young men formed the basis of the resistance to Israeli rule and whose casualties during the intifada numbered in the thousands, now chafed under the rule of the elite of Tunis. "Every revolution has its fighters, thinkers, and profiteers," one Gazan would say. "Our fighters have been killed, our thinkers assassinated, and all we have left are the profiteers."

Bashir Khairi is arrested on suspicion of being involved with George Habash's PFLP (pp. 167-168):

Bashir Khairi sat in a three-by-five-foot cell with stone walls, iron bars, and a low-watt bulb dangling from the ceiling. He slept on the cement floor, and for six nights he lay in the dark, shivering without bedcovers. Since his incarceration at Sarafand prison -- the old British lockup close to al-Ramla -- Bashir had developed a high fever and chills; on the seventh day, Bashir remembered decades later, his Israeli jailers brought him a blanket.

"In the interrogation room at Sarafand," Bashir recounted, "there was a chair and a table, and on the table was a black shabbah," a hood. "You put the hood over your head, and they beat you. They beat me on the hands, they choked me with the hood on. Other times they would chain my hands and legs, blindfold me, and unleash the dogs. The dogs would jump on me and pin me back against the wall. I could feel their breath on my neck." Bashir believed the interrogations were conducted by agents of the General Security Services, or Shin Bet. He would recall the men with a precision and seeming calm of someone remembering a trip to the store the day before. "Their faces," Bashir would say quietly. "To this day I remember exactly their faces."

After the interrogations came psychological operations. "In my cell," he said, "I would hear shots, and then someone screaming. Then the guards would arrive and bring me outside and show me a hole, and say, 'If you don't cooperate, this is where you'll end up.' Then I would be back in my cell, hearing shooting and screaming. You'd think: They're killing the people who don't confess." The Israeli interrogators wanted Bashir to admit to having played a role in the supermarket bombing and to describe the internal operations of the PFLP so they could put an end to the El Al hijackings. The young lawyer admitted nothing. He refused to confirm any association with the Popular Front. Consequently, he said, the beatings, dog attacks, and psy-ops continued.

This kind of treatment was not exceptional. In 1969, the year Bashir was arrested, little was known outside of the Shin Bet about Israeli treatment of Palestinian prisoners. In 1974, the Israeli human rights lawyer Felicia Langer published a memoir, With My Own Eyes, detailing her interviews with prisoners who had endured an "ordeal of beatings and humiliation." She described prisoners who showed evidence of blows to the head, hands, and legs; who told of being punched in the face while blindfolded; who arrived for jailhouse interviews in bloodstained shirts; who described hanging from a wall by handcuffs tied to iron bars; who reported interrogations with "electricity and sticks"; whose feet and hands were bound until they bled.

In one case, Langer wrote, a fifty-two-year-old man with a respiratory disease was interrogated naked, and "his hands were tied behind his back; a rope was tied on to his hands too,a nd he was lifted in the air thus. His interrogators beat him also now, and after each beating they rodered him to talk, and since he had nothing to say they went on beating him." Langer also described one prisoner, "blue from the beatings," who died, the authorities claimed, after "he had stumbled and fell down a staircase."

On one of her jailhouse visits, probably int he spring of 1969, Felicia Langer met Bashir. She would remember a pale man with large eyes who seemed "barely alive." "They beat me very badly," Langer recalls Bashir telling her, "until I was barely able to stand up."

(p. 246):

The next day, Prime Minister Sharon ordered Israeli troops back into Bethlehem, where they reoccupied the city, imposed a military lockdown, conducted house-to-house arrests, and blew up five homes, including the house where [suicide bomber] Nael Abu Hilail had lived with his parents and slblings. Sine Sharon had come to power less than two years earlier on a pledge to increase Israelis' security, bombers had struck Israel nearly sixty times; this was nearly twice the number of attacks of the previous seven years. Sharon's spokesman blamed Arafat and the Palestinian Authority for the attacks, saying that "all our efforts to hand over areas, and all the talk about a possible cease-fire, that was all window dressing because on the ground there was a continuous effort to carry out as many terrorist activities as possible."

