Paul Woodward: British officials say Mossad murdered Hamas commander: Starts with passport photos of suspicious persons traveling on anything but Israeli passports. (In particular, there is a report that the real Melvyn Mildiner never left Jerusalem and is actively seeking to clear himself.) The juicy part is here:

If the investigation into the murder of the Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 20, establishes that it was carried out by the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, Dubai police have said they will issue an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While this would not be the first time an Israeli leader faced the risk of arrest, unlike previous instances which have involved alleged war crimes, in this instance Netanyahu would presumably be treated as a co-conspirator to pre-meditated murder in a case that already involves Interpol.

This reminds one of the CIA abduction case in Italy, which as far as I know is still waiting for the agents to be captured, but wasn't pursued so quickly to the desk where the buck stops. But then that seems to be a shorter path in Israel, where prime ministers routinely sign off on Mossad operations (or order them up directly). This may seem like politics, but once one starts looking at such actions as criminal conspiracies -- and assassination is nothing if not criminal -- they take on a life of their own.

By the way, Woodward forgot about another class of indicted Israeli prime ministers: those who got nabbed for corruption. Ehud Olmert tops that list. Not sure who else, but Ariel Sharon seemed to be headed that way before he checked into the witless protection program.

PS: Added an update to "Bayh" below.

I got a letter from someone in the UK asking for my opinions on a couple of things. Don't know why he cares, but I have lots of opinions. He asks:

How would you respond to those who advocate missile defense?

I don't think the concern of such people is about a surprise attack, as wouldn't need missiles but could be done by terrorist-style means, and could in any case be deterred by the US nuclear arsenal. The concern is that the US would no longer be able to invade a rogue state if it acquired nuclear missiles and the US did not have a ballistic missile defense, then the US would no longer dare impose a regime change on said rogue state. This means that the rogue state could sponsor terrorism with impunity, or worse conquer neighboring (non-nuclear-weapon) states, growing into a great power or even a superpower strong enough to directly threaten the Western world.

I suppose there could be an economic case against missile defense -- namely that it would be far more expensive for to build than it would be for the enemy to build enough missiles to overwhelm it (meaning that it's only useful if you have an enormous economic advantage over the enemy). A similar case could be made against highly sophisticated penetrating bombers like the B-2 (as opposed to bomb trucks like the B-52).

My first thought about missile defense is that it doesn't work. It's not only that it is a very difficult technical task given the speeds, sizes, and distances which leads to a very complex and finicky system, but also that it's virtually impossible to test to any real degree of confidence. Maybe if you had a lot of incoming rockets you could get some real world practice. Testing against MIRVed ICBMs, even with mock warheads, is prohibitively expensive, not to mention dangerous. Israel has some sort of system for combatting toy rockets from Gaza, but it's a long ways from being reliable.

That leads to my second thought, which is what good is a defensive shield system if it can't be trusted as reliable? It isn't exactly useless, but it is certainly dangerous. In particular, it's likely to confuse the chain of command, and it's likely to confuse whoever the enemy is supposed to be. We know, for instance, that both the US and the USSR regarded the other's ABM efforts as destabilizing advances meant to secure a first strike capability -- even if one was certain that the system would fail you couldn't trust the side that was building it to recognize its faults. (Ronald Reagan was the only guy on earth who regarded such systems as benign.)

There are other problems, like response time. In order to have a chance of working, response has to be pretty automatic, which runs the risk of taking the decision of starting a war away from the chain of command -- a problem that is all that much worse given that the likelihood of a glitch is greater than the odds of an actual attack.

Your economic points are valid enough. It's certainly cheaper to defeat an ABM system than it is to build one, which is yet another reason it's impossible to build a working system against a determined, resourceful foe. On the other hand, rocket science is rocket science, and few nations are actually any good at it (or for that matter B-2-like bombers). More likely a relatively poor nation would try to circumvent rather than overwhelm the system, in which case the economic differential is a moot point, and the system is even more unworkable.

It's also worth noting that in the US missile defense has evolved (i.e., has been molded by selection pressures) mostly as a form of graft. The companies who build it are rewarded for their political clout and are not punished for failures. The US has deep pockets, but nothing that can't be wasted by companies like Boeing. And how deep for how long is a serious question.

As for your rogue state scenario, I think you'll find that the critical issue isn't how perfectly defended we are -- no real way to do that, and certainly not with a hacked missile defense shield -- but how aggressive (or reckless) we choose to be. The US was not deterred from attacking Iraq by chemical and biological weapons -- real in 1991, mythical in 2003; on the contrary, Saddam Hussein was deterred from using them. The US has very daunting conventional military force, and if the other side wants to play nuclear, the US can bring that on too, faster and harder than any other nation. Such a strategy may be riskier once the opponent has nuclear weapons, but no recent US president (except maybe Reagan) seems to have been squeamish about sacrificing American lives.

On the other hand, there are no rogue states like you mention. No nation can conquer its neighbors and become "a great power." Every such occupation costs more than it's worth. (Iraq taking Kuwait might have been an exception, but Kuwait is contiguous with Iraq, really the same people and culture, and small enough to be manageable -- India taking Goa was a similar example but nobody cared about that.) Nobody has figured out how to practice nuclear blackmail. I suppose you could say that Israel is free to bomb Syria and Lebanon, but Israel's conventional forces have ample deterrence, and Israel doesn't flaunt its bomb. Similarly, the US has fought many wars without bringing nuclear weapons to the battlefield, and has caused incredible amounts of damage. Nuclear weapons are at best difficult and awkward to use. As for terrorism, there are plenty of options besides regime change, and often regime change is a bad strategy. North Korea, for instance, is an awful mess, but you'd have to be a really crackpot pseudo-humanitarian to think invasion is the answer.

To sum up, I think missile defense is an insane investment intended to produce a set of undesirable policy options that are unwise and fraught with danger. I see it as a very stupid and unnerving thing to pursue.

Another question (only semi-related) -- how likely do you think it is in the future that Israel will expel or exterminate the Palestinians and become a North-Korea-like pariah state, relying on nuclear MAD to keep its neighbors from wiping it out?

I think it's extremely unlikely, almost unthinkable. This has much to do with how Israel's security elites view themselves, and it's not that they're too "moral" to do such a deed so much as that they're too professional. The endstate they want is for the Palestinians to be ground down and invisible -- "an utterly defeated people" -- but more important they really don't want an endstate. The conflict is what holds Israel together, what gives Israelis their identity, and what gives the security elites their unique societal status. It's not surprising they don't want to give that up.

On the other hand, if the elites did decide to implement a final solution, I don't doubt that it would be substantially popular among Israelis -- probably only a big minority right now, but it wouldn't be hard to uncork enough terror to sway a majority. One thing to understand is that most Israelis have been systematically terrorized all of their lives -- not by Palestinians, although they've done their part, but by the Holocaust culture, military indoctrination, religious study, all-pervasive hasbara. A good picture of the gap between what the elites know and what the masses fear can be gleaned from Tom Segev's 1967, although since then both sides have gotten much nastier. There are no shortage of political demagogues and "willing executioners" in Israel, but it would take an extreme fluke to flip the elites.

