CenterFeud

A Palestinian state by 2009?

WorldNet Daily is carrying an "insider account" of secret US-brokered negotiations that will supposedly lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state by the end of this year:

According to the source who has been playing a role in the meetings, the two sides are drafting an agreement, to be signed by the end of the year, requiring Israel to evacuate most of the West Bank and certain eastern sections of Jerusalem.

The source said Israeli community blocks in the zones of Gush Etzion, Maale Adumin and Ariel would remain Israeli while most of the West Bank and parts of Jerusalem will be slated for a Palestinian state.

In contradiction to statements by Olmert, the status of sections of Jerusalem is being negotiated but the specifics of any agreed-upon Israeli withdrawal is as yet unclear, said the source.

"It is understood [Jerusalem] Arab neighborhoods would become part of a Palestinian state," the source said.

The source told WND both sides agreed Israel would retain Jerusalem's Pisgat Zeev neighborhood, which is located near large Arab communities. Many of those Arab towns were constructed illegally on property owned by the Jewish National Fund, a Jewish nonprofit that purchases property using Jewish donors funds for the stated purpose of Jewish settlement.

The source said the U.S. pledged advanced training for thousands of PA security officers who would take over security in the West Bank and eastern sections of Jerusalem and operate in those territories instead of the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli police.

The U.S. previously has trained thousands of Palestinian security officers, including units in which known members of Fatah's Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group serve. Scores of those security forces have carried out terrorist attacks against Israeli soldiers and civilians, including recent deadly shootings in the West Bank.

But the source claimed the planned U.S. training is different:

"This training is unlike anything before. The PA, Israel and the U.S. are working very closely to vet the forces. All sides are approving the training candidates. The training is more advanced than ever. It will create a very serious Palestinian army," said the source.

Color me skeptical, but also hopeful. I was in favor of Israel withdrawing from Gaza, not because I expected it to improve the prospects for peace, but because in my view, it was an untenable situation for Israel to devote military resources to protecting a few thousand Jewish settlers embedded among a  million-plus Palestinians in a Hamas-led enclave. In a post dated August, 2005 I wrote:

The Gaza pullout makes tremendous sense to Israel, not as a "peace offering" (Sharon is not so naive) but as a military strategy. It makes no sense to have 9,000 settlers surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians, many of whom want them dead. Even from a religious standpoint, Gaza has little significance compared to areas of the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria" to the Israeli right). It requires some thirty thousands IDF soldiers to protect those settlements, and Sharon's decision to abandon them is based purely on a cost-benefit analysis. Removing the settlements not only removes the roadblocks and occupation forces that have increased misery for the Palestinian residents of Gaza, but it also puts the emphasis on the creation of a functioning civil government. He (and future Israeli leaders) can now demand that Gaza get its house in order before there are any further concessions. And should Israel need to undertake military operations against Hamas and other terrorist groups using Gaza as a base, they can go on the offensive without having to divert resources to protecting setllers (not killing innocent Palestinians in the process will still be a major challenge, given that terrorist groups often hide among and draw support from the civilian population).

Since then, we have seen that the Hamas leadership in Gaza did not take advantage of the pullout to "get its house in order" and create a functioning civil government, but rather to continue to target Israeli civilians with rocket attacks on Sderot, near the Gaza border. Hamas has made no bones about their aim to establish Palestine in the place of Israel and to murder Jews as a means to that end. Although the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is led by the supposedly "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah ("Conquest") party, I do not expect a different outcome were Israel to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state there. Fatah and Hamas have the same goal, they differ only in their tactics and timframe, with Fatah willing to use negotiations as an interim step to the long-term goal of eliminating Israel altogether, which has never been eliminated from the PLO charter.

So that explains the skeptical part, but then how in the world could I be hopeful? Because a two-state solution ultimately makes more sense for Israel than the alternative: a single "bi-national" Jewish-Arab state which, through sheer demographics, would soon become yet another Arab majority country in the region. For better or worse, Israel is the only place on earth where Jews can live as a majority and live according to their own religious and cultural norms. To maintain Israel is a Jewish state (one where Arabs ironically have more political freedom than anywhere else in the Middle East), the Israeli government will need to relinquish the West Bank to the Palestinians.

