he said lots of good stuff ! http://www.pragmora.com

We love you John McCain!  You are the most beloved candidate we have ever seen in our lifetimes, and you are hearing that from a Californian who knows you mean what you say!

“REFORM, PROSPERITY, PEACE”

Breaking off the WIRE! Click and go!

“…I’ve been a great admirer of his … and look forward to meeting an individual who is a transcendent international role model and hero,” the White House hopeful said ahead of the meeting in Aspen, Colorado.

“And I have admired him and respected him for the efforts he’s made on behalf of freedom of the people of Tibet but also all over the world,” McCain told reporters…”

IMAGE FROM: http://www.images-photography-pictures.net/Dalai_Lama.htm

Gershom Gorenberg

Dov, the guy who owns the hole-in-the-wall computer lab, explained to Elliott and me that the operating system was only in English; he didn’t have Arabic Windows. As for service, he said, that would be no problem, "as long as he brings it here."

Unfortunately, Muhammad Abu Arkub, to whom we were delivering the computer, has about as much chance as getting a permit to enter Jerusalem for a computer repair as he does of getting back his wife’s gold. Dov wasn’t being snide. He’s the old-fashioned gruff kind of guy who curses about everything and then puts in twice the work fixing your computer that he planned and charges no more, and would be embarrassed if you mentioned it. But the village of Wadi al-Shajneh, in the South Hebron Hills, is beyond where he does service calls. He was surprised when Elliott explained why we were buying the computer. "And you with a kipah ," he said. Not that he objected to what we were doing.

Elliott read about Muhammad in a Ha’aretz article by Gideon Levy, a few days after we went to Hebron to give a washing machine to Ghassan Burqan. If you read my previous post (Journey to Hebron: Nightmares and Hope ), you’ll remember that Ghassan had bought his own washing machine and was carrying it to his home in the Israeli-controlled side of Hebron when he was stopped by Border Police, beat up and arrested. The machine disappeared. In memory of our late friend Gerald Cromer, Elliott decided we should bring Ghassan a replacement.

Muhammad’s home was searched by soldiers who arrived at midnight. They said they were looking for weapons. The search lasted two hours. Muhammad, his wife Lubna, their two small daughters, and Muhammad’s younger brother Rami were all kept under guard in Rami’s home – a single-room shack built onto the side of Muhammad’s house. When the search was over, and the family rushed back into the main house, they found their computer and television smashed. And, they say, the jewelry box where Lubna kept her gold was gone.

Rami ran to where the soldiers’ jeeps were parked, sat down in one, and demanded the gold. Normally a Palestinian could expect arrest for such behavior. Instead, the soldiers pushed him out and left. I measure that as oblique, partial evidence confirming a theft took place: Arresting Rami might have required explaining the incident to higher-ups, and Rami would told why he jumped it in the jeep.

A gift of gold, from groom to bride, is part of Palestinian wedding customs. It’s not just for beauty; it’s a financial asset for emergencies. Muhammad, 24, had given Lubna 200 grams of gold, 7 ounces, over $6,000 at today’s prices.

According to Levy, the B’Tselem human rights organization has testimony of a dozen or so similar incidents in the area in recent months. I want to be careful: A complaint isn’t proof. (Muhammad filed a complaint with the Israeli police in Hebron. Unfortunately, there’s very little chance that the investigation will lead anywhere and that he’ll ever get answers.) If these reports are true, a small number of soldiers are exploiting the opportunies for corruption provided by the occupation, which has created a realm of "ein din ve’ein dayan," as Talmudic texts say: No judge and no justice. Give young men guns and power to search homes to stop terror attacks, and have a "justice" system that ignores abuses, because the abuses are against people who lack the vote and are therefore transparent politically – and you will get abuses. The answer, ultimately, is to end occupation.

After the search: The remains of Muhammad’s computer

With the ultimate not scheduled soon, Elliot suggested that we replace Muhammad’s computer. We had donations left over for the washing machine from my friends at Kehillat Yedidya, our progressive Orthodox congregation. The gold was beyond our means, but we could do what we could, with the thought after all that were Gerald around, he would have done it. Yehiel, who works for Rabbis for Human Rights, drove again: Three men with graying beards and skullcaps, driving south, out on Highway 60, on a hot June morning, past the roadblocks, past the red tile roofs of Efrat stretched out in suburban comfort over the terraced hills between the Palestinian villages. The road looped east past Kiryat Arba and Hebron. At junctions near Palestinian villages stood tall pillboxes: cylinders of grey concrete with gun slits at the top, like chess pieces placed on the board of the south Hebron Hills, to show that player with the grey pieces controls the board.

At one checkpoint near the settlement of Otniel, we picked up Musa, the B’Tselem field worker. Then we turned into the Palestinian town of Dura. Muhammad has a barber shop there. The main street is well kept; new stores and apartment buildings have been built recently. A truck with Palestinian plates and the word "Spring" in Hebrew on the side – the name of a soft-drink brand – was delivering to local grocery stores: Musa says the town is relatively prosperous, so the amount of gold that a young man buys his bride is known to be large there, and in the neighboring villages, like Wadi al-Shajneh.

Muhammad’s house is a small one on a dirt road. He invited us to sit in Rami’s shack: a bed on one wall, pillows around the others on the floor for guests. On one wall Rami had taped a photo of himself and some cut-out pictures of beautiful women, clothed but provocative: A bachelor’s room. On the small stereo he had a disc that appeared to be Islamicist speeches. The room was a small village museum to the infinite contradictions of the human soul. Yakut, Muhammad’s three-year-old daughter, danced around the room looking at us. She had curls, and tiny stud earings.

Muhammad and his daughter with Musa and the new computer

This was the difference between Wadi al-Shajneh and Hebron: In Hebron, a three-year-old Palestinian had to be told that the bearded men who’d come in the house were not settlers, that one need not fear them. In the village, the child was unafraid, despite the night of the search. Musa said that Otniel is a quiet settlement. The settlers of Hebron and Kiryat Arba are known as violent, and the ones from the outpost of Havat Maon are "criminals." On Highway 60, settler drivers sometimes try to run Palestinians off the road. But inside Wadi al-Shajneh a three-year-old had not yet learned to hate or fear. This a reason for hope: A generation of Jews and Palestinians might be born who could live without fearing each other.

Elliott had brought a bracelet for Lubna, Muhammad’s wife. He didn’t say where or how he got it. Muhammad took it to her. She appeared at the door, dressed full length in black, wearing a head scarf and a beautiful smile, and thanked us and vanished. The three strangers sit with the master of the house, and the woman is in the tent, Elliott said. And from here, I asked, do we go to take the measure of Sodom, and what should we report?

Muhammad said that before the Israeli search in his house, he’d been called in several times by the Palestinian security services for questioning. On the Israeli side this is called effective cooperation. On the Palestinian side the word to be used would be "collaboration" and it cracks the legitimacy of Abu Mazen’s regime.

I am glad about any bombs found before they find their way to Jerusalem or Beersheba. But security measures, especially harsh ones, without the hope of a political solution – without the hope of the occupation ending – are like healing the skin over a deep wound. Beneath the healing, the abcess festers and the poison spreads.

The destroyed computer and TV were still in the yard. The computer had been pulled from its case; the fan hung out to one side. The TV was a black frame with no screen. Mute relics, unable to provide testimony to anything but force and speed.

Elliott explained to Musa and Muhammad what the technical papers in Hebrew said. Muhammad would have to get an Arabic operating system, he said. He said we’d brought this as mitzvah. Muhammad, who’d once worked in construction inside Israel, before the second intifada, didn’t remember that Hebrew word till Elliott said that "Allah wants…" and then Muhammad shook his head "yes."

Then we shook hands, and waved to Yakut, and drove back through hillsides, terraced with vineyards and olive groves, the twice-loved hills waiting for human beings to stop fighting over them like two angry young men who think the way to show love is jealousy and fists.

Haim Watzman

I recall a gathering of journalists once many years ago at which a well-meaning but clueless intern told me that she worked in “Jerusalem, Israel” and then quickly corrected herself: “I meant just Jerusalem. I believe it should be an international city.”

In response to my Jerusalem Day post earlier this week, DanH asks a related question:

It has always seemed to me that, given the claims of both sides, the only long-term solution for Jerusalem is joint or autonomous administration, not just of the holy places, but of the whole city.

To idealists, and to some overwhelmed by the intractability of the Jerusalem problem, internationalization and joint Israeli-Palestinian rule over the Holy City sound like wonderful solutions. But, quite aside from the practical problems (recall Danzig, recall Trieste), they are wrong in principle.

Why? Because they give neither the Jews nor the Arabs what they want and need-ownership and sovereignty in the city they see as their capital.

Those two words, “ownership” and “sovereignty,” sound primitive and selfish to idealistic peaceniks. But that’s only because such people think the whole concept of national and religious identity is primitive and selfish. Enlightened humans, such people believe, don’t need such divisive things as religious belief and national affiliation. They don’t need blood and soil.

True, religious fundamentalism and hypernationalism can be a cause of conflict. But so can disregard of the natural human trait of identifying with and taking pride in one’s native culture, faith, and land. One reason (not the only one, of course) that sub-Saharan Africa is such a mess today is that the colonial powers disregarded ethnic affiliations and territories in drawing their boundaries. And self-styled trans-national states (Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union) always end up imposing a dominant culture on their minorities, leading to resentment and rebellion.

But the diversity of human culture, language, historical narrative, and paths to God is a gift and an asset. Who wants to live in a world where everyone thinks, talks, remembers, and worships the same? Instead of ignoring or dismissing particularistic identities, we need to strengthen them. It’s when people feel that their national and religious identities are under threat that they take up arms to defend them–and justly so.

A nation strong and secure in its identity can afford to give up some of its native territory and accept and acknowledge that other nations have other beliefs and narratives. When a people feels secure–not just militarily, but culturally as well–they can compromise.

Making both Palestinians and Israelis feel secure in their identities is thus essential for any peace plan. Given the centrality of Jerusalem in both Palestinian/Arab and Israeli/Jewish history, belief, and myth, it’s important that each nation have its own stake in the city. It’s not enough to hand it over to some vague international administration, or to share ownership. Each nation needs and deserves to have a part of it for its own. With firm and unchallenged sovereignty for both nations, Jerusalem can indeed become a city of peace.

In the past, when the press has reported that Israel’s leaders were talking to Syria about returning the Golan Heights for peace, I was skeptical. First Yitzhak Rabin, then Binyamin Netanyahu, then Ehud Barak signalled to Syria that they were willing to contemplate a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a peace agreement. Yet, when I compared the price to be paid with the possible benefits, it wasn’t clear to me that the deal was a good one. What were we losing by holding on to the Golan, and what would we gain by giving it up?

In contrast, Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip was clearly debilitating our country, and we obviously stood to gain much by leaving them and allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Today, Ehud Olmert’s government is talking, indirectly, with Syria about returning the Golan Heights in the framework of a peace agreement, and with Hamas about a cease fire in the Gaza Strip. Now the benefits of an agreement with Syria seem obvious to me, while I’m skeptical about a possible agreement with Hamas.

Gershom has concisely summed up the reasons to pursue the negotiations with Syria. Iran is behind the malevolent forces on Israel’s borders, and in the current geopolitical constellation, the best way to neutralize Iran’s influence to our north is to create a situation in which Syria’s interests will tie it to the West. All the signs are that Syria is seeking such an opportunity.

Iran is also behind the Hamas arms buildup. With Iranian help, Hamas is swiftly extending the range of its missiles and mortars. A cease-fire would make the lives of Israelis who live within range (my oldest daughter, who lives in Sderot, is one of them) much easier. But will it lead Hamas to abandon its Iranian patrons?

Right now, that seems unlikely. Syria knows that it will never regain the Golan by force of arms no matter how much Iranian support it receives. But from Hamas’s point of view, their Iranian connection has been immensely profitable and they see Israel’s viable military options as limited.

Don’t get me wrong–I favor pursuing the talks with Hamas. But if I were prime minister, I’d try to move the talks with Syria forward quickly. With Hamas, I’d move slowly, while intensifying military pressure on the Gaza Strip. We can make a good deal with Syria because we have something they want that they can’t get except by making peace and abandoning their Iranian patron. To make peace with Hamas, and to convince them that their Iranian connection is detrimental, we need to show them first that we’re willing and able to pursue the fight.

Hamas’s strategy is to keep upping the ante–firing a missile at Ashkelon, sending a truck laden with tons of explosives to a border crossing. Their assumption seems to be that if they keep intensifying their attacks, Israel will give in.

A full-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip would be bloody and costly in life and property for both sides. A bad cease-fire, however, will make such an enventuality more likely, because if the cease-fire fails, the only option left will be major military action. Ironically, the best way to avoid an invasion is to prepare for it. Military pressure will produce a stronger agreement, one with a better chance of turning into a permanent peace.

As Laura Rozen points out , George W. Bush wasn’t just attacking Barack Obama in his Knesset speech dismissing negotiations with “terrorists and radicals” as appeasement. He was also attacking his host, Ehud Olmert, whose government was already engaged in indirect peace contacts with Syria via Turkey – the negotiations made public yesterday.

The contacts through Turkey reportedly began in February 2007. If so, the Olmert government may have been persuaded to act (or embarrassed into acting) by the reports published the previous month about Foreign Minister director-general Alon Liel’s back-channel negotations with Syria. The “non-paper ” – or unsigned framework agreement reached by Liel and unofficial Syrian negotiator Ibrahim (Abe) Suleiman is important reading, because it gives a sense of how an Israel-Syria deal is likely to look. One creative feature: in order to keep the Golan demilitarized and to prevent competition over Jordan River water, the Golan would be turned into a giant park after Israeli withdrawal – with free access for Israelis.

Liel has stressed – in a press briefing in January 2007, and since – that a critical part of any deal is a switch in Syrian orientation from pro-Iran to pro-West. That would necessarily mean dropping support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Syria’s secular regime wants the reorientation in order to maintain its independence, Alon reports. For Israel, such a deal would mean much more than removing the direct military threat from Syria. With Hamas and Hezbollah weakened, Iran’s power in our area would be sigificantly reduced.

But the deal requires a third party: Washington. Syria won’t and can’t risk dropping Iran without a new patron; otherwise it will be totally isolated in the region. And Bush’s Washington isn’t interested. Since the Liel-Suleiman talks were publicized, experts here have said that the main obstacle is the U.S.

In a fairly devastating report on the adminstration’s nonexistent role in Mideast peace efforts, the Washington Post says today :

For years, the Bush administration has resisted overtures from Jerusalem and Damascus to participate in revived peace efforts over the Golan Heights…

At his Senate confirmation hearing on May 1, James B. Cunningham, the ambassador-designate to Israel, said expanding peace talks to include Syria would be difficult. “We have taken the position that it is not very useful right now for us to be talking to Syria,” he said. As a result, over the past year Turkey has taken the initiative to launch shuttle diplomacy, a role once reserved for U.S. secretaries of state.

The administration, it seems, has now dropped its absolute veto. But it isn’t happy. Rozen reports :

The Bush administration, which knew the talks were taking place, even as the president was making his controversial remarks, offered reluctant support. “It is our hope that discussions between Israel and Syria will cover all the relevant issues,” a State Department official, speaking on background, told Mother Jones.

The operative word there is “reluctant.”

One administration objection to talking peace with Syria is that it would undercut the pro-Western government in Lebanon, and thereby hurt Washington’s efforts to promote democracy in the region. As I wrote recently in The American Prospect, the Bush policy has actually hurt the Siniora government by strengthening Hezbollah. Hezbollah knows that Syria could leave it high and dry; Washington doesn’t.

It’s true that the Siniora government has lobbied against an Israeli-Syrian deal. Instead, it wants the U.S. to protect it from Hezbollah. This is a clue to what Bush doesn’t get about our neighbor to the north. Lebanon provides a preview for those who’d like to turn Israel and the territories into a binational state. Instead of the state looking for foreign patrons against outside enemies, each community within it – or each faction within each community – looks for a foreign patron, usually hoping that the outside power will do its fighting for it. Syria is always a player, but it regularly switches clients. Back in 1982, Israel was seduced by Bashir Gemayel into thinking it could control Lebanon by backing his Christian faction. The results were disastrous. Siniora would like the US to make the same mistake, but Bush has no troops available. Perhaps he even understands why it would be a bad idea.

The only way to weaken Hezbollah in Lebanon, therefore, is to get Syria to cut it loose. But Bush is ready, at most, to stand aside and let Israel and Syria negotiate. The Bush doctrine, essentially, is “no negotiations, no recognition, no peace .” So the chances of cutting a deal before next January are poor. What happens after that depends – not exclusively, but significantly – on who’s in the White House. Obama believes in negotiating . The McCain Doctrine is the Bush Doctrine, shop-worn, failed and relabelled.

Dan Kurtzer, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and an Orthodox Jew, is in Jerusalem for the 60th anniversary celebrations. This morning my wife heard him being interviewed on Israeli Radio, in Hebrew, about the U.S. election. Kurtzer explained that he’s backing Barack Obama.

This was not exactly a revelation. Kurtzer has explained his reasons for backing Obama at length . Here’s some key snippets:

…we have had eight years of disaster with respect to our foreign policy, and I have to share with you as an analyst, we have had eight years that have [compromised] the security of the state of Israel.
An administration that has ignored the search for peace in the Middle East to a point where you have chaos in the Palestinian Authority, and you have a sham process called the Annapolis process, in which our Secretary of State, whom I admire personally, travels to region and announces when she gets there that she is bringing no new ideas.
You have an administration that hasn’t engaged in the peace process, and so inherited a bad situation in 2001 and is leaving it in a worse situation in 2008. And you have