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I admire people like Ezra Nawi, people with the cussedness and determination and confidence to just keep doing simple right things. In Nawi’s case, that means being an Israeli yet sticking up for Palestinians on the West Bank near Hebron — people who are being viciously and criminally (they’re really the only words that will do) harassed by nearby Israeli settlers.

To the right is a short video of the incident that has led to Nawi’s conviction for “assaulting” an Israeli officer. (Nawi is in the green jacket as the video begins.) As you’ll see, I think, if there was an assault it was pretty hard to spot. Be that as it may, the first point of this post is to ask you to go to FreeEzra.org and add your name to a petition asking the Israeli justice system to forego jailing Mr. Nawi.

But the real point is what was happening to the Palestinians. Writing for Ha’aretz in mid-June, David Shulman (who says he knows Nawi and is certain the charge is untrue) explains:

On February 14, 2007, the Israeli authorities sent army bulldozers to demolish several Palestinian shacks in a tiny place called Umm al-Kheir, 25 kilometers southeast of Hebron. Umm al-Kheir embodies the everyday reality of the Israeli occupation like no place else: The 100 or so impoverished Bedouin who call it their home, eking out a livelihood by grazing goats and sheep on the dry, stony hills, live in rickety structures of canvas, tin and stone. The land is theirs: Originally refugees from Tel Arad in the Negev in 1948, they bought it for good money from its Palestinian owners in the early 1950s. Israel, however, has put up a large settlement called Carmel right next to Umm al-Kheir, and like all settlements, Carmel (founded in 1981) is constantly expanding, encroaching on the lands of its Palestinian neighbors. As documented in detail in police records in Kiryat Arba, settlers also regularly attack these neighbors, whom they would like to remove altogether from this area.

House demolitions in the Palestinian territories are routine, and there have been several at Umm al-Kheir, too. The legal justification is always that the houses were built without a permit. But Palestinians living in Area C in the territories have almost no hope of getting a building permit. (To give some idea: on average, in all of Area C, only one building permit is granted to Palestinians each month, whereas some 60 demolitions orders are issued, of which 20 are carried out. Fewer than 5 percent of Palestinian applications for building permits in Area C are approved.)

You may have skimmed past the “settlers also regularly attack these neighbors” part above, or imagined a shouting match or some scuffles.  Wrong.   Nir Rosem, writing about Nawi for Ha’aretz in 2005, reported nearby Israeli “settlers” poisoned livestock, destroyed olive orchards, plowed up fields, committed arson, and beat the Palestinian village children and foreign volunteers accompanying them to school badly enough that several needed hospitalization.

I don’t really know that much about the lay of the land over there.  So I wouldn’t usually have a feeling for whether what’s happening or happened in and around Umm al-Kheir is an outlier, or whether it’s as everyday as Shulman says it is.

Except for that video.  Because the worst thing about it isn’t the soldiers breaking in to the metal shack, it isn’t even the bulldozer demolishing the old house next to it while villagers cry and curse.  The worst thing was that the IDF soldiers laughed when they were done. Like it was no big deal at all.

You can also visit supportezra.net for ongoing news about the case and the cause.

Israel has now declared “all-out war” on the Gaza strip Hamas government for its continued rocketing of nearby Israeli towns and settlements.  The Washington Post’s Sudarsan Raghavan and Griff Witte report the death toll stood at 364 — including at least 57 civilians, according to a separate (and heartbreaking) report on the death of five sisters when a neighboring mosque was bombed.  The numbers and high civilian casualties are in large part because the aims of the Israeli government are broader than ever before:

While previous Israeli assaults on Gaza have pinpointed crews of Hamas rocket launchers and stores of weapons, the attacks that began Saturday have had broader aims than any before. Israeli military officials said Monday that their target lists have expanded to include the vast support network that the Islamist movement relies on to stay in power in the strip. The choice of targets suggests that Israel intends to weaken all the various facets of Hamas rather than just its armed wing.

“There are many aspects of Hamas, and we are trying to hit the whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism against Israel,” said a senior Israeli military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“Hamas’s civilian infrastructure is a very, very sensitive target. If you want to put pressure on them, this is how,” said Matti Steinberg, a former top adviser to Israel’s domestic security service and an expert on Islamist organizations.

