Jimmy Carter: Palestine Peace Not Apartheid

I doubt that there is anything more terrifying about the power of the right-wing media in America than the extent to which Jimmy Carter has been and continues to be villified in public. One obvious, even if petty, example is Bernard Goldberg's ranking Carter high on his list of "101 People Who Are Screwing Up America." It's easy enough to see why Carter was voted out of office in 1980, although even there a sober assessment of history shows that he made some hard, unpopular calls that have largely been vindicated. He managed to break the spiral of inflation even though the short term economic cost was extreme. He recognized the long-term threat of rising oil costs even though he was unable to do much about it. And he made virtually the only significant contribution to peace in the Middle East by any American in the last fifty years. He staked a strong claim to always telling the truth, in contrast to his predecessor Nixon and, for that matter, every President who followed him.

But even if it is debatable how good, or great, a President he was, his service as an ex-President is impossible to fault, unless you have a particularly bloody political axe to grind. Yet this short, simple, logical, humane solution to a grave problem that has been rendered intractable by sheer demagoguery has elicited an almost unprecedented torrent of character assassination from Israel's apologists and propagandists. Brings to mind the saying, methinks they doth protest too much. After all, there is no sound basis for arguing with the solution: it's been laid out again and again, in the series of UN resolutions, in the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel which Carter himself negotiated, and in many other forms. What's strange is the contortions so many go through to deny the obvious. What's bizarre is that there's been no solution. Carter's too kind to explain why that is; he simply wants to put us back on the right path. It is in fact the path he's always been on -- a point he makes by sketching out his own personal experience with Israel.

Carter talking about his first visit to Israel in 1973, when he was governor of Georgia, contemplating his run for president (p. 30):

At that time, Foreign Minister Abba Eban was the best-known Israeli, famous for the eloquence of his speeches in the United Nations, and I was excited when he invited us to meet with him. Not surprisingly, he was full of ideas about Israel's future, some of which proved to be remarkably prescient. He said that the occupied territories were a burden and not an asset. Arabs and Jews were inherently incompatible and would ultimately have to be separated. The detention centers and associated punitive and repressive procedures necessary to govern hundreds of thousands of Arabs against their will would torment Israel with a kind of quasi-colonial situation that was being abolished throughout the rest of the world. When questioned, he replied without explanation that the solution to this problem was being evolved. (I knew that some Isaeli leaders were contemplating massive immigration from both Russia and the United States plus encouraging Arabs to emigrate to other nations.) Eban explained his extraordinary role in the United Nations by saying, "If I were foreign minister of the only Arab nation surrounded by thirty-nine hostile Jewish ones, I would turn to the U.N. for support."

Eban's great skill was his ability to play to the prejudices of West: the patronizing colonialism that once honored itself as the "white man's burden" and now establishes common ground between Israel and the West; the matter-of-fact racism of the "incompatibility" of colonizers and natives; the "repressive procedures" that necessarily follow. What the quote shows is that Israelis in high positions knew what they were getting into, even if they underestimated how many Jewish immigrés they could attract and how many Palestinians they could cajole into exile.

When Carter was president, in 1978, working toward the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (pp. 44-45):

Unfortunately, my working relationship with Menachem Begin became even more difficult in March, when the PLO launched an attack on Israel from a base in Southern Lebanon. A sightseeing bus was seized and thirty-five Israelis were killed. I publicly condemned this outrageous act, but my sympathy was strained three days later when Israel invaded Lebanon and used American-made antipersonnel cluster bombs against Beirut and other urban centers, killing hundreds of civilians and leaving thousands homeless. I considered this major invasion to be an overreaction to the PLO attack, a serious threat to peace in the region, and perhaps part of a plan to establish a permanent Israeli presence in Southern Lebanon. Also, such use of American weapons violated a legal requirement that armaments sold by us be used only for Israeli defense against an attack.

After consulting with key supporters of Israel in the U.S. Senate, I informed Prime Minister Begin that if Israeli forces remained in Lebanon, I would have to notify Congress, as required by law, that U.S. weapons were being used illegally in Lebanon, which would automatically cut off all military aid to Israel. Also, I instructed the State Department to prepare a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's action. Israeli forces withdrew, and United Nations troops came in to replace them in Southern Lebanon, adequate to restrain further PLO attacks on Israeli citizens.

