When it comes to Israel and Palestine, I have been guilty of making judgments and forming opinions with relatively little information or historical context.
Like many pseudo-intellectuals, I tend to take positions on the basis of well-stated opinions of people I respect, a smattering of history and a dash of my own good intentions.
David Podvin, a political writer whom I have grown to respect deeply, wrote an essay about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that pretty much shot to pieces my reflexive response system. In addition to throwing me into a tailspin, the essay did confirm my initial opinion of the Clintonian effort to bring peace to these two nations (yes, I know Palestine isn't a "Nation," but it should be).
After sitting in my comfortable armchair and smugly declaring that I know who is more culpable and I know the solution to the Israeli/Palestinian Conundrum, it is more than a little humbling and exasperating to find myself essentially back where I started: A giant shrug and sigh, a shake of the head and a glance to the sky, as if to say, "Why are people so goddamned stupid?"
Poor Rodney King; whatever his failings as a human being might have been, he did manage to distill the basic eternal question perfectly: "Why can't we all just get along?"
The following is an essay by David Podvin, titled "The Palestinians Have A Final Solution." Here is the link to the essay, and here is the link to his entire series.
THE PALESTINIANS HAVE A FINAL SOLUTION
By David Podvin

This is the official map of the Palestinian Authority. It hangs in the office of Yasser Arafat. Copies of it are used to teach geography to Palestinian schoolchildren, who also learn of the greatness of Adolf Hitler and that the Holocaust is a myth.
Note that something is missing on the map.
For liberals who want to pretend that the Palestinian objective is a homeland on the West Bank rather than the destruction of Israel, the existence of this map is a problem that calls for selective amnesia.
There appears to be an emerging liberal consensus on the Middle East. It goes like this:
The key to peace is for brutal Israel to completely withdraw from the occupied territories that it illegally stole (when the Arabs attacked it and tried to kill all of the Jews). The West Bank must be ethnically cleansed of Jewish settlers (because it's okay for Arabs to live in Israel, but Palestinians should not have to endure the indignity of being around Hebrews). Yasser Arafat, who is the legitimate representative of the persecuted Palestinian people (those he has yet to murder for opposing him) will renounce suicide bombing (which he directs and funds but over which he has no control) and the Jews and the Arabs will live in harmony (because when Arafat tells his people in Arabic that the goal is to drive all Jews from the Middle East, he's just kidding). Also, the Israelis really should get rid of that racist genocidal maniac Ariel Sharon (who has killed fewer Palestinians than has Arafat).
It's a good thing that liberals aren't wrong very often, because when they are, a lot of innocent people tend to die.
In the 1970's, American liberals insisted that the United States shun the government of Cambodia in favor of the agrarian reformers of the Khmer Rouge. Joan Baez ultimately apologized for this misjudgment after more than a million Cambodians had been annihilated. Less ethical liberals, like Robert Scheer, are still unrepentant and none the wiser. They now arrogantly seek to impose the same kind of peace on Israel that they advocated for Kampuchea. Scheer and others blame Ariel Sharon for being intransigent.
How does Mr. Sharon plan to revive the peace process if he refuses to acknowledge the Palestinian leadership and the national aspirations recognized by his predecessors? Why has he so casually dismissed the Saudi initiative at the Arab summit in Beirut?
--Joe Conason, New York Observer 4/6/02
Why is the unreasonable Prime Minister of Israel skeptical of the sincerity of our earnest Saudi friends in promoting a plan that many American liberals are enthusiastically embracing as the path to peace?
"...the (gentile) victim suffers dreadful torment - torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood-shedding with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend. After this barbaric display, the Jews take the spilled blood, in the bottle set in the bottom [of the needle-studded barrel], and the Jewish cleric makes his coreligionists completely happy on their (Passover) holiday when he serves them the pastries in which human blood is mixed."
