So is schools, medicare, the Middle East, multiculturalism, fiscal policy, and sustainable development - all serious as a heart attack. But an asshole is still an asshole.

I feel like we're still not on the same page but I have to get back to my regular job. Maybe we can tweet it out later, like men.

Me neither, but I found Beauchamp's defense of them at least partially persuasive, and I found Freddie to be as nasty and uncharitable as ever. Maybe that's influencing my tilt here, I'm not sure, since I agree with you on a lot of the substance.

I'll group two responses together here.

"He’s making critics of Libya equivalent to the brokers of war in Iraq. In other words, he’s saying that anyone who opposed Libya is *just as wrong* as anyone who thought we should invade Iraq."

Yes, that much I'll grant you and I'll also side with you in disagreeing with it. Clearly, the Libya issue is not resolved when the issue itself is a legal one, not a tactical one. So on that count Beauchamp is making a false equivalence, which is a huge pain in the ass and one of my least favorite fallacies. All I was trying to say is that he is *not* calling for the excommunication of Libya critics, which appeared to be your takeaway.

"Okay but give me a freaking break. Who is banishing it from right-thinking debate? Do you honestly think the non-interventionists have the upper hand here? Really? I mean, we didn’t stop Libya did we? This is insane. If that’s what he’s doing, he’s doing it as a back-handed way to spread bullshit about his opponents. Nobody is calling for shunning of anything. He’s creating a false equivalency under terms that don’t exist in the real world."

I'm not sure how you could have lived through the aughts with a politically active mind and honestly not heard calls for this writer or that politician to be banished from polite society for supporting Iraq. I don't have the energy or time to prove it to you, though. I'll just say that there is a difference between the rhetoric that flies around these events, and the structural issues that make us more or less likely to go to war. The former is a lot more fungible than the latter.

If no one is calling for shunning I again award you the point, but only on the condition that you include Beauchamp in 'no one.' He may be a little false equivalence machine but I don't think he is asking us to shun you as you think he is.

He is not defending them on the substance of the Libya issue, he is defending their right to be wrong and still participate in public debate. Or rather, he is not so much defending them in this instance as illustrating a broader point, that one can be wrong without being a bastard.

I think you are adding in a lot of context that's not really there. I've been reading these updates pretty closely and I don't really see Beauchamp pounding the Libya drum the same way you seem to. I could be wrong, obviously. But I can see how you might read this post (including a number of grammatical and word choice errors that are making it unnecessarily hard to decode) as more of an attack if you begin from the assumption that the writer is on the war path.

As I read his post, he is reminding us of the more militant critics of the Iraq war, who demanded that right-thinking people excommunicate those who supported that action. He draws an equivalence by pointing out that many of these same critics denounced the Libya action as folly, and then asks rhetorically whether they too will now be excommunicated for being wrong. But as I understand the final line, this is clearly a rhetorical gesture. The implied answer is that no, these critics should not be excommunicated - just as supporters of Iraq should not have been. The ironic thrust is that a bit of self-examination on these critics' part might reveal to them that it is inappropriate to try to ban public thinkers from the discourse merely for disagreement.

I do take your narrower (or broader, depending on how you look at it I guess) point that in this case, most of these critics were not conditioning their opposition to Libya on the fate of the regime, but rather on its legality. (And this is where I stand as well.) But Beauchamp's point and that one can both stand - many critics of Libya are more concerned about what is happening in our government than what is happening there, AND it is wrong to exile people with a lot of ideas just because once in awhile they have bad ones.

I highlighted that particular line in your post because you seemed to be taking it at face value, when it seems clearly to be meant ironically from where I am sitting.

"Zack Beauchamp wants us to renounce our own credibility because Gaddafi fell."

Seems pretty clear the point of his post is the exact opposite of this. It's a thought that has crossed my mind as well, most frequently when reading Juan Cole, who has continued to defend the Libya action even after a sordid history of demanding the scalps of writers he disagreed with over Iraq.

I opposed Libya and think it was shameful, whatever the results there. And I'm not usually one to scold a writer for expressing a little passion. But I think you're having trouble articulating your thoughts clearly here and I think it's because you're too angry about this at the moment. Freddie has managed to make himself a tiny career on that kind of writing, but in my opinion you read a lot better when you're more calm.