This will not bring about an end to terrorism against Israel, but it will allow for clarity as to what motivates that terrorism: the refusal of many Arabs  to accept, in any form, the existence of a Jewish state in their midst (84% of Palestinians preferred continued violence over talks, according to a recent poll). Nonetheless, with the removal of the occupation as a pretext and Palestine officially negotiated and on the map, it will be difficult to maintain the fiction that the conflict has ever been solely about land and borders.

But with the US fully engaged and applying the lessons learned from its counter-terrorism strategy in Iraq, there is a possibility that over the coming years, some semblance of civil society will return to the West Bank, as well as economic development and trade with Israel. We saw glimpses of this during the illusion of Oslo -- if a deal can finally be reached, we may yet see that illusion become the reality. As the alternative would be a continuation of endless war, one can't fault Bush and Olmert from making one last effort before the clock runs out for both of them.

Middle East role reversal

On Jihad Watch/Dhimmi Watch, Hugh Fitzgerald offers an interesting thought experiment in response to the question: "If the Israel/Palestinian conflict were exactly the same as it is, only the roles of the two warring parties were exactly reversed, would you then switch allegiances to the Palestinian side?"

Let's see.

If there were 22 Jewish states, and only one tiny Arab state, and if in those 22 Jewish states every other group was denied anything like equality (see the various groups of Christians all over the Muslim Arab world, or for that matter see the various groups of non-Arab Muslims -- such as Kurds, Berbers, and black Africans in Darfur), and if those 22 Jewish states also possessed fantastic oil reserves and the one tiny Arab state possessed nothing but the intelligence of its populace, and if those 22 Jewish states were the size of the 22 members of the Arab League, with 14,000,000 square miles of territory, and the one tiny Arab state had less than 1/1,000th of that, or about 10,0000 square miles, and if those 22 Jewish states were possessed of an ideology that required them to move heaven and earth in order to eradicate that one tiny Arab state...

Read the whole thing.

The lowest ratio of real to apparent integrity

Alan Dershowitz on Jimmy Carter:

If money determines political and public views as Carter insists "Jewish money" does, Carter's views on the Middle East must be deemed to have been influenced by the vast sums of Arab money he has received. If he who pays the piper calls the tune, then Carter's off-key tunes have been called by his Saudi Arabian paymasters. It pains me to say this, but I now believe that there is no person in American public life today who has a lower ratio of real to apparent integrity than Jimmy Carter. The public perception of his integrity is extraordinarily high. His real integrity, it now turns out, is extraordinarily low. He is no better than so many former American politicians who, after leaving public life, sell themselves to the highest bidder and become lobbyists for despicable causes. That is now Jimmy Carter's sad legacy.

In 1976 I voted for Jimmy Carter and saw his inauguration as a long-overdue cleansing of the Nixonian stench hanging over Washington and the country. But over the years I have come to see Carter as a failed president, albeit a moral man who worked hard for worthy causes such as his Habitat for Humanity.

More recently, I have been troubled by his tendency to focus on Israel's occupation of the West Bank as though it were the only obstacle to middle East peace, with his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid being the most egregious example. It is sad enough to think that Carter is merely so shallow as to uncritically drink the Israel-as-South-Africa kool-aid retailed the world over as thoughtful analysis, but that he is a bought-and-paid-for shill, working as a tool of the Saudis even as denounces the influence of the "Zionist lobby" on US policy-making.

Is Carter sincere? I believe that at this point he is, but in the mold of Dershowitz' example of the tobacco lobbyist, he has thoroughly convinced himself that a genocidal Hamas-led government in Palestine is less of an obstacle to peace than an Israeli polity that builds a wall to protect itself from that genocide. And that human rights abuses in the Arab world (or China, North Korea, Sudan or Iran for that matter) don't merit the condemnation that Carter seems to think is due uniquely to Israel.

Is France moving closer to Israel?

Yes, according to the Jerusalem Post, which tracks a shift in French thinking about the Middle East:

The negative attitude regarding Israel typical of the French government of late is shifting towards a new policy, according to the delegation of French senators sent to visit Israel and the West Bank by the Medbridge Institute.

Now, France is eager to offer Israel support in ensuring its national security by confronting terrorist groups and regimes in the Middle East. "The feeling in France today is that terror must be handled directly, and we are ready to combat terrorism," Jean Pierre Plancade, vice president of the Foreign Affairs and Defense committees, told The Jerusalem Post over the weekend.

