Matt Yglesias

IDF Troops Threaten Mutiny

There’s a certain strain of American Jewish liberal that acknowledges that Israeli settlement expansion is bad and that settlements will have to go someday, but doesn’t really like to see the U.S. or other governments do anything about this. One day, the story goes, the Palestinians will come to their senses and want to make an agreement and of course Israel will give up at least the vast majority of the settlements. But Tom Ricks points to this story in Haaretz headlined “IDF troops hang sign at base: We won’t evacuate settlers”.

Now that’s not to say that settlement evacuation is impossible. In fact even Bibi Netanyahu’s right-wing government recognizes the need to discipline these soldiers. But the point is that even an Israeli government that was inclined to abandon large numbers of settlements would have practical problems doing so. And those problems get worse the more settlements expand. And they also get worse as religious nationalists gain influence inside the IDF.

Meanwhile Sarah Palin comes out in favor of unlimited settlement expansion “because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead.” But of course the population of the United States is growing. Does that mean we should start colonizing portions of Canada? Almost every country is experiencing population growth—and that growth with be accommodated within those countries’ boundaries. After all, the population of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is also growing. Should their be Palestinian settlements inside Israel?

Mahmoud Abbas Dropping Out of Palestinian Elections

Reports are out that Mahmoud Abbas is telling people he won’t run for re-election as head of the Palestinian Authority: “The aides said Abbas received calls earlier today from Israel’s president and defense minister, the president of Egypt and the king of Jordan, all asking him to reconsider.”

People want Abbas to reconsider, because him declining to run could be a disaster for the peace process which, in turn, would be a disaster for the remaining credibility of the four figures in question. But note that among those begging Abbas to reconsider is not Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who loves the idea of isolating and discrediting Palestinian moderates in order to bring Palestinian radicals to power and thus have the pretext he wants to avoid peace negotiations. The question is why the United States has been helping Netanyahu do this. The Obama administration’s decision to back-track on its initial demand of a settlement freeze, followed by the catastrophically counterproductive pressure that was brought to bear on Abbas to disavow the Goldstone report have massively undermined his political position. The upshot has been another set of victories for the Hamas-Likud partnership that’s been ruining things in Israel/Palestine since the wave of suicide bombings that brought Netanyahu to power in the first place in the 1990s.

Living Conditions in Gaza

It’s probably just the well-known anti-Israeli bias of the Condé Nast corporation at work, but I certainly found Lawrence Wright’s description of living conditions in the Gaza Strip to be pretty affecting. It seems to me that a lot of the huffing and puffing you hear about this person’s bias or that person’s moral equivalence is about trying to distract people from looking clearly at what’s going on:

Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. [...]

The Israeli blockade includes a ban on toys, so the only playthings available have been smuggled, at a premium, through tunnels from Egypt [...]

Many of Gaza’s sports facilities have been destroyed by Israeli bombings, including the headquarters for the Palestinian Olympic team. [...]

Israeli authorities maintain a list of about three dozen items that they permit into Gaza, but the list is closely kept and subject to change. Almost no construction materials—such as cement, glass, steel, or plastic pipe—have been allowed in, on the ground that such items could be used for building rockets or bunkers. [...]

According to Haaretz, the I.D.F. has calculated that a hundred and six truckloads of humanitarian relief are needed every day to sustain life for a million and a half people. But the number of trucks coming into Gaza has fallen as low as thirty-seven. [...]

Until Operation Cast Lead, there were several concrete plants, a flour mill, and an ice-cream factory, but they have all been bombed or bulldozed, and the mixing trucks for the concrete have been knocked over. Houses and mosques and shops lie in rubble; entire neighborhoods have been demolished. [...]

Most economic activity came to a halt in 2007, with the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Now, according to the U.N., about seventy per cent of Gazans live on less than a dollar a day, and seventy-five per cent rely on international food assistance. [...]

[T]he tanks that line the border do lob shells into the territory, causing many random casualties. While I was there, a teen-age girl was killed, and her young brother injured, in such an incident. The Israelis maintain a buffer zone along the border about half a mile deep, which places at least thirty per cent of the Strip’s arable land off limits. [...]

The Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, warned that Gazans were “bringing upon themselves a greater Shoah, because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate.” [...]

That’s completely without getting into what happened during the attack and who was killed and why and how. This is a prison in which over 1.5 million people, the majority of whom are under the age of 18, are serving time.

Barghouti on The Daily Show

Moustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian advocate of non-violent resistance and head of the Palestinian National Initiative alternative party to Hamas and Fatah, was on The Daily Show earlier this week. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Dr. Barghouti in a small group some time ago, and to hear him speak at a somewhat larger gathering last night. He’s a very interesting, very compelling person.

One thing that comes to mind thinking about this is how rare it is to see Palestinian perspectives in the American media. There’s not much of a percentage in it. If you present content that offends U.S. political orthodoxies you get in hot water and there’s no real upside. A wise man suggested to me yesterday that it might be helpful to not only watch the interview, but if you enjoy it write a note to The Daily Show telling them you appreciated it.

Might do some good.

HRW and Hamas

Since Human Rights Watch’s work in the Middle East and North Africa is driven by the organization’s anti-Israel agenda, clearly this letter urging Hamas leadership to take seriously the allegations made against their group in the Goldstone Report and to implement Goldstone’s recommendations can’t actually have happened. For that matter, since Goldstone himself was part of the very same vast anti-Israel agenda his own report can’t possibly have said that stuff.

That said, if we pretend that HRW really did issue the statement posted on their website, it highlights an interesting dynamic. Clearly, in the real world Hamas is not an organization that’s interested in human rights or the laws of war. But if you read the article you can see that Hamas is at least an organization that’s interested in pretending to be interested in these things and gets into a dialogue with human rights groups:

Prior to the vote, a Hamas Foreign Ministry adviser, Ahmad Yusuf, had said that Hamas “will try to do our best” to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli population centers. Yusuf also claimed that Hamas had only intended its rocket attacks to hit Israeli “military targets,” rather than Israeli civilians, and that “maybe some of these rockets missed their targets” because they were “primitive weapons.”

That’s pretty transparently nonsense:

In its letter to Haniya, Human Rights Watch recalled repeated statements by Hamas officials and fighters indicating an intent to direct the rockets toward civilian targets and asked Hamas to clarify its stance on the issue. A June 11, 2006 statement from the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas armed wing, for example, said that in response to an Israeli attack that targeted Palestinian fighters, the group had carried out a rocket attack against the Israeli town of Sderot and would continue attacking Sderot “until its residents flee in horror. We will turn Sderot into a ghost town.”

The point here is that Hamas seems to believe that its own legitimacy and interests can, in fact, be damaged by the perception that it is violating the laws of war and attracting the disapproval of human rights monitors. What’s more, Hamas is clearly very interested in pressing human rights claims against Israel. But that, of course, opens them up to pressure to acknowledge the criticisms of their own conduct being made by those very same group. HRW grew out of the Helsinki Watch concept, which was aimed at holding the Communist Bloc to account for violations of agreements they had plainly signed in bad faith. At the time, that was regarded by many as a futile and pointless task, but in retrospect most people now acknowledge that their work was important and effective.

Goldstone Report Findings

Judge Richard Goldstone

Not really unexpected, but good to have on record:

The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.

The report also concludes there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated launching of rockets and mortars into Southern Israel.

Presumably Judge Goldstone issued these findings motivated by his racist attitudes toward Jewish people, and threw in the stuff about Palestinians in an effort to cloud over his true agenda with false even-handedness.

Hamas Embracing Holocaust Denial

The UN Relief and Works Agency, which oversees assistance to Palestinian refugees, was considering the idea of including a unit on the Holocaust in history lessons to Palestinian schoolchildren. It seems like a good idea to me that, among other things, might help the kids better understand the context for their current situation. Hamas leaders, however, are having none of it:

Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students. Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to “marketing a lie and spreading it,” al-Astal wrote in a statement. [...]

Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge Jewish suffering, fearing it might diminish their own. Attitudes toward the Holocaust range from outright denial to challenging its scope.