(pp. 260-261):

Bashir believed "it's the strong who create history," but his years in prison and in exile had helped forge a longer-range view. "We are weak today," he said. "But we won't stay this way. Palestinians are stones in a riverbed. We won't be washed away. The Palestinians are not the Indians. It is the opposite: Our numbers are increasing. [ . . . ]

Dalis has long believed in Einstein's words -- that "no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." For Dalia, the key to coexistence lay in what she called "the three A's": acknowledgment of what had happened to the Palestinians in 1948, apology for it, and amends. Acknowledgment was, in part, to "see and own the pain that I or my people have inflicted on the Other." But she believed this must be mutual -- that Bashir must also see the Israeli Other -- lest "one perpetuate the righteous victim syndrome and not take responsibility for one's own part in the fray." Through this acknowledgment, she and Bashir could act "as mirrors through which our own redemption can eventually grow." As for amends: "It means that we do the best we can under the circumstances towards those we have wronged." But for Dalia this could not involve a mass return of refugees. Yes, she believed, the Palestinians have the right of return, but it is not a right that can be fully implemented, because the return of millions of Palestinians would effectively mean the end of Israel.

Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East (2007, Metropolitan Books) is a sprawling history with little on the war itself, hardly anything on the Arabs, little on the diplomacy, not much historical context, and even less on its subsequent effects. In other words, it's basically a volume of Israeli navel-gazing. Segev argues that in order to understand the war you have to understand Israel. He's basically right, inasmuch as the whole thing makes so little sense in any other framework.

The Jewish/Zionist immigrants to Palestine fought a war in 1947-49 to capture as much land as possible with as few non-Jews as possible. To this end, they nominally accepted a UN resolution to partition the territory, but didn't accept the partition borders proposed by the UN. Instead, they went to war, expanding their territory, and driving most of the non-Jewish inhabitants of that territory into exile. Segev has previously written about the Mandate period in One Palestine, Complete and the 1947-49 war in 1949: The First Israelis. He also wrote a book on Israeli's relationship to the Holocaust, The Seventh Million. These are all fascinating works of history, full of telling detail.

From the end of the 1947-49 war until 1967, Israel had never been satisfied with its borders. The 700,000 Palestinians who had fled or been expelled in 1947-49 were stuck in refugee camps, prevented from returning, while Israel settled more than a million Jewish immigrants. Israel declined to sign peace treaties with neighboring countries, not least because a continuing state of belligerency provided legal cover for refusing to allow the return of any refugees. Israel launched an aggressive war in 1956 against Egypt, and engaged in numerous border incidents with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. Israel built up its military forces, and was by 1967 well on its way to producing nuclear weapons. A pretext for the 1967 war was set up when the UN withdrew troops that had been stationed on Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula since the 1956 war, allowing Egypt to close the Straits of Tiran, as well as the Suez Canal, to Israeli shipping. In June 1967 Israel launched a pre-emptive attack on Egypt, which rapidly expanded into attacks on Syria and Jordan. Over six days, Israel was able to seize significant territories from each of its adversaries, giving Israel control of all of Palestine and then some, rectifying all (well, most) of the regrets they had about the borders coming out of the 1947-49 war.

The 1967 war led to several attempts, both by force and through diplomacy, by Egypt to recover its lost territories, where the Suez Canal was especially significant. Israel eventually returned Sinai to Egypt as part of a separate peace deal brokered by US president Jimmy Carter. That deal set up a framework for dealing with the rest of the conflict, but Israel has been unable to come to terms, either in returning lands seized by armed aggression or in permitting the inhabitants of those lands to exercise equitable political rights. The reason for Israel's intransigence is deeply buried in the core beliefs of Zionism and the history of Israel's struggle to exist as a Jewish State.

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Because of the length of this post, the quotes have been moved into the Extended Body.

