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Once upon a time, a long, long time ago — well, in November 1998– the London Sunday Times printed a report* titled “Israel Developing an Ethno-Bomb,” by former Israeli intelligence officer Uzi Mahnaimi and war correspondent Marie Colvin. The report claimed that researchers at an institute in Nes Tziyona — “the main research facility for Israel’s clandestine arsenal of chemical and biological weapons” — were attempting to develop deadly micro-organisms that would attack only people with distinctive genes carried by some Arabs.

I’m not qualified to assess whether such a weapon could be successfully developed.*** I merely point out that this report features a number of people — reporters, politicians, scientists — who were or seemed respected, knowledgeable, Jewish, or combinations thereof, and who said the idea was conceivable and/or that Israelis were researching it. In addition to the reporters, the report features Knesset member Dedi Zucker and former Defense Secretary William Cohen (quoted on feasibility only; Israel’s pursuits were raised by a second anonymous defense official). That doesn’t mean they were right, of course.

I imagine Mahnaimi and Zucker — now an ex-Knesset member who has left the Meretz party to form an Israeli Green Party — may be dismissed as the usual “Peace Now” suspects by many, and perhaps even their non-self-hating-Jewishness will be in question for some.

For my part, although the story and its sources seemed reasonably credible at first, I’ve come to be skeptical. First, there’s Dedi Zucker — or rather, how he’s used in the Times article:

Dedi Zucker, a member of knesset [sic], the Israeli parliament, denounced the research yesterday. “Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied,” he said.

At first glance, Zucker’s statement seems to corroborate the report (although “denied” is an odd choice of words). But on re-reading the article, I think he’s just reacting to it. I’m trying to reach Mr. Zucker about this. It’s possible that Mr. Zucker had some knowledge about Israeli research via his participation in the Knesset’s “Committee for Scientific and Technological Research and Development.” The committee concerns itself with research institutes, but probably not with military research, which I’d guess is overseen by a different committee. On the other hand, although (admittedly) judging by a Google search, Mr. Zucker’s interests have seemed to lie elsewhere over the years.

Second, the Times story quotes a South African scientist named Goosen; he’s popped up again recently in a Washington Post story about black-market bioweapons, so that I’m provisionally tagging him with my “shady?” and “joker?” mental magic markers.

The anonymous scientist at Nes Tziyona is the key to the story, of course. His anonymity is “convenient” if you dismiss the story, and understandable if you don’t: Mordechai Vanunu has been in jail since 1986 since claiming Israel has nuclear weapons. The anonymous source “confirming” that Cohen meant Israel with his remarks is secondary. It seems fair — and will hopefully not remain embarrassing — to point out many of us have assumed Iraq had WMD on similarly unsubstantiated (albeit presidential) claims. (For what it’s worth, it seems Mahnaimi’s byline also appears on stories claiming Iraq developed nuclear weapons before 1991, and managed to keep a small stockpile after the Gulf War.)

So what’s this all about? Only that it seems to me that Mr. Aziz Poonawalla had a reasonably good faith basis for believing such weapons were being developed — especially because he relied on the WiredNews abridged version of the story, where Mr. Zucker’s comment seems quite authoritative, at least to non-Israelis. Aziz stumbled into a hornet’s nest of anti-Semitism charges of “blood libel” and the like for daring to repeat the story.** Given the Times article itself, I’d say that’s not justified unless you also level the charge at Mahnaimi, Zucker, and possibly Secretary Cohen as well.*** Furthermore, although I’m not Jewish, nothing I’ve ever seen by Aziz justifies the charge.

One objection commonly raised about the story is that you couldn’t keep such a weapon from affecting the many citizens of your own country who have “enemy” ancestry to one degree or another. That seems easy to counter. You somehow (1) tailor a disease virus or bacterium like smallpox or anthrax to be more lethal or contagious for people with a given genetic makeup. That’s the hard part, of course. You then also (2) vaccinate your population, perhaps especially the susceptible members, against the disease. Step (1) wouldn’t necessarily make existing vaccines useless; at any rate, you might also develop a custom vaccine. The motive for tailored bioweapons-plus-vaccination over regular bioweapons-plus-vaccination would be to limit the “collateral damage” outside the vaccinated population, and inside it as well if the vaccine were known or suspected to not be completely effective.