It's worth noting that this same pattern recurred in 1982 and in 2006, and in both of those cases US presidents (Reagan and Bush) gave Israel the green light to invade. Both invasions resulted in immense damage to Lebanon. They also turned out to be major public relations disasters for Israel and the US. Carter wasn't the first US president to reign in Israeli excess -- Eisenhower put an end to the 1956 Suez War -- but he may have been the last. Carter may have been the only US president to view peace between Israel and the Arabs as more valuable than Israel's alignment with US military interests in the region. (Curiously, the main thing the US military needed in the region to promote its presence was enemies, which Israel was uniquely able to provoke. As such, the US often wound up promoting Israeli aggression.)

Carter provides a rather oblique history of the founding of Israel (pp. 65-66):

Nationalism became a powerful force in nineteenth-century Europe, and it influenced Jews living there to create the Zionist movement. In Western Europe, the unique identity of the Jewish population was threatened by assimilation into Christian and secular society. But almost three-fourths of Jews were living in Eastern Europe, where persecution continued, and it was there that the seeds of Zionism were nourished. Although a majority of Jewish emigrants went to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, increasing demands were heard for the establishment of a Jewish state -- both to escape oppression and to fulfill an interpretation of biblical prophecies.

Although exact data are not available, it is estimated that in 1880 there were only 30,000 Jews in Palestine, scattered among 600,000 Muslim and Christian Arabs. By 1930 their numbers had grown to more than 150,000.

The Arabs in Palestine fought politically and militarily against these new settlers, but they could agree on little else and dissipated their strength and influence by contention among themselves. The British, who succeeded the Ottoman Turks after World War I as rulers of Palestine, attempted to contain the bloody disputes by restricting immigration of Jews to the Holy Land, despite desperate appeals from those who faced increasing threats and racial abuse. And then came the world's awareness of the horrors of the Holocaust, and the need to acknowledge the Zionist movement and an Israeli state.

This is a rather muddled account, hiding many significant details. The Zionist movement started in Russia in the 1880s. Palestine at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire, a conglomerate which recognized rights of many linguistic and religious groups. The Ottomans had welcomed most of the Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain during the Inquisition, but few had actually settled in Palestine. The Zionist movement was different, because it aimed specifically at Palestine with nationalist overtones and perhaps more importantly because it occurred at a time when European powers were tearing at the Empire by demanding capitulations -- grants of special rights within the Empire (e.g., France wanted to "represent" Maronite Christians in Lebanon; Russia laid similar claim to Orthodox Christians; the best Germany could argue for was the Jews). The Ottomans went back and forth on this, allowing immigration over two brief periods, which may have increased the Jewish population in Palestine from 5% to as much as 10%, but it had no real effect until the British took over. And this is where Carter loses the ball.

Great Britain, in 1917, before it had any claim or presence in Palestine, issued the Balfour Declaration, declaring their intent to turn Palestine into a "Jewish homeland." Their aim in doing so was to establish a British territory secured by Jewish colonists, who would depend on the British for protection against the locals. The Palestinians, in turn, were manipulated much as the British had been doing from Egypt to India, with favors to local elites -- such as the Husseini clan, one of whom was appointed the Mufti of Jerusalem. Like most British plans, it didn't really work out all that well. After major Zionist immigration in the 1920s, Palestinian revolts in 1929 led to restrictions, which were eased in the 1930s to allow an influx of German Jews, which in turn led to the revolt of 1937-39 and further restrictions -- needless to say, at a time when European Jews were most desperately in need of sanctuary from Nazi aggression. The British were so tone-deaf in this regard that they rounded up all the German Jews who managed to reach their shores and shipped them off to Australia and Canada to be jailed as enemy aliens. On the other hand, the Zionists lobbied against allowing Jews to emigrate anywhere but Palestine, so nobody comes off looking very good here.

Carter gives the British a relatively free ride here. The problem with that is not just that the British deserve a large share of the blame -- they did, after all, try the same partition trick in Ireland and India, with disastrous results in both cases -- but that it obscures the fundamental reason the Palestinians had a problem with the Zionists in the first place: the Jews came as instruments of British colonialism, they built a society and an economy separate from and in destructive competition with the existing society and economy, and they intended to use their growing power to phase the British out and complete their redemption of the land and their marginalization of its people. The same project in various guises was attempted many times, succeeding in Australia and the United States, failing after a long and violent struggle in places like Algeria and South Africa. In Israel it has succeeded only in the sense that its failure continues to be unresolved.