Based on France's history of accommodating Arab governments, one would expect its position on the new Palestinian "unity" government agreed to in Mecca by Hamas and Fatah to be closer to that of Russia, i.e. that the Road Map's preconditions can be thrown over the side and the unity government could receive funding from the UN and EU in spite of its continued refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, renounce terrorism or abide by past peace agreements with Israel. In fact, my own expectation was that France would eagerly cooperate in such a charade. Perhaps it will, but the initial reaction gives me more reason to hope than I would have otherwise had."

According to a French Foreign Ministry official, the French government's position on the conditions of the road map are non-negotiable. "Obviously we cannot judge what will happen in the future, but don't expect either Royal or Sarkozy to differ from the current government's position," the ministry official said.

Earlier in the week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert urged the French delegation to fulfill their "moral obligation" regarding Iran, insisting that "Europe must remain forceful regarding the nuclear capabilities of Iran." That position was echoed by Plancade, who acknowledged the threat of a nuclear Iran and opposed their efforts saying that a France under Royal "would totally oppose a nuclear Iran in any capacity. We have carefully analyzed the situation, and are against Iran having a nuclear program of any kind."

He added that they are "in favor of a more severe handling of Iran if they do not cease their efforts. It is not only Israel who will be in danger, but the Sunnis and the rest of the world would be under the Iranian threat." While the Chirac government is opposed to an Iranian nuclear arsenal and has expressed concern over the lack of cooperation by the Iranians with the international community regarding the program, they do not oppose peaceful nuclear technology in Iran.

Other delegates, such as Senate Secretary Yvon Collin, have admitted to broadening their views concerning Israeli-Palestinian relations. "We arrived with preconceived ideas but every day those preconceptions... make room for new realities," declared Collin.

France has a long history in the Middle East, and prides itself on knowing the nuances of the political situation in countries like Lebanon, Syria and Iran. French citizens have long championed the Palestinian cause, viewing Israel through the prism of its own colonial past in the Middle East, and not as an embattled democracy at war with both government and non-government forces who are determined to end its existence.

Now, perhaps realizing that French president Jacques Chirac's recent bizarre offhand comments indicating a comfort level with an Iran that has the Bomb, combined with its own realization that it may be facing its own "intifada" in the streets of its cities, it is possible -- maybe -- that elites in the French government are coming to the realization that the Arab-Israeli conflict may not be just about land, nor even about Arabs and Israelis -- but about a complete unwillingness on the part of the Muslim world to tolerate the existence of Israel under any circumstances, regardless of its policies.

If France is waking up because it perceives a threat to the democratic West, what about the rest of the EU? It seems odd to hear French criticism of the EU, but what to make of this?

Medbridge Chairman and member of the European Parliament Francois Zimeray, who founded the institution to fill the information gap between Middle East and the EU, said from Paris: "This is why Europe has no real impact in the Middle East. They cannot mediate a peace in the Middle East because they do not understand the Middle East.

"I was fed up hearing European diplomats talking about realities that they do not understand, so that is why I have sent 350 parliamentarians from 27 different European countries to Israel and the Palestinian territories." According to Zimeray, one such diplomat is French President Jacques Chirac, who he believes exposed his ignorance of Israel and the Middle East last week with his comment that Teheran would be razed if Iran fired a missile at Israel.

"Israel's real friends are those who understand the fragility of the state of Israel" Zimeray noted. "Saying that Israel would destroy Teheran shows that Chirac doesn't understand Israel's fragility. Israel is not going to take on confrontations all over the world, they need friends and supporters."

The next Holocaust

In an essay for the Jerusalem Post, Israeli historian Benny Morris lays out the depressingly plausible scenario:

The second holocaust will be quite different. One bright morning, in five or 10 years, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, a day or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will convene in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go-ahead.

The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles will take off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa and Jerusalem, and probably some military sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missile bases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiple warheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemical agents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Front Command units.

With a country the size and shape of Israel (an elongated 20,000 square kilometers), probably four or five hits will suffice: No more Israel. A million or more Israelis in the greater Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem areas will die immediately. Millions will be seriously irradiated. Israel has about seven million inhabitants. No Iranian will see or touch an Israeli. It will be quite impersonal.