For what it's worth, Israel is a pariah state already -- maybe not a North Korea, but the comparisons to South Africa are, if anything, too generous. The more the Palestinians try to court world opinion -- as opposed to trying to fight their way out of their cage -- the more bizarre Israel looks and the more isolated it becomes. That may matter little to the masses who can't see themselves, but the elites will eventually face a self-identity crisis as traditional allies like Europe and the US turn on them. If this really were an existential conflict, they might decide to go down an isolationist path, like Myanmar, but the conflict isn't like that. There's a straightforward deal on the table which would leave the elites secure in a slightly smaller Israel, and if the choice was that or Myanmar they'd be unprofessional not to take it. It will, of course, be Israel's choice: no one's going to impose regime change on them. But South Africa was in a similar situation, and chose to be part of the world rather than apart from the world.

I actually think most rogue states would lean that way if given a self-respecting chance. Building anti-missile shields to ensure a nation can't take any recourse against you while you pound them back to the stone age is a crude, expensive, and ultimately ineffective way to solve such problems.

Let me add a little more on missile defense. First, recall that in the days and weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, Bush's top priority (having passed his tax cuts) was getting Congress to approve funding for major expansion of anti-missile defense. One of the first conversations we overheard when we went out to lunch in Brooklyn that day was someone saying, "boy, too bad we don't have that anti-missile defense system." I don't recall anyone rejoining with, "oh, come on, the anti-missile defense system is only for real, serious attacks."

Fred Kaplan has a good chapter on anti-missile defense in Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power. In particular, he says (p. 79):

The debate over missile defenses dated not to Reagan's Star Wars or even to the 1972 ABM Treaty but much further back, to the mid-to-late 1950s, when weapons scientists inside the government, carrying high-level security clearances, first discovered the technical obstacles. Roughly every ten years since, the debate has repeated itself, with the same arguments, often among the same people. And each repetition has followed the same pattern, with the president and his aides at first enthusiastic about some technological advance that makes shooting down missiles seem suddenly feasible -- then realizing that the same old technical obstacles remain.

If Bush and his aides had known this history -- if they had known that the main critique of missile defenses was not political or philosophical but rather technical -- they might have stepped more gingerly before tripling the missile-defense budget yet again, withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, and rushing a brand-new missile-defense system into production and deployment without having any idea whether it could really defend against an attack. But they didn't know the history; they thought that history was irrelevant anyway; and so they plunged ahead.

And (p. 85):

It has been a recurring pattern throughout the history of arms procurement: when one rationale for buying a weapon proves untenable, its most impassioned advocates shift to a different rationale. The advocates know that the weapon is vital to the national defense; they figure that opposition stems from some ulterior motive (political hostility or pacifism or a rivalry with the branch of the armed services that's funding the weapon). For many, it would be too drastic a cognitive shift to reassess the wisdom of a project; better to devise a new argument that justifies it. [ . . . ]

This pattern of shifting rationales has been particularly acute in the history of the ABM, because the desire for a nuclear defense is understandably strong -- and because the case for specific ABM systems has fallen apart so repeatedly.

And he follows this with various examples from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the setback that shook Nixon into negotiating the ABM Treaty (pp. 89-90):

But a bigger shock came in the spring. On April 9, 1970, Kissinger's assistant on strategic issues, Laurence Lynn, met in DuBridge's White House office with two senior executives from Bell Telephone Laboratories, Safeguard's prime contractor. The executives had called the meeting to announce that they wanted out of the ABM business. They recited all the ways that Safeguard could be overwhelmed by the offense, and concluded -- as Lynn put it afterwards in a secret/eyes-only memo to Kissinger -- that Bell no longer wanted "to be associated with a program which cannot technically perform the missions the government claims it will perform."

Nixon and Kissinger were shocked. Nixon wrote in the margins of the memo, "My guess is that the real reasons are their scientists" -- who might have been influenced by all the Nobel laureates opposing the system -- "and P.R. fears." Whatever the motive, they knew this was a disaster. Once Congress found out that the prime contractor was giving up lucrative business on the grounds that Safeguard wouldn't work, the program was doomed.

I considered working the latter story into my response. In particular, I thought about comparing Bell's scruples to the companies that have been working on Star Wars since Reagan came in. Another interesting sidelight is a story from James Carroll's House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power. In the early 1960s McNamara set up the in-house Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to sort through all the crap the CIA and the military brass were passing off as intelligence. The first head of the DIA was Carroll's father, Lt. Gen. Joseph Carroll, who remained in charge until Nixon's Defense Secretary, Melvin Laird, fired him in 1969. The reason? Carroll refused to remove a statement from an intelligence estimate that said that the Soviet Union wasn't pursuing a first strike capability. Why? Because the statement was needed to justify Laird's ABM system (i.e., the same one Bell decided wouldn't work).

Also worth reading is Chalmers Johnson's Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic, which focuses especially on space-based weapons schemes (e.g., p. 216):

Similarly today, there can be no rationale for a space war because one unintended but unavoidable consequence would be to destroy our own preeminent position in space. A major but little-noticed reason for this is because a conflict in space using antisatellite weapons of any kind would vastly increase the amount of orbiting garbage, which would threaten our whole network of military and commercial spacecraft. That, in turn, would threaten the whole American -- even planetary -- way of life. Yet space debris is a subject that the air force's "counterspace doctrine" never so much as mentions.

In fact, he gives an example of a doomsday weapon: a rocket that could launch "a dumptruck full of gravel" into orbit, where it would suffice to destroy every satellite, including the NSA's and the military's eyes and ears, as well as most of our global telecommunications bandwidth, plus handy things like GPS. Missile defense would also produce space debris, starting with the test phase.

Stephen Walt: Time for George Mitchell to Resign: I don't think the bottom line matters much one way or another, especially if Mitchell were to resign without turning the fact into a damning indictment of Obama, Clinton, Emmanuel, et al. -- which isn't Mitchell's style. One might also talk about Mitchell's own problems. Early on, Israel's flaks accused him of being too even-handed, and it turns out they were right: Mitchell has bent over backwards to let Netanyahu obstruct the process. Still, this post does a good job of explaining what's been going on this past year when nothing got accomplished.

One thing I want to add to the list of missteps -- and I'm already on the record as saying that it would be more useful to break Gaza free as an independent Palestinian state now than to try to do anything about freezing settlements. This is that Obama made a major mistake allowing Iran to be rolled into the equation. He may have thought that he could easily cut a deal with Iran and throw that as a bone to Netanyahu, but Iranian political turmoil made that impossible, leaving him nothing to offer but increasingly belligerent posturing, starting with a big arms buildup in the Persian Gulf. The net result is not only no Israel/Palestine progress but also a worsening of his Iran problem. One indication of how bad this is getting is that Richard Haass, not normally a neocon, is among those agitating for regime change.

The news out of Israel/Palestine has been unremittingly bleak lately -- scroll back through WarInContext and Mondoweiss if you want details.

Good letter from Laura Tillem in Wichita Eagle this morning, under title "Honor cease-fire":

Regarding "Gaza reality" (Jan. 11 Letters to the Editor): What is it with these Israel defenders that they cannot admit what the Israeli Foreign Ministry itself confirmed? During the cease-fire from June to November 2008, before the attack on Gaza, there were almost no rockets from Gaza. So the Hamas authorities were obviously working hard to prevent angry Gazans from launching rockets into southern Israel -- because it was a cease-fire.

Then on Nov. 4, 2008, Israel broke the cease-fire by assassinating several Gazans. No doubt the Israel defenders will give an excuse for that, but it sure does explain that there is a way to stop the rockets -- honor the cease-fire.

As one of many American and Israeli Jews who oppose Israeli policy, I cannot believe how blind those in the Israel lobby are to the danger they are bringing to both Jews and Palestinians.