Carter also excuses the British in discussing the Arab side. The final service Great Britain did for the Zionists was to mismanage the Arab response to Israel's declaration of independence. Nobody seems to remember this, but at the time Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq were barely independent British puppet states, ruled by monarchs that Britain had set up. The Jordanian army was actually run by British officers. The "contention among themselves" that Carter mentions was really Britain's confusion about fighting in a war it professed neutrality over.

There's actually a lot more that can be said about these three paragraphs, like we could go into the whole question about the world's alleged "need to acknowledge the Zionist movement": the Zionist movement had very little Jewish support until the British adopted it and the Americans shut down the preferred destination for most Jewish emigrés -- a situation that Zionists worked hard to perpetuate, both to exclude having to compete for Jewish immigrants, to cement the public identity between Israel and the Jews, and ultimately to capitalize on the victimhood of the Holocaust.

But ultimately these misunderstandings have little impact on Carter's understanding of what should be done now. This is because Carter, even though he doesn't recognize the historical effect that colonialism and racism have had in forging the intertwined histories of Israel and Palestine, doesn't accept and perpetuate the racist prejudices of the colonial era. By recognizing that Palestinians today should be entitled to the full range of human rights that all other human beings deserve, he moves out from the shadow of Zionist propaganda.

Carter visited Israel in 1983 and found the nation profoundly changed from his initial 1973 impressions (pp. 108-109):

Speaking officially for the Likud coalition, for instance, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir expressed his belief that the root of the Middle East conflict had nothing to do with Israel and that a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict was not likely to affect regional stability. He minimized the importance of the Palestinian problem and considered Jews to be the natural rulers of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, with a right and obligation to continue populating the area. The proper homeland for Palestinian Arabs was to be found in Jordan, and the pre-1967 borders of Israel were of no consequence. Ariel Sharon went further, having called for the overthrow of King Hussein in favor of a Palestinian regime in Jordan, even if headed by Yasir Arafat. He added that the east bank of the Jordan is "ours but not in our hands, just as East Jerusalem had been until the Six-Day War."

Shamir's background was as the head of LEHI (aka the Stern Gang), the terrorist militia responsible for, among many other atrocities, the assassination of the UN's first envoy sent to help resolve the 1948 war. He went on to become Prime Minister, as did Sharon. This quote does a good job of showing their mindsets before they moved up and learned to speak more circumspectly -- not that Shamir, in particular, was ever what you'd call nuanced.

Another little case in selective fact-checking (p. 147):

Unfortunately for the peace process, Palestinian terrorists carried out two lethal suicide bombings in March 1996, a few weeks after the Palestinian election. Thirty-two Israeli citizens were killed, an act that probably gave the Likud's hawkish candidate, Binyamin Netanyahu, a victory over Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The new leader of Israel promised never to exchange land for peace. Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon declared the Oslo Agreement to be "national suicide" and stated, "Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours. . . . Everything we don't grab will go to them." This policy precipitated Israel's tightened hold on the occupied territories and aroused further violence from the Palestinians.

The fact that didn't get checked is that the suicide bombings were in response to an assassination that Peres foolishly ordered. The target was a Hamas official. Hamas had no stake in the peace process, so no reason not to send out the bombers except for lack of a specific justification, which Peres provided. Had Oslo been an honest effort to engage the Palestinian people in constructive peacemaking, Israel would have made an effort to include Hamas in the process, instead of cutting a side deal with the PLO against Hamas -- a deal that ultimately delivered the Palestinians little if anything. Whether Peres intended to shoot himself isn't clear. Most likely he was a victim of the prevailing double-think that claimed one can kill terrorists and still make peace.

Carter makes a big point of interpreting the Bush "Roadmap" as continuing in the tradition of UN Security Council Resolution 242, even though it was worded in ways that made it ineffective (pp. 159-160):

The Palestinians accepted the road map in its entirety, but the Israeli government announced fourteen caveats and prerequisites, some of which would preclude any final peace talks (see Appendix 7 for the full list). Israeli provisos included:

1. The total dismantling of all militant Palestinian subgroups, collection of all illegal weapons, and their destruction;
2. Cessation of incitement against Israel, but the Roadmap cannot state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.
3. Israeli control over Palestine, including the entry and exit of all persons and cargo, plus its airspace and electromagnetic spectrum (radio, television, radar, etc.);
4. The waiver of any right of return of refugees to Israel;
5. No discussion of Israeli settlement in Judaea, Samaria, and Gaza or the status of the Palestinian Authority and its institutions in Jerusalem.
6. No reference to the key provisions of U.N. Resolution 242.