David Remnick has a piece in The New Yorker this week, on Israeli ex-politician Avraham Burg, called "The Apostate." Remnick frequently dwells in a fantasy world where Israel is always nobly seeking peace according to a two-state scenario that Remnick often proclaims as self-evident. Still, I was astonished to read:

More recently, Hezbollah's ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas -- the Islamic Resistance Movement -- led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States, found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the West Bank to Hamas as well.

I always thought The New Yorker was legendary for its fact-checking department. Leaving aside the question of whether the Hezbollah-Hamas alliance is anything more than the fevered product of neocon imagination -- if so it is the only functioning instance of Sunni-Shia harmony in today's Middle East -- the key error is Hamas came to power not by violent uprising but by a democratic election, which the US (over Israeli objections) first insisted on staging, then (with Israeli agreement) rejected, as (oops!) the wrong side won. The "violent uprising" -- actually, a coup attempt against the Hamas government -- was started by US-armed warlord Mohammed Dahlan's gang, which Hamas managed to disarm in Gaza, but not in the West Bank.

Maybe this escaped the fact-checkers because it was too gross to be seen as mere fact. It amounts to no less than a systematic abuse of history.

The main part of the article consists of a couple of quotes from an interview of Burg by Ari Shavit, resulting in numerous people attacking Burg. One quote ends with Burg saying: "There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part -- I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community -- I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don't understand me, either." Burg's outrage was his slandering of Zionism: "He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority."

Remnick's article bears out that description. Burg's critics put their outrage out front to avoid having to discuss anything substantial. Or they just dither around the edges, avoiding the subject, as in this quote:

"The comparison with pre-Nazi Germany is absurd," Shavit said over lunch one afternoon in Jerusalem. "Also, Israel was much more militaristic in the old days. I don't like the role of generals in political life, and i regret the lack of a Truman to restrain the influence of generals -- a tough, decent civilian who understands the need to use power but who is decisive in controlling the Army. But there is nothing here of that Junker tradition or even anything like America's military élites and academies. Israelis live in an open, free society with a very free spirit, even verging on anarchy. To describe us as a Bismarckian state with expansionist chauvinism -- if there was a grain of truth to that, it was thirty years ago! Soldiers here take off their uniforms as soon as they come home. They're not proud of their uniforms or their ranks. Wearing a uniform doesn't get you girls." There are anti-Arab racists in Israel, he added, but nothing like those in Burg's favorite part of the world. "There are actual racist parties in Continental Europe that are far more powerful than any of the sickening elements here," Shavit said. "There is no chance that an Israeli Day parade will draw as many as the number of people who came out for the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv. So to describe this as a Prussian Sparta is ridiculous."

Then what is it? Much the same can be said about America, but still we have armed forces based in hundreds of countries abroad, including very hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have an arsenal large enough to toast the entire earth. Talk to Americans in the streets all across the country and you'd never imagine we're capable of doing the things our government routinely does, but there's such an enormous disconnect between everyday life and politics in the US that those questions never even come up for debate -- no one is allowed to debate them. It's not surprising that the same thing applies in Israel, but there's also a lot of willful self-deception. Remnick quotes one poll as showing that 30% of Israelis want Yitzhak Rabin's assassin to be pardoned. It's hard to reconcile that with Shavit's comment about how marginal the "sickening elements" are.

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Postscript: After writing this, I saw a note at WarInContext on a piece from Haaretz noting that 4,300 Israelis have received German citizenship in the past year. Paul Woodward commented, quoting Berg, then adding: "The willingness of Jews to 'return' to Germany is an indication that the possibility is now opening for some Israelis to go move beyond the core of that trauma. At the same time, Zionists will clearly feel threatened by the possibility that a significant number of the 300,000 Israelis entitled to German citizenship might take up that opportunity."