We watched a movie a couple days ago: a documentary Jonathan Demme made about Jimmy Carter's publicity tour in support of his book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. There was a lot of "how dare you" interviews which gave Carter opportunity to respond and explain, and there were things there I'd quibble with. In particular, he defines Palestine as a real place separate from Israel -- presumably he's following the Green Line -- and he limits his apartheid charge to Palestine, exempting Israel, which he repeatedly praises as an open and democratic society. The actual situation is more complex, with many elements of segregation and discrimination applied to the so-called Israeli Citizens of Palestinian Descent that managed to survive the 1948 war without fleeing, lived through 20 years of military rule, and 40 more years as second-class citizens, both economically and politically. Their status is certainly more benign than that of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. In those cases South African-style apartheid would be an improvement. There is in fact no word that adequately describes life under the arbitrary and capricious boot of Israeli occupation. In particular, the signature of oppressed peoples everywhere is economic servitude, but countries like South Africa or classes like the white owners of the Jim Crow South are dependent on ultracheap labor, which gives that labor some small measure of power and respect. This is not the case in Occupied Palestine, where Israelis have become utterly indifferent to Palestinian labor.

This indifference has rendered Palestinians invisible to Israelis, at least beyond their utility as cartoon demons. Although it's only a tiny part of the movie, one thing you will notice is how pro-Israel, anti-Carter hecklers can't conceive of anyone other than Israel as having legitimate rights and desires. The most obvious case is the guy who screams, presumably at Palestinians, "You are nothing!" The same sentiment is often raised to a political argument, as when our local Israel sentry -- the source of the article Laura responded to -- tried to answer every legitimate complaint about Israel occupation, including the devastating siege of Gaza in 2006, by bringing up the homemade rockets fired from Gaza at nearby Israeli villages. He, like nearly every propagandist Israel employs, implies that only Israel's security matters, and that nothing that Israel ever does can ever be faulted because to do so would endanger Israel -- and Jews worldwide. In other words, he is saying that only We matter, that no one else matters; that only We have rights, that no one else does.

One question then is why do they worry about being tagged for apartheid (or racism)? The central problem with these terms isn't whether they are accurate. What Israel's flaks are responding to is the implicit recognition that apartheid and racism, therefore Israel, are things that decent people should oppose. They could care less about accuracy, because they've become so blinded to what they actually do in the Occupied Territories, but they can't abide by the notion that they should be criticized. The irony of all this is that throughout its entire history Israel has never shied away from embracing racist allies, starting with Imperial Britain and continuing to the colonial French in Algeria, good ol' Jim Crow America, and especially apartheid-era South Africa. Israel is the last of the White Settler Republics, hanging on for dear life. As the first, it's not surprising that America should be Israel's great ally, but more and more we're getting over that, which threatens to leave Israel as stranded as they expect to be.

Matthew Yglesias: Jimmy Carter. Seems like a reasonable summary of the Carter presidency, but this misses some context and significance. No doubt that Carter was more aware of major problems facing the nation, and more willing to face them even at personal sacrifice, than any other president in his era -- you have to go back to Truman to find anyone with remotely similar traits. (Hoover was similarly snakebit by events, but it's hard to see any of his principles that have been vindicated by history.) The Volcker Recession is the most obvious example, not least because it's the one that killed Carter's reelection campaign. By contrast, Nixon and both Bushes pulled all sorts of strings to keep interest rates arbitrarily low: in Nixon's case that led to galloping stagflation and Volcker's constriction; for Bush I the excess money was shunted into bubbles that soon collapsed in Mexico and later in East Asia; for Bush II the money went into the real estate bubble and its subsequent collapse. But in all three cases cheap money helped paper over lagging economic performance and -- excepting Bush I -- got disastrous presidents reelected. You can say that Carter gave himself up for the better management of the US economy, but it's harder to say that that was a good thing. The real problem with Carter's presidency is that he lost it to Ronald Reagan, and not only did he give way to Reagan, he paved the way.

A number of the things that Reagan became notorious for actually started under Carter. One was the turn to deregulation, which seems to have been a good idea for trucking, a mixed one with airlines and telecommunications, and a disastrous one with banking. Maybe a second Carter term would have managed the mistakes better, but Reagan made them worse. The Volcker Recession is another case in point. Inflation was a real problem, although it's never been all that clear to me how much of a problem it was. What was clear was that under Reagan the purpose of the recession became to bust the unions. Inflationary pricing caused by quasi-monopolies has never seemed to bother the Fed, as long as workers don't have the pull to index their wages to the cost of living. The persistent fall of real wages since Volcker may not have been part of the original plan, but it was by the time Reagan got through with it.

Carter also got a leading jump on the Reagan military buildup. He instigated a new aggressiveness with the Soviet Union, most publicly by boycotting Moscow's first-ever Olympics, but more notoriously by sponsoring the Afghan Mujahideen even before the Soviet Union moved troops into Afghanistan. Again, what Carter did was much more modest than Reagan's escallation, but once again it was easier for Reagan to move once Carter had pointed the way. It was also under Carter that the US formalized its self-appointed hegemony over the Persian Gulf: what was for a long time called the Carter Doctrine. He didn't really invent the idea -- the US had been picking up the pieces of the British Empire for several decades and had had ties to the Saudis back as far as WWII -- but in pushing the idea he did much to break up Iran and leave us permanently, precariously estranged. In that regard he didn't pave the way for Reagan so much as for the two Bushes.

Like all Democratic presidents since Roosevelt, Carter was elected by the left which he then shunned in favor of the rich and entrenched. His accomodation to Reaganism was one way he wound up hurting democracy in America. Still, thirty years later it's tempting to cut him some slack. No former president in US history has worked harder to redeem himself, and we see that in many ways, from his everyday piety to his willingness to interpose himself in conflicts all around the world. His constant efforts and example, more than anything else, tempt us to revise our estimation of his presidency. As Yglesias points out, there is some merit to that, but I'm inclined to look at it differently. The old saw is that "power corrupts" -- and Carter's presidency was his taste of power. His failures there no doubt involved some measure of bad luck, but they mostly derived from his compromises with entrenched power, and his sense of how to accommodate it. Once out of office, he's been much more free to pursue, and respect, his own conscience. Give him credit for that, but also take note of what the presidency and the political machinations that got him there did to him. Those pressures are, after all, even more institutionalized today, which is one big reason Obama is so hard pressed to live up to the hopes invested in him.

I'd be remiss at this point if I didn't point out my book pages on Carter's books on Israel:

• Palestine Peace Not Apartheid
• We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work

War in Context: Israel: Apartheid and beyond: I haven't had much to say about Israel lately, mostly because nothing new has been happening. The Goldstone report, for instance, didn't do much more than sum up what was obvious from the start. It does add two notable things: one is that Goldstone himself is very articulate over what he has found; the other is that is may form the legal basis for world courts to start issuing indictments. While I don't think the latter will solve much, it would add to the number of people who have to be careful where they travel (e.g., Kissinger, Pinochet, Polanski). I also don't much buy the meme that Netanyahu is wrapping Obama around his finger. My own view is that Obama is waiting out Bibi's puerile temper tantrum, and when it runs its course Netanyahu will find that nothing has changed. Of course, I wouldn't bet on that, because it's never been clear just how committed Obama was to ending the conflict.

But I can't resist circulating this photograph of a Hebron settler throwing wine on a Palestinian woman. You can charge Israel with ethnic cleansing, with constructing a system of apartheid, with all manner of abuses of human rights and international law, but it's hard to grasp just how infantile some Israeli attitudes are. Try, for instance, to imagine how this act contributes to the security of the Jews. I can't. I can't even recognize this settler as Jewish. After all, Rabbi Hillel explained Judaism this way: "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow; this is the whole Law; the rest is commentary." Try to reconcile this picture with the Law. I can't.