Israeli officials are using this argument as a pretext for why western governments shouldn’t reconsider their attitudes to dealings with Hamas. Meanwhile, the actual situation in Gaza is incredibly dire. As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Robert C. Adler wrote for CAP in July:

In the six months since unilateral ceasefires by Israel and Hamas were announced on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered from shortages, including basic medicines and services. In early March, the International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Economy for the Reconstruction of Gaza that was held in Egypt raised a total of $4.4 billion in pledges from the international community for the Palestinian Authority. But stringent import restrictions imposed by Israel and the continued divisions among Palestinian factions have impeded these funds from delivering much benefit to Palestinians.

A recent ICRC report emphasizes that the Israeli blockade has pushed unemployment to over 40 percent, while depriving the population of regular access to running water, to say nothing of proper medical. They warn that tens of thousands of children are going malnourished due to “deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.” The indifference of both the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership toward the practical aspects of this humanitarian crisis is truly appalling.

Clinton Denies Knowledge of Secret Bush-Era Agreement on Settlements

Talking to ABC News’ George Stephanoupoulos in an interviewed aired earlier today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denied the existence of any record of an alleged secret Bush-era deal with the Israeli government granting them a loophole out of their public, international agreement to halt settlement activity.

Meanwhile, to be clear about why this issue is important it’s not that a settlement freeze will bring about peace. Rather, it’s that any kind of realistic peace agreement will require the dismantling of many settlements. And if the Israeli government doesn’t have the willingness—or the political will—to so much as freeze expansion, then there’s no way they’ll be able to do the dismantling. And, similarly, if there are arguments which hold that freezing expansion is wrong or impossible on the merits, then those same arguments imply that the settlements can never go. That totally poisons the water for peace.

Congress Pushing Back on Obama’s Anti-Settlement Stance

I’ve remarked twice before that I’ve been surprised by the level of seriousness with which Barack Obama seems to be pursuing the settlement freeze issue. It’s been official American policy that these settlements are illegal and ought to be stopped for a long time, but the tradition is to offer clear signals that the U.S. is in fact willing to turn a blind eye. Thus far, Obama hasn’t done that, and now the pushback is beginning:

“There’s a line between articulating U.S. policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line,” said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), who said he’d heard complaints from constituents during the congressional recess. “I would have liked to hear the president talk more about the Palestinian obligation to cut down on terrorism.”

What’s telling right there in Rep. Weiner’s statement and as pointed out by Ben Smith, the author of the piece, is that none of Obama’s critics are willing to say he’s actually wrong. Obama wants a settlement freeze, and as Smith reports “few will defend illegal Jewish outposts on land they hope will be part of a Palestinian state.” But the sense seems to be that it’s somehow unfair for Obama to actually criticize Israel for doing bad stuff, even if we agree that the stuff is bad.

I think the complaint that Obama has somehow failed to mention that Palestinian terrorism is unacceptable is just factually wrong. What’s more, Obama hasn’t just said terrorism is bad, he’s committed to an effort to rebuild the kind of state institutions in the West Bank that can provide provide security. But details aside, there’s a real “two wrongs don’t make a right” issue here. If it’s wrong for Israel to expand settlements—and it is—then it’s wrong for Israel to expand settlements and pressure should be brought to bear to make them stop. Settlement expansion doesn’t make the murder of civilians okay, and terrorism doesn’t make land grabs okay.

Doing Business in Occupied Palestine

The lives of ordinary Palestinians is something that doesn’t tend to get much play in the American media. But here’s Sam Bahour, a Palestinian entrepreneur, talking about the difficulties of simply trying to peaceably start businesses in the West Bank. It involved spending 15 years on a series of tourist visas:

The absence of peace between Israel and Palestine is a negative-sum dynamic. Both sides, in other words, would be better off if peace could be reached. But there is no peace. And Israel, as the stronger party, has managed to allocate the vast majority of the deficit onto the Palestinian population. Israelis, in other words, are somewhat worse off than they would be under conditions of peace. But Palestinians are much worse off. The stronger side making the weaker side bear the brunt of the negative consequences of a bad situation isn’t particularly unusual. That’s life. But it’s not justice.