Having recently read Tom Segev's 1967 and Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, I've been thinking about revisions to the piece plan piece I posted a couple of years ago. I've been looking for unilateral acts -- things that do not require Israeli agreement -- that would move the argument toward resolution. One thing that I think should be done would be for as many other countries as possible to adopt Israel's "Law of Return" and extend it to Palestinians as well as to Jews. It's very unlikely that it would have much if any demographic impact in any countries, but it would establish the point that Jews don't have to go to or stay in Israel -- that the whole world welcomes them. It would also help settle Palestinian refugees, making some small progress against their tragedy -- and thereby reducing the settlement problem. It would require some soul searching, and a commitment to respect and protect minority rights, but both of those would be good things. It would also drive the Zionists crazy, or crazier, because it would show up how dated and dysfunctional their ideology is.

The July 8 issue of The New York Times Magazine has a cover story on Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni by Roger Cohen. Mostly a puff profile, although the net effect is to show her as a dangerous ideologue -- her claim to be the one who put the words in Bush's mouth trashing the right of return is just one example. Still, two quotes struck me as interesting:

One of Livni's catchphrases is, "There is a process of delegitimization of Israel as a Jewish state." She sees herself in a race against time.

The second expands on the first:

"Stagnation works against those who believe in a two-state solution," Livni said in our first conversation. The West, she suggested, needs to tell Hamas, the Islamist movement battling Fatah for control of a Palestinian movement now split between Gaza and the West Bank, that it must not only recognize Israel's right to exist but also "the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, which is not that obvious anymore."

The West needs to get on speaking terms with Hamas before any telling becomes possible, but that's not what's important here. What matters is that Livni is acknowledging that in the eyes of more and more of the world the very concept of a Jewish State is untenable. This is obviously a big problem for Zionists, who see the Jewish State as existential. This happens routinely when someone -- more recently President Ahmadinejad of Iran -- offers an opinion that "the Zionist Entity" cannot persist, and this gets translated into a call for genocide against Jews. While it's possible that's what a few folks really think, the necessary linkage between the Jewish State and the Jewish People is pretty much a figment of the Zionist imagination. The Jewish State is a metaphysical ideal most parties in the Israeli body politic pledge allegiance to, but it's not even the same thing as the actual State of Israel -- the differences due to both secular and ethnic erosion within Israel, and to a worldwide distaste for racist colonial regimes.

The modern view, indeed the basic precept of democracy, is that states should reflect the interests and composition of the people they represent, with all due respect for minority as well as majority rights. Israel doesn't fit that view. For a long while lots of folks, especially those of pale complexion in Europe and America, gave the Zionists special dispensation, partly due to guilt over past crimes against Jews, partly out of indifference or worse regarding Arabs. But both of those rationales have softened over time, while we've witnessed the actual effects of allowing Israel to lord it over Palestinians and others. The net effect is that the Jewish State has mutated from being seen as a hypothetical sanctuary for Jews to an actual ghetto for Arabs. Little wonder the romance is fading; what's remarkable is that it's lasted as long as it has.

Livni is as committed to the Jewish State as ever, but at least she recognizes the dynamic. This is exceptional -- most Israelis still cling to the notion that time is on their side, that somehow all they have to do to win is to run out the clock. And this makes Livni more dangerous than your basic do-nothing Likudnik, since she feels the need to force something to happen. The thinking here is that if the Palestinians recognize the Jewish State the rest of the world will accept its legitimacy. The problem is that her notion of the Jewish State is unrecognizable, as it demands that Palestinians give up their history and accept a permanently subservient role to a nation built on their land in their forced absence. No such deal is possible, especially where Palestinians, too, see time as on their side.

Later in the article, Cohen looks at the other side:

You don't so much drive into the Palestinian territories these days as sink into them. Everything, except the Jewish settlers' cars on fenced settlers-only highways, slows down. Donkeys, carts and idle people replace Israel's first-world hustle-bustle. The buzz of business gives way to the clunking of hammers. The whole desolate West Bank scene, described recently by the World Bank as "a shattered economic space," is punctuated with shining garrisonlike settlements on hilltops and checkpoints where Palestinians see themselves reflected in the stylish shades of Russian-immigrant Israeli soldiers. If you are looking for a primer on colonialism, this is not a bad place to start.