"contribution" is a major stretch, man

I thought that was a really disappointing contribution for Andrew to highlight.

For one thing it's all but impossible that Wall doesn't know of Israel's sizable ethnic minorities. Even minimally educated American Jews are aware of this, in my experience. They may not know the exact proportion of Jews to non-Jews, but they are acutely aware of Israeli Arab, Druze, Bedouin, and other citizens. The members of these minorities serve in Israeli civil service, the IDF, the Knesset, and the Supreme Court.

I won't speak for Wall but when I use the language he used in his post, about being unwilling to walk away even during times of fierce disagreement, I most certainly include all Israelis in that sentiment, and that means non-Jews as well. Even if I were motivated purely by tribalism (and I'm not, as Wall took some pains to explain here - like just about any Jew I know, I care about human rights as an end in themselves), the status and treatment of minority groups in Israel is an obvious cachet for the state of Jewish moral living.

Nicely put. I emailed a similar clarification to Andrew but this was better, I hope he picks it up. This parable is among my very favorites.

Like you I was saddened by Benedikt omitting it, as it's the essence of the Seder in my opinion. Why else would we sit around the table and eat the horrible bread, if not to demonstrate that shared communal experience is our personal responsibility?

That said, I'm also surprised at the surprise that greeted her over this. In my view, Reform Jews and those further left have made all sorts of changes to the liturgy that are, if not as depressing, nonetheless considerable. I'm thinking particularly of the replacement of "mchayeh hameytim" with "mchayeh hakol" in the Amidah, and the omission of a large section of the full Shma; where the former is a response to a lack of belief in traditional Jewish theology, and the latter is a suspension of law. It seems like the precedent is certainly there.

And *another* note: Ethan Bronner's round-up of Israeli reaction to Netanyahu's visit is a must-read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/world/middleeast/26mideast.html?_r=2

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you they're speaking for the 'majority' of Israelis when they refuse to consider the '67 borders.

That would be one way to prove it's a spurious charge, yes.

Luckily, the IDF is a bit more than an armed mob, and there are actual memos, diplomatic cables, orders dispatched, etc. that researchers have access to. These paint a pretty clear picture of the aftershocks of both those wars, in which above all else the IDF was improvising strategy as problems arose.

To my knowledge he has always supported withdrawal, but post-Gaza, pre-post-Mubarak, he was writing more and more often that he was not sure he believed peace was possible any longer.

And this is a niggling detail, but "transfer" as I've described it above didn't happen in 1970, or 1948 for that matter. There were groups of Palestinians that were expelled from their homes (as well as groups, including Mahmoud Abbas's family, that left of their own volition out of fear). But all of the evidence confirms that these situations were incidental, the unpredictable consequences of war. I have personally never seen anything that suggests Israel engaged in a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing, which is what "transfer" means.

Just a quick note: Mr. Gorenberg (whose book I recommended above) is today's bloggingheads feature: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/36392

I'm not an Israeli but lived and worked there for a time. My personal investment is the same as any Jew, I have friends and family that live there and I care about them. I also have Palestinian friends and I care about them as well.

The whole point of Mark's original post is to illustrate the existential need for a Palestinian state. Calling the 1967 borders "suicidal", in addition to being tactically wrong and sensational, is also a category error. The only suicidal option on the table at this juncture is not seizing on the '67 borders.

The rest of your arguments are irrelevant or addressed elsewhere in these comments. No one cares a whit how the '67 borders came about or who struck first - the point is that they are what we have now, and they are what Israel is going to have to work with going forward. As Mark already pointed out, this is a widely acknowledged reality from at least the past 10 years, if not longer, by Israeli, American, and Palestinian heads of state.

What on earth are you talking about? Are you trying to retroactively justify more than *40 years* of occupation based on the 2006 vote?

Try to keep a civil sensibility and I'll take care of my tongue. Only one of us is condemning an entire nation of people to indefinite statelessness and occupation because he can't get his history straight.

Read it: http://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empire-Israel-Settlements-1967-1977/dp/0805082417/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306366764&sr=8-1

You are beyond ignorant. The Jordanian king struggled for decades to get the West Bank back after '67, and never succeeded. The settlement enterprise began in earnest before 1970 and never ceased.

And yet, in your refusal to think rationally about the need for a Palestinian state, you condemn Israel to precisely the conditions under which Lebanon exploded.

This is a very good point. Israel is suffering from dozens of civil rights infringements against its own citizens because of its lack of a constitution. It's a real crisis.

I don't think it will give you a viable single state, though. There is too much enmity between Jews and Arabs in the region. Any individual rights enshrined now could be easily revoked were the government to be majority Arab, for one thing.

But frankly it would never even get to that point. If Arabs ever become a voting majority in Israel, there will be a civil war.

The premise is not bizarre. Indeed there are already popular movements in Nabi Saleh, Sheikh Jarrah, and other cities and towns that are harnessing political, nonviolent power to protest Palestinians' complete lack of human/civil rights in the West Bank. If you don't believe they are already having the conversation about how to obtain the right to vote, you are dreaming.

The demographic tension is not about how many humans of x ethnicity live in y place - it's about how many humans of x ethnicity are living without the right to vote. It's an image and international law issue, not an impending-physical-violence issue.

A unilateral withdrawal completely solves the issue. Withdrawal is not about negotiating the "right of return" because Israel doesn't *need* to negotiate it. Israel holds all the cards: it controls the borders and has an army leaps and bounds larger and more advanced than anything Palestinians could hope for in 100 years.

The point of ending occupation (besides that fact that it's unjust and morally reprehensible) is to restore Israel's standing in the global community and solve its impending identity crisis. It has nothing to do with strategic defense. That's what the Middle East's most effective army, combined with it's strategic military advantage underwritten by the world's most powerful nation, is for.

It's a red line for Palestinian negotiators, and the Israelis have no particular reason to want it. As I understand it, moving people back and forth between Gaza and the West Bank within a two-state framework is actually not one of the bigger challenges in the negotiations.

That's why you don't hear much about it: no one has an incentive to push it, and it's the kind of thing that makes a lot more sense on paper than in reality.

I want to add one more to my list. There is a certain stream of "moderate" center-right thinking (this one is more popular among Israelis than Americans in my experience) that posits a couple of things:

a. The demographic issue is real; but
b. There will never (really, never) be peace in the Middle East; therefore
c. The situation vis-a-vis the Palestinians will continue to evolve unpredictably and cannot be managed, either by a two-state resolution or by any other means

This is the nihilist-fatalist position and in some ways it is more disturbing to me even than the "transfer" people. I think Jeff Goldberg was actually moving in this direction himself - but the Arab Spring seems to have turned him around, at least for now.

The other popular (among American Jews) purveyor of this position is Daniel Gordis, who I think directs the Shalem Center, a neoconservative stalking horse that is trying to establish itself as an Israeli answer to the generation of true believers that brought America the Iraq war.

I have had lengthy conversations with moderately religious Jews who hold this viewpoint. It is astonishing to me that they are able to resign themselves to endless war even as they prostrate themselves on Yom Kippur to beg God for, above all else, peace in this world. I don't think I'll ever understand them, but in fairness I don't think they understand themselves.

You left out a couple of popular right-wing ideas:

1. "There is no such thing as Palestine/Palestinians are actually Jordanians" and variations thereof. Under this formulation, Israel is saved from being an "apartheid state" because it is occupying and suppressing a foreign population that has a country elsewhere. This is absolution in name only (and not even name for a rational observer), but many right-wingers cling to it because it avoids their having to acknowledge....

2. "Transfer," also known as ethnic cleansing. The Israeli electorate as a whole is actually to the left of American Jews (at least concerning Palestine), but its far right is far more vicious than anything American Jews have produced. One of their most odious ideas/aspirations is a forced transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan, a "long march" of millions of people.

Beyond their offensive immorality, neither of these options could ever actually apply to the real world, but they are popular forms of rhetorical retreat for right-wingers.

You are completely correct on the fundamentals, though: the right-wing has no plan whatsoever on Israel - neither here or over there. Most of them are older and actually clueless about the demography. Those that understand it...just don't care, I guess? I've never really been able to figure them out, except for a sneaking suspicion that a not-small number of them would not mind an apartheid state one bit if Arabs were on the receiving end.

I can't say I have ever gone to sleep with one belief and woken up with its opposite. Does that happen? Seems like we reserve the word 'revelation' for things like that, which I have not ever had.