The Demilitarization of Palestine

Apparently David Ignatius came away from his meeting with Bibi Netanyahu convinced that the key stumbling block to Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state is something that doesn’t get much attention:

Binyamin Netanyahu’s friends liken him to a good poker player. They explain, for example, that before the Israeli prime minister plays the card marked “Palestinian state,” he wants an American commitment that this state will be demilitarized. [...] Here’s where Netanyahu’s poker skills will be tested. The Israeli prime minister wants U.S. and Arab leaders to pledge that any future Palestinian state will be demilitarized — with no army and no control over its airspace — before he agrees to negotiate the details of statehood. Netanyahu probably isn’t bluffing on this one: Unless a formula can be reached that protects Israeli security, he won’t play.

One thing to note on this is that it’s not an irrational Israeli demand—this really would advance Israel’s interests and wouldn’t, per se, be a gross violation of Palestinian human rights.

But another thing to note is that this is not the usual picture you get of Israel eager for peace and ready to make a deal, but constantly thwarted by the lack of Palestinians willing to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist. In Ignatius’ telling, what Netanyahu is doing is essentially holding millions of Palestinian civilians’ basic rights hostage hoping to force them into a situation of such utter desperation that they’re willing to accept an infringement on their sovereignty that no other country accepts.

Non-Violent Resistance in Palestine

The search for the kind of Palestinian non-violent resistance movement that would almost certainly be more effective than all the rockets in the world at forcing Israel to seriously contemplate a just resolution of the Palestinian issue is a bit of a staple of left-wing Jewish thought. But Gershom Gorenberg executes the genre with uncommon verve and affecting power. And perhaps most notably of all, he does it in The Weekly Standard where one isn’t accustomed to reading such things:

But even if patronizing, the question remains valid: Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery’s buses were desegregated.

As an Israeli, to imagine Nasser a-Din al-Masri is disturbing for another reason: This is a fantasy of a political savior who comes from the adversary’s side because one’s own has no answers. Israeli politics has become a junkyard of broken ideologies. The outgoing government of Ehud Olmert succeeded neither in negotiating peace nor in bringing quiet to the Gazan border with military force. Meanwhile, settlement construction continued, deepening Israel’s entanglement in the West Bank. In February’s election, a majority of Israelis voted for parties that offered no expectation of an end to the conflict. We have failed to manufacture hope. Let the Palestinians do it.

I would emphasize that it’s not just that sainthood can work. Given the right circumstances, non-violent resistance is harder to commit oneself too—it requires enormous self-discipline—but it’s likely to be more effective. It’s not as if the civil rights leaders of the 1950s and 60s were just doing white America a favor by eschewing violence; they were taking a harder road to stick to precisely because it worked better. If southern blacks had launched a campaign of terrorist violence against their white neighbors, presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy would have wound up mobilizing the national guard to protect Jim Crow’s perpetrators rather than its victims.

Which isn’t to say there’s no non-violent protest in Palestine—there’s quite a lot. But the leading faces of Palestinian resistance in the eyes of Israelis and the West are Hamas and Hezbollah and their indiscriminate violence. That, in turn, does wonders to help maintain the political and diplomatic viability of unjust Israeli policies.

Israel Grabs More Palestinian Land, Sets Stage for Further Illegal Colonization of Palestinian Territory

Meanwhile, in the Middle East’s only democracy, settlements continue to grow:

Some 1,700 dunams of land in the northern part of Efrat were declared state land last week, paving the way for the West Bank settlement to start the process of seeking government approval to build there.

The Civil Administration issued the declaration after rejecting eight appeals by Palestinians against the move. A ninth appeal was accepted, and the land covered by this appeal was consequently removed from Efrat’s jurisdiction.

Barack Obama and George Mitchell need to make a serious effort to stop this. Opposition to settlements has long been official United States policy, but the overwhelming tendency has been for U.S. administrations to turn a blind eye to settlement expansion. The expansion itself is an impediment to peace, and American unwillingness to stand behind our own policy commitments is devastating to our credibility in the region.