Cohen goes on to visit Saeb Erekat, a key Palestinian negotiator under Arafat and now Abbas, who says: "Palestinians are tired of the no-partner-for-talks symphony. Livni has an interlocutor in me and Abbas. We don't ask why Israelis choose Labor or Kadima; she doesn't need to ask about Hamas. With a decent peace accord we can go to a referendum. Moderates would win. That would be Hamas's fig leaf. But Livni has to learn that peace and settlements don't go together, walls and peace don't go together and nothing is solved until everything is solved."

By making the issue recognition of the Jewish State, Livni subsumes all the inequities of the last sixty years into a precondition for any settlement. The settlements, the walls, the dominating security state, most of all denial of the right of return, those are all necessary parts of her Jewish State. Abba Eban used to quip that the Palestinians never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace. The punch line is that they never had one, because the Jewish State was predicated on dominance, and therefore on war. Ironically, only when that vision of the Jewish State is ended will Jews be able to live in peace -- which is pretty much the normal state these days for diaspora Jews who don't live in thrall to the metaphysical Jewish State.

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I'm a little less than half way through Tom Segev's 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. The annoying thing about the book is that, thus far at least, there is hardly anything about how anyone other than Israelis viewed the conflict -- well, a bit about the US, but that's it. On the other hand, the book is fascinating as a piece of Israeli navel-gazing. The nation appears to have been torn between militaristic hubris and existential dread, with both factors perfectly exemplified in Yitzhak Rabin's nervous breakdown. I suspect that Segev's final conclusion will be mine: that Israel found purpose in the 1967 war, and never dared risk peace again. Israel had two main opportunities to negotiate peace, and turned them both down. Following the 1949 armistices, Israel could have negotiated peace treaties with neighboring countries and worked to defuse the refugee crisis before it calcified into permanence, but chose to keep its borders unsettled, hoping for future expansion. The result was that they lost political ground to Arab nationalism, while building up military muscle, which led to the 1967 war. In 1967, Israel grabbed land it couldn't settle but could trade back for peace on more favorable terms, but preferred to keep the land and fight with the people on the land, trying to at last realize the expansion they dreamt of in 1949. (Some of it anyway: the Likud still insisted on both sides of the Jordan.) Again, failure to settle soon after the conflict hardened into long, self-perpetuating struggle.

I've always been somewhat sympathetic to the Israelis in 1967 -- although even then I had serious doubts about war as a solution to anything, and nothing since then has proven otherwise. The 1947-49 war occurred before I was born (in 1950), so I can only look back at it with hindsight. The original sin of the founding of Israel was the UN partition resolution of 1947, rejected by the Palestinian majority and radically reinterpreted by the Zionist leadership, in ways that were not uncommon nor surprising at the time. This led to the more/less forced expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians, who were stripped of their property, denied their homes and their rights, to be replaced with Jewish immigrants from wherever the Mossad could find them -- mostly Arab countries, eventually extending to Ethiopia, with a later massive influx from the former Soviet Union. In effect, the refugees looked like several contemporary population exchanges -- between India and Pakistan, or the Germans of Eastern Europe who were driven west. The Palestinian case was different primarily in that it was done under the nose of the UN and was presumed to be covered by international law, which demanded peace settlements and the refugees' right of return. The conflict then was about two things: the right of Jews to create a predominantly Jewish nation in part of Palestine to serve as a haven for Jews from all over the world, which is roughly what the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate promised and the UN reaffirmed in 1947; and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and live in peace. In hindsight the former is far more dubious, but it still held considerable sympathy in 1967, putting Israel in peril should its Arab neighbors eventually manage to reverse their previous military losses. This assumed, of course, that victorious Arab armies would kill or force into exile most Israeli Jews, but given the way both sides had fought in the past, that seemed likely enough.

