Reflecting on the Palestinian state which would be approaching its twentieth year of existence had Arafat and the Palestinians been interested in living peacefully next to Israel Barry Rubin writes.

Today, two decades later, there is no such state. But there could have been. The reason why there isn’t has very little to do with Israel and a lot to do with Palestinian and Arab politics. Briefly, the PNC was called on to pass a simple resolution–mere words–saying that it accepted Israel’s existence and would stop using terrorism. In exchange, it was promised U.S. and international help to receive a state.

He attributes the failure to the negotiations so far to the failure to understand the dynamic between the two sides. It’s what he aptly calls the Win/Win attitude (the Israeli/Western attitude) versus the Zero sum (the Palestinian/Arab/Muslim attitude):

When win-win (WW) and zero-sum (ZS) come together the negotiating process is something like the following:
* ZS: We demand 100 percent!
* WW: We’ll give you 50 percent!
* ZS: 100!
* WW: 75!
* ZS: Perhaps if you offer me 100 I will make a deal.
* WW: Wow, what a window of opportunity! How about 90?
* ZS: 100
* WW: 95, and that’s my last offer!
* ZS: 110!

This is the history of Israel-Palestinian negotiations, of talks about Iran’s nuclear drive, attempts to deal with Hamas or Hizballah, and diplomatic exchanges with Syria. All fail for very real reasons. But refusing to understand the fundamental problem, these failures are interpreted differently: not enough was offered, cultural sensitivities were disregarded, the table was shaped wrong, the democratic side did not prove its good intentions sufficiently.

In his introduction Rubin focused on Arafat’s “acceptance” of Israel in Geneva in 1988. That led to American recognition of the PLO until mid-1990 when a faction of the PLO atttempted a terrorist attack on Israel and Arafat refused to condemn it. In the aftermath of the American rejection of the PLO, the New York Times reported, “P.L.O. Sees Deeper Arab Hostility After U.S. Move”

A senior adviser to Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said tonight that Washington’s suspension of talks with the P.L.O. would produce ”a loathing of the Americans” and prompt the organization to seek a greater Arab show of military strength in the conflict with Israel.

At the same time, the adviser, Nabil Shaath, who lives in Cairo, said in an interview that the P.L.O. is ”not considering at all going into any military operations or any terrorist actions against civilians” targeted at Americans living in the Middle East. He said the P.L.O. would maintain its avowed commitment to peace.

So remember the PLO had just failed to uphold its obligation to fight terror and the United States was at fault for responding to that failure. The Chutzpah is incredible. But that follows from the assumption that the zero sum side believed that the West (and Israel) needed it more than they needed the z.s. to abide by its agreements.

And the New York Times faithfully reports this news from the perspective of a wronged PLO leadership, encouraging the zero sum side (the Palestinians in this case) to stick to its guns and avoid responsibility for its breach.

Gen. Moshe Ya’alon takes a different approach to the same problem. He argues that the failure to create a Palestinian state results from a refusal of the Palestinian leadership (and population in general) to accept Israel’s right to exist. That being the case, negotiations are rather fruitless. What’s needed to be done is to seek changes in Palestinian education so that they teach their children to accept Israel and maintain military pressure on Hamas.

The former is out of Israel’s hands. The latter is still possible, though the current Israeli leadership is averse to such an approach. This might be an attempt by Gen. Yaalon to make a case for a future Likud government as he is expected to possibly receive the defense portfolio should Binyamin Netanyahu return to power in an upcoming election.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In a recent article, Isabel Kershner of the New York Times wrote the following about Israel’s security fence:

Israel started building the barrier in 2002 with the intent of preventing Palestinian suicide bombers from reaching Israeli cities. Consisting mostly of wire fence but also, in parts, of high concrete walls, much of the barrier, which is about 57 percent complete, has been constructed on land east of the 1967 boundary, inside the West Bank, leading Palestinians to characterize it as a land grab.

In July 2004, the International Court of Justice in The Hague issued an advisory opinion describing the routing of the barrier inside the West Bank as a violation of Israeli obligations under international law.

Israel’s Supreme Court, in response to petitions, has ordered several sections of the barrier route to be moved closer to the 1967 line, but most of the alterations have not yet been carried out.

There are several important things to note about these paragraphs.

Nowhere does Kershner write that since the fence has been built terror against Israel has decreased.
She mentions the ICJ’s ruling but doesn’t explain that the ruling is political not legal.
Even the Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t ignore the security issues involved.

When the Israeli High Court of Justice (or Supreme Court) ruled on the route of the fence in 2004, it wrote:

56. From a military standpoint, there is a dispute between experts regarding the route that will realize the security objective. As we have noted, this places a heavy burden on petitioners who ask that we prefer the opinion of the experts of the Council for Peace and Security over the approach of the military commander. The petitioners have not carried this burden. We cannot - as those who are not experts in military affairs - determine whether military considerations justify laying the Separation Fence north of Jebel Mukatam (as per the stance of the military commander) or whether there is no need for the Separation Fence to include it (as per the stance of petitioners’ and the Council for Peace and Security).

Still it concluded:

60. Our answer is that there relationship between the injury to the local inhabitants and the security benefit from the construction of the Separation Fence along the route, as determined by the military commander, is not proportionate. The route disrupts the delicate balance between the obligation of the military commander to preserve security and his obligation to provide for the needs of the local inhabitants.

Understand what’s going on here. The court admitted that it could not determine whose security credentials to trust: Whether to trust those then currently in the military or the partisan ex-officers. In the end, it ruled that the security question was moot, but determined that the damage caused by the fence was too great to justify any lessening security that might result from rerouting the fence.

Israel’s high court didn’t ignore the security issues it just ruled that they were irrelevant.

Now contrast that report with that about another recent court ruling.

On Sunday night, the Israeli High Court of Justice rejected a petition from an organization of terror victims, Almagor, against the release.

Among those freed Monday were two men whom Israel says have “blood on their hands,” meaning they had been convicted in attacks that harmed Israelis. Said al-Atabeh, 57, who had been in custody since 1977, was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner.

Now Almagor had empirical evidence that prisoner releases were dangerous. Nadav Shragai recently provided the details of how released prisoners end up committing more terror.

I have no idea about the nature of Almagor’s petition. But if they provided proof that many of the terrorists freed in previous releases had indeed returned to terror and the court rejected that petition, then it showed once again that it deems the security of Israel’s citizens unimportant. It has demonstrated that inconveniencing Palestinians is worse than risking Israeli lives.

The media as demonstrated by the NY Times’s reporting also shows that their concern for the very real risks taken and negative rewards reaped by Israel is less important than that a process not leading to peace takes place. And, of course, Israel’s judicial system’s concern for Palestinian inconveniences at the expense of Israeli lives is met with Durban II.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The approach to threats against Israel is one of those things that is taken casually. Here’s Secretary Rice on the regular but (relatively) infrequent Qassams that still get fired into Israel despite the ceasefire with Hamas:

QUESTION: How does the ceasefire in Gaza help matters? Has it endured better than you imagined?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, it has its ups and downs, obviously. But look, I - we said early on that if there - that calm in Gaza would be a useful thing because it - the Egyptians, who - with whom we worked, have managed to keep what is a very fragile situation at least stable, and that’s certainly a help to any process of trying to move forward on the peace process.