Here’s something we may all agree on, though: I’d certainly prefer to believe that Israel would not even research such a weapon. The sheer volume of angry reactions to merely reviving the suggestion tells me it would be tremendously controversial among Israelis, and among Jews around the world.

Look at it this way: either Mahnaimi and Colvin were right, or they weren’t. If it ever turns out they were right, shame on the Israelis responsible. If they lied or were wrong, shame on them, and the discussion was unnecessary — but it may also have a small deterrent effect of its own.

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* The story is widely reproduced on the Internet. That doesn’t make it true, but the texts copied seem to match up, so I’m reasonably confident my link is an accurate copy of the Times item itself, for which subscriber access is required.
** As the controversy about Aziz’s post grew, he edited a sentence to read “Israel may be developing” instead of “Israel is developing,” which seemed obvious anyway, but worth stating clearly.
*** I found indirect but credible evidence supporting the Cohen part of the London Times report in a very interesting SIPRI report by Malcolm Dando, where footnote 6 reads:‘Cohen warns of new terrors beyond CW’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 4 June 1997, p. 27; and Starr, B. and Evers, S., ‘Interview: US Secretary of Defense, William Cohen’, Jane’s Defence Weekly, 13 Aug. 1997, p. 32.; I don’t have access to JDW to follow that further. On the subject of Mahnaimi/Colvin items that more or less check out, they also mention that the British Medical Association was to consider the possibility of genetically tailored bioweapons. This seems to be the 1999 BMA report Biotechnology, Weapons & Humanity.

Benny Morris interviewed Ehud Barak about the year 2000 Camp David negotiations for a New York Review of Books article. An excerpt:

But in the West Bank, Barak says, the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem through from Maale Adumim to the Jordan River. Here, Palestinian territorial continuity would have been assured by a tunnel or bridge:

The Palestinians said that I [and Clinton] presented our proposals as a diktat, take it or leave it. This is a lie. Everything proposed was open to continued negotiations. They could have raised counter-proposals. But they never did.

Barak explains Arafat’s “lie” about “bantustans” as stemming from his fear that “when reasonable Palestinian citizens would come to know the real content of Clinton’s proposal and map, showing what 92 percent of the West Bank means, they would have said: ‘Mr. Chairman, why didn’t you take it?’” (emphasis added)

This partly supports a Palestine Orient House map (via MidEast Web), showing two Israeli wedge-and-corridors through the West Bank: a northern one via Ariel and Shilo and a southern one via Maale Adumim and Shilo. A Israeli-controlled Jordan river corridor connects these two, resulting in at least three major Palestinian West Bank “islands” bounded by relatively narrow Israeli corridors or the Israeli “mainland.” Calling these “bantustans” is only a slight exaggeration (the South African bantustans were a bit more far-flung)– assuming for a moment that the Orient House maps accurately reflect Camp David discussions.

As noted, the Morris article suggests they at least got it partly right, by arguably describing the map’s southern corridor. Barak and the Palestine House maps thus seem to agree on one thing: the West Bank was to be gerrymandered, to preserve at least some of the Israeli settlements. The accuracy of descriptions like “razor-thin” (Barak) and “bantustan” (Arafat) is in the eye of the beholder.

Given the fluid situation at the summit described by most participants, it’s possible that the two versions of the West Bank refer to two different proposals floated at the summit; of course, it’s also possible one or the other (or both) are inaccurate in its details. But assuming (as I do) that Barak isn’t lying, the offer he described to Morris would have further subdivided a Palestine already split between the West Bank and Gaza — and preserved a string of galling settlements through the center of the West Bank.

I’m writing about this as part of an ongoing conversation with Gil “Israeli Guy” Shterzer, who took mild exception to my offhand description of the Barak offer as a “patchwork territory criss-crossed by Israeli roads and zones.” In his comments, Gil said, “I’ll take Barak’s word in any given time, especially when the countering is Arafat’s word, and we all know his credibility.”

Well, here is Barak’s word. It may not amount to the “criss-crossed patchwork” I described, but it’s not difficult to understand why Palestinians weren’t overjoyed by the idea. At any rate, I still hope the “People’s Voice” proposal gains support.