Israel's quick victory in 1967 put an end to the Arab's ability to threaten Israel's existence, and Israel's development of nuclear weapons closed the issue once and for all. The subsequent wars up to 1973 were never more than border conflicts, as Egypt toned down its goals to recovering its lost territory -- eventually achieved diplomatically. Israel complained much about terrorists afterwards, but they were never more than nuissances, regardless of how hysterical Israelis got over them. The Intifada, as a mass revolt, was (and is) a more serious problem, but not an existential threat. So the net effect of the 1967 war was to shift power clearly enough to prevent future wars. While one could imagine other ways to do that, there is little reason to think that either side would have been interested. Given that, the 1967 war in itself could have been a starting point for peace.

Of course, we now know that it wasn't. Indeed, it's hard to find any wars that in the end promoted peace and justice. (Noam Chomsky is fond of the 1971 war that broke Bangladesh free of Pakistan, and may have one or two more. The abject defeat of Japan and Germany in WWII did encourage them to become more peaceable.) The usual pattern is that the winners want more, and the losers want a rematch. That's what happened in 1967, and why it took the less lopsided 1973 war to bring Israel and Egypt to an accommodation that was on the table but rejected by Israel in 1971.

We should have learned much since 1967, including that the Zionist solution to "the Jewish problem" was itself bogus, and has created far more anti-semitism than it ever defended against. Driving most of the Jews away from muslim lands has made those countries less tolerant and less cosmopolitan than they would otherwise be, while creating an underclass in Israel. Meanwhile Jews in Europe and America have fully integrated into secular democratic societies -- so much so that the closest thing they can find to anti-semitism is really just disappointment over Israel's unjust behavior. And in Israel Zionism has created the world's most militarist state to no purpose other than to deny citizenship and human rights to the descendents of the people who lived there before the Zionists moved in and took over. It's worse than a crying shame. It's sheer intellectual nonsense.

Juan Cole quotes GW Bush as saying:

In Israel, terrirosts have taken innocent human life for years in suicide attacks. The difference is that Israel is a functioning democracy and it's not prevented from carrying out its responsibilities. And that's a good indicator of success that we're looking for in Iraq.

Israel envy is one of the most bizarre characteristics of the Bush regime. The idea that Israel is any sort of success is itself hard to imagine -- its main claim is to be the last colonial outpost of Europe to maintain a rigid apartheid system, leaving it with an endless struggle to suppress the natives, the enmity of nearly all of its neighbors, and disapproval by most of the world. To call that success takes a high pain threshold and inordinate fondness for the exercise of force -- traits that Israelis seem to have, and that Americans like Bush envy.

Even so, it's damn near inconceivable how to map Israel's "success" to Iraq. For starters, who in Iraq is there to constitute the Zionist master class? The Shiites aren't rich enough; the Sunnis have a bad attitude; the Kurds just want to be left alone. That leaves the US occupiers, and there just aren't that many of them, no matter how heavily armed. To some extent the US has managed to find Iraqis to do its bidding, but that has rarely been more than grudgingly, with various trade-offs as various factions seek to profit by angling off the US occupation. The story about how Iraqis never get to where they can "stand up" is really evidence that they have interests that are different from what the Americans expect. Indeed, it's unlikely that you can find any Iraqi politician whose interests are fully aligned with the US, let alone a whole class of them capable of controlling the country like Israeli security services do in occupied Palestine -- not that that's exactly a gold standard.

This isn't the first time Bush has looked for inspiration in past disasters. A couple of weeks ago he was touting America's 62+ year occupation of South Korea as as a model. Sure, a third of the country is stuck in a time warp under the world's most brutal dictatorship, one that can't feed its own people but can threaten the region with nuclear bombs, but even that looks pretty stable compared to Iraq. A while back, Bush even wandered into the dreaded Vietnam analogy, thinking that some events in Iraq had resembled the Tet Offensive, and thinking that was some sort of US victory. (After all, the only reason the US lost Vietnam was the yellow-bellied peace movement! Ah, the perils of drinking your own propaganda.)