Of course, this is only a trivial example of the hateful things many Israelis do. I won't start enumerating them here, because in the end they're all commentary. The very triviality of this example is what makes it unanswerable.

Stephen Walt: Time to start working on Plan B:

Obama's election and speechifying has done a lot to repair America's image around the world -- at least in the short term -- in part because that image had nowhere to go but up. But as just about everyone commented when he got the Nobel Peace Prize last week, his foreign policy record to date is long on promises but short on tangible achievements. Indeed, odds are that the first term will end without his achieving any of his major foreign policy goals.

Walt follows this with a 6-point list, starting with Israel/Palestine. Obama's election signalled a new will in America to try to solve some problems in the Middle East, as opposed to his predecessor's favored tactic of dousing them with gasoline. Even before Obama took office, Israel responded to installing their No Team, a governmnent dedicated to never giving up an inch of ground especially if it might in turn result in a moment of peace. For Netanyahu that's not just a promise; that's a proven track record, as he set up the vastly popular Oslo Peace Process for a final takedown by his tag team buddy, Ariel Sharon. It's easy now to say that Obama never stood a chance in Netanyahu's ring, but that's mostly because Obama felt the political need to cede points on Hamas and Iran. But it's also because the one plank that Obama did attempt to walk -- the insistence on reining in Israel's West Bank settlement expansion -- was something of a sideshow, and not the fight that he should have fought.

It's true that the purpose of the settlements is to make any sort if Israeli withdrawal politically impossible. I can think of several ways to deal with the settlements problem, but the best way to deal with it now is to ignore it. If you look realistically at all of the land that ultimately should be turned into a Palestinian state, the settlements (especially the big, close ones) will be seen as the last parcels to be returned. The real question right now is whether any land can be turned over to the Palestinians. The fact is that there is a lot of land that can be turned over immediately, starting with the whole of Gaza. The position Obama should take is that every Palestinian is entitled to full, first-class citizenship, at least in the country where he or she currently lives. If that abode is in Israel or under Israeli control, then that citizenship must be citizenship in Israel. If Israel doesn't like that, Israel should renounce the territory, and turn it back to the UN so that it can be incorporated into an independent Palestinian state. That's a simple point, and it's hard to see how any American or European can disagree with it when stated in those terms.

There are a bunch of objections Israel will raise, basically revolving around an endless circle of security demands and final borders that have to be negotiated with a Palestinian responsible party that as far as Israel can tell doesn't exist. This is all bullshit, but Obama is going to have to make a couple of points clear to get past it. The first is that because there is no free and independent Palestine, there is no responsible Palestinian party that Israel can negotiate with. The only way that Israel can negotiate with anyone -- and such negotiations will be needed over borders, water rights, travel, extradition, all sorts of things -- Palestine must first be free and sovereign. If that isn't the case, then Palestine isn't free to negotiate, because they won't have the power and leverage to ever say no. It should be easy to explain this point, even though no one seems to get it yet.

The way this would work is that Israel would give up a parcel of land to the UN. The UN would then organize government institutions and elections to direct those institutions. That parcel and those institutions would constitute an initial Palestinian nation, which would be recognized as having the same rights and responsibilities as every other nation (including Israel). As time goes on, Israel may decide to give up further parcels, which the UN would then integrate into Palestine according to procedures that ensure that each citizen of Palestine has equal rights and representation. The resulting government could negotiate with Israel, or not. It could, for instance, assert that Israel should turn over more territory, including its illegal settlements. It could take such a case to the World Court. The main thing it could not do is to threaten or attack Israel -- a violation of international law. On the other hand, once Israel gives up parcels of land, they can no longer threaten or attack the nation representing the people living on that land.

There are some more bells and whistles that can be added to this scheme to help ensure that it would work, but the key is that Obama and any allies he can round up -- Europe should be more proactive on this -- have to insist that Israel moves to ensuring that everyone in the region has full and equal rights, whether within Israel or in two states. Israel has managed to make the whole problem insurmountable. But parts of the problem can be picked off and resolved simply. And once you do that with, say, Gaza, then you will have broken the logjam. Israel's central preoccupation ever since Ben-Gurion sent Golda Meir to negotiate Transjordan's stake in the West Bank with King Abdullah has been to prevent the Palestinians from ever having the legal status of a state. But all through history they've hardly ever put it in those terms. They've avoided the subject because deep down they've taken a position that is indefensible. If Obama wants to solve this problem he has to hit Israel at its weak spot, and that isn't the settlements; it's the denial of the most basic civil and human rights to millions of Palestinians.

Matt Yglesias: Right-Wing Cranks and Israel: Glad someone said this (although it could have been said in fewer words, with fewer mitigating asides):

I think Josh Marshall is to some extent overthinking his analysis of Mike Huckabee's claim that "generally Evangelicals are so much more supportive of Israel than the American Jewish community." Everything he writes about Christian Zionist eschatology, the apocalypse, and Revisionist Zionism is true. But the larger truth is just that Evangelicals, on average, despite the fact that an intuitive reading of the Gospels points in a different direction, are just generally inclined toward an affection for violence, brutality, and authoritarianism.

If you look at support for executing felons or support for torturing terrorism suspects or support for launching aggressive wars, time and again you'll see that white Evangelical Protestants are the leading proponents of violence as a solution to policy problems.

So if you totally ignore Israel, and just look at the "America debate" inside the United States you find that Evangelicals are much more inclined than Jews to believe that using the military to kill foreigners is a wise and moral approach to security issues. That's not because Evangelicals are more "supportive of America" than Jews are, it's because they're more supportive of violence. Jews and Evangelicals, meanwhile, are both favorably disposed toward Israel. But "support for Israel" in the context of American political debates, is often glossed as meaning something like "proclivity to believe that killing Arabs is a wise and moral approach to security issues."

One interesting thing about right-wing support for Israel -- and this is not just an evangelical phenomenon; it's equally true of neocons -- is that they seem to intuitively grasp that Israel is a racist, vicious, violent, expansionist, domineering force, and that's precisely what they like about Israel. Jewish supporters of Israel (neocons excepted) take great pains to deny all those attributes; they invariably cast Israel's actions as defensive. Part of this is that evangelicals are especially close to the religious settler movement, which is -- even by Israeli standards -- exceptionally belligerent.

This violent streak has a long history in American politics, but it especially came to the fore under George W. Bush, whose abiding faith in the "clarifying" power of force is downright fascist. Jim Geraghty memorably summed this up in a book title: Voting to Kill. But it goes back a long time. One example: after Begin installed the first far-right government in Israel, there was much worry about the reaction when Israeli right-wingers would appear before Congress. Turned out that Alabama Senator Richard Shelby's response to (I think it was) Yigal Allon was, "Now you're finally talking American."

I'm reading Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories, by Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar, and one thing that's especially striking, even beyond the racist violence so many settlers enjoy, is the messianic overtones of their beliefs -- which differ from the Christians mainly in their belief that is should be possible to secure heaven on earth. I've never been able to believe that Christians actually believe in premillennial dispensationalism (much less understand it), but like moths to the flame they seem to intuitively get off on the apocalypse over there.

Rick Perlstein: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition: More American history, mostly dêjà vu.