--Al-Riyadh, The Official Daily Newspaper Of The Government Of Saudi Arabia 3/10/02
"Charities from Saudi Arabia and Qatar are also donating thousands of dollars in cash to funds that go to the (suicide) bombers' families. ..."
--Reuters 4/4/02
Syria would have to be an integral part of a comprehensive peace:
Mr.Assad said Palestinians were being murdered by "those who killed the principle of equality when they claimed God created a people distinguished above all other peoples. They try to kill all the principles of divine faiths with the same mentality of betraying Jesus Christ and torturing Him, and in the same way that they tried to commit treachery against the Prophet Mohammed."
--London Telegraph 5/7/01
And, of course, the rejectionist Palestinians would have to agree before the terror could stop:
Hamas wants Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank and Gaza, the dismantling of all Israeli settlements and full right of return for the four million Palestinians who live in other states. After that, the Jews could remain, living "in an Islamic state with Islamic law," Dr. Zahar said. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine."
Mr. Shenab insisted that he was not joking when he said, "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews."
--The New York Times 4/4/02
So, who is to be believed? The highly regarded liberal columnist Joe Conason, who says that peace with the Arabs is just waiting there for the belligerent Sharon to accept? Or the Arabs, who say that they want the Christ-killing kosher vampires dead/exported to America?
There is a Simpson Juror quality to the liberal consensus. Arafat has already said, "I want to kill the Jews and take their land." However, because he said it in Arabic instead of English, apparently it doesn't count. The liberal devotion to the peace process now transcends the liberal devotion to peace. Since discontinuing the peace process is deemed to be unthinkable, there is literally nothing that the Palestinians can do that would make them unworthy partners. Ergo, a Passover massacre, followed by Conason chastising Sharon for hesitating to negotiate with the degenerate whose functionary had just slaughtered twenty two people as they prayed.
In direct contrast to liberal orthodoxy, President Bill Clinton has blamed the Palestinians for the current conflict:


At left is the map showing the projection of the bridging proposals of U.S. President William J. Clinton, December, 2000. Dark Gray areas are currently Areas A and B of Palestinian control. Light Gray areas would become part of the Palestinian state. Gray-striped areas would become part of the Palestinian state after an interim period.
At right is the map showing the projection of the Israeli proposals of the government of PM Barak, December, 2000. Dark Gray areas are currently Areas A and B of Palestinian control. Light Gray areas would become part of the Palestinian state. Gray-striped areas would become part of the Palestinian state after an interim period.
Maps are adapted from www.fmep.org.
The Israelis accepted President Clinton's Middle East peace plan. The Palestinians rejected it. They refused to make a counterproposal. Arafat went home and declared war on Israel before Sharon visited the Temple Mount. The result has been Intifada II: Murdering Jewish Children At Passover Seders.
Clinton said, "The Palestinians have blown up the peace process."
The truth doesn't matter to Norman Solomon, a widely read liberal writer. He insists that the maps above, which give more than 95% of the West Bank to the Palestinians, constitute "apartheid". The idea that President Clinton advocated subjecting Palestinians to apartheid is an outrageous slander worthy of Kenneth Starr or Richard Mellon Scaife. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter when an ideologue is desperately searching for a way to exonerate Arafat for rejecting a homeland in favor of waging a campaign of murder against civilians.
It also doesn't matter that the Palestinians broke every agreement they made in Oslo; Israel still has to be coerced back to the negotiating table to give up land in exchange for nothing but more false promises. This must happen, no matter how many lives it costs, because the alternative is for liberals to grow up and face the grim truth that Yasser Arafat is a glorified Middle Eastern version of Charles Manson.
Indeed, Arafat's resume of carnage is far more extensive, ranging from slaughtering Olympic athletes, to flooding both Jordan and Lebanon with blood, to executing Palestinians who advocate peaceful coexistence with the Zionist Entity. Despite the highly selective indignation about how Ariel Sharon is "The Butcher of Sabra and Chatila", Arafat has killed thousands more Palestinians than has Sharon, and he has killed more Israelis than has Sharon, and he has killed more Americans, and more Jordanians, and more Lebanese...Yet predictably, as Carter National Security advisor Zbignew Brzezinski said in comparing the two earlier this week, Sharon is "brutal", while Arafat is "elusive".