Ultimately, though, Gaza has to be resolved and it has to be resolved on the basis of the - Abu Mazen’s program for it, which is that legitimate Palestinian Authority institutions have to be reinstated. I think we want to continue to look at what can be done at the crossings for regularization of those ultimately along the lines of the November 2005 agreement. So this is not, I think, a metastable situation, but it’s a situation that for now has seemed to allow at least people to - you know, the levels of violence to stay low, and that’s welcome.

(h/t My Right Word)

Nothing about the threat from Hamas’s building of fortifications and re-arming. Somehow Abu Mazen (she’s using his nom de guerre, how reassuring) is going to impose his authority on Gaza.

And how’s that Abu Mazen thing going? Didn’t Israel just build his confidence? Why yes they did. The New York Times reports:

Israel released almost 200 Palestinian prisoners Monday in a good-will gesture aimed at reinvigorating the faltering peace process. Hours later, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in the country to make her own push for a deal between the two sides.

And what does this “good will gesture” entail?

Among those freed Monday were two men whom Israel says have “blood on their hands,” meaning they had been convicted in attacks that harmed Israelis. Said al-Atabeh, 57, who had been in custody since 1977, was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner.

“This is a great joy for our mothers and our people, but it remains a small step because we left behind us thousands of prisoners,” Mr. Atabeh said after his release, according to Reuters.

Mr. Atabeh had been convicted in bombings that killed one Israeli woman and wounded dozens of people.

A second long-serving prisoner was Mohammed Abu Ali, who had been jailed since 1980 for the murder of an Israeli settler in the West Bank.

However, most of those set free had been arrested for lesser crimes within the past two years.

“It’s not easy for Israel to release prisoners,” said a government spokesman, Mark Regev, according to The Associated Press. “But we understand the importance of the prisoner issue for Palestinian society.”

(h/t Boker Tov Boulder)

Note that “blood on their hands” is in quotes. Why not just write “who were convicted of murder in the commission of acts of terror?” (without the quotes, of course) Why is almost as much time spent describing the prisoners by the length of time served as by the crimes they committed?

By emphasizing the time served changes their status from terrorists to prisoners. Put another way Snapped Shot asks and answers a question about the coverage of the prisoner release:

How does our “impartial” press choose to represent them?

You guessed it: As heroes.

And as far as the release of prisoners being important for Palestinian society, Israelly Cool explains why it’s important.

These murderers are but two of the “prisoners” we freed today, as a “goodwill” gesture to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. And he reciprocated with a goodwill gesture of his own - a threat that unless all the “prisoners” are freed, there will be no peace.

Speaking of gestures, this one made by the released prisoners does not mean “peace.” It means “V for victory”, and is basically a promise that the terrorism will continue.

JoshuaPundit writes (regarding Condoleeza Rice but the general point holds) about what’s not important:

No mention of course on whether it might matter a lot to the Israelis to keep these killers behind bars.I doubt that matter penetrates her consciousness.

Nor does it matter to Mahmoud Abbas, who referred to the released terrorists as ‘heroes’ and made a point of saying that no peace agreement with Israel was possible until all of the terrorists are released.Nor did eithr he or Condaleeza Rice have the common decency to mention a single word about Gilad Shalit, who’s still being held incommunicado in the Gaza Strip.

And as noted before past experience shows that these prisoner releases will lead to more terror, not peace.

Israel freed 400 Palestinian prisoners and five other prisoners in return for Elhanan Tannenbaum, who was held captive by Hizbullah, and for the bodies of three soldiers kidnapped on Mount Dov. According to Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Tzahi Hanegbi, from the date of the deal on January 29, 2004, until April 17, 2007, those freed in the deal had murdered 35 Israelis.

The Washington Post describes the issue of prisoner releases like this:

Israel has periodically released Palestinian prisoners, whose fate is among the most politically and emotionally compelling issues for the Palestinian public, to shore up Abbas’s government. Abbas favors negotiations with Israel to create an independent Palestinian state, while the rival Hamas movement has advocated destruction of the Jewish state. The releases, although modest, are designed to show that Abbas’s approach yields rewards.

“Modest?” “yields rewards?” No mention that there’s a very good chance that a portion of the terrorist released will likely return to terrorism. So who receives the “rewards” other than terrorists who have seen their terms reduced, is not clear. No mention that the fellow who “favors negotiations” considers resistance (i.e. terrorism) to be peace. There’s something really Orwellian here.

And as a Blog for All writes:

It’s supposed to help bolster Fatah in their internecine struggle with Hamas, but all it does is provide more fodder for the terrorists to hold out hope that they can beat Israel for control over all territory West of the Jordan River.

Despite the romantic terms used to describe the prisoner release, they present a real risk to Israel. When will the world demand that the Palestinians take similar risks for peace?

Crossposted on Yourish.

The kingdom of Jordan, which was the guardian of Jewish holy sites from 1948 to 1967, is lecturing Israel on digging near the Temple Mount.

Jordan said on Thursday it summoned the Israeli ambassador to protest against plans for excavation and construction work near the Al-Aqsa mosque compound, Jerusalem’s most volatile holy site.

“Foreign Minister Salah Bashir summoned the Israeli ambassador this week to officially inform him that Jordan rejects such illegal measures,” said MP Mohammed Abu Hdeib, head of the lower house of parliament’s committee on international affairs, after meeting Bashir on Thursday.

Really? Jordan objects to such “illegal measures”? And yet, Jordan had no such objections when it was using Jewish cemetery headstones to pave roads, knocking down synagogues that had stood for centuries, and letting the al-Aqsa Mosque fall into disrepair.

Funny how the Jordanians only find their voices about this when they’re not the ones doing the digging. And Israel has never deliberately destroyed Muslim holy sites. So we really have no comparison to speak of.

You know, I really want to tell Jordan to do something extremely disgusting, but I think I’ll just leave this post with a G rating. (”Eat [censored] and die” was what I was thinking, actually.)

As co-blogger, Daled Amos notes in his excellent critique of the Times editorial The Peril of an Israeli Transition, the Times holds everyone responsible for a Palestinian state other than the Palestinians themselves.

I’d like to add a few observations.

1) More and more Palestinian independence is defined by their dependence on others.

2) At the end of the editorial, the editors write:

A way must be found to help turn Hamas into a legitimate and acceptable negotiating partner.

And that worked out so well, when the organization in question was Fatah.

3) We’ve been here before. A search yielded this editorial from when the Oslo Accords were anticipated.

Mr. Arafat, the P.L.O. chairman, risks his prestige and his life by standing up to radicals who hold out for the same maximalist demands he himself used to proclaim.

Then, 3 years later, after Binyamin Netanyahu was elected PM of Israel, in large part due to Arafat’s failure to move beyond the rhetoric of his past, the Times had this to say:

By meeting with Mr. Arafat, Mr. Netanyahu showed that he understands that the Likud Party’s fierce animosity toward the Palestinian leader should give way to a more moderate governing posture.

While it’s true that Netanyahu did moderate his “governing posture,” his “animosity” wasn’t the result of arbitrary prejudice as the Times suggested, but it was a reaction to his (correct) observation that Arafat did nothing but take Israeli concessions and then aid his allies fight in the commission of terror against Israel.