…says honorable blogparent Matt Welch; I hear and obey:

While we’re on the subject: it turns out that Aziz Poonawalla posted an article (”basic needs and desires of all peoples“) about the Israeli-Palestinian issue on Sunday, too.

Aziz argues for a bi-national single state, an even more idealistic solution than the Nusseibeh-Ayalon “People’s Voice” initiative I described. This approach is laid out in detail by a group called the Alternative Palestinian Agenda (APA), whose initiative proposes reconfiguring Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip as a federal union of three U.S.-state-like regions: 1) majority Jewish areas within pre 1967 Israel, 2) West Bank/Gaza/other majority Arab areas, and 3) Jerusalem. The APA provides maps of “Palestine-Israel” and Jerusalem to illustrate their proposal. There would be a single Senate, Parliament, Supreme Court, currency, and military. A great number of additional details are presented in the APA proposal — all the way to a gun ban and anti-discrimination commissions — but these seem the most critical.

This bi-national state solution at least makes the Nusseibeh-Ayalon idea seem attainable and feasible. I won’t pretend to have followed Aziz’ arguments in detail yet, this is more of a “go take a look” post in that respect.

My initial reaction is that this plan and proponents like Aziz choose to ignore what the state of Israel means to Israelis, at least as this non-Jew and non-Israeli understands it. That would be Israel as a place apart, as a refuge for Jews and Judaism. This may be wrong on my part, or it may be wrong, on some level, for Israelis to cling to such views at the expense of fresh thinking like the APA initiative..

Be that as it may, I think a single-state solution like the APA’s would be overwhelmingly rejected by Israeli voters. Given the history of Israel, it would seem a surrender of what Israel has come to mean to many of its defenders. That’s no reason to not try — unless the political resources might be better spent elsewhere. I have the feeling Palestinians would reject such a plan by a similar margin, and for similar reasons: they don’t want to be part of a nation, they want to be a nation of their own, period. But I don’t know.

I have a couple of other feelings as well, though. The first one is that 9/11 has put Americans and Israelis in a similar psychological boat; Americans can’t be said not to “get it” about terrorism, the existential threat affecting Israeli lives and politics every day. The second is that both the historic American support for Israel and the current expenditure of blood and treasure in Iraq has earned the United States a seat at the Israeli table as a road map to peace is drawn.

As I write, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is knocking down a threat not just to ourselves, but also to Israel, and at real cost and risk to the United States. Americans have thereby earned a deeper right than ever to make demands of Israel: an end to the settlements, serious consideration of the Bush administration “road map,“* and creativity in arriving at an equitable solution, or at least a reasonable cease-fire, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Given the Iraqi defeat, the United States and Israel couldn’t be reasonably thought to be dealing from a position of weakness or as a reward to terrorism/intimidation, a common argument against negotiations.

But progress seems to be stuck in reverse gear. On Monday, the Guardian reported that the Israeli government permitted a settlement in heretofore off-limits Palestinian Jerusalem. The United States should respond unfavorably, bluntly, and painfully. These days, it’s at least nice to see a way to save a little money.**

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* This speech refers to a prior June 24, 2002 speech. While it emphasized the need for Palestinian reforms and the end of support for terrorism, it also contained language directed at the Israeli government.
** Data via this Jewish Virtual Library discussion.
TECH 4/11: In case anyone ever cares: for some reason the automatic permalink for this item remains wrong. Here is the correct permalink.

Hamifkad Haleumi, or the “People’s Voice,” is an initiative trying to create grass-roots support for a “two states” political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is headed by the Palestinian Sari Nusseibeh of Al Quds University and Ami Ayalon, a retired Israeli high military official, who have the goal of collecting one million signatures online or otherwise, from the two peoples. From the “Statement of Principles“:

Permanent borders between the two states will be agreed upon on the basis of the June 4, 1967 lines, UN resolutions, and the Arab peace initiative (known as the Saudi initiative). [...]After establishment of the agreed borders, no settlers will remain in the Palestinian State. [...]

Palestinian refugees will return only to the State of Palestine; Jews will return only to the State of Israel. [...]

The Palestinian State will be demilitarized and the international community will guarantee its security and independence.

I learned of this a few weeks ago via “Israeli Guy” Gil Shterzer, who comments:

…I’m pretty skeptic but I sure wish it will succeed. I signed the petition and if you are an Israeli you can sign as well over here.