Some of the dead will inevitably be Arab - 1.3 million of Israel's citizens are Arab and another 3.5 million Arabs live in the semi-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Haifa have substantial Arab minorities. And there are large Arab concentrations immediately around Jerusalem (in Ramallah-Al Bireh, Bir Zeit, Bethlehem) and outside Haifa. Here, too, many will die, immediately or by and by.

It is doubtful whether such a mass killing of fellow Muslims will trouble Ahmadinejad and the mullahs. The Iranians don't especially like Arabs, especially Sunni Arabs, with whom they have intermittently warred for centuries. And they have a special contempt for the (Sunni) Palestinians who, after all, though initially outnumbering the Jews by more than 10 to 1, failed during the long conflict to prevent them from establishing their state or taking over all of Palestine.

Besides, the Iranian leadership sees the destruction of Israel as a supreme divine command, as a herald of the second coming, and the Muslims dispatched collaterally as so many martyrs in the noble cause. Anyway, the Palestinians, many of them dispersed around the globe, will survive as a people, as will the greater Arab nation of which they are part. And surely, to be rid of the Jewish state, the Arabs should be willing to make some sacrifices. In the cosmic balance sheet, it will be worth the candle.

Read it all. With Iran on track to realizing its nuclear ambitions and Ahmadinejad confidently predicting the end of the "criminal zionist regime", does anyone doubt this is the likely scenario? Will any country, even the US, move pre-emptively, or even after the fact? Can Israel?

Taking their cue from the successful IAF destruction of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, the Iranians duplicated and dispersed their facilities and buried them deep underground (and the Iranian targets are about twice as far from Israel as was Baghdad). Taking out the known Iranian facilities with conventional weapons would take an American-size air force working round-the-clock for more than a month.

At best, Israel's air force, commandos and navy could hope to hit only some of the components of the Iranian project. But, in the end, it would remain substantially intact - and the Iranians even more determined (if that were possible) to attain the Bomb as soon as possible. It would also, without doubt, immediately result in a world-embracing Islamist terrorist campaign against Israel (and possibly its Western allies) and, of course, near-universal vilification. Orchestrated by Ahmadinejad, all would clamor that the Iranian program had been geared to peaceful purposes. At best, an Israeli conventional strike could delay the Iranians by a year or two.

IN SHORT order, therefore, the incompetent leadership in Jerusalem would soon confront a doomsday scenario, either after launching their marginally effective conventional offensive or in its stead, of launching a preemptive nuclear strike against the Iranian nuclear program, some of whose components are in or near major cities. Would they have the stomach for this? Would their determination to save Israel extend to preemptively killing millions of Iranians and, in effect, destroying Iran?

This dilemma had long ago been accurately defined by a wise general: Israel's nuclear armory is unusable. It can only be used too early or too late. There will never be a "right" time. Use it "too early," meaning before Iran acquires similar weapons, and Israel will be cast in the role of international pariah, a target of universal Muslim assault, without a friend in the world; "too late" means after the Iranians have struck. What purpose would that serve?

I am unable to see any realistic alternative scenario. Even if Israel were able to successfully launch a pre-emptive strike to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, the Iranians would then retaliate and the world would condemn Israel as the aggressor. And if missiles were launched, Israel's anti-missile defenses would need to achieve a 100% success rate, a virtual impossibility.

Can anyone offer an alternate scenario not based on wishful thinking?

Hat tip: Pajamas Media

With friends like these...

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick says of Tony Blair:

Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is Israel's best friend in Europe. And he's not a very good friend.

Immediately after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, Blair was instrumental in convincing US President George W. Bush to view the Palestinian jihad against Israel as a conflict completely separate from the global jihad. His success in convincing Bush of this distinction turned the anti-Semitic - not to mention strategically disastrous - view that terrorists who kill Israelis should be treated differently from terrorists who kill anyone else into one of the cognitive foundations of the US war on Islamic terror.