The same approach is still in place. Everyone in the world is responsible for creating a Palestinian state other than the Palestinians and that an essential element of that help is to ignore ongoing Palestinian obligations towards Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Dion Nissenbaum’s in high dudgeon because Israel is “punishing” Al Jazeera.

How’s that?

The Israeli government stopped helping Al Jazeera after the station aired a birthday celebration for Samir Kuntar, the Lebanese killer freed last month in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah.

Danny Seaman, the head of Israel’s government press office, called the celebration “unfathomable” and said he would stop helping the station by providing press cards and work visas for its reporters.

Nissenbaum admits that Al Jazeera “apologized” for the celebration, but he doesn’t seem quite clear what Al Jazeera is. At the end of his post Nissenbaum quotes Danny Seaman with the definitive reason for Israel’s refusal to continue enabling Al Jazeera.

“This is a fundamental question as to where Al Jazeera stands,” Seaman told Reuters. “Does it stand with the extremists or is it a professional organization?”

Time and again it has demonstrated that it’s a propaganda organization. Did it escape Nissenbaum’s notice that David Marash quit as Al Jazeera’s anchor a few mohts ago? Or perhaps the classy way it’s going about recruiting conservative commentators?

Nissenbaum shouldn’t be standing up for Al Jazeera, or is it that he shares its worldview and is scared that the Israel government may stop abetting him from spreading propaganda. I don’t know what was filthier, Al Jazeera’s birthday party for Samir Kuntar, or Nissenbaum’s celebration of Kuntar’s release. Al Jazeera, of course, is a propaganda organization, Nissenbaum is supposedly a journalist. Though his treatment of Kuntar and his sympathy for Al Jazeera, makes me wonder.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Yesterday I blogged about a Physicians for Human Rights report that accused Israel of pressuring Palestinians seeking medical treatment in Israel into becoming informers. Honest Reporting provided a link to Gerald Steinberg who questions the claims:

Similarly, in this publication, the “evidence” is entirely based on unverifiable claims, primarily from 11 interviewees from Gaza who allegedly asked Israel for permission to cross from the territory controlled by Hamas for medical care. Some of these Palestinians may have genuine medical needs, but others may be inventing stories that sell well in an environment that is inherently hostile to Israel. PHR-I has issued press releases declaring a Palestinian to be dead after Israel refused to allow him to cross the border, but he turned out to be alive. And in NGO reports on Palestinian suffering, Gazans who claimed to have been denied permission to study at universities in the United States were exposed as imposters. Unless the evidence can be checked be independently verified, it should be treated with the same skepticism used by professional journalists regarding other self-serving stories.

Steinberg describes this as the “halo effect,” where NGO’s are accorded a status of unimpeachable authorities even if their records are less that pristine. The media then takes the claims made by NGO’s at face value while doing precious little verification. After all, the NGO gave them the information they were looking for, indicting Israel for one crime or another.

The Augean Stables relates a relevant observation (h/t LGF):

A few friends of mine went to a party in Jerusalem that was primarily made up Anglophone reporters, people who work for NGOs and UN agencies. What amazed them was the pervasive sense of the people they met and spoke with that Israel was the greatest human rights violator in the world and that the dismantling of Israel would be a great step forward for global human rights.

Now the idiocy of this position, the suicidal nature of this strategy to advance human rights is nothing short of breathtaking. Take Israel out of the Middle East and the region becomes nothing but Hama rules… especially when the nastiest people — those who want to destroy Israel — would feel empowered by such a victory. But try and tell that to people who are smart enough to believe they can’t be wrong, and credulous enough to believe the demopaths who pull their chains on a daily basis. And as a result, they are prime targets for a hate campaign against Israel.

(emphasis mine)

One of LGF’s commenters wrote:

I wonder why they didn’t hold their little cocktail party in downtown Gaza? They could hold it in a place right next to their hotels or apartments, because they stay in Gaza, right? Surely they don’t stay in Israel? Surely they don’t feel safe in the “greatest human rights violator’s” territory?

It’s not just Pysicians for Human Rights, it’s the whole mess of NGO’s. (Remember Marc Garlasco?) The NGO’s despite their deeply held biases against Israel (after all they have to justify their existence) get uncritical reception from the media, while most other organizations would receive at least some perfunctory scrutiny.

It’s one of the engines that drives media bias against Israel.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

How many Sudanese have been killed by Egyptian border guards? Fifty? One hundred? Two hundred?

I have no idea. It’s a body count that the AP isn’t interested in keeping. The wire services barely acknowledge that not a week goes by without another beating, shooting, or killing of a Sudanese refugee by Egyptian border guards. The IDF, as far as I know, has not shot a single Sudanese refugee. Which, of course, is the point: If Israelis were doing this, there would be UN resolutions condemning it. Egyptians are shooting a few Sudanese? So what? What are a few more added to the total murdered by the Janjaweed? Another Sudanese was killed today? Who cares?

And please take note of how the man was killed:

An Egyptian medical official says border guards have shot dead a Sudanese migrant who was trying to cross illegally into Israel.

Imad Kharboush, head of the Northern Sinai ambulance department, says that a 24-old Sudanese man from the war-torn Darfur region was shot with a bullet in the back of his head while trying to get across barbed wire on the Egypt-Israel border early Wednesday.

Disgusting. But it’s double standard that is in evidence throughout the media: If Israel or the U.S. were to do something like that, there would be thousands of stories and front-page headlines, an investigation into the man’s death, and calls for the arrest of the shooter. This? One story found on Google News. Two, counting the AP reprint in Ynet. And the AP boilerplate is missing something.

Many African migrants seeking jobs try to cross illegally into Israel from Egypt.

It’s missing the the rest of the story. The truth would be, “So far this year, Egyptian border guards have killed xxx unarmed Sudanese civilians trying to sneak across the border into Israel.”

Apparently, the AP only counts the results of American and IDF bullet strikes.

Two months ago the State Department embarrassed Israel into allowing a number of students from Gaza travel abroad as Fullbright scholars. At the time the NYT reported:

The American State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted them permission to leave.

Abdulrahman Abdullah received word on Thursday via an e-mail message in Gaza City that the American State Department had withdrawn his Fulbright grant to study in the United States.

Israel has isolated this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas. Given that policy, the United States Consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been “redirected” to students elsewhere out of concern that it would go to waste if the Palestinian students were forced to remain in Gaza.

A letter was sent by e-mail to the students on Thursday telling them of the cancellation. Abdulrahman Abdullah, 30, who had been hoping to study for an M.B.A. at one of several American universities on his Fulbright, was in shock when he read it.

Something about the reporting makes me think that it was the State Department that informed the NYT in order to ebarrass Israel. I can’t be sure of that, but that remains my suspicion.

The other day the Fullbnights were back in the news, 3 Fulbright Winners in Gaza Again Told They Can’t Travel

Four of the seven were cleared but three were told by Israel that they were security risks and could not enter the country. Skeptical American officials asked for details but said they only got broad accusations of links to Hamas; the officials still wanted to offer the grants. The consulate brought from Washington high-priced mobile fingerprinting equipment and sent several officials to the Israel-Gaza border to interview the three Palestinians on July 10.

Three weeks later, on July 30, all three were informed that they had cleared the security screening and were granted their visas.