I've been arguing for a while now that Israel today is a glimpse of the sort of country the US is turning into: racist, militarist, paranoid, and vicious. Following the same path will be difficult here, mostly because the US is relatively open and inclusive, both in fact and in principle. Israel, on the other hand, styles itself as The Jewish State, so there's never any doubt there about whether one is part of the ruling us or the enemy them. Still, the US has come remarkably close to a functional definition of us-versus-them thanks to the Republican Party's voter profiling -- a distinction the rightwing radio demagogues have no trouble drawing. One thing the self-appointed us has in common is blind support for Israel. As Bush shows, it's only a tiny step from there to envy.

Rami Khouri on Hamas and Hizbullah:

Hamas and Hizbullah are among the most effective and legitimate political movements in the Arab world: They have forced unilateral Israeli retreats that no Arab army could induce; won elections democratically without resorting to the gerrymandering or ballot box stuffing that most American-supported Arab regimes live by; provided efficient service delivery and local governance to their constituents; and sustained resistance to Israeli occupation that appeals to the desire of ordinary Arabs to restore dignity to their battered lives and to their shattered, hollow political systems.

We should criticize such Islamists for some of their policies and ambiguities. But it is a big mistake to confront and fight them mainly because they challenge Israel, are friendly to Iran and Syria, and represent vanguards of regional Islamism; for these three attributes precisely define much of their indigenous efficacy and legitimacy. Those who wish to fight Hamas and Hizbullah would do better to help address the indigenous grievances in Lebanon and Palestine that gave birth to these groups and continue to underpin their popularity.

My own take is that you have to recognize and deal with Hamas and Hizabullah precisely because they are popular and strong. It does little good to try to deal with groups that can't deliver a solid agreement. It also does little good to insist on terms that aren't acceptable. That's pretty much what Israel did with Arafat in the Oslo Accords: by agreeing to an unacceptable deal, Arafat showed how weak he really was; then, as the terms hardened, he had to back-peddle to save his leadership. That ultimately left him unable either to deal or to deliver, so he did nothing and took the blame for everything.

But neither Israel nor the US, at least under Bush, wants any sort of deal. They want to show that force works. They're having a hard time making their case, but as long as it's the only tool in their kit, it's the only one they have to fall back on. Back when the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report was due, it was totally clear that nothing Bush had done had worked, and that the only sane thing to do was to shift course. So what did Bush do? He announced the Surge, arguing that we had to give force one more chance. Pretty much everyone predicted then it would fail, and six months later the only thing the Surge has achieved is a significant increase in the number of dead American soldiers. Now Bush is still biding for time -- September is the latest magic date, but even now they're hedging their bets. And come September, what will the new plan be? Another plea to give force one more chance.

Israel is in a similar boat. No matter how many walls they build, how many checkpoints they throw up, etc., the only thing that will provide security to Israel is if Palestinians choose not to attack or strike back. To do that they need a deal; to do that they need a credible partner, who can accept a reasonable deal -- minimally, one that allows Palestinians to live normal lives with full rights and justice -- and make it stick. Hamas may or may not be a partner, but Abbas certainly isn't -- the US and Israel just destroyed what little was left of his credibility.

Naomi Klein has a piece in the July 2 issue of the Nation that talks about business in Israel:

At a glance, things aren't going well in Israel. So why, in the midst of such volatility, is the Israeli economy booming like it's 1999, with a roaring sotck marke tand growth rates nearing China's? [ . . . ]

In the 1990s, Israel was in the vanguard of the information revolution. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Israel had its worst year since 1953. Then came 9/11, and new profit vistas opened up for any company that claimed it could spot terrorists in crowds, seal borders from attack and extract confiessionsz from closed-mouthed prisoners. Within three years, large parts of Israel's tech economy had been radically repurposed. Put in Friedmanesque terms: Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet.

The key to Israel's supergrowth is not mysterious. Many of the country's young entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, and its occupation of Gaza and the WEst Bank, as a kind of twenty-four-hour-a-day showroom -- a living example of how toenjoy relative safety amid constant war. Now Israel is exporting that model to the world. [ . . . ]

Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States -- up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products -- well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector: high