As folks have commented on Gil’s blog, it’s a little disappointing the Arabic language version of the site is still under construction. In her comments, on the other hand, Diane Moon is dismissive, calling it a “public relations stunt” and urging Gil to “stop trying to get Arabs to like you.” Gil replies,

The point here is not to show that we are nice but to clarify what Israel is willing to compromise on and on what Israel isn’t willing to compromise. Another reason for this campaign is to shake the Israel public out of its numbness. The people here have gloomed into apathy.

There’s not much about “Hamifkad Haleumi” on the web; I’ve found you’ll have better luck Googling about this using the words”Nusseibeh Ayalon,” via which I found this highly negative assessment –”Palestinian rights in the document shredder” — by “Electronic Intifada” writer Ali Abunimah. Mr. Abunimah is mainly upset about the agreement to give up the Palestinian right of return to lands under Israeli control, and about the details of the Jerusalem partition. Yehudith Harel of Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace group, makes similar criticisms.

As near as I can tell, the plan at least doesn’t repeat the Barak error of presenting the Palestinians with a patchwork territory criss-crossed by Israeli roads and zones. The full withdrawal of settlers seems like a major concession under the circumstances, and compensation is envisioned for Palestinians who lose the right of return. Since this is something the agreement envisions being ratified by the governments of the two peoples, it seems like this is not an abrogation of rights, as Abunimah charges, or an evasion of responsibility, as Harel claims.

I’m with Mr. Shterzer: I hope this agreement receives support.

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UPDATE, 4/8: Gil updates the story: Nusseibeh and Ayalon are seeking an endorsement from the Israeli president, Moshe Katsav, according to an item in Ha’aretz. Katsav’s post is largely ceremonial, but it’s still a nice touch. Gil also gently chides me for being a “bit misinformed describing Barak’s offer in Camp David”; see the comments to his post, where I present some evidence – and he rebuts fairly effectively. More on this little historical dispute soon.

Haifa suicide bomber kills 15, including 7 teenagers and one 12-year old. From the Jerusalem Post, the father of a boy lost in the bombing:

Yossi Mendelevitch described the news of his son’s death as “an ink blot, spreading across the consciousness.”

Called to the national forensic institute in Tel Aviv, he was warned to bring Yuval’s dental x-rays so that he would not have to view what the bomb had left of his boy.

“I want to remember Yuval whole,” he said. “In one piece.”

In today’s Washington Post, I read that Mr. Mendelevitch added this, reacting to deaths in the Gaza Strip following fighting there, in which an Israeli tank shell killed eight people putting out a fire:

“I’m not looking for revenge — I’m not fulfilled when 11 innocent people get killed in Gaza,” Yossi Mendelevich said just before leaving his Haifa apartment to bury his son. “If it’s 11 militants, I would be happy. But this worthless killing will not solve anything.”

Israeli blogger “Civax” is posting victims’ portraits like Yuval’s, above, and writes:

I’m sure the Palestinians will get the country they deserve, eventually. But every such attack just kicks it further away. I don’t have any illusion that we’ll manage to kill all the terrorists ever. But I sure hope we’ll take care of as many of them as possible.

NAVAH

Terrorism doesn’t end with the funerals. Its effect ripples for years — sometimes for life. NAVAH was established to assure victims of terror that they are not alone, that there is a place in our heart that feels their pain, and shares their suffering. The volunteers of NAVAH spend hours visiting victims after each attack, sitting by their bedsides, listening to them and encouraging them. [...]

What sets NAVAH apart is that it is usually the first grant that victims of terror receive, enabling them to get the help they need during the first crucial weeks after an attack. In general, most of the victims of terror are ordinary Israelis, with few financial resources.

Donations start at $18.

Incredible. Der Spiegel’s Markus Deggerich chronicles (”Wenn sie doch geschwiegen hätten”: “If only they had shut up”) the final days of an election campaign where most of the major parties spared no effort in either self-destructing or really changing the German-American relationship for the worse.