Two days later, the visas were revoked although not before Israel allowed one of the grantees, Fidaa Abed, to leave Gaza to fly to Washington unaware of his changed status. He was informed at the airport that his visa was no longer valid, flown back to Amman, Jordan, and instructed to return to Gaza. He remains in Amman.

On Monday, the American Consulate in Jerusalem sent letters to Mr. Abed and the two other grantees still in Gaza saying “information has come to light that you may be inadmissible to the United States,” and therefore their visas were being revoked. In Washington, Gonzalo Gallegos, a State Department spokesman, declined to get into specifics, but said that the visas were revoked because “we got more information” about the grantees.

So Israel did additional checking and found information that made them judge the remaining three as possible security risks.

A senior State Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Ms. Rice was very unhappy about how these cases had been handled and that a thorough review had been ordered to prevent a recurrence. The official added that the latest information about the three Palestinians was enough to give pause but that “we really have to scrub it and are now going to take a good look to see if it holds.”

Well for one thing, the State Department ought not try to do end runs around an ally. According to the original story, the Fullbright candidates were allowed to appeal to Israel authorities and had not done so. The State Department instead opted to make the matter public and get Israel to review the cases by embarrassing Israeli authorities.

But despite the skepticism expressed by the official, my guess is that the State Department wouldn’t have revoked the visas this time without something rather convincing.

Israel Matzav:

Don’t hold your breaths waiting for Condi or anyone else at State to apologize.

Boker Tov Boulder emphasizes something that Israel Matzav does too. In the first paragraph the reporter, Ethan Bronner refers to the State Department’s reversal as “reneging” and comments:

And here’s the kicker - Ethan Bronner has the chutzpah to twist the story

Backspin notes an earlier Times editorial about the incident boasting of its role in getting the Fullbright candidates out of Gaza and asks:

What does this say about the way the MSM relates to Israel’s security concerns?

It also doesn’t speak well about the State Department’s concern.

The AP reported the latest like this:

After international pressure, US officials intervened to facilitate Abu Shaaban and several other Fullbright scholars to leave the coastal trip, only to later deny them entry into the US for apparent security reasons.

“apparent” Apparently that lack of concern runs through quite a bit of the MSM.

And Mere Rhetoric observes that the State Department is trying to engage with Islamists. Maybe the reason the State Department is so cavalier about Israeli concerns, is because they have no such concerns themselves.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad,

Today Nicholas Kristof pleads for Tough love for Israel?
Before he gets to his conclusion though he writes:

Granted, not everybody sees things this way, and discussions of the Middle East usually involve each side offering up its strongest arguments to wrestle with the straw men of the other side. So let me try something different.

Then he proceeds to create a legion of straw men as he responds to the eminently sensible pro-Israel critics of a previous column. (Critics in italics; Kristof’s response in regular font.)

Jews lived in Hebron for 1,800 years continuously … until their community was murdered in 1929 by their Arab neighbors. The Jews in Hebron today — those “settlers” — have reclaimed Jewish property. So I don’t see what makes them illegitimate or illegal. (Irving)

True, Jews have deep ties to Hebron, just as Christians do to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but none of these bonds confer any right to live in these places or even visit them. If Israel were to bar American Christians from Jerusalem, that would not be grounds for the United States to send in paratroopers and establish settlements. And if Israel insists on controlling the West Bank, then it needs to give citizenship to Palestinians there so that they can vote just like the settlers.

Huh? But when the world accepts the notion that it is unacceptable to acquire land by force, isn’t it hypocritical to accept the forced Jewish exodus from Hebron and the Etzion Bloc? The only reason that Jews weren’t living in Hebron post 1935 and the Etzion Bloc post 1948 (until 1967) was because they were forced out by violence. So the Jewish absence from those areas is acceptable to Kristof, even if that absence occurred in a manner that would violates the standards he applies to Israel.

The paratroopers argument is just plain silly.

And Israel has ceded parts of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians. We’re not talking about occupation anymore but borders.

One side is a beautiful, literate, medically and scientifically and artistically an advanced society. The other side wants to throw bombs. Why shouldn’t there be a fence? (Mileway)

So, build a fence. But construct it on the 1967 borders, not Palestinian land — and especially not where it divides Palestinian farmers from their land.

Well why not demand that the farmers fight the terrorists? Israel does have to conform to court rulings that often compromise the effectiveness of the fence. What law do the terrorists follow?

While I do condemn this type of violence, it pales in contrast to Palestinian suicide bombers, rockets and other acts of terror against Jews. (Jay)

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, reports that a total of 123 Israeli minors have been killed by Palestinians since the second intifada began in 2000, compared with 951 Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces.

This proves what? That Israeli is indiscriminate in its application of force? I’d suggest that it proves that the Palestinians sent teenagers out as fighters without uniforms in violation of international law in order to blur the distinction between combatant and non-combatant. This is an important distinction that B’Tselem doesn’t make. Additionally, how many of those 951 were targeted while doing nothing? Every single one of those 123 Israeli minors was targeted by a terrorist.

To withdraw from the West Bank without a partner on the Palestinian side will find Israel in the same fix it has once it withdrew from Gaza: a rain of daily rockets. Yes, the security barrier causes hardship, but terrorist attacks have almost disappeared. That means my kids can ride the bus, go to unguarded restaurants and not worry about being blown up on their way to school. Find another way to keep my kids safe, and I’ll happily tear down the barrier. (Laura)

This is the argument that I have the most trouble countering. Laura has a point: The barrier and checkpoints have reduced terrorism. But as presently implemented, they — and the settlements — also reduce the prospect of a long-term peace agreement that is the best hope for Laura’s children.

Well ignorance and bias didn’t stop Kristof from trying his hand with the other arguments, so why should it stop him now? No, it is the failure to accept Israel’s right to exist and consequently, the honor accorded the terrorists who kill Israelis by Palestinian society (and Arab society in general) that reduces the prospectgs of a “long term peace agreement.”

Kristof continues:

If Israel were to stop the settlements, ease the checkpoints, allow people in and out more freely, and negotiate more enthusiastically with Syria over the Golan Heights and with the Arab countries on the basis of the Saudi peace proposal, then peace might still elude the region. But Israel would at least be doing everything possible to secure its long-term future, rather than bolstering Hamas.

I’m sorry, but Israel got removed the occupation from one area: Gaza and that’s where Hamas is strongest. Israel also withdrew from southern Lebanon and that, in turn, strengthened Hezbollah. The Saudi peace proposal was a sham.

If there is no two-state solution, there will be a one-state solution — and given demographic trends, that will mean either the end of Israeli democracy or the end of the Jewish state. Zionists should be absolutely clamoring for a Palestinian state.

As I mentioned above. Israel’s withdrawn from a number of cities in Judea and Samaria, leaving them under control of the Palestinians. There is already a two state solution. The question is only what borders it will finally have. Kristof’s view seems to be that unless it conforms to the demands of the Palestinians, Israel’s concessions mean nothing.

Laura is right about the need for a sensible Palestinian partner, and the failures of Palestinian leadership have been legion. At the moment, though, Israel has its most reasonable partner ever — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — and it is undermining him with its checkpoints and new settlement construction.