I am a huge fan of Tony Blair, whom I see as one of the last bastions of the responsible Left. Although he is clearsighted about the nature of the global jihad against the West, he has a blind spot when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

Like most on the Left, Blair operates under the assumption that terrorism against Israelis is somehow distinct in its motives and justification from terrorism anywhere else in the world. It is a tragically naive point of view, one that is implicitly or explicitly held around the world. It is based on the misplaced analogy that the Israelis are to the Palestinians what the former white nationalist apartheid government of South Africa was to black South Africans. In this framework, the Israeli/Palestinian question (and not religious extremism that rejects the existence of the Jewish state) lies at the heart of all problems in the Middle East. In Britain and Europe, reeling from terrorist attacks and looking for scapegoats, this worldview is expressed in a hatred for not only Israel (and by extension, its US sponsors) but of Jews in general. The old anti-Semitism has become fashionable again, only this time it comes from the supposedly progressive Left:

British antipathy towards the US and Israel was clearly exposed in an opinion poll published on September 6 in the Times of London. The poll reported that 73 percent of Britons believe that Blair's foreign policy, and especially his "support for the invasion of Iraq and refusal to demand an immediate cease-fire by Israel in the recent war against Hizbullah, has significantly increased the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain."

More than 62% said that to "reduce the risk of terrorist attacks on Britain, the government should change its foreign policy, in particular by distancing itself from America, being more critical of Israel and declaring a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq."

The day after the poll was published, Blair announced that he would leave office in a year.

Also, on September 7, a committee of members of Parliament released a report on anti-Semitism in Britain. The all-party committee found that that since the Palestinian jihad against Israel began in 2000, anti-Semitism in Britain has become a mainstream phenomenon. Attacks against Jews in Britain were at an all time high over the summer.

In their anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, the British, of course, are no different from their Continental brethren. And the situation in Europe is alarming. Writing in Frontpage magazine this week, Islamic expert Andrew Bostom reported that in November 2005, Stephen Steinlight, the former director of education at the US Holocaust Memorial Council, told a conference in Washington that on average, Muslims attack Jews in Paris 12 times a day. According to Steinlight, this means French anti-Semitic violence is approaching the level of anti-Semitic violence in Germany during the days of the Weimar Republic.

These attacks against Jews in Europe are accompanied by ever increasing official hostility towards Israel on the part of European governments. On the second day of the war with Hizbullah, Chirac felt comfortable alleging that "Israel's military offensive against Lebanon is totally disproportionate." Chirac then acidly asked, "Is destroying Lebanon the ultimate goal?"

Chirac's remarks opened the floodgates for anti-Israel propaganda throughout Europe. They were followed by the barring of El Al cargo planes carrying weapons shipments from the US from European airports. That prohibition still stands.

For those who have not yet caught on, the forces of global jihad are not going to suddenly abandon their desire to make war upon unbelievers just because those unbelievers favor retreat from Iraq, allowing Iran to go nuclear, or blaming Israel for fighting back "disproportionately" against enemies who want to wipe it off the face of the earth. The jihadists will gladly accept all these concessions as proper tribute to the rightness of their cause, and continue to push for the establishment of Islamic sharia law as the only acceptable form of rule in the world.

The Europeans, and even the British, in their willingness to demonize Israel (which last time I checked was not blowing up trains in their capitals), are selling out the only Western democracy in the Middle East, in the hopes of quelling their restive Muslim populations. And in the end, they will find that they are still targets, willingly co-opted by religious extremists for whom there will be no peace until all the world falls under their rule.

Making Israel the problem lets them ignore the real problem, and maintains the bubble of denial. This denial was on full display recently as the EU decided to back the newly formed Palestinian "unity" government, even though it does not recognize Israel's right to exist, and has not renounced terrorism.

Tony Blair is a little less cynical about this exercise than his counterparts on the continent; I have always seen him as an idealist, who wants to see a just peace in the Middle East but not at the expense of Israel's right to exist. But he is, sadly, the exception. And now he is headed for the exit.

Cracking the code on Middle East coverage

Victor Davis Hanson offers a translation guide for the code phrases used by the press in its coverage of of the war between Israel and Hezbollah:

A “ceasefire” would occur should Hezbollah give back kidnapped Israelis and stop launching missiles; it would never follow a unilateral cessation of Israeli bombing. In fact, we will hear international calls for one only when Hezbollah’s rockets are about exhausted.

“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.

“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.

“Cycle of Violence” is used to denigrate those who are attacked, but are not supposed to win.

“Deliberate” reflects the accuracy of Israeli bombs hitting their targets; it never refers to Hezbollah rockets that are meant to destroy anything they can.

“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny, the Syrians in Hama, or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.

“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”

Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.

There's more along these lines, leading to the question of why the coverage tends to stress Lebanese casualties and damage, while ignoring the fact that Hezbollah is committed to the destruction of Israel in the name of the same Islamist ideology that lies behind terrorist attacks around the globe. Yet Israel remains the blind spot. Why?