The SPD’s justice minister, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, who equated Bush’s and Hitler’s political methods on Thursday, continued to claim that she “simply didn’t say that” - without being very clear what she means by “that.” She wouldn’t rule out suing the “Schwaebisches Tagblatt” — even though it’s hard for me to see exactly what the difference is between the newspaper’s account and her own explanations.*

So much for the final campaign message from the German left. Meanwhile, in the “center”, the FDP’s chairman Westerwelle has been unable or — in view of the FDP’s rising poll numbers — unwilling to force his repugnant Jew-baiting lieutenant, Moellemann, out of the limelight or the party. While the SPD is eager to make the German election about Iraq, FDP vice-chair Moellemann seems to want it to be about Israel and Palestine. After an ostensible cease-fire with the German Jewish community and his own party on the subject earlier in the year, Moellemann released a flyer reviving what might be called the “Israel question” as an issue in the German campaign. The current German tendency towards loud opinions about nominal friends’ life and death issues seems to be a winner for the FDP, too: the party appears poised to take a distinctly larger share of the vote this election than in the last one.

Meanwhile, on the right, Herr Stoiber showed a keen sense of timing by surprising everyone with the declaration that the US would not be allowed to use its German NATO bases for an attack on Iraq if it weren’t sanctioned by the UN. His prior position had been merely that German troops wouldn’t participate in the event of a solo US attack.

So Germany appears poised for warm relations with Palestine and Iraq after this election is over, and grudging cooperation at best with the United States. Apparently the plights of suicide bombers and nerve gas wielding dictators count for more in the German scheme of things than the rights to survival and self-protection of their country’s greatest protectors and victims, respectively. How we got here will be worth reflecting on over the next few months.

As of last weekend, a Spiegel poll put the SPD and Greens at 38.5 and 8%, respectively, and the CDU/CSU and FDP at 36 and 8.5%, respectively. This would be a win for the ruling coalition, but with an even smaller majority in the Bundestag than they currently enjoy. From this American Democrat’s point of view, there’s little to recommend any of the German alternatives. Prost!

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* No wonder I couldn’t see the difference: the newspaper says she dictated her quote to them over the phone in an apparent inept attempt at spin control:

Our editor … asked how she recalled having said it, and that he would publish that as a quasi final authorized version. And that’s how she recalled what was said - [the editor] wrote it down word for word and read it back to her slowly: “Bush wants to distract…” (see below)

# While others might see it as a kind of pocket veto, I prefer to put it down to “stunned silence” from Instapundit that my 2/21/02 rebuttal on reproductive cloning has not yet met with a reply. A post today, however, relegates concern about reproductive cloning to the “chattering classes.” I’ve heard that one before, actually (re my 1/20/02 post). The point, incidentally, seems belied by the polls Reynolds acknowledges (the Fox one unscientific, but not the Time one): lots of outside-the-beltway types do seem concerned about the issue. Their reasons don’t totally match my own, but I’ll take it on faith, so to speak, that plenty of God-fearing Americans believe God is not in favor of human experimentation, just as they take it on faith — perhaps unwisely — that their society won’t allow it.

# Eve Tushnet e-mailed some nice comments about the same posting, and also mentioned her own essay (”Love in the Time of Cloning”) on the subject. That essay may have predated any of mine, and takes the same position (see her essay’s third point). As Ms. Tushnet’s title implies, she approaches the topic from a different direction than I do. But we arrive at the same conclusion, for the same reason. We’ll just keep chattering about it, I suppose.

# All this is arguably “biting the hand that feeds,” but so what. I agree with Mr. Reynolds on many issues, and disagree on many others such as this one. The “Instapundit” effect (or maybe the “bottom of Instapundit’s link list” effect) continues unabated. I’m too cheap or lazy to switch to a stats engine that would tell me whether some of you folks are returning, but I sincerely hope so. Thanks for visiting! The idea here is to generate some civil discussions; please feel free to leave your comments!

# Patrick Nielsen Hayden (”Electrolite”) commented on the same “Best of the Web” article that got my goat a couple of days ago, citing some of my comments but adding his own well-crafted scorn to the cause:

… I’ll take even the flakiest student antiwar protestor over this kind of braying declaration that might makes right.

# Gary Farber (”Amygdala“) continues to scan every interesting magazine or newspaper article days and weeks before I do. He mentions Joe Klein’s thought-provoking piece on Iran in one of the latest New Yorkers (on which more myself sometime this week, I hope), comments on the “anti-Semitism, redefined” (and whitewashed?) piece by Peter Beaumont in the Guardian, and many others. He also agrees with Chris Patten (EU Foreign Affairs Plenipotentiary, or something like that) that Patten doesn’t “get it” about 9/11, with words more succinct than my own — and how could they not be — on the same general topic a couple of days ago. Patten offers a skilfully blunted apology by “admitting” that Europeans don’t get how the attack shattered our “sense of invulnerability.” As Farber notes, it wasn’t that so much, it was all those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people incinerated, or crushed, or compelled to jump to their deaths that sort of upset us, blank you very much, Chris. I’m not altogether on the same page with Gary on issues like Iraq, but he’s always well-informed, thoughtful and well-spoken.

# Disappointing drop-off in German hits. May have to rev up another German blogger episode, but that takes a lot of research in search of a point. My hope for German readers isn’t for its own sake, it’s to try to generate some transatlantic exchanges on and relationships about these issues. The “We’re not in the same boat” magnum opus below failed in that respect, it may well have been too long, too vague, and ultimately too critical to make for enjoyable reading, especially by Germans. Left out “too wrong” there, I suppose, I’m open to comments, though.

# Before my work crunch hit, I was indebted to Jim “Unqualified Offerings” Henley for some nice comments about the various Palestinian issue posts; I never got around to saying so. Thanks, Jim. Jim’s point was that while Arafat should have made a counteroffer at Camp David, Barak had probably already promised more than he could deliver. (For a review of the Camp David impasse, see this New York Review of Books article, “Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors,” by negotiators Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, as well as the response by Dennis Ross.)

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UPDATE: Ouch; note to self: must follow all Electrolite links in future. Hey, this was a weekend roundup; get a life, Weekly Standard.

Via Sean McCray (”next right”), the New York Post article “GODFATHER ARAFAT’S LIES ABOUT TERROR“, by Uri Dan:

Then Israel provided the audio - months of intercepted conversations between Arafat and his aides discussing the $20 million arms deal with Iran.

The Israeli surveillance operation even caught Arafat and his aides’ involvement with Imad Mughnia, one of the 22 men on a U.S. most-wanted list of terrorists.

The name of Mughnia, a Lebanese Shiite with close ties to Iranian intelligence, emerged in the investigation of the Marine-barracks blast in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 250 Americans, and later as the commander of the hijacking of a TWA plane to Beirut.

Assuming the story holds up, and the technical evidence bears out that these recordings were of Arafat et al, that pretty much ends my theory that this was done by other political factions within the PA; I suppose it was always a stretch. And if Arafat is dealing with Mughniyah, that’s worse news than the Karine-A. Mughniyah is a bona fide sociopath, personally responsible for torturing CIA station chief William Buckley to death in Lebanon, and beating to death a Navy Seal aboard that hijacked plane. Now affiliated with Hezbollah, Mughniyah was once part of Arafat’s Fatah group.

On Tuesday, I briefly noted some of the results of a survey by a Palestinian polling group. Gary Farber (”Amygdala”) picked up on that; yesterday, he wrote in far more detail about that survey than I did. He broke up his comments in to three parts; have a look. Farber itemizes findings like these:

An overwhelming majority, ranging between 91%-98%, views all Israeli violent acts against Palestinians as acts of terror.

An overwhelming majority, ranging between 81%-87%, does not view Palestinian violent acts against Israelis as acts of terrorism.

While 94% would view as an act of terrorism a future use by Israel of chemical and biological weapons against Palestinians, only 26% would view the same act as terrorism if carried out by Palestinians against Israelis.

Now, the final item above is just ugly; the 74% of Palestinians who accord themselves the unbridled right to use heinous weapons are evidence of a population in a vicious frame of mind. Many of the other poll findings are equally unsettling; yet settlements, checkpoints, and all the rest of the real grievances of occupied Palestinian (or, if you prefer, occupied Jordanian) life can not be excuses for contemplating chemical attacks, or for carrying out suicide bombings and other mass attacks on civilian targets.

But as Farber points out, polls like these are snapshots; I would add that this one is a wartime snapshot. Americans themselves are in the grip of wartime thinking; “and rightly so,” we think and I agree. But not so long ago, we weren’t; we now contemplate wars (plural) each of which Americans would have rejected out of hand prior to September 11. Similarly, not so long ago, Palestinian polling numbers looked very different, too; indeed, this point is developed within the polling director’s article in Foreign Affairs which I also mentioned on Tuesday. Substantial majorities supported the peace process, radical Islamist groups were much less popular; in July, 2000 the level of support for violence was around half of the roughly 60% figure it would be one year later.

What has changed is that an an Oslo peace accord was derailed by Palestinian radicals — but also by Israeli ones. Remember the 1994 Hebron mosque massacre? At least 39 people died in a hail of bullets — and the perpetrator’s grave has been turned into a shrine by radical Israelis. Remember who killed Rabin? But mainly, remember that since the 1993 Oslo accord, over 20,000 housing units — over half financed with public funds — were started in the occupied areas.* A self-respecting, patriotic Palestinian would be about as fed up with Israel now as many Americans are about Al Qaeda, and that can make for a lot of ugly opinions, especially if you’re losing. And so an uprising began, one that is morphing into a war before our eyes. The Palestininan Authority fans the flames with its school curricula, its media and information policy, and its attitude towards violence — whether that attitude amounts to “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” or direct support for weapons shipments, bombings, riots, and the rest of it. I believe that Arafat and the Palestinians made a dreadful miscalculation in turning down the Barak proposals at the 2000 Camp David summit. But Israel has arguably pursued a miscalculated, two-faced strategy of its own since Oslo as well, a strategy that even Barak shared in.

I don’t for a second hold with suicide bombings of civilian targets. That, more than anything else, is why I have been closing my eyes to the settlements issue; the people who do such things are not seeking real negotiations, in my view. If Israel dismantled every settlement and retreated to pre-1967 borders, such people would continue their war; to them, Israel itself is the provocation, not the settlements. Such people must be defeated no matter what; at the end of the day, Israel’s right to defend its citizens against such criminality is paramount and undeniable, by any means necessary.

But in the long run, and in fact even in the middle and short run, Israel’s right to occupy Palestinian(/Jordanian) land and provoke, humiliate, and sometimes abuse its inhabitants is not paramount and is eminently deniable**. I should think even the most fiery “warbloggers” over here (in fact, especially the most fiery ones) might well find themselves ardent Palestinian nationalists if they were to walk a mile in Palestinian shoes, and would find themselves sorely tempted to split hairs, set aside scruples, and lie, cheat, steal and kill generally in the fight against their enemies.

Under the current circumstances, a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories may be the best outcome we can realistically hope for. But that outcome will be fought tooth and nail by many settlers, a sizeable number of whom have come to view their settlements as part of God’s plan, more than some return to their literal ancestors’ homeland. That can’t be good enough for the rest of us; any old Tom, Menachem, or Mohammed can come along claiming he’s doing Yahweh’s, the Lord’s, or Allah’s will. Americans owe it to themselves and their Israeli friends to resume urging Israel to cease settlement construction, and ultimately to find a way to end the occupation. That doesn’t amount to “letting the terrorists win”; it amounts to being honest with ourselves and our friends.

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*The Oslo accord took no specific position on the settlements issue. The chief ongoing argument against the settlements is that they violate the Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention stating that “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Israel’s supporters argue that the settlements are not illegal under international law. But the very double-edged argument is that Jews and Israelis have a “right of return” to the lands they were expelled from after 1948; this very assertion by Palestinians to land within Israel’s pre-1967 borders that they were just as arguably expelled from after 1948 is considered the deal-killer sine qua non by many Israel supporters. The legalities of the matter may be in dispute; but the Israeli position seems intransigent, and based on the calculation that the settlements can be defended by force, just as Israel’s pre-1967 borders can be defended by force. That’s no better a basis for negotiations than the Palestinian one many Israelis suspect, bent on pushing Israel back into the sea.

**Even by soldiers in its own army, it seems: the New York Times reports “Reservists Balk at Occupation, Roiling Israel“.

Update: Jim Henley and Charles Johnson respond (+/- favorably, +/- skeptically). Read their comments for yourself, of course; summarizing, Henley points out that the Barak proposal wasn’t all that great, and left settlements in place. Johnson points out that there will still be lots of Arab troublemakers egging Palestinians on to continue the fight, even if Israel withdraws. I join in a discussion of Johnson’s post.