Incidentally, my understanding is that a dunam is equal to a square meter, meaning that we’re talking about around 18,300 square feet.

Friedman: We Need State-Building in the West Bank

Thomas Friedman writes about the idea that building the possibility of an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires substantial capacity-building on the Palestinian side:

That said, once Obama is able to think afresh about the Middle East, he will find that the Bush team has left an interesting legacy here: 140,000 U.S. soldiers doing nation-building in Iraq and one U.S. soldier — actually a three-star U.S. Army general — doing nation-building in the West Bank. We need a better balance. [...]

Palestinians need the same chance. You can’t have a two-state solution without two states, and today the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which still supports a two-state deal, doesn’t have the institutions of a state, particularly an effective police force. Therefore, my hope is that Obama will focus not only on peace plans from the top down, but also on institution-building from the bottom up. The best way to isolate Hamas in Gaza is to build the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank into a decent government with steadily expanding control over its territory.

He goes on to describe a promising initiative in this regard that’s already under way. And it certainly sounds like a good idea to me. But on another level, this goes back to the centrality of the Israeli settlements to the situation. Israel doesn’t just let its citizens wander out into Palestinian land and build houses. It also takes action to protect them. That means a series of security barriers, checkpoints, special no-Arabs-allowed roads, and other restrictions on Palestinian movement. Those are not only inconvenient for ordinary Palestinians and offensive to their dignity, they make it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to exercise effective authority over its territory.

And recall the issue I raised in my “cycle of excuses” post. One needs to recall that the lack of Palestinian Authority efficacy is not just a result of settlement activity, but of a deliberate U.S.-backed Israeli strategy of degrading Palestinian Authority institutional efficacy back in the “isolate Arafat” period. Back then, the U.S. endorsed the view that Israel couldn’t negotiate a final settlement deal until it had finished destroying Fatah’s security organs. Now we’re in danger of endorsing the view that Israel can’t negotiate a deal until we build them back up again. The truth is that we need to move on all these fronts. We need to freeze settlement activity. We need to start working on building Palestinian capabilities. And we need to move forward on finding again on top-down political agreement.

Strange Oversight

Aaron David Miller is a notorious anti-semite veteran of US policy toward the Israeli-Arab conflict, with over 25 years of service in the field. And he says:

In 25 years of working on this issue for six secretaries of state, I can’t recall one meeting where we had a serious discussion with an Israeli prime minister about the damage that settlement activity—including land confiscation, bypass roads and housing demolitions—does to the peacemaking process. There is a need to impose some accountability.

Todd Gitlin writely calls this “shocking.” Kevin Drum says “It’s sort of hard to imagine an equally important topic on the Palestinian side never even being raised with its top leadership.” And indeed it is. But of course to be clear, even-handed failure to bring up hugely important topics wouldn’t be any good either. Miller’s whole article deserves to be widely read.

A Back and Forth on Israel

I got an email from a reader the other day saying:

I was wondering if you would consider opening up this question to response:

Do the people of Israel have a fundamental right to uphold and protect a Jewish state?

I ask, not because it necessarily precludes judging the nation’s recent actions in Gaza, but because the passion of the discussions on your blog and others seem to indicate, on some level, a disagreement on this point.

For example, I have noticed some commentators may say “of course, Israel has the right to defend itself”, and then go on to compare it to apartheid South Africa — which is problematic at the least, since nobody would say the Boers had a fundamental right to a Boer nation.

Ditto for criticism of Israel’s “racist immigration policy”, and so forth.

In reply, I said:

Sure. I don’t think Israel has any obligation to give in to, say, demands for an unrestricted Palestinian “right of return” to live within Israeli territory. Nor do I find it especially problematic that Israel uses Jewish ancestry as the basis for its immigration policy. Germany and other countries do the same.