As Eric Trager notes:

Well, here’s something that’s very much within Abbas’s control: his mouth. Today, as Israel received two black coffins in exchange for a notorious–and very much alive–murderer, Abbas took the opportunity to “offer congratulations to the family of Samir Kuntar, the chief of Arab prisoners.” With this remark, Abbas demonstrated that, far from being the Great Palestinian Hope, he is merely the latest Palestinian leader who sees glorifying terrorists–and reaching out to their families–as an acceptable, if not principled, political strategy.

Abbas is, at best, ineffective. At worst he is Arafat with a suit. This is a point that was generalized by Elder of Ziyon regarding Marwan Barghouti:

Here we have the Palestinian Arab story in a nutshell. Historically, they have been led by incompetent, corrupt and selfish leaders. Yet their most competent and least corrupt leaders are still unrepentant terrorists.

And it cannot be any other way. Since the Palestinian Arab psyche is so heavily invested in making murderers into heroes, it is impossible to imagine in this generation that an effective leader could emerge who is not a terrorist. Simply put, if you haven’t spent time in Israeli jails for murder, you have no street cred.

Back to Kristof:

Peace-making invariably involves exasperating and intransigent antagonists and unequal steps, just as it did in the decades in which Britain struggled to end terrorism emanating from Northern Ireland. But London never ordered air strikes on Sinn Fein or walled in Catholic neighborhoods. Over time, Britain’s extraordinary restraint slowly changed attitudes so as to make the eventual peace possible.

Well that’s just plain ignorant. There is a separation fence in Belfast that gets credit for reducing violence. And I don’t recall that Sinn Fein launched a military campaign on the level of Fatah and Hamas. Israeli restraint hasn’t brought a reduction in the will of its enemies to launch a war against it.

Furthermore, the peace in Ireland isn’t a function of British restraint; it’s a function of the terrorists’ goal. The IRA never wanted to destroy Britain, they just wanted their independence. Palestinian nationalism - despite wrapping itself in the mantle of “independence” - is predicated on the denial of the Jewish state.

Overall, reading the Kristof column I’m left wondering: when will there be “tough love” for the Palestinians, telling them that their continued support for terror makes peace impossible.

As for Palestinian apologists like Kristof, I wonder why is it that circumstances that would lead them to declare Israel illegitimate are perfectly acceptable for a Palestinian state founded on those very same circumstances. My Shrapnel (playing devil’s advocate) observed:

“Why should we have to? We have an Palestinian minority; why can’t a Palestinian state have a Jewish minority? The people living there could become citizens of the Palestinian state. Or we could do a land exchange”.

Israel has an Arab minority and gets criticized for discrimination. Palestine, whenever it is created will not have a Jewish minority, so such niceties as minority rights won’t need to be observed. (Whether other freedoms such as the press, religion or due process will be observed in Palestine is also a real question.)

Yet people like Kristof have no concerns about such matters. Israel must be a perfect democracy in their books or not deserve to exist, while they take it for granted that Palestine would deny its citizens the very rights they demand of Israel. More incredibly they believe that Israel’s legitimacy depends on creating the little tyranny of Palestine.

Kristof, for his talk of “tough love” for Israel, is silent on the talk of “tough love” for the Palesitnians. Kristof and his fellow travelers don’t tell the Palestinians that they need to give up terror, incitement and Israeli denial. They indulge the terror, making excuses for it. As such they are at least apologists if not accomplices in the bloodshed. And yes, their excuses rather than “tough love” prolong the conflict.

Israel has changed a lot in 20 years. What’s now mainstream in Israel regarding the Palesitnians was the leftist fringe in 1988. Where’s been the reciprocal movement? Until Kristof and his ilk start demanding it there will be none. Despite his posturing, Kristof hates Israel more than he loves the Palestinians.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The NYT makes this sound like a bad thing: Mideast Sees More of the Same if Obama Is Elected

“What we know is American presidents all support Israel,” said Muhammad Ibrahim, 23, a university student who works part time selling watermelons on the street in the southern part of this city. “It is hopeless. This one is like the other one. They are all the same. Nothing will change. Don’t expect change.”

Across the border, in Israel, Moshe Cohen could not have agreed more. “Jews there have influence,” Mr. Cohen said, as he sold lottery tickets along Jaffa Road in Jerusalem. “He’ll have to be good to Israel. If not, he won’t be re-elected to a second term.”

And of course to the NYT, that’s a bad thing.

Mr. Obama, who will be here on Tuesday, has promised change. He has offered to begin dialogue where the current president has refused, in places like Syria and Iran. But when he stepped into the Middle East, he walked into a region where public expectations were long ago set. The Bush years have supercharged those sentiments, especially in the Arab world, where there is little faith that the United States can ever again serve as a fair broker between the sides.

How about a different reason for supporting Israel: it actually has more in common with the United States than any Arab state or nation.

For example there’s an effort to pardon Ahmad Dakamseh in Jordan.

In the wake of Israel’s release of despicable murderers of Jewish children, prominent Jordanians are asking King Abdullah to do the same.

And we know that even the reformist March 14th coaltion in Lebanon welcomed back Samir Kuntar - with honors.

The “March 14″ movement is a political vehicle for Lebanon’s liberals, democrats, free-market capitalists, human rights activists, and those who want an exit from the seemingly endless war with the “Zionist entity.” Unfortunately, that is not all it is. It’s also a political vehicle for hard-line Sunni Arab Nationalists and other political retrogrades who only oppose Hezbollah and the Syrian Baath regime because they hate Shias and Alawites as much as they hate Jews.

And of course the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas also sent a congratulations to Kuntar’s family and condolences to Hezbollah. And his government. And his “moderate” Fatah faction named a summer camp after a terrorist whose body was returned last week.

In the meantime an Israeli soldier who didn’t kill an Arab but violated the army’s procedure for dealing with suspects is being investigated by Israeli authorities.

And of course, whatever the Times reports about perceptions in the Arab street and how disappointed they are with the United States belies the fact the the United States is pushing Israel to make more and more concessions even in the light of undiminished Arab enmity and threats:

And then there is Israel. We learn today from Haaretz
that U.S.-Israel relations are being strained by the State Department’s busy-body routine on behalf of all manner of Palestinian complaints, such as Hanan Ashrawi’s daughter’s desire to receive special treatment from the Israeli government over her residency paperwork (Ashrawi’s whining to Rice apparently caused David Welch, the assistant secretary of state, to snap to attention and harass Israeli officials).
. . .
Ah, so the American general doesn’t like the security posture that the Israeli military has determined it must assume in order to protect Israeli lives. And he doesn’t like it that the IDF doesn’t take seriously the Palestinian Authority security services, which are dangerously incompetent, but which the United States has been deeply involved in training. Question for General Jones: Would you put the PA security services in charge of protecting American lives from Hamas?

(That’s a rhetorical question, but as I recall the U.S. sent troops to Ramallah to protect the president and didn’t rely only on the PA security services.)

This leads Daled Amos to comment:

The US is so used to trampling over Israeli interests and needs, that apparently stuff like this is becoming second nature, while still maintaining that everything is normal.

Over and over again we hear from the Arabs and their cheerleaders that the United States can’t be an “honest broker” because it favors Israel even while the Arabs show an undiminished level of hostility to Israel. The United States finds some pretext to pressure Israel in the name of “confidence buliding.” Israel, unwilling to buck its main benefactor relents and allows concessions that are often inimical to its security.

