Jeffrey Goldberg nearly breaks his arm patting himself on the back for his op-ed article Israel’s America problem.

My op-ed in the Times has provoked a certain amount of unhappiness in people who believe it to be an attack on AIPAC.

Well actually it was a criticism of AIPAC. I criticized Goldberg because his criticism was unfair.

Apparently, we are all supposed to behave as if Israel has never made a mistake in its 60 years of existence.

This isn’t even logical. The criticism was that his prescription hasn’t exactly worked as well as he seems to think it has. Consider Max Boot who has the quality of admitting admiration for Goldberg:

How can he argue with a straight face that more territorial concessions on Israel’s part will “buttress” Palestinian moderates when we’ve seen just the opposite happen in the recent past? Israel unilaterally evacuated southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, in the latter case dismantling settlements as Goldberg urged. (I was in favor of this move, too.) The result, as we all know now, was to empower Hezbollah and Hamas–not the “moderates.” Why Goldberg thinks the result of a West Bank pullout would be any different is not readily apparent from his Times essay.

Worse, even as he dismisses those who disagree with him as unthinking Barry Rubin notes that those who hold Goldberg’s views hold them despite years of experience that show them to be wrong:

Given this experience, someone might conclude that concessions didn’t work and that the Palestinians and Syria were not ready for peace. But such a conclusion is not permissible for those wedded to certain notions. Instead, they say: ignore all that because no matter how high the price you must make concessions and take risks in order to survive. Is this obvious nonsense? Yes. But obvious nonsense backed by the New York Times and Maclean’s in Canada, etc., drowns out the point that it is obvious nonsense.Second, of course, this expresses wishful thinking. A lot of people want Israel to disappear and thus feel good in asserting it is going to happen. The line in “pro-Palestinian” circles in the West seems to be that it doesn’t matter that they lose all the confrontations, that their state-building effort has collapsed, and that the movement is more split than at any time in the last forty years. More important, they say, they now have control of the narrative. That and a few bucks will get you a cup of coffee.

There are also some ideological reasons on the left, or what passes for it nowadays, that have invested heavily in the idea of Israel disappearing. One is that nationalism is obsolete.

This is clearly absurd. It might be disappearing in Western Europe–I mean European nationalism, not that of the new immigrants–yet it is not a generalized global phenomenon. Quite the opposite. But the people who think this way want nationalism to die in their own countries very badly and detest those who have pride in their heritage.

And while he isn’t addressing Goldberg’s assertion that Israeli needs American pressure to survive, Rubin makes clear that those who question Israel’s (future) legitimacy aren’t exactly harmless:

It assures radical Islamists and radical Arab nationalists that they will win. Thus it encourages Arabs, and especially Palestinians, to keep fighting rather than to make peace and act moderately or constructively.It promotes terrorism, recruitment to terrorist groups, violence against moderates, and dictatorships. After all, if victory is in sight why stop fighting? If triumph is possible than it follows logically that anyone who wants to make peace is a traitor who should be killed.

Goldberg may congratulate himself on his perceptiveness and sophistication, but it he, not his critics, who unthinkingly prescribes a disastrous policy. And he doesn’t possess the awareness to realize how wrong and counterproductive he is.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

You know the conventional wisdom that keeps saying that most Palestinians don’t agree with Hamas, and that they want peace with Israel?

Not so much.

(Angus Reid Global Monitor) - The majority of people in the Palestinian Territories are against the militant group Hamas recognizing the legitimacy of Israel as a state, according to a poll by Arab World for Research & Development. 63 per cent of respondents living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip share this opinion.

Do you support or oppose Hamas’ recognition of the state of Israel?

Source: Arab World for Research & Development
Methodology: Face-to-face interviews with 1,200 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, conducted from May 3 to May 5, 2008. Margin of error is 3.1 per cent.

Support	17.3%
To some extent	14.1%
Oppose	63.0%
Don’t know / No opinion	5.6%

Right. So to recap: Two out of every three Palestinians think that Hamas should not recognize Israel. I guess that means they’re not nearly as willing to establish “two states, living side-by-side” as some would have us believe.

The problem, once again, is not Israeli settlements. It is the refusal of the Arabs to accept the reality: Israel isn’t going anywhere.

Ha’aretz interviewed director of Military Intelligence Major General Amos Yadlin. Here are his thoughts on the threats Israel faces:

According to Yadlin, Israel faces five threats: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The intelligence picture that Israel has about these threats is not homogeneous, he says. On certain fronts the intelligence is good, on others it is very good. In any event, the intelligence picture is significantly better than it was two or three years ago.

One would have to agree with that, knowing Israel destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor disguised as an ordinary building.

Asked whether a war is likely in 2008, he replies, “The assessment of MI is that there is a low probability, even a very low probability, that the enemy will initiate a war against Israel in 2008.” However, he adds, “The MI assessment also states that even though the enemy will not initiate a war, it is preparing for war. It is preparing for war because it is afraid that Israel will attack it. Accordingly, a mistake in judgment is liable to lead to war. The situation is volatile because both sides are preparing for war and are ready for a war, even though they do not want it.”

Oh, that’s cheerful. And Yadlin pulls no punches on what will happen in that war:

We must not put into the same basket the rockets we remember from the Lebanon War, which for the most part covered only the north of the country, and the steep-trajectory munitions, which can reach Gush Dan [Metropolitan Tel Aviv] and even farther south. The steep-trajectory munitions resemble surface-to-surface missiles more than they do rockets. Here the count is completely different. Hezbollah?s steep-trajectory munitions now cover large areas of Israel.

But here’s some good news:

Ahead of a possible future confrontation, Hezbollah is preparing a combined deployment of steep-trajectory weapons that will target the Israeli rear, and at the same time trying to create a ground force that will be able to cope successfully with a ground assault, which Hezbollah perceives as the IDF’s central lesson from the war of 2006.

[...] I will say only that some of the changes Hezbollah is undergoing oblige it to move from the form of a terrorist army to the characteristics of a conventional army. This is the case in its deployment, its weaponry and also in terms of command and control. This transition is not entirely advantageous for Hezbollah. It deprives it of some of the advantages it had as an elusive body that strikes at the civilian population and hides behind the back of the civilian population.”

There is much, much more on all five threats. Read it all.