It also doesn't matter that, if by rewarding people who use suicide bombing to advance their agenda, irrespective of the validity of that agenda, the inevitable result will be the widespread use of suicide bombing to achieve the goals of various aggrieved groups. According to Gene Lyons of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, "Apologists for slaughter make fine distinctions between Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli tank commanders who bulldoze civilian homes and kill children with land mines."
One important distinction is that Israeli tank commanders are unlikely to ever target civilians in the United States. For the average American, the current violence in the Middle East has less to do with the respective flaws of the brutal Israelis or the persecuted Palestinians. The more relevant concern is whether suicide bombing is about to be perceived by disaffected people around the world as a viable means to an end. As soon as it is, then kiss what's left of American democracy goodbye.
If an epidemic of suicide bombing reaches America, the people of this country will not show "restraint". The liberals now exuding empathy for suicide bombers who slaughter four year old Jewish girls in Netanya will be less empathetic when it is their own daughters who are blown to Hell while browsing at the mall. If September 11 set any precedent, then even the truth-averse "We Show Our Opposition To Suicide Bombing By Bashing Israel" crowd will temporarily be willing to hold Arab terrorists accountable for their own behavior.
By that time, it will be too late to save whatever civil liberties we have left. Once Americans are afraid to leave their homes because of the arrival to our shores of Arafat's noble pizzeria munitions squad, the Constitution is guaranteed to be an early fatality.
It will be a considerable irony if liberal support for the Palestinians translates into suicide bombings in America that lead to the suspension of the Bill Of Rights. Who needs a lunatic like John Ashcroft to grease the skids for the destruction of our civil liberties when you've got a swell guy like Michael Moore to do it for you? Moore knows that the Middle East problem is exclusively the fault of the Israelis, and he thinks it's extremely clever to compare them to Hitler, Torquemada, Pharaoh, or name-your-anti-Semite. His solution to the suicide bombings is to give the Palestinians everything they demand, aka:
Attention: World Terror Groups!
Suicide Bombing Is Good. Suicide Bombing Is Right. Suicide Bombing Works.
When the subject is Israel, many otherwise honest people have a visceral conflict with reality. The fact that Israel has maintained a democracy in the face of fifty four years of one September 11 style atrocity after another does not impress some liberal Americans. All they see are the imperfections of the Jewish state. Conversely, many of them are blind to overwhelming evidence that Arafat is a savagely corrupt murderer who retains power by killing Palestinian dissidents. The peace movement on the West Bank consists of the corpses of "collaborators", with collaborator having an operational definition of someone who expresses the same views voiced by Israel's Peace Now Movement. If pious mugwumps like Joe Conason were correct when they contend that Arafat and Sharon are morally equivalent, then the streets of Tel Aviv would be littered with thousands of dead liberal Jews who dared to disagree with their prime minister.
As with the American corporate media, however, facts are to be ignored in favor of the story line. Israel is Brutal. Palestinians are Persecuted. Any evidence that deviates from this psuedo reality must be dismissed as "pandering to the Jews". Therefore, most people are unaware that Arafat has ordered the execution of Palestinians for advocating a peaceful resolution to this conflict:


These are Associated Press photographs. They were available to the "pro-Israel" American media, which chose to spike them.
It used to be that progressives opposed killing people who advocated peaceful coexistence, but apparently this is a more swashbuckling era of liberalism. It is currently unknown whether these deceased Palestinian peace activists were provided with access to legal counsel before Arafat's murderers blew them away. If you look hard, you can see that this carnage was actually the Jews' fault.
Can't see it. Look harder. Virtually every prominent mainstream liberal columnist and commentator can see it.