Israel and the United State end up on the defensive, unwilling to justify their alliance.The Arabs get their way without paying a price or giving any credit. And the media (and assorted peace processors) act like an injustice has been righted and that peace is now closer at hand.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Dion Nissenbaum, McClatchy’s Israel correspondent, lets all know where his sympathies lie, with Samir Kuntar.

As Israel was getting ready to free Kuntar last Wednesday, the Lebanese militant told guards that he didn’t want to walk to freedom in a prison uniform.

When the Israeli guards refused, Kuntar said he told them to call off the deal.

“I’ve kept my dignity for 30 years,” Kuntar said he told his jailers, “I’m not going to give it up in the last half hour.”

The standoff lasted until the guards called their superiors, who eventually agreed to let Kuntar go free in civilian clothes.

Once free after nearly 30 years, Kuntar traded the civilian clothes for military fatigues and delivered a defiant threat to return to his militant mission.

Dignity?

Accepting a wife and an education and plenty of food from the evil Zionists for 30 years didn’t compromise his dignity? Why the hell did the authorities give in?

Though Israel recently released long-secret court records with eyewitness testimony and medical reports to support Kuntar’s conviction for shooting an Israeli dad in front of his daughter and then smashing the 4-year-old girl’s head with his rifle butt, Kuntar denies killing either one.

From his 1980 trial to to this day, Kuntar has said that the two were killed by Israeli bullets in a firefight as he tried to flee. Kuntar contends that he meant to take hostages in an attack that went awry.

“This was a military operation,” says Kuntar’s younger brother, Bassam, who led a long PR campaign to free Samir. “We have to accept the reality of what happened, but we will never accept that this operation was aimed at children.”

It wasn’t aimed at children? So why the hell did he take Einat Haran out to the beach? Come on. Nissenbaum, at least challenge the less plausible claims. And why not tell your audience that there was an eyewitness to the atrocities on the beach and that the evidence you link to, physically tied Kuntar to the murder of Einat. His fingerprints were on the rifle that had her brain tissue. (That also contradicts his claim that Danny and Einat Haran were killed by Israeli bullets.)

And for dessert, Nissinbaum let’s a Lebanese “political analyst” (actually Hezbollah mouthpiece from other articles I’ve seen by this woman)

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Beirut-based political analyst and Hezbollah specialist, said people here simply don’t accept Israel’s version of events.

“I don’t think all Lebanese believe he actually killed the child,” she said.

For others, there is a certain callousness in their replies.

“How come they have the right to feel sad for one or three people when they killed thousands in the south,” said the woman in the market, who criticized Israel for bombing Lebanon during the 2006 war in a 34-day campaign that killed 1,200 Lebanese civilians.

So they don’t believe he killed Einat Haran, but they do believe that he killed a policeman and Danny Haran, don’t they? Isn’t there something offensive about a society that lionizes murderers?

Nissenbaum surely knows that 1200 Lebanese civilians weren’t killed in the war two years ago. At least half were members of Hezbollah. (Yes Hezbollah claims the number is less than 200. But do you really trust Hezbollah?) But that was a war in which Israeli civilians were targeted and killed. It’s not like Israel simply took civilians from their homes and killed them, the deaths occurred in the context of war. There is a difference.

Just what role Kuntar will play in the coming days, weeks and months isn’t clear.

For now, he is a potent symbol of Hezbollah’s ascendant power.

And he is a reminder of the emotionally-charged divisions that will make it difficult for Lebanon and Israel to make peace any time soon.

Nice equivalencing Nissenbaum. The fact that a terrorist organization, Hezbollah, which is a pawn of Iran, is now in control of Lebanon’s government is the reason that there will be no peace. Forget the “emotionally-charged divisions.” That’s poppycock. It’s the declaration of a man with no moral compass, incapable of judging right from wrong. It’s the declaration of someone who romanticizes terrorists and who incapable of objectivity.

Nissenbaum you are an f—ing bastard. Why the hell don’t you draw your salary from Nasrallah? After all you’re doing his work.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Before Israel agreed to a ceasefire with Hezbollah in 2006, Thomas Friedman wrote a column, The Morning After the Morning After, in which he argued that the population of Lebanon would eventually turn on Hezbollah when it realized the costs that the war imposed on the country and how little Hezbollah gained. I dismissed it at the time.

To some degree, now, nearly two years later we’re seeing small stirrings of this sentiment. But it’s hardly leading to a weakening of Hezbollah’s position as Friedman suggested. In fact Friedman’s belief overall seems like a lot of wishful thinking:

Israel needs to keep its eyes on the prize. It’s already inflicted enormous damage on Hezbollah and its community, but Nasrallah will only have to pay the full price for inviting all that destruction once the guns fall silent on the morning after the morning after. So let’s get there as soon as possible. That will deter him. What would deter him even more, though, would be if the U.N. would go ahead and impose sanctions on Iran for its illicit nuclear bomb program. After all, it was Iran, Nasrallah’s master, that ordered up this war to distract the U.N. from doing just that. It would be nice to say to Iran: You ravaged Hezbollah for nothing.

“That will deter him.” What a sick joke.

Still some are starting to complain about the war. The Jerusalem Post reports. Arab media mock Hizbullah victory:

While Hizbullah on Wednesday went to great lengths in its attempts to paint the prisoner swap with Israel as a victory, emphasizing the fact that Nasrallah had kept to his word and managed to release murderer Samir Kuntar, a leading Arab paper ridiculed the perceived “victory.”

“The Radwan deal,” the headline of the London-based pan-Arabic daily Asharq Al Awsat cynically ran on Thursday, “cost Hizbullah over $7 billion, more than 1,200 dead and 4,500 wounded Lebanese citizens.” The paper referred to the exchange by the name given it by Hizbullah.

Radwan was the nom de guerre of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hizbullah terror mastermind killed several months ago in a car bombing in Syria.

(via memeorandum)

Noah Pollak points to another such argument made graphically.

Still these seem like few voices in the wilderness, not the start of rebellion against Hezbollah. James Taranto in fact notes that one newspaper was perfectly willing to present Hezbollah’s line:

The [Lebanese] government declared a national day of celebration, closing all government offices and banks, and many private businesses closed as well. The president, the prime minister and others tried to present the swap as a triumph for Lebanon, not just Hezbollah, which is considered a terrorist group by the United States. But there was no disguising the fact that, in the eyes of its followers and many others, Hezbollah had scored a historic victory.

Guess which one.

In fact what’s really striking is not the resistance to but the number of “moderates” who showed their solidarity with Hezbollah.

Noah Pollak again:

All of this is not just disgraceful, but should trigger nothing less than a crisis in U.S.-Lebanon relations. If being a safe haven for child-murderers is something the Lebanese prime minister considers a “national goal,” the United States should reevaluate its support for Lebanon’s government, which both rhetorically and symbolically has made itself an ally of Hezbollah in defining Lebanon as a state which exults in terrorism against Israel. Such a crisis in relations will not happen, of course, and it is perversely ironic that on the same day the Lebanese government was popping corks with Hezbollah, the Bush administration announced an increase of over $32 million in aid to the Lebanese army.

The President Bush of 2002 might have, but not the President Bush of 2008.
Israelly Cool! presented a trivia question, that Meryl Yourish answers. Again, there will be no consequences for this perfidy.