What explains this distortion of language? A lot.

First there is the need for Middle Eastern oil. Take that away, and the war would receive the same scant attention as bloodletting in central Africa.

Then there is the fear of Islamic terrorism. If the Middle East were Buddhist, the world would care about Lebanon as little as it does about occupied Tibet.

And don’t forget the old anti-Semitism. If Russia or France were shelled by neighbors, Putin and Chirac would be threatening nuclear retaliation.

But while it's useful for Hanson to point this out, this is old news. Europe long ago chose sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, with even popular opinion in Britain largely critical of Israel's policies and actions. To some extent this was due to a tendency to see in Israel a reflection of Europe's own shameful colonialist history, and to a large extent it has to do with the continent's energy and economic ties to the Middle East. China and Russia are a different matter. In addition to economic interests in the region, they are still smarting from the defeat of Communism and the rising influence of the US, so will do anything to undermine its policy aims, including turning a blind eye to an increasingly belliigerent Iran.

We know this is the case. And we also know that this time no one can make the claim that the hostilities are about land. After all, Israel withdrew from Lebanon six years ago, uprooted its settlements from Gaza last Fall, and was on a course to withdraw from large parts of the West Bank. Rather than building on these actions as milestones towards a lasting peace, Hamas and Hezbollah are trumpeting them as proof of Israel's weakness and so are pressing the attack, believing they have Israel backed into a corner. That they don't care what happens to the innocent (and some not-so-innocent) civilians they hide among is reason to condemn these terrorist organizations, not those who are fighting them to defend their very existence.

Sadly, not so long ago it was not out of the question that Israel and Lebanon might have one day worked out a peace agreement, since Israel had demonstrated that it was willing to quit its occupation of Southern Lebanon. Unfortunately, the Lebanese government is divided and weak, and Hezbollah's influence was strong enough to drag that beautiful country into war.

So for those who are wondering about the prospects of restoring "stability" to this troubled region, here is a little reality check:

Israel will do whatever it must do to defend itself from a well-armed, highly discplined terrorist group that is ideologically committed to its destruction. Whatever the spin in the media, Israel has no choice.

Hezbollah will press forward at the behest of its sponsor, Iran and its surrogate Syria, who are determined at all costs to prevent the formation of stable democracies in either Iraq or Lebanon. Playing the Israel card through Hezbollah is a reliable way for Iran to rearrange the playing field more to its liking.

The EU and the UN will bleat on about the need for a cease-fire and an international solution, but are not willing to actually expose themselves to real danger, so they are not in a position to affect the situation on the ground. The UN fled Iraq after its headquarters was attacked, and the UN presence on the Lebanese border has merely given cover to Hezbollah. Any credible international force will have to include real soldiers who are willing to put themselves on the line to protect both Israel and Lebanon from Hezbollah.

The US will go along to an extent with the international call for a cease-fire, but refuse to broker one on terms favorable to Hezbollah. The Bush administration realizes that a "peace agreement" cannot be reached with a terrorist organization. Any agreements that are achieved will be made with the Lebanese government, not with its would-be puppet masters in Syria or Iran.

In the Arab and Muslim world, the steady stream of hateful anti-semitic rhetoric will continue unabated. Calls will issue forth for the "Zionist regime" to leave the field to the jihadists, but from their standpoint it will matter little what the Israelis do. If they defend themselves against and kidnapings, suicide bombings and rocket attacks, their response will be decried as beliigerent and "disproportionate"; and if they withdraw their forces or hunker down, they will be scorned by their enemies as weak, and so attacks against them will only mount, with deadlier weapons. The goal is nothing less than the eradication of Israel and the slaughter or ethnic cleansing of every Jew in the region to clear the way for a Taliban-style Islamist regime.

And sadly, the oh-so sophisticated and progressive Western press will cooperate - whether wittingly or unwittingly - in this shameful propaganda effort to demonize and deligitimize the Jewish state. It's up to the rest of us to keep Hanson's decoder ring close at hand.

Reporting from Ramallah

Michael J. Totten continues to run rings around the MSM with his amazing reports on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His most recent post is from Ramallah, capital of Hamas-led Palestine, and it's not at all what he (or you) expected. He interviews a variety of Palestinians about Hamas' defeat of Fatah, the end of the intifada and the prospects for peace and a two-state solution. Even Palestinian legislator (and former spokesman) Saeb Erekat, whom in the past I have tended to view as a dissembling mouthpiece for the failed Arafat regime, comes off with surprising depth and not like the CNN soundbite I am accustomed to.

Totten is straightforward and disarming in his questioning, letting his subjects speak but not afraid to call them out if he thinks they are being disingenuous. He is not pretending to be unbiased - he is an American who has travelled throughout the Arab world and spoken to a wide range of people, both ordinary and extraordinary, all of whom have informed his opinions and impressions. He has sympathy for both sides and believes in a two-state solution, but no truck with Hamas, its support for terrorism, or its program of strict Islamic rule in Palestine, which is already seeing some backlash.

If you care at all about the fate of the Middle East and the prospects for reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, you are missing a vital perspective if you are not reading Michael's reporting, which is entirely independent and reader supported. If you want a straightforward, no-nonsense reporter telling you what's really going on in the Middle East, you need to make his blog a regular stop.

Both sides now: Michael Totten on the Lebanese-Israeli border

With an impressive record of recent dispatches from Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon under his byline, Michael Totten is now blogging on his experiences in Israel and his perceptions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And, not surprisingly, it is hands-down the best journalism I have read on the region in many years. Read his latest work, in which he reports on the situation at the Israeli-Lebanese border from both sides and I'm sure you'll agree. Then hit his PayPal button and support his continuing efforts to provide thoughtful reporting and analysis on the Middle East.

Here is an excerpt:

The lieutenant was easily ten years younger than me. But he was so ground down from world-weariness he sounded like a man 30 years older who hadn't slept for three days.

“Any minute now something huge could break out," he said. "I am afraid to go home and leave my soldiers. When Hezbollah decides to do something, they do it. And they’re pretty good at it.”

"What do you think they'll do next?" I said.

“I have no idea," he said. "They could do anything. Kidnapping. Sniper.”

"How do you feel about that?" I said.

“Well,” he said. “You get pretty cynical about it after a while.”

“Do you think they’re watching us?” Lisa said.

“They are watching you right at this second,” the lieutenant said. “You are definitely being photographed. It’s possible you’re being watched through a sniper rifle.”

To say I felt naked and exposed at that moment would be a real understatement. I felt like my skin was invisible, that psychopaths were boring holes with their eyes straight to the core of my being. At the same time, I knew they did not see me as a person. They saw me as a potential massacre target.

In an earlier post, he compares the vibe in Israel to that of the Arab countries he has visited:

Arab countries have a certain feel. They’re masculine, relaxed, worn around the edges, and slightly shady in a Sicilian mobster sort of way. Arabs are wonderfully and disarmingly charming. Israel felt brisk, modern, shiny, and confident. It looked rich, powerful, and explicitly Jewish. I knew I had been away from home a long time when being around Arabs and Muslims felt comfortably normal and Jews seemed exotic.

First impression are just that, though. They tend to be crazily out of whack and subject to almost instant revision. Israel, I would soon find out, is a lot more like the Arab and Muslim countries than it appears at first glance. It’s not at all a little fragment of the West that is somehow weirdly displaced and on the wrong continent. It’s Middle Eastern to the core, and it has more in common with Lebanon than anywhere else I have been. The politics and the history are different, of course. But once I got settled in Tel Aviv I didn’t feel like I had ventured far from Beirut at all.

Totten recently considered his goals as a reporter, did the math, and found out he could survive as a citizen journalist choosing his own assignments and working directly for his readers vs. trying to get published via the usual media outlets. He is willing and eager to continue this experiment in "non-corporate writing" so long as he can get financial support from his readers (that's us). I'm game, and I hope you'll be as well.

Ironically, Hamas victory brings clarity

Publius Pundit puts the Hamas electoral victory in terms even the most self-deluded can understand:

The conventional wisdom, or at least the conventional party line is that the Palestinians just want their own country, their own slice of earth. Now we have prime evidence that not only do they want their own land, but they also want the land and lives of others, namely, Israeli’s. The election of Hamas is akin to the US voting in the KKK.

My view is that it's a moment of clarity. Up until now, the prevailing wisdom was that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was about 1967. Now, we can finally see that all along it was really all about 1948.

And what would we do if Al-Qaeda had just won a landslide victory in Canada or Mexico?