The practical result of all this is that the Roadmap for Peace has become moot, with only two results: Israel has been able to use it as a delaying tactic with an endless series of preconditions that can never be met, while proceeding with plans to implement its unilateral goals; and the United States has been able to give the impression of positive engagement in a "peace process," which President Bush has announced will not be fulfilled during his time in office.

With the Roadmap and all other peace initiatives, like the Geneva Accords and the Saudi proposal backed by the Arab League, stalled, Israel is free to unilaterally implement their own isolation of the Palestinians, most palpably evidenced by the wall they are building to squeeze in the West Bank (pp. 189-190):

In this diplomatic vacuum, Israeli leaders have embarked on a series of unilateral decisions, bypassing both Washington and the Palestinians. Their presumption is that an encircling barrier will finally resolve the Palestinian problem. Utilizing their political and military dominance, they are imposing a system of partial withdrawal, encapsulation, and apartheid on the Muslim and Christian citizens of the occupied territories. The driving purpose for the forced separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa -- not racism, but the acquisition of land. There has been a determined and remarkably effective effort to isolate settlers from Palestinians, so that a Jewish family can commute from Jerusalem to their highly subsidized home deep in the West Bank on roads from which others are excluded, without ever coming in contact with any facet of Arab life.

Actually, I can't think of a more accurate word, especially given its resonance with the American experience, for this than "racism" -- at least in English. People are reluctant to apply the term to Israel because the discrimination there is not based on our old-fashioned conventional notions of race, but that's superficial. Whether discrimination is based on skin color or some other arbitrary dividing line, its potency derives from the common desire to separate "us" from "them," to grant "us" rights and privileges that we in turn deny to "them," and back that system up with force; in the end, we feel our own pain but not the pain of the others, and we side with our own even when we doubt our righteousness -- which happens less and less frequently as we master the art of ascribing our sins to their faults. Details, like dividing criteria, may differ from one racist system to another, but the fundamentals are the same. The system starts with a statement like Abba Eban's "Arabs and Jews were inherently incompatible and would ultimately have to be separated."

Where it ends is primarily a function of how much power the dominant side has, and how little value the other side has to offer up. Segregation in America and Apartheid in South Africa at least offer the separation, admittedly inequal, would be a satisfactory end state. A more extreme endstate is annihilation, the practice of genocide, where the dominant side is saying that the live of the others have no value whatsoever, and the dominant side has the power to make that happen. One reason the US and South Africa never crossed all the way over to genocide is that their economies were always largely dependent on black labor. The biggest difference between the US and South Africa on the one hand and Israel on the other is the extent to which Israel has freed itself from any dependence on Palestinian labor -- a process which, by the way, was adopted by the Zionist labor movement back in the 1920s. This does not mean that Israel is on the verge of committing genocide. It merely means that one reason that has restrained other racist systems is not present with Israel. That still leaves other reasons, including what's left of human decency in Israel -- which judging from the quotes of Shamir and Sharon isn't a very strong thread to hang on.

Carter's religious beliefs infuse the book, as they do so much of his life and work. He frequently refers to the Holy Land, an old phrase that all sides have learned to avoid. I find it redolent of the Crusades, but also reminiscent of Sunday School, which is no doubt his point of reference. On the other hand, in his hands it takes on the significance of saying that respecting this land has deeper historical import than the mere question of who controls it now. He also frequently reiterates the point that Palestinian Arabs include Christians as well as Muslim, and that Israel discriminates against both. That's another point one rarely hears. One wonders whether the pro-Zionist Christian right has any sense of the plight of their co-religionists -- something they are very conscious of in places like Sudan where Muslims, rather than Jews, can be blamed.