M.J. Rosenberg: Great New Book. That would be Israel Is Real, by Rich Cohen. As rave reviews go, this actually comes out rather fuzzy: "I don't know if Cohen is a Zionist. . . . He seems to believe . . . But the book is not a political argument. It's a story with wonderful tales about Herzl, and Golda, and Sharon,and Rabin, written with love but also with pity." I wrote up a comment, tried to post it, only to get rejected. My comment:

I read Cohen's book. Enjoyed it a lot. Winced at various errors, especially the ones Adam Kirsch didn't bother with, like the consistent soft-peddling of Israeli atrocities from Deir Yassin to Kibbya to Sabra and Shatila. The book is full of big ideas, worth pondering even if some don't quite pan out. It's occurred to me before that the Judaism of the temple and the Judaism of the exile are fundamentally different with different trajectories even though they share common referents. Cohen puts a lot of emphasis on Israel the nation as the third temple, a metaphor that hadn't occurred to me before. And he makes a strong case for the Holocaust as all-pervasive in Israeli political culture, but then he makes Yad Vashem the third temple. (He explains how one exits Yad Vashem to behold a panoramic view of Jerusalem, as if the point is to give the Holocaust a happy ending.)

On the other hand, I'm not sure that his elaboration of so much myth really explains what is going on. Cohen comes off as a dabbler: religious enough to observe the high holidays but not much else; skeptical of Israel from a distance but welcomed inside whenever he makes an appearance. If Zionism is religion for secularists, he dabbles in it too. He sees the occupation as corrupting, but money and power corrupt yet it's still good to have some. Palestinians hardly ever appear in the book, except as genocidal killers or as embarrassing victims. He quotes Hillel but doesn't connect the dots, except insofar as the Zionist rejection of exilic Judaism frees them from the rule not to be hateful to others.

On the other hand, Palestinians aren't likely to get anything out of the book, except perhaps to wonder how they got wrapped up with such nutters.

Kirsch, in his review, is exactly wrong about Cohen: what's most valuable in the book is precisely its mess of contradictions, flippant ideas, and injudicious rhetoric. Cohen never gives you just one way to think about Israel, which is why no one with pat answers and a canonical storyline will like the book. He challenges you to think. On the other hand, he overindulges those of us who already tend to think too much about the history. That's why I suspect that a more present focus, like Richard Ben Cramer's Why Israel Lost (several years old but hardly obsolete) goes further in explaining why Israelis have become so addicted to their fight.

Adam Kirsch: Disengagement. Another review of Rich Cohen's Israel Is Real, referred to above thanks to a tip in the post's comments.

Marked some quotes in the book, but don't have them typed up yet, but when I do they'll be here.

Helena Cobban: Just how inept is Ross as a 'Middle East expert'? That would be Dennis Ross. "Short answer: extremely." Long answer follows. Points out that his original training -- I doubt that it actually qualifies as expertise -- in in Soviet affairs. What he's doing in the Obama White House isn't clear, but it's probably tied into the lack of results so far. His specialty is CBMs (as they're called here, standing for Confidence Building Measures), a way to pretend you're doing something while never getting anything done. Saudi King Abdullah goes a bit out on a limb calling himself a "man of action" but the contrast to Ross is still well taken.

Robert D Kaplan: Losing patience with Israel. Not a guy you'd call anti-Likud much less anti-Israel. Not a guy who wouldn't be just as happy with another Middle East war or three. But a guy who isn't going to book reservations on Masada either:

Both politically and demographically, time is not on Israel's side. Now that Iran is weakened by domestic turmoil, it may actually be in Israel's best interests for America, Saudi Arabia, and other moderate Arab states to impose a peace agreement by leaning hard on the Palestinians, as America twists Israel's arm. The result would be the return of almost all of the West Bank to a fundamentally demilitarized Palestinian state, even as many Israeli settlements are dismantled. What other resolution can there be?

The piece is full of the usual crap distortions, but underlying it is a plea for Obama to do something -- as opposed to having Dennis Ross making sure nobody does anything.

David Bromwich: The character of Barack Obama. Actually, Obama needs not only to do something; he needs to do pretty much the right thing. But thus far he's compromised on just about everything, which has sort of worked OK in some cases but not in others. He got enough in bank bailouts to save the system, but thus far hasn't gotten the regulation needed to keep it all from happening again, and he's let a lot of people who did no good off the hook when he could have gone much further. He got enough of a stimulus to bring GDP back toward the black, but not enough to generate the jobs that would make the recovery feel like one to average workers. He's left health care painfully dangling in the political winds. Maybe he'll pull something through, but it's likely to be so compromised we'll have to do this all over again.

The strange thing about Obama is that he seems to suppose a community can pass directly from the sense of real injustice to a full reconciliation between the powerful and the powerless, without any of the unpleasant intervening collisions. This is a choice of emphasis that suits his temperament.

One might compare Franklin Roosevelt, who started his first term with a fireside chat that explained the banking crisis in terms so clear and convincing that he defused the problem virtually overnight, and who wound up taunting his conservative opponents by admitting he welcomes their hate.

I hadn't looked at Mondoweiss in a while, not since I took my vacation. They've redesigned the layout, and it's really hideous: only two (short) posts in full, everything else in two columns you have to jump to based on teasers. This used to be a very useful blog -- during last year's Israeli siege of Gaza it was the best information source available on the web. I hate to say this, but I can't stand to look at it now.

Matthew Yglesias: The Next Tax Revolt: Had this stuck in a window for a week now, and didn't want to lose it, even though I don't have time to dig into it. Interesting point:

The United States already does about as much as any other country to curb inequality through the tax code. Where we fall short is in fighting inequality through government spending -- we just don't spend very much. If you care about inequality, in other words, the thing to focus on is not soaking the rich through the tax code but rather ensuring that there's enough tax revenue to finance generous public services. Broad social-insurance schemes like Social Security and unemployment insurance, as well as government operations more generally, are strongly progressive in their impact.

The most important issue is whether or not the government has the revenue needed to finance generous spending on social services. The Scandinavian model of a cradle-to-grave welfare state financed largely through regressive taxation is not regarded as punitive to the poor. By contrast, the pre-New Deal United States had an extremely progressive tax structure -- a simple income tax levied only on the wealthy -- but it resulted in meager revenue and financed no noteworthy social-insurance system or public services.

One thing that seems to be a general rule of US tax policy is to make taxation as visible, and therefore as painful, as possible. This actually runs counter to one of the basic (and oft-repeated) considerations in taxation: the belief that taxes disincentivize behavior. This is even considered a selling point for sin taxes. But if taxes are such a drag on the economy, it would make much more sense to make them less visible, as well as to focus them on cases where disincentives are trivial or non-existent -- e.g., taxing dead people. For the living, the least painful time to tax is whenever a transaction occurs: when you buy and sell something, or when you pay someone a wage or other remuneration. With few (if any) exceptions, the robust tax base countries Yglesias favors raise most of their taxes through a VAT, which (unlike American sales taxes) is generally buried within the cost of the purchase. VATs raise prices, which has some negative effect on demand, but they don't hit you out of the blue like property taxes do. It also helps if the burden of tax collection is placed primarily on business, which used to be the case in the US but is less so now: it is both less visible to most people and it fits in with accounting procedures that businesses need to do anyway.

I can't vouch for Yglesias's assertion that the US tax code is relatively progressive compared to other countries. One thing that is certain is that it is much less progressive than it used to be. There are a lot of ways that progressivism could be used that aren't now. In particular, I would make both corporate income and VAT taxes mildly progressive based on company size: a break for small and especially new competitors and a brake against WalMart-sized monopolies. I also think that unearned income -- interest, dividends, capital gains, gifts, estates -- should be taxed progressively according to total lifetime gains: a break for anyone starting to build a nest egg, and a brake on excessive accumulation.