The only people who are concerned about this solidarity for terror is the pro-Israel crowd. The folks who are constantly hectoring Israel to make sacrifices for goodwill don’t seem to notice or care that more and more Israeli concessions don’t bring goodwill. The Washington Post had a good editorial An unwelcome hero, unfortunately the editorial pretended that the only support Kuntar got was from the fringes:

This turn of events does, however, tell us a lot about Hezbollah and about those within Lebanon’s political culture who either support it or can’t quite bring themselves to oppose it.

And in the end the editors were right there demanding more Israeli concessions:

Israel must make territorial compromises and foster a dignified future for the Palestinians.

The idea that those Palestinians to whom Israel must make more territorial compromises are those who lionize the likes of Kuntar. That there is something wrong with that picture, is something that the Post’s editors just can’t bring themselves to acknowledge.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The other day the Palestinians condemned two men to death for supposedly “collaborating” with Israel to target terrorists. These men weren’t convicted by Hamas, but by the “moderate” Fatah faction that is in charge of Jenin.

Reacting to this story, Elder of Ziyon observed:

It’s been about three years since a death penalty has been carried out
in the PA, and most of them have been for “collaboration with the enemy” (the list is here.)

In other words, the internationally recognized government of the PA, who is supposedly Israel’s peace partner, actively supports and defends known terrorists (”resistance fighters”) , and rather than punishing the actual terrorists, it punishes those who try to stop them.

To put it bluntly, the PA is the enemy and there is no distinction between the Palestinian Authority and the terrorists whom it actively supports and defends.

So if Israel needs to act against terror threats, who can it depend on? Apparently only itself.

Israeli troops arrested seven Hamas figures Tuesday, including two municipal council members, in a widening crackdown on the Islamic militant group in Nablus, residents said.

The Israeli military confirmed that it arrested seven Palestinians in the city but did not elaborate.

And apparently Tony Blair depends on Israeli security too.

Israel’s Shin Beth domestic intelligence agency warned Blair shortly before his arrival at the Gaza border that a “terror organisation” was planning to attack his motorcade, an agency official told AFP on condition of anonymity.

But the Islamist movement Hamas, which had welcomed the visit, said it had made the appropriate security preparations and accused Israel of pressuring Blair into cancelling the trip.

(h/t LGF)

(The headline of this “news” item gives credence to the Hamas claim by enclosing “threat” in scare quotes.)

Tony Blair (the guy pictured doing the Macarena) is someone who has regularly asked Israel to relax its security measures. It absolutely defies belief that he’d heed a warning that he didn’t think was serious. I have no doubt he is concerned about his own welfare; his concern for Israelis is somewhat less certain.

Still Hamas’s claim that Israel was somehow conniving to keep Blair from seeing the utter devastation visited upon Gaza by the Israeli blockade has some credibility with a particular gullible segment of the population: supposedly skeptical reporters.

Plus, we’re talking about Tony Blair here, who even braved untamed Iraq, presumably he doesn’t scare easily..

Noah Pollak comments:

Don’t you see? The Israelis, hoping to cover up their crimes, invented a “security threat” — they lied, in other words — to prevent Blair from going to Gaza and drawing attention to the “catastrophe” for which Israel is responsible. McGirk’s evidence of this? Literally none.

No evidence, but McGirk was parroting the words of Hamas.

“The Israeli occupation exerted great pressure to prevent Tony Blair from visiting the Gaza Strip because they did not want him to see the size of the disaster caused by the unjust blockade,” Hamas spokesman Taher al-Nunu said.

(McGirk’s credibility takes another hit for writing:

Abbas is already playing second banana to Hamas in Gaza and is sulking over the fact that Hamas in large part has managed to keep up its end of the bargain and stop militants from lobbing rockets into southern Israel –upping their credibility among Palestinians and Arab states.

- emphasis mine - Hamas has control of Gaza, other than this week’s ostentatious arrest of three Fatah affiliated rocket launchers, Hamas has taken no action to prevent attacks on southern Israel. Like Sunday.

Palestinians on Sunday fired two mortar shells into Israel from the Gaza Strip, the Israel Defense Forces said, in another violation of the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas in the coastal territory.

The shells, which Israel Radio said landed near the security fence, caused neither casualties nor damage. There was no word if Israel would retaliate for the mortar strike.

h/t Rubicon3)

Of course if Gaza’s so badly off how can they afford to maintain horses for racing? What catastrophe is there for Tony Blair to see?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Newsbusters takes the NYT to task for ignoring the result of the Enderlein-Karsenty case. (Newsbusters acknowledged that the result was covered half-heartedly in the NYT’s blog.)
Newsbuster’s author Warner Todd Huston asks:

So what gives, New York Times? Why the reluctance to cover this new twist in the al-Dura story that you have used so many times in the past to support Palestinian terrorists? You have used this tale to beat the Israelis up for 8 years, now. But, we have final proof that this is a faked video. The Jews didn’t kill little Muhammad al-Dura.

( via memeorandum )

Instapundit answers (with a question):

Because it opens the door to suggestions that this wasn’t an aberration, but the norm in Mideast coverage?

It’s a topic I wrote to the Times’s public editor about two months ago. At the time I wrote:

As I’ve shown above the Times accepted a narrative that shaped a lot of its reporting at the time. One piece of that narrative was exposed quickly. In another case a Times reporter used a highly suspect statement of an interested party to support the narrative. Now another part of the narrative has been shown to be suspect. At least in the name of accuracy one would hope that the Times would look into the case and what it implies.

In addition to the immediate issue of the origins of the “Aqsa intifada”, the case calls into question the widespread use of local stringers who may be more interested in promoting an agenda than in accuracy. The Times’s lack of curiosity in this case reflects poorly on its commitment to getting the story correct.

I still have not received a response from Clark Hoyt. I don’t think that accuracy is the main goal of the NYT.

This failure doesn’t just apply to the NYT but to nearly every major media outlet in American.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Given the sympathy that the Washington Post once showed for Samir Kuntar in a news story, the editorial An Unwelcome Hero was welcome, if flawed.

If anyone ever deserved the title “baby-killer,” it is Samir Kuntar. Yet his freedom has been a popular demand in Lebanon and the cause of Lebanon-based gunslingers for almost three decades. Abbas’s gang hijacked the Achille Lauro in 1985 in a failed effort to win Mr. Kuntar’s release. After Abbas faded into semi-retirement in Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad, Hezbollah took up the Kuntar cause, attempting to get Israel to swap him for bodies of Israelis killed in Hezbollah raids.

That’s correct, however, I’m a bit troubled by the conclusion:

Great changes must take place across the Middle East before a lasting peace can be achieved. Israel must make territorial compromises and foster a dignified future for the Palestinians. But attitudes among Israel’s enemies must be transformed as well. A good place to start would be to declare that people such as Samir Kuntar deserve to rot in prison, no matter what the religion or nationality of the children they kill.

I’m not bothered by their wish that Kuntar rot in jail instead of seeing him executed; the Post’s editors don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s the mantra about great changes and how Israel must make “territorial compromises” and “foster a dignified future,” these are both programs that Israel has been engaged in for the past 15 years. For the Post’s correct complaint about Lebanon and Hezbollah it ignores the bigger problem: Kuntar and terrorists like him are heroes even to the so-called Palestinian “moderates.” For there to be peace in the Middle East great changes are necessary, but the greatest change is the acceptance by the Arabs generally, and the Palestinians specifically, of the Israel’s right to exist. Fifteen years of peace processing and Israeli concessions have not changed that fundamental problem.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Taking its cue from the NY Times that recently introduced “Op-classics,” the Washington Post is inaugurating a feature called “Re-posted.” (I like the name Op-Classics better, but the idea is still a good one.)

Here’s the deal:
This RePosted article comes at the suggestion of a reader, Howard Schmitt of Pittsburgh,
who recently came across a 1999 Post essay about the perils of cheap gas and praised it for its prescience. That essay, originally published in The Post’s Outlook section, is “reposted” below, along with the article that originally accompanied it.

We’re grateful for Mr. Schmitt’s generosity. He also got us thinking: What other columns or editorials from The Post’s archives would you like to read again? Are there past opinion pieces that you think are newly relevant? Do you remember editorials or columns that were spot-on — or dead wrong? Do you wonder what the Post had to say about a particular historical event that might shed light on what’s happening now?

Send your suggestions to reposted@washingtonpost.com.

We don’t expect you to recall headline, byline and date. And we can’t promise that we’ll get to every request. But give us as much guidance as you can — and explain why you think it would be helpful or interesting to read again now. Then we can start digging through the archives.

Here’s my suggestion: Charles Krauthammer wrote a column “The end of the illusion” on March 7, 1996. The column started:

This is peace? “Israelis Unnerved by Peace That Kills ,” says a Washington Post headline, March 5. Peace that kills ? This is an absurd oxymoron. If peace means anything, it means at its very minimum an absence of violence. After all, “armistice” and “truce” — lesser forms of peace — mean cease-fire. Peace must mean at least that .

This Orwellian conjunction of peace and violence demonstrates the state of hypnosis that Americans and Israelis have placed themselves under since the September 1993 Handshake on the White House lawn. What followed has been called a peace process. It has been nothing of the kind. The Palestinian war on Israel has been unrelenting. More Israeli civilians have been massacred since the handshake than at any time in the entire history of the country.

The ” peace process” is in fact nothing more than a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. The Palestinians have gotten Gaza, West Bank autonomy, huge influxes of foreign aid, international recognition, their own police force, their first free elections ever (something their Turkish, British, Egyptian and Jordanian rulers never granted them).

In return Israel has gotten what? Pats on the head from the United States. The occasional trade mission from Tunisia. And, from the Palestinians, death. This is peace?

I already criticized the Post’s coverage of Hamas’s breach of the ceasefire it concluded with Israel last week. In short, the Post’s correspondent Griff Witte departed from straight reporting in his portrayal of Hamas’s bad faith.
1) He termed the firing of rockets at Israel as “rattling” neither “breaching” nor “violating” the ceasefire, and thus downgraded the seriousness of the action.
2) He failed to report (unlike the New York Times) that a leader of Hamas claimed that the organization had no obligation to stop the firing on Israel.
3) He reported Hamas’s claim that Israel’s renewed closure of Gaza was a violation of the truce, effectively declaring Hamas the good guys.
4) He termed those who criticized the truce as “hard-liners,” and then quoted an Israeli critic. The critic, Gen. Moshe Yaalon was correct when he called the truce unstable, largely because Hamas will not stop the smuggling of weapons as it committed to and, as mentioned, won’t stop the firing on Israel.

Just as the Post’s correspondent (I think Barton Gellman) 12 years ago declared “peace” where an extremist group was violating its terms, (then it was Fatah,) now Witte pretends there is a ceasefire or truce when an extremist group (now Hamas) was violating every one of its terms.

I don’t expect that the Post will follow my advice; it seems averse to self criticism. But what the heck, I’ll give it a shot.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

From Ethan Bronner’s Israel in the Season of Dread:

Mr. Sara’s use of the word “calm” (”regiah” in Hebrew) was telling. No one quite knows what to call the current accord. Many use the Arabic word “tahadiya,” which is what Hamas has chosen; the word means not quite a truce, not quite a cease-fire, but some temporary cessation of hostilities.

Later on Bronner quotes a famous former Prime Minister who can’t seem to avoid the limelight, though he seems to miss the obvious:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, who has spent part of the past year as an international envoy to the Palestinians, said on Thursday that it could be very hard for everyone involved to gain a grasp on this conflict.

“The view of what is happening here tends to lurch between unjustified optimism — pretty rare, actually — to unnecessarily bleak pessimism, which is more common,” he said in a conversation in his Jerusalem offices. “There is a cease-fire now and both sides think the other’s commitment is tactical rather than strategic.”

Given that Hamas itself by the way it defines the “ceasefire” deems it temporary, it’s not an Israeli perception is it?

And of course Blair (not to mention Bronner) seem blissfully unaware that indeed, Hamas is violating the terms (not just the spirit) of the recent ceasefire. Noah Pollak writes:

How are Ehud Olmert’s various diplomatic gambits going? Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet — he was against the Hamas cease-fire in the first place — tells Haaretz that both arms smuggling and terrorist training in Gaza have increased since the cease-fire took effect.

Not all that surprising considering the Haniyeh said that smuggling would continue:

According to a Reuters report, Haniyeh - speaking to worshipers ahead of Friday prayers in Gaza City - said: “We cannot talk about stopping smuggling because it is something beyond our ability as a government and we did not give a commitment in this regard.”

Haniyeh added that Hamas would not force other organizations in Gaza to abide by the truce, but added that they had nevertheless agreed to it voluntarily.

As if Hamas didn’t have the ability to police its own borders. It isn’t a “perception” that Hamas will not keep all the terms of the ceasefire, it’s the reality.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Nicholas Kristoff sounds off about The Two Israels. In Kristoff’s simplistic formulation there’s the good Israel and the bad Israel. There are no grey areas. Here’s his take:

It is here in the Palestinian territories that you see the worst side of Israel: Jewish settlers stealing land from Palestinians (almost one-third of settlement land is actually privately owned by Palestinians); Palestinian women giving birth at checkpoints because Israeli soldiers won’t let them through (four documented cases last year); the diversion of water from Palestinians. (Israelis get almost five times as much water per capita as Palestinians.)

Yet it is also here that you see the very best side of Israel. Israeli human rights groups relentlessly stand up for Palestinians. Israeli women volunteer at checkpoints to help Palestinians through. Israeli courts periodically rule in favor of Palestinians. Israeli scholars have published research that undermines their own nation’s mythologies. Many Israeli journalists have been fair-minded toward Palestinians in a way that Arab journalists have rarely reciprocated.

Who are these Israeli scholars who undermine the “nation’s mythologies?” One Ilan Pappe. Here’s what Pappe’s former employer, the University of Haifa had to say about him:

In actual fact, during the past few years, Dr. Pappe has transgressed all common ethical standardsof academic life. Yet, despite his conduct, the University of Haifa has demonstrated extraordinary tolerance. One of his colleagues did indeed lodge a complaint with the internal faculty disciplinary committee. The complaint focused on Dr. Pappe’s unethical behavior towards his peers and his efforts to disbar them from international forums for daring to contradict his views.

Here’s new of