This is a formula for all-out, total war indeed.  But it presupposes you’re fighting people who’ll accept different leadership when it’s over — and by that measure, Israel’s war may well have the opposite effect.  In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Palestinian journalist Daouad Kuttab notes that Hamas had been increasingly unpopular in Gaza — its support stood at a Bush-like 17% level among Palestinians in November, with Hamas trailing Fatah even within the Gaza Strip.  As importantly, it had lost support around the Arab world, in part for scuttling Arab-sponsored talks with the rival Abbas government in the West Bank.  That’s all a thing of the past:

The disproportionate and heavy-handed Israeli attacks on Gaza have been a bonanza for Hamas. The movement has renewed its standing in the Arab world, secured international favor further afield and succeeded in scuttling indirect Israeli-Syrian talks and direct Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. It has also greatly embarrassed Israel’s strongest Arab neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. While it is not apparent how this violent confrontation will end, it is abundantly clear that the Islamic Hamas movement has been brought back from near political defeat while moderate Arab leaders have been forced to back away from their support for any reconciliation with Israel.

But the same poll showing low Hamas approval ratings showed Palestinians essentially uncommitted to the Hamas 6 month truce with Israel: a clear majority (41%) felt it had made no difference, with the remainder statistically tied between judging the truce had served or harmed the national interest.

The question was whether even an eye for an eye — let alone many, many eyes for an eye — was the right way to go under these circumstances. It’s interesting and a little sad to note that the “original intent,” as it were, of the “eye for an eye” phrase may be quite different from what it’s assumed to be.*  Exodus 21:23-25, in the King James Version, reads as follows, with emphasis added:

23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,
24 Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,
25 Burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

To be sure, other biblical passages (e.g. Lv 24:19-20, Dt 19:21) are more clearly about punishment to be exacted, and there’s apparently room for debate with this one, since other translations replace the “give” with “take.” But this discussion suggests that the original Hebrew for this Exodus passage amounts to “being in place of being” — i.e., it actually comes closer to suggesting proportional, functional substitution of something new for that which was lost, by you, for your own misdeeds rather than narrowly equivalent penalties on someone else for theirs; the writer proposes that a person blinded by your fault would be compensated by a seeing servant.

But in any case, the fundamental idea is “proportional” — and also in any case, these biblical passages aren’t the end of all wisdom on the topic.  It’s all too easy for me to sit here in safety and pontificate, but I think hilzoy is right:

I imagine what people on both sides are thinking is something more like: do you expect us to just sit here and take it? Do you expect us to do nothing? To which my answer is: no, I expect you to try to figure out what has some prospect of actually making things better. Killing people out of anger, frustration, and the sense that you have to do something is just wrong. For both sides.

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* In case it’s not obvious, I’m no biblical scholar; I’m just following up on leads from the Wikipedia “eye for an eye” entry.

Gil Shterzer, quoted in full:

This is what a suicide bombing really looks like. Warning, uncensored gruesome hard to watch photos.

No prescriptions or wannabe smart forecasts here — or balance or “balance.” It just makes me understand the fury Israelis must feel, I feel some of it myself.

Sad to say, I lost track, there have been so many terrorist attacks in Israel in the last week. Israeli blogger Imshin provides links to brief bios of each victim in a bus bombing in Jerusalem that left 7 dead, not counting the shithead who did it. The contrast between the apparently relatively affluent teenage engineering student bomber and the 5AM shift workers he murdered was striking. Imshin writes,

Why are the cold-blooded murders of these people seen by so many as fitting revenge of the weak? Why is this young, good looking, physically strong and economically secure kid perceived as being more desperate than a 67 year old economics lecturer making his way in the soft early morning light to his dead end job as a guard in a car park?

Gil Shterzer (”Israeli Guy”) posts a devastating photo of two victims of the attack. I think one victim in the photo is Mr. Ostinsky, the car park guard.

It’s hard to disagree with Imshin’s (apparent) support for the security wall, or Gil Shterzer’s angry call to “waste” Hamas leaders like Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi or Mahmoud Al-Zahaar in retaliation. May be easier said than done, though.

I continue to support ending the West Bank/Gaza settlements, and think the “road map” or the Nusseibeh/Ayalon agreement could be ways out of the conflict. But I read (via Imshin) that Arafat is insisting on “right of return” again, which together with non-stop suicide bombings makes either peace plan seem like it should be in your bookstore’s “fantasy” section. What does Abu Mazen say? If that matters.

Meanwhile, consider helping Israeli terror victims by supporting NAVAH.

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.

Terror Leader Is Dead, Palestinian Reports Say: The Associated Press, citing two Palestinian officials in Ramallah who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Nidal’s body had been found in his Baghdad apartment with multiple bullet wounds, though they described his death as a suicide.

# 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.