Of course, there's no point raising taxes unless you plan on spending the revenues on something useful. I can come up with a long list there, too -- subjects for many future posts.

Getting ready to take a vacation of sorts. A long road trip, anyhow. Some interesting articles that I had kept open with some vague notion of writing something about them, but now will have to pack up:

• Tony Judt: Fictions on the Ground: On Israel's settlement occupation.
• Tony Karon: Iran's Crisis: The Opposition Weighs Its Options: Realistically, it's a long shot to bet against the house.
• Ezra Klein: Wealth-Care Reform: Yes, it's more about money than medicine, which is the reason health care reform is such a struggle: a lot of money is at stake, for uncertain medical outcomes.
• Paul Krugman: Not Enough Audacity. On health care: "The point is that if you're making big policy changes, the final form of the policy has to be good enough to do the job. You might think that half a loaf is always better than none -- but it isn't if the failure of half-measures ends up discrediting your whole policy approach." Also: "Indeed, the prospects for such savings are precisely what have the opponents of a public plan so terrified."
• Kathleen Parker: Runaway Goveror: The Sequel: On Gov. Sanford, more or less, before all the facts were in, which is why she had time/space to survey the rest of the GOP. Don't miss the Newt bit at the end.

By the way, Iraq is getting bloody again, with over 200 civilian deaths this past week. I've just slogged through Thomas Ricks's Surge-celebratory The Gamble, and it's worth noting that the intelligent people behind the strategem -- a group excluding politicians like McCain and Lieberman, pundits like Kristol, and self-appointed experts like Fred Kagan -- never saw as anything more than a beachhead that would depend on significant political reconciliation to secure. The latter didn't happen for a lot of reasons, and now it's closing. Of course some people, including Ricks in his prognosticating epilogue, will attribute this to the imminent US withdrawals, implying that we can fix the problem by launching Surge II. But the fact is that there will always be a day of reckoning when US forces leave, and putting that off tries the patience of everyone in Iraq who wants to get this war settled. The idea that Iraq is a "forever war" is stuck in the heads of a few American hawks who invested heavily in it, but it's plainly absurd to most Americans, who sooner or later will manage to pull the plug. When that happens, Iraq will sink or swim. I've always felt that Iraq's odds would be better if the country is not tied to the dead weight of American imperialism. Nothing that has happened, including the adjustments Petraeus and Odierno made, has changed that.

Adam Horowitz: Israel wants to keep the settlements, PA says they can stay as Palestinian citizens. After some Israeli teeth-gnashing over the settlements, Horowitz quotes Ahmed Qureia saying: "residents of Ma'aleh Adumim or Ariel who would rather stay in their homes could live under Palestinian rule and law, just like the Israeli Arabs who live among you." In other words, the Palestinians would have no problem with Israeli settlers continuing to live in their present homes after Israel ceded the West Bank to an independent Palestinian state, provided the settlers accepted the rule of Palestinian law. In other words, the removal of Israeli settlers is not a prerequisite or obstacle to a two state solution along the Green Line border, as envisioned by the UN in 1967 and by the recent Arab League proposal.

Horowitz comments:

This idea, while controversial among Palestinians, is an interesting way of turning Israeli intransigence on its head. If Israelis are not willing to leave the settlements then they are welcome to stay in Palestine, but only if they are willing to live in equality with Palestinians, and not from a position of dominance. So far there have not been any signs that Israel would be willing to do this.

Actually, we've been through this same debate before: in Gaza, Abbas made the same offer, but Sharon insisted not just on forcibly removing all Israeli settlers but on physically destroying their buildings to prevent them from becoming occupied by Palestinians. It's an idea that is worth pursuing further, because it gets at the heart of Zionism, its destructiveness and dysfunctionality. I wrote the following as a comment:

I believe that Qureia is on to something, but he needs to articulate it better, both for his own people and for the world. There are two good reasons to welcome Israeli settlers with Palestinian citizenship: one is practical in that the settlements aren't going to vanish quickly or painlessly; the other is that doing so seeks the higher moral ground. Israeli intransigence is based on the belief that Jews can only be safe if wrapped up in a state that they totally dominate. The more places Jews are welcome, the more that rule is disproved, and the weaker the case is for a Zionist state. If done credibly, it would argue that in a two-state scenario at least one state would be founded on the principle that the state represents and respects all of its citizens. That would be a powerful implicit critique of Israel, and hopefully a model for improvement.

However, the key to all of this is credibility. Qureia's position isn't new. It was at least a minority position going back before the fouding of Israel. I'm not saying that anyone who held the position was insincere, but it's always been a tough sell -- to the Zionists, naturally, and also to rejectionists and nationalists among the Palestinians. And even if you do agree to offer citizenship, the current settlers aren't exactly your first choice for new citizens. They tend to be right-wing, exceptionally nationalist and racist, and they come wrapped up in segregated enclaves, and pretty well armed. A better idea would be to open up immigration to Jews who want to come and who are willing to integrate, and build your credibility around that seed. Meanwhile the settlements could be handled like Hong Kong or the Panama Canal Zone, where a deal was struck with a fairly long term (20-30 years) to allow everyone to adjust. (I sort of recall Abbas pushing something like that, maybe as a leaseback.)

Normally I wouldn't argue that any group should get special consideration, but lately Israeli phobias have been running amuck, with disastrous consequences for Palestinians, and considerable ill will all around -- consider how Israeli government figures keep talking about the need for preemptive war against Iran, or the recent reports from Sudan where Israeli airstrikes have killed over 100 people (some allegedly smuggling supplies into blockaded Gaza). Now we find the Knesset entertaining laws to prohibit all reference to what Palestinians call the Nakba, to criminalize any criticism of Israel as a Jewish state, and to require Palestinian citizens of Israel to take loyalty oaths. In a later post, Horowitz quotes MK Zevulun Orlev: "Many intellectuals in the academia who talk about a country belonging to all its citizens belong in prison." Israel's right-wing ruling claque are sure leaving a lot of moral high ground open. Hopefully, the Palestinians will claim it. I can imagine a whole nonviolent campaign based on embracing the Jewish legacy and distinguishing it from what Zionists have been doing for decades now, but especially lately. This may sound condescending, and it may lead to a bit of self-righteousness, but the world isn't that sophisticated. It's a simple approach, like conversion. You don't wait for the sinner to repent and be forgiven; you forgive, then shame the sinner for not repenting.

Adam Horowitz: Is this getting stabbed in the back or the front? Looks like Obama's (or is it Clinton's) Iran consigliere Dennis Ross has a new book out, including a chapter called "Linkage: The Mother of All Myths." Linkage is the notion that solving the Israel/Palestine conflict will help solve other problems the US has in the Middle East. In other words, Ross is arguing that America's slavish support for Israel's occupation in all its brutality and persistent efforts to intimidate neighboring countries -- its 2006 war against Lebanon, its occasional bombing runs in Syria and Sudan, its constant ranting about Iran -- have absolutely no effect on American interests in the Middle East. In other words, America has no business second-guessing Israel's frantic, fanatic little rogue terror state. Who could think otherwise? Well, Obama, for one. Maybe Ross should check up on who's signing his paychecks. I suppose he could argue that this one was in press while he was still flacking for Israel, but it looks bad right now. If he backpedals, it shows he's a whore; if he sticks to his guns, it proves he's a mole. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett had an op-ed in the New York Times on Sunday called Have we already lost Iran?, which puts a lot of blame on Obama's failure to make any headway with Iran squarely on the shoulders of his envoy . . . Dennis Ross.