I find myself shying away from such points. For one thing, I know the history well enough to be leery of any suggestion that we in the West should look out for the interests of Christians in the Holy Land -- a tactic which actually had little to do with the Crusades, but offered much camouflage for imperial encroachments from 1800-1948, before the job was subcontracted to Israel. I'm also sensitive to anything reminiscent of ye olde antisemitism, which includes a long and often ridiculous set of myths about Jews oppressing Christians. But it's easy for me to steer clear of such rhetoric: I have no affinity for any religious groups, and find the very notion of a Holy Land nonsensical. I don't know whether Carter has been branded antisemitic on these grounds -- his opposition to Israeli human rights abuses is all the grounds his most vociferous critics think they need.

Of course, the assertion that Carter is antisemitic is patently ridiculous. The worst you can say of him is that sometimes, especially when his faith is on the line, he speaks plainly without considering all the possible ramifications. I'm reminded of the Playboy interview in 1976 where Carter admitted feelings of lust when he sees pretty women. Now clearly, Bill Clinton wouldn't have made that blunder, but Carter could and did precisely because he had nothing to hide. Same thing here.

posted 2007-04-21

The following are two earlier posts, based on reviews and reports of the book, before I got around to actually reading it.

The Perils of Apartheid

Just to clarify a point in yesterday's post: I don't think that Israel is going to engage in genocide against Palestinians. I think they're getting desensitized and desperate enough that their peak massacre totals could jump from dozens to hundreds and their offensive body counts could grow from hundreds to thousands. Israel has killed about 4,000 Palestinians since September 2000. Unless some conscience arises within Israel or abroad to moderate current trends, we could see an order of magnitude more deaths in the next couple of years. That would be far short of the millions genocide implies, and will have no effect on the demographic struggle. But it would be a very bad omen: the lesson that terrorism has taught us is that even a miniscule statistical threat can be massively disrupting and debilitating, and ultimately dehumanizing and brutalizing.

A small example of this trend is the vicious assault on Jimmy Carter's Peace, Not Apartheid book. For a brief summary, see Patrick O'Connor's piece on Ethan Bronner's New York Times book review. I took a look at Carter's book last night, and decided once again that it's not all that interesting for me to read at this point. What's important about the book isn't what it reveals -- as opposed to, e.g., the works of Tanya Reinhart -- as that it's written by someone with Carter's political and religious credentials.

As Tony Karon wrote, Carter's charge of apartheid is fundamentally correct -- I might add "for all practical purposes." I have three caveats about the the term:

1. Israel differentiates not just between Jews and Palestinians (Muslim or Christian), but discriminates differently according to where the Palestinians live. Approximately one million Palestinians are nominal citizens of Israel, and as such have considerably more rights than Palestinian residents of annexed Greater Jerusalem or the Occupied Territories (where the West Bank and Gaza are treated somewhat differently). Apartheid in South Africa (and segregation in the US, which provided the model for South Africa) was based on race, whereas Israel's discrimination is more complex and arbitrary. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are rigidly separated; in Israel the discrimination is more subtle, although the net effect in many cases is separation.

2. The South African economy depended on black labor, whereas Israel has eliminated its dependencies on Palestinian labor. This significantly reduces the leverage Palestinians have in everyday activities, as well as grinding them into abject poverty. It means they have virtually no interaction with unarmed Jews, and it means that Jews have no view of Palestinians except as threats.

3. The demographic balance in South Africa so heavily favored blacks -- about 90% of the population -- that black-majority rule appeared to be inevitable sooner or later. White settler colonies have either succeeded (US, Canada, Australia) or failed (South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia) depending on overwhelming demographic balance. Israel is in between and indeterminate, but the general trend favors the Palestinians -- not to displace the Jews, but to join them in one or two states. One aspect of this shift is that it encourages Palestinians to adopt pro-democracy strategies, while increasingly limiting Israel's options to violence. This is in fact what we've observed over the last twenty years, although we've also seen a great deal of ingenuity on the part of Israel to divide and control the Palestinian population, and to shift the blame for the violence onto them. (It's noteworthy that Israel's efforts have been most successful with the US, which has a similar, albeit more successful, history.)

So it's not exactly the case that what Israel is doing is South African-style apartheid, much as it was not exactly the case that South Africa merely implemented Jim Crow segregation laws. But morally the three cases are equivalent: they divide the population into two or more groups and deny those groups equal rights and protections under law. Where they differ is in the details of control, and what that means on both sides of the boundaries. I wouldn't say that one is worse than the other, but I will say that what Israel is doing is both more tenacious and more destructive than what either US or SA did.