It is sad that, while Rush Limbaugh is supporting the only country in the region that practices "One Man, One Vote", the liberal consensus is sympathetic to a regime that practices the governing philosophy of "One Dissident, One Rope".
Of course, the liberal pundits don't put it like that. They put it like this:
"I don't approve of Arafat, but the solution to the problem is to step on the Israelis and force them to withdraw from the West Bank."
--Former State Department Official Edward S. Walker 3/31/02
English Translation: "I want to punish Israel."
Walker employed the standard format of the American left. They issue a perfunctory criticism of Arafat, whose homicidal depravity is "regrettable" or "unfortunate". Then, they launch into a spirited attack on their real target, the Naziesque Israelis. In fairness, they have not bombed synagogues or desecrated Jewish cemeteries, as peace loving pro-Palestinian activists are now doing throughout Europe.
Liberals have had moments of greater moral clarity than they are currently experiencing. They used to admire Dr. Martin Luther King's doctrine of nonviolent resistance, as opposed to Jesse Jackson's rationalization for slaughtering pedestrians. Dr. King told his oppressed people that there was no excuse for using their own frustration and rage to justify inflicting violence on their adversaries. Rev. Jackson said last week that he "certainly understood the Palestinian need for revenge. (It is wrong, but) they are desperate."
They are so desperate that, according to President Clinton, they turned down their own nation, along with the recognition and the foreign aid that went with it. It is, in fact, their apologists who are desperate to somehow explain away the vision of Palestinians dancing ecstatically in the streets to celebrate their latest successful massacre of innocent Jewish children. By contrast, Israelis and Americans grieve when their militaries accidentally kill children. Liberals who support the Palestinians have the unenviable task of constantly being in the position of defending the indefensible on behalf of those who celebrated the bombing of the World Trade Center.
If the Palestinians were sincere about wanting their own state, there is an absolute surefire way for them to get it: Lay down their arms and tell the Israeli people that they are ready to live in peace. That's all it takes, and that's all it's ever taken. Golda Meir proposed returning the West Bank one week after obtaining it during the 1967 War. The prerequisite was mutual recognition and peace, so the Arabs said no. This, along with Arafat's rejection of the 2000 Clinton Plan, are documented facts that Conason and company must steadfastly ignore in order to arrive at the conclusion that both sides are to blame. A convoluted sense of fairness might dictate blaming both sides, but such fairness is less important than honesty.
In defiance of all logic and reason, the liberal consensus is that Israel is intransigent. This is an article of faith that is sustained only by ignoring that, when Sadat offered to stop killing Israelis, they returned the Sinai to him. Now, there is word out of Cairo that Egypt is again considering a war against Israel. There have not been any confirmed reports as to whether, if the Egyptians decide to violate their peace treaty by attacking the Israelis, Mubarak will feel ethically compelled to adhere to the inverse spirit of "Land for Peace" by handing back the Sinai to Sharon.
"Land for Peace", which is the foundation of the liberal consensus on the Middle East, has the potential to work as well for the Israelis in the long term as it has for the Native Americans. Israel has survived for five decades only because the Jews have outfought the Arabs. When that changes, treaties or no treaties, Israel will cease to exist.
In the event that the Palestinians ever desire peaceful coexistence, Ariel Sharon would face overwhelming pressure from his own war weary people to reach an agreement. He would either offer something like the Clinton Plan, or be replaced by someone who would. The United States would provide generous financial support to a Palestinian state, as would the European Union. Together, the Israelis and the Palestinians would enjoy unprecedented peace and prosperity.
There's just one problem with this vision, a problem that makes it a hopeless fantasy. If the Palestinians agreed to coexist with Israel, then they would never get what they constantly tell each other they really want. From the day Israel was born, the Palestinians have irrationally created agony for themselves and others by insisting on the expulsion of a neighbor who is never going away. Although their supporters in America deceitfully continue to deny the true aspirations of the Palestine liberation movement, all of the suffering on both sides of this conflict is the result of the sick and destructive pipedream that adorns walls throughout the West Bank:
