As always with Israel posts, the debate began too fast for me to get involved. (These posts must do wonders for your traffic, yes?) I'll confine myself to the original.

So here's your discussion question: wasn't the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal that "unilateral" movements toward withdrawal are inherently dangerous and counter-productive? Recall that the PA was in full control of Gaza after the Israelis left. Hamas took over in only weeks of fighting. Do you believe the same could not happen in the West Bank? If not, why not?

i found the angriest picture of myself i could. that seemed to make it work.

testing?

ED said: "Oh, and really clever use of the $ symbol. I’ve never seen that before…."

But credit where it's due for the use of url to hammer home the point yes?

Seems like 'the sea' needs a metaphorical representation as well, yes? Nationalization maybe?

ED are you flame-baiting me?

I just wrote a thirty-page essay on why the Palestinians are like Macs because they are overpriced, and why the Israelis are like Macs because they are chalk-white European colonists.

"problems white people have"

you probably only need to read the url:
http://somepolitical.blogspot.com/2009/04/prosecute.html

can't get pandora in Israel, either, it's been a terrible shame.  Though I understand they're having some serious financial trouble, and perhaps soon you won't be getting them in the US, either.

I used Pandora in college a ton, and as I understood it their algorithm is based directly on the 'sound' of what you're hearing, not on any artist information--so you should be fine voting down covers by artists you don't like.  An alternative is last.fm, which functions nearly the same way but does base its ratings on artist info.  (And Roque, you may want to check out that one; it works in Israel, and I'm guessing Mexico, as well.)

yeah, ED, I agree with you that the counterargument is that it's not at all clear how military action against Iran actually shuts down a nuclear program.  I just wanted us to keep our eye on the ball w/r/t the danger posed by that program.  Nobody is suggesting (perhaps outside of Netanyahu, and in his case I will also play the 'it's bluster' card) that Iran would be stupid or crazy enough to directly strike Israel.  The problem is Iran's lengthy and deadly history of passive-aggressive fueling of terrorist groups that are barely under its control.

As an exercise, you might extend the same level of disbelief to Netanyahu.  (I'm not sure why you're including Lieberman in this discussion.  I understand that you don't like him, and I share your feeling, but he has nothing to do with Iran; in Israel, foreign policy and defense policy are totally separate, and you can rest easy that Iran falls fully into the latter category.)  It doesn't seem unfathomable to me that Netanyahu's violent, somewhat illogical rhetoric is a message sent to Iran that reads something like this: "I don't care if you launder a nuke through ten shadow groups before it lands in Israel.  We're still crazy enough to hit you directly."

The concern is not that Iran will launch a nuclear strike against Israel.  The concern is that Iran will give a small terrorist organization a nuclear warhead or warheads to launch at its discretion--preventing Israel from retaliating against Iran while doing massive damage to Israeli infrastructure/populace.

Goldberg may be too quick to react, but the notion that he is attempting to 'shut off debate' is beyond laughable, and well illustrates the (not surprising) fact that Katherine has not actually read any of Goldberg's writing on the subject. Accusations of anti-Semitism as a tool to shut off debate? At what point do accusations of accusations of anti-Semitism become the same thing for the other side?

As for your pathetic apology for violence against civilians, Katherine, it speaks for itself.

ok

no, I meant in a line like this: "He’ll just continue to hold largely sensible views on Israel and scold everyone else who does the same"

who is the everyone else supposed to be? Roth or Churchill? (Or both?)

Are you referring to Roth, or Caryl Churchill? Do you consider Churchill's views on Israel 'sensible'?

John says:
"I agree that in a perfect world (for instance, the type of world in which torture never happened in the first place) Bush Administration officials would be held accountable for their actions. But I think prosecuting a previous administration is a very, very bad idea. If outgoing administration officials believe they will be prosecuted by political opponents upon leaving office, they are likely to engage in wide-scale document destruction, refuse to assist the incoming administration transition, or, worst case, resist transition."

Are these risks greater than those incurred by telling future administrations (and the current one) that their flagrant violations of habeas corpus, the right to privacy, and the laws of war will go unpunished? I understand your concern but it absolutely pales in comparison to the risk we run of unchecked executive power if serious prosecutions are not pursued against the Bush administration. You'll have to do better.

John also says:
"Torture is a terrible thing; but it's not deliberate murder of innocent civilians who were no where near a combat zone. "

Torture may not be as bad as 9/11, though outside of ED's exaggeration (however great) I don't know why that needs to be or should be our benchmark. But it certainly WAS murder of people who certainly WERE civilians, people who were in a 'combat zone' only insofar as they happened to be somewhere inside Iraq or neighboring countries. (A tough criterion to beat for the vast majority of them.)

Was that murder deliberate? Depends on your sense of the word. Is it a 'deliberate' murder when a guy gets loaded at a bar, tries to drive home, and plows into another car, killing someone? He never set out to kill anybody -- yet he engaged in incredibly dangerous behavior that displayed a willful disregard for the safety of others. Not a simple call.

So the argument is that, because during an unprecedented period of civil war 150 years ago the president suspended habeas corpus, it is now permissible to secretly suspend it for any given reason? How novel. The race to see who can be more jaded about American history is inevitably a race to the bottom; I have no interest in engaging in it, and it seems to me that anyone who does is not only myopic, but perhaps a bit nihilistic, as well.

The Obama administration could very easily temper accusations of partisanship by increasing oversight of its own prosecution of the war on terror as it pursued criminal charges against Bush administration officials. That they will not do this is, as you say, all but a given. But that doesn't mean we are required to pat them on the back for not even trying.

Not that these guys don't richly deserve the humiliation, but does this make anyone else uncomfortable from a national sovereignty perspective?

Will, you beat me to it, but I was just going to say: it's very sad to me to see guys like Goldberg dragged through the mud by liberals, because he's doing a great deal in the service of a liberal vision of Israel and Palestine. I thought it was sad when Glenn Greenwald did it over a meaningless, flip remark, and I think it's sad when Freddie does it over a meaningless, flip remark.

It's a big mistake to try to reduce Hamas, Hizbollah, and other resistance movements to simple Islamist terror groups, and doing so does Israel and the US no favors. And it shouldn't take you long to see that when you simply proclaim that these organizations operate from an intractable 'world-view' that cannot moderate, you are engaging in the same idle and ill-informed speculation of which you're always accusing ED. Exactly why do you believe that, unlike all other militant-political movements in the world, it's the Arab ones that are utterly in thrall to principle?

We need only consider Hizbollah during the Gaza war to see the manifest falsity in your notion of an apolitical extremist group. Hizbollah made a conscious, political choice, as an organization, not to strike Israel in the north. The way you describe the mindset of Hizbollah and Hamas leadership, we should be expecting all war, all the time. Yet this doesn't happen. So are you wrong, or did these two groups just forget how ideological they are supposed to be?

As for negotiation with elements within these groups that want to cease violence, or have ceased violence -- the saga of never-ending violence in the Middle East owes a great deal to the notion that parties seeking to renounce violence aren't dangerous, and therefore aren't worth talking to. Besides the obvious problem that this attitude is an incentive for extremists in Hamas to *continue* violence, it is incredibly short-sighted to imagine that anyone in Hamas will be content to forgo violence for very long. Hamas doesn't believe that if they fire enough rockets, Israel will disintegrate. They fire rockets precisely because of people like you, who incoherently condemn their violence on the one hand, and advocate ignoring them and cutting them out of the political process on the other.

"a decade’s peace in exchange for the aforementioned, perhaps even more."

Would you be in favor of Hamas declaring a permanent truce with Israel in exchange for a promise that Israel removes its West Bank settlers for ten years -- and possibly longer? Just curious.

Roque, you should also read that link. There is a 'political wing' of Hizbollah, although as Abu whatshisname rightly points out, both the political and militant wings answer to the same authority.

Hamas is structured similarly, although with the recent violence the old organization is fraying as the party seems like it may be getting ready to split, with a moderate faction breaking off from Khaled Meshaal's harder line.

I thought the main substantive point of that link, ED, was to remind us that, while it may in principle be sound to engage diplomatically with enemy entities, that's presuming we have something they want -- which for Hizbollah, unlike Hamas (and perhaps Iran) is manifestly not the case.

An interesting counterpoint for your reading pleasure: http://abumuqawama.blogspot.com/2009/03/cohen-on-hizballah.html

The senate is out of step with the American people on a wide number of issues, not just the Gaza operation. When it comes to a vote on a symbolic gesture, are senators going to analyze the newest opinion polls, or lean toward Israel when they know that, generally speaking, Americans are more supportive of Israelis and Palestinians?

I disagree with Roque's suggestion that Walt and Mearsheimer are the equivalent of the Protocols, but I too am getting more and more frustrated by this new insistence to read the dark work of AIPAC in every set of tea leaves coming our way. To answer Andrew's hypothetical -- yes, there are many other explanations. And not to do the unthinkable and suggest that any of us is capable of stereotyping, but maybe it's time to take a step back and ask yourself why you're so quick to see legislative manipulation, when a far more likely cause is simply the slowness of representative government to react to the fickle opinions of the country.

I'm reading Watchmen for the first time right now. (The movie hype reminded me that it was something I'd always meant to take a look at.) You're right about the self-conscious artiness of it (although I find it cute, in a way -- it's the kind of thing I would have really dug in high school.)

That said I do think it has its moments. I haven't finished the series yet but there are lots of funny little reinterpretations of the superhero conceit. A recent favorite: two of the superheroes sleep together, and then have an exhilarating return to the masked life that they left behind. Afterwards, one says to the other something like 'now I know what we've got to do: break [blank] out of prison!' The shot is panned out to the exterior of their heroic ship, and for a moment no one speaks. The, lady hero: '...What?'

It's a nice send-up of the absurdity in the superhero story of a sudden consciousness of the mission-at-hand, and it's done subtly and humorously. I don't suppose that will convince you to see you way out of the boring 'get off my lawn'-ness of this post, but just thought I would put it out there.