The US ultimately gave up segregation because white supremacy wasn't really threatened, either demographically or economically, and because it just proved to be a damn stupid and embarrassing institution. (In many ways it was just the South's way of taking revenge for losing the Civil War, a cause that the North humored for a while, then got bored with.) South Africa gave up apartheid because it ultimately isolated the nation's ruling whites to the point where it was no longer viable. It is worth noting in this regard that the last friends the Afrikaners had where the US and Israel; also that Israel was equally chummy with France while they were desperately trying to hold on to Algeria. Israel is still a ways from having to make peace with the Palestinians, but its leaders are starting to feel cramped, both from inside and outside. And that's why they struggle so desperately against the word "apartheid": it is a word that commands the world to stand up for human rights, and shows Israel itself to be so very much in the wrong; moreover, it is a word that bespeaks failure for just that reason.

posted 2007-01-10

Carter's Salvage Job

I remember seeing Jimmy Carter on TV a few years ago -- I think this was on Charlie Rose, but I'm not sure -- where he was asked why he worked so hard on the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. He answered that it was because of the Cold War -- that making peace for Egypt would stifle Soviet ambitions in the region. He didn't seem to have the slightest interest then in the rights of Palestinians, or in supporting international law as a means of resolving the broader conflict.

Now he has a new book, titled Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, which finally does take up the core issues of the conflict, and as such attempts to solve it, rather than just slicing off a piece in the interest of US geopolitical ambitions. Given his past indifference, I have to wonder whether this, too, isn't mostly a calculated move in the direction of salvaging US power, prestige, and credibility, in the wake of Bush's utter disaster in Iraq. Of course, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's no doubt true that he's been aware of the issue for a long time. I also don't doubt that his values are honest and sincere. But it is striking how propitious the timing is. The one-two punch of Bush's brutal war in Iraq and his cheerleading for the most viciously repressive Israeli regime in history has cost the US virtually ever shred of good will we once enjoyed in that part of the world. The US position has sunk so low that the only way we can start to make amends would be to broker a real solution for the Palestinians. They are, after all, the only people in the region who still hold out hope for working with the US -- if only because they recognize that only the US will be able to put effective pressure on Israel. Carter stepping up gives Bush some political cover, if only he'll change course and act on it.

It seems likely that Baker's Iraq Study Group will move slightly in this direction as well. It's been reported that they'll push for an international summit on Iraq. Clearly, the only thing that keeps the US and Syria from working constructively together is Israel. Given US weakness in Iraq, this is clearly an opportune time for Syria to press the US on return of the Golan Heights. Israel also looms large in US problems with Iran. A peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians goes a long way toward defusing the nuclear issues with Iran. A peace deal also makes it easier to bring more international support into Iraq, allowing the US to disengage more gracefully. If you see the Middle East as a cauldron boiling over in some spots and threatening to explode in others, you should be aware that the fire beneath largely comes from Israel. On the other hand, a relatively painless solution like the Saudi plan, already endorsed by all Arab nations, is ready to be had.

It wouldn't be hard to adopt the Saudi plan as the deliverance of what Israel has been fighting for all these years. The only thing David Ben-Gurion craved more than land was recognition -- that Israel should exist, and that the world should acknowledge and recognize its right to exist. The Saudi plan fulfills his dreams to such an extent that it's downright churlish that his heirs should go to such lengths to grab a few extra parcels of dirt and rock. The plan does leave some loose ends for further negotiation, but it at least gets the big issues out of the way and sets the basis for cooperation. Beyond that, most issues come down to money, and if money's all it takes, that shouldn't be a problem.

It seems to me that there's a real opportunity for someone, probably a Democrat, to make political hay here: proclaim yourself Israel's real champion, embrace the Saudi plan, and promise as much money as it takes to make it all work. The point, which thus far the Democrats have totally missed the boat on, is that there is a powerful myth -- a story line with just enough basis in fact to be plausible -- that Israel's goal all along has been to live at peace, respected by its subjects and neighbors. Relevant facts include that polls have consistently shows a majority of Israelis in favor of dismantling settlements and recognizing independent states for Israelis and Palestinians. Someone needs to make that happen.

posted 2006-12-03