But this is precisely what makes it so untenable for Israel to be exercising sovereign control over the Palestinian territories. What Israel is governing right now isn’t a Jewish state, it’s a binational state in which most of the Arab population is being denied its basic rights. We can see from the condition of the Israeli Arab population that Israel is perfectly capable of functioning as a Jewish state that respects the rights of a smallish Arab minority, but it’s obviously untenable to remain a Jewish state while granting full rights to the Gaza and West Bank Arabs. So under the circumstances, Israel has no choice but to cease governing and colonizing the territory in the West Bank and Gaza.

I’d say that’s a pretty conventional wisdom opinion in the United States. And even to some extent in Israel where really all the Labor and Kadima politicians acknowledge the basic reality of the point. But they’re not actually acting like they believe it nor does American policy really seem to reflect a belief in these points.

Rice: I Love Palestinians So Much I Ruined Their Lives

Condoleezza Rice’s exit interview is really stunning. Check this out from the opening:

QUESTION: What’s been the best moment?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, there have been a lot of great moments: seeing the Afghans liberate themselves from the Taliban; seeing the Iraqis vote for the first time; going for the first time to the West Bank and being with Palestinians was a really special – a special time. And I think the thing I never expected was to actually be in Libya face-to-face with Colonel Qadhafi. So that probably stands out as one of the extraordinary moments.

Apparently she treasured that moment on the West Bank so much that she decided to ensure it would forever be the high point of Palestinian living. Thus, after telling the Palestinians they’d be subjected to endless Israeli occupation until they held an election, they held an election and were told they’d be subjected to endless Israeli occupation because the wrong party won. And then with the wrong party in office, Rice backed efforts to overthrow the Hamas-led government by force. That led to a civil war, a breakdown of Palestinian institutions, and a new line from Washington that the Palestinians have to be subjected to endless Israeli occupation because the Palestinian side lacks a coherent government to negotiate with. And these are her finest memories!

Syria First

Aaron David Miller makes the case for a “Syria first” approach to Middle East peace. I think there are some reasonable elements to that, and it would help lay the groundwork for the kind of approach to Iran the president-elect says he wants to pursue. But I don’t think US policymakers can afford to think that the Palestinian issue can just fester indefinitely merely because it’s not convenient to deal with.

Huckabee: West Bank Forever

The Christian Zionist influence on American — and, I suppose, Israeli — policy continues to be terrifying. Here, for example, Tim McGirk reports for Time on Mike Huckabee:

A trip to Israel does no harm to his standing with American Jews; they are traditionally wary of the Christian right, but might overlook Huckabee’s Bible Belt beliefs on education and abortion because of his backing for Israel. A guest of the Jerusalem Reclamation Project, which aims to move thousands of Jewish families deep into the Arab neighborhoods of this divided city, the ex-Arkansas governor told reporters that he supported Israel’s control over all Jerusalem. Jerusalem was a beacon to the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he said, “but you can’t have two governments overseeing the same real estate.”

The guitar-playing ex-governor went far beyond the White House view on the conflict, which calls for separate Israeli and Palestinian states. “From the security standpoint, the Israeli state should include the West Bank,” Huckabee said, referring to the territory that is a cornerstone of an eventual Palestinian nation. Huckabee claimed that his views supporting an Israel that expands beyond its pre-1967 borders, were based on “common sense” rather than his own religious beliefs.”Would I tolerate this in my own neighborhood? No,” he said. Many Christian evangelicals believe that it is part of Biblical prophecy that Jews should return to occupy all of their ancient homeland.

Now clearly a certain number of American Jews are already conservative Republicans. But the majority are liberal Democrats who are unlikely to support any aspect of Huckabee’s Christianity-fueled approach to domestic politics. But what’s more, I dare say that few Jews who actually care about Israel’s future are going to embrace this vision. To achieve long-term security, Israel needs a viable peace deal with its neighbors, and that’s never going to happen if Huckabee’s proposals are adopted. And that’s to say nothing of the appalling human rights implications for the Palestinians. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is now slamming Barack Obama over the fact that one of his informal advisers went to Syria and told the Syrians they should make some concessions now if they want to be able to secure a durable deal under the next administration. And, yes, if you go wildly out of your way to portray what happened, you can spin this as an attack on Obama.