Martin Van Creveld: Do Like Jimmy Carter. Written by a prominent Israeli military strategist and historian -- no dove, but realistic enough. A long list of American presidents dutifully delivered arms, money, and advice to Israel -- as Moshe Dayan said: we take the arms, we take the money, and we ignore the advice -- Carter was the only one to actually solve any of Israel's problems. He did so by standing up to Menachem Begin, who quite frankly was a tough dude to stand up to. But he also got Egypt to accept a deal that offered no guarantees of solving the Palestinian's major complaints -- one that divided the previously united Arab world against Israel, one that led directly to the assassination of Anwar Sadat, one with vague wording about Palestinian "autonomy" that Begin never had any intention of giving meaningful implementation to. For his trouble, Carter is widely reviled by Israel boosters like Alan Dershowitz, who singles Carter out in his The Case Against Israel's Enemies. Van Creveld tries to set up a set of analogies -- between Carter and Obama, Begin and Netanyahu, the likelihood that the Knesset opposition (then Labor, now Kadima) would back a US-sponsored peace deal, even if the right coalition in power were to split on it. He notably doesn't flatter Netanyahu in the deal:

Begin was an honest demagogue who passionately believed in Israel's right to retain the territories. Netanyahu is a petty rascal who believes in very little except, perhaps, his own advancement. Unlike Begin, a man of exceptional integrity, he can be bought.

Maybe, but the price is likely to be high. He has, after all, learned that the one path to power that works in Israel is to keep turning right. And he's managed to go so far down that path it's hard to imagine him returning to reality. So Obama has a tough job ahead of him, assuming even that he's up to it. Carter had a rough time of it, and still doesn't get the respect he deserves, least of all in Israel.

Lead front page article in The Wichita Eagle today is titled "Prison cuts hurt El Dorado." Joe Rodriguez writes:

The closing of the minimum-security unit at th El Dorado Correctional Facility will mean the loss of thousands of hours of inmate labor in the community, officials say.

Officials from El Dorado State Park, the cty of El Dorado and Butler County say they are uncertain how they will make up for the lost labor, which they depend on for jobs such as park maintenance, construction, and landfill maintenance.

Just an idea, but they might consider hiring people in the free labor market. But even in the midst of a depression where unemployment is surging, the costs are troubling:

It may be felt most at El Dorado State Park, where about 16 to 20 inmates work each day, according to park manager Doug Lauxman.

At the park, inmates do jobs such as mowing, weeding, welding and repairing equipment. They are paid $1.05 a day.

Prisons have long been a source of cheap labor in America -- a fact that is little recognized, especially of late since the world's largest gulag has become a voracious sink for government funds. In the post-Reconstruction deep south prison labor was exploited so shamelessly you had to figure it was social revenge for the Union's ending the "peculiar institution" of slavery. At their worst, those prisons had morality rates rivalling Soviet and Nazi slave labor camps. The El Dorado deal sounds relatively benign, but the idea that you can strip people of their rights and force them to work for virtually nothing isn't much different.

The bottom-right corner of the front page also has a McClatchy article: "$96.7 billion war funding bill easily clears House." A big chunk of the article has to do with $50 million allocated to close a much larger and more notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay. Evidently several states have passed laws or resolutions against transferring those "dangerous" prisoners -- not convicted, not even formally charged -- to their states. Still, I'd bet that if if those so-called terrorists were willing to do yardwork and a little welding for $1.05 per day, they'd be welcome at El Dorado State Park.

Conspicuously missing from the article, and most likely from the House deliberations, was any mention of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Page 3 of The Wichita Eagle leads off with an Associated Press article titled "Pope, Israeli PM discuss Iran." The eleven paragraph article barely alluded to the Pope's criticism of Israel's occupation:

The two men [Pope Benedict XVI and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu] met a day after the pope made a powerful call for Palestinian statehood, a concept that Netanyahu has refused to endorse. They held 15 minutes of face-to-face talks, which the Vatican said "centered on how the peace process can be advanced."

But in televised remarks following the talks, Netanyahu did not mention the Palestinian issue, focusing instead on Iran. [ . . . ]

He [Netanyahu] said Benedict said "he condemns all such things, anti-Semitism, hate," adding: "I think we found in him an attentive ear."

The pope not only called for a renewed peace process and a Palestinian state; he visited a Palestinian refugee camp to make his point. As Paul Woodward points out:

But then comes the image that should overshadow all others: the Pope in a fully operational open-air prison camp. No need to get lost in a debate about whose memories he is giving sufficient attention to -- the visible reality of incarceration is inescapable. The Pope's vaguely Reaganesque moment when he said that walls "can be taken down" not only evoked the fall of the Berlin Wall, but intentionally or not, called attention to the differences between the two barriers. East Berliners were deprived of all sorts of liberties, yet even they enjoyed far greater freedom than Palestinians. The emancipation of those oppressed by authoritarian communist rule was a popular cause among freedom-loving Americans. The emancipation of Palestinians from Israeli oppression . . . oh, that's something we're not even interested in thinking about.

I don't put much stock in the pope as an effective advocate for peace or human rights, but he's eminent enough that even Netanyahu is compelled to put on a show and dance to ignore him.

Seymour M Hersh: Syria Calling: Mostly on the so-called Syrian track of the much lamented Peace Process. No doubt Bashir Assad would be delighted to get on America's good side, not to mention recover the slice of relatively prime real estate known as the Golan Heights. What Israel has to gain from this isn't any way near so clear. There is vague talk about flipping Syria to undermine Iranian influence in the area, particularly through Hizbullah, but the effect would be trivial, and neither Syria nor Hizbullah (nor for that matter Iran) is any manner of threat to Israel. Syria, in particular, has shown itself to be helpless whenever Israel feels like bombing it: kind of like a doe standing by helpless while a cougar devours her fawn. And the Golan Heights are settled. Given the stink Israel's now-dominant far right made over giving up settlements in Sinai and Gaza, you'd expect all hell to break loose over the Golan Heights: the one piece of occupied territory Israel did manage to ethnically cleanse. Along with Greater Jerusalem, Israel formally annexed the Golan Heights, which seems likely to mean something when and if the issue ever gets to the negotiating table. Still, all the usual suspects from Netanyahu to Dennis Ross talk up the prospects for the Syrian track. Most likely they just don't want to talk about anything else. They can safely talk about/to Syria because it's at best a side show, and it's not like they have to go through with a deal: remember how Barak pulled the plug on the deal he had previously wanted back in 1999.

On the other hand, there is one piece of low-lying peace process fruit that would make a positive step: Lebanon. Israel hands over Shebaa Farms and releases their Lebanese prisoners; Hizbullah and Israel agree to a cease fire, with Hizbullah agreeing to disarm in something like 5-10 years, with the UN providing oversight. (I don't see any rush as long as they're not shooting. In any case, the units and materiel could be integrated into the Lebanese military, which even then wouldn't be a threat to anyone.) The two countries would exchange ambassadors and promote trade. I'd also like to see a plank where Lebanon (and possibly other countries) offers citizenship to Palestinian refugees (especially those born in Lebanon), with some amount of internationally financed compensation to grease the skids. Lebanon has refused Palestinians citizenship, mostly for fear of unbalancing the preexisting confessional hierarchy, and Palestinians haven't pushed the issue because they'd rather keep their claims against Israel active. But such a deal would start to release some pressure from the Palestinian refugees, who in any presently imagined deal have no chance of returning to Israel. This, again, could be set up as a long-term individual option -- 20 years, say, or 10 years after an Israel-Palestine two-state deal, whichever takes longer -- so it wouldn't result in an immediate flood of new Lebanese voters. And if Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Persian Gulf states, etc., or for that matter Europe and/or the US, were willing to take some of the Palestinian refugees (with their compensation) that would cut back on the impact on Lebanon. In any case, it would be good for all Lebanese to get out from under Israel's bombsights. And it would directly end the Hizbullah threat, thereby eliminating one of Israel's persistent security problems.

Shebaa Farms is unpopulated; Israel's prisoners are little more than hostage-pawns; both sides benefit from avoiding another war like the sorry, embarrassing 2006 episode; and some progress on the Palestinian refugee front would be good for everyone. Syrian and Iranian influence in Lebanon would no doubt be reduced once Lebanon is free from Israeli military threat. Seems to me like a no brainer, but the parties involved will probably figure out some way to scuttle it.

MondoWeiss is busy covering the AIPAC convention this week, where the 24/7 theme is Iran. Shimon Peres tried his hand at stand-up: "Historically Iran sought to enrich mankind. Today, alas, they want to enrich uranium." He topped that by asserting that "Iran is not threatened by anybody." Really? Israel has a history of bombing suspected nuclear research sites in Iraq and Syria, and Israeli politicians have been wailing non-stop about Iran for years now, including explicit bombing threats and well-publicized practice exercises, while polls shows Israeli public opinion overwhelmingly favoring an attack. What holds Israel back is presumably the US, which has soldiers on Iran's borders with Iraq and Afghanistan, and has had hostilility toward Iran ever since 1979, when a broad-based revolution deposed the US-installed Shah. Back in the 1980s the US sent arms to Iraq to further its war against Iran, and the US directly shot down an Iranian airliner and destroyed an Iranian oil platform. Even short of direct military attacks, the US continues to conduct economic warfare against Iran. And while Saddam Hussein is gone, the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms and kingdoms that bankrolled Iraq's invasion of Iran are still intact and more or less hostile. I'd say Iran has some reason to be concerned about its safety and integrity -- probably more than Israel does, despite their carefully cultivated paranoia.

Helena Cobban: NYT interviews Meshaal. References a New York Times interview with Damascus-based Hamas spokesman Khaled Meshaal: better to get the Hamas position from him than from the usual pro-Israeli spinmeisters. Essentially offers support for the 1967-border two-state scenario supported by the UN in 1967 and currently by the Arab League. I would have preferred an indefinitely renewable "hudna" but the 10 years he offered would very likely lead to more unless Israel made it seem necessary to change tactics. I would also have preferred that his renunciation of the 1987 Hamas Charter be taken more formally, including an acknowledgment that the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" crap was never true in the first place. But Meshaal's view is a reasonable place to start from. He shows the kind of depth and integrity that makes him someone to deal with -- assuming that's what Israel wants, which you can't prove by Netanyahu.

Stephen Walt: The treason of the hawks: Underneath a picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, Walt starts out:

In Every War Must End, his classic study of war termination, Fred Iklé coined the term "treason of the hawks" to describe those tragic situations where hardliners stubbornly refuse to make peace and thereby lead their countries to disaster. Iklé, who served as Ronald Reagan's under secretary of defense and is certainly no dove, recognized that obstinate opposition to making peace is as dangerous to a nation's future as naïve pacifism and potentially as damaging as deliberately selling out to the enemy.

After pointing out that "treason" is a word that carries especially harsh moral connotations, Iklé noted:

[T]he English language is without a word of equally strong opprobrium to designate acts that can lead to the destruction of one's government and one's country, not by giving aid and comfort to the enemy, but by making enemies, not by fighting too little, but by fighting too much and too long. "Adventurism" -- much too weak a word -- is perhaps the best term to describe this "treason of the hawks." . . . Treason can help our enemies destroy our country by making them stronger; adventurism can destroy our country by making our enemies more numerous.

I was thinking about a seemingly unrelated matter the other day: the relative value of business choices made by the state and the private sector. Economists have worked hard to prove the innate superiority of private over political choices, but the real cause seems pretty obvious: states tend to choose only one option and to hang onto failures much longer than the private sector can afford to tolerate. On the other hand, private actors tend to choose a wide range of options, but limit their bets and are quick to cut their losses -- a process that tends to find and perpetuate good choices, and to quickly forget many bad choices. A lot more can be said about this, but the relevant point is that political choices can fail repeatedly, up to the very brink of disaster, without any correction. The Iraq War is as much example as we need, but Israel offers many examples as well.

Israel's long struggle with its neighbors, its unwanted people, and its own confused self-conscoiousness, is so cluttered with pseudo-victories its people and supporters have trouble realizing how poorly they have fared. The main reason is that Israel, going back to Jabotinsky nagging Ben-Gurion, and Ben-Gurion hectoring Sharrett, has always been plagued by hawks who insisted that if they pushed and pounded a little harder they could secure a bit more. Over the last decade, we've seen Netanyahu and Sharon trade roles like a pair of tag-team wrestlers, with whoever was out of power excoriating the other from the right. Together (with a lot of more or less inadvertent help from Ehud Barak, and Ehud Olmert subbing once Sharon fell comatose) they managed to scuttle the Oslo peace process, provoke the Al-Aqsa Intifada, rout repeatedly the Palestinian territories, senselessly bomb Lebanon, fire up ridiculous fears of Iran, and generally drive Israel's worldwide reputation into the toilet. All they've gotten for this has been a few more hilltop settlements looking down on growing masses of disgruntled Palestinians, a steady supply of military toys from their fan club of neocons and evangelicals in the US, and the continued illusion that they alone are masters of their fate.

You would think that Ben-Gurion, Dayan, Meir, Rabin, even Begin -- leaders from the founding generation that above all hoped for Israel to achieve worldwide respect and recognition -- would be spinning in their graves, but the fact is that they all played this same game, and they are the ones who taught Sharon, Netanyahu, Peres, Barak, Olmert, Lieberman, et al. A big part of the problem is that Israel's politicial system has selected those who are especially good at playing this game -- and who lack virtually any other skill, including a grasp of reality. They are forever locked in a cosmic struggle against Nazism, seeing Hitler's face on every foreigner who crosses them. In other words, they've lost their grasp on reality, including the most important change in their world since 1948: the fact that Jews no longer need a safe haven, because nobody anywhere in the world frets about Jews in their country any more. As Israel has become a "solution" to a problem that no longer exists, Israel's leaders create new problems to justify their perpetually endangered existence. But the new problems harm Israel as much as anyone else:

Netanyahu ought to be equally concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According to Ian Lustick and John Mueller, only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country, and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized -- which is one reason Netanyahu had such trouble forming a governing coalition -- with the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox at odds with secular Israelis, to include the more recent immigrants that form the core of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's support.

This looks like the private sector is voting against the Jewish State: with Jews leaving, and unwanted Palestinians sticking, the demographic tide has turned against Israel, just as the "facts on the ground" have pinned Israel in an untenable position. They can't pretend to be a modern country while embracing so many traits that have been rejected everywhere else in the modern world: colonialism, militarism, theocracy, apartheid. Fortunately, the Palestinians are so exhausted they're willing to deal, and so is the rest of the world. That is, after all, why the hawks thrash so frantically. They seek to postpone the inevitable, and thereby make it all the worse. Treason is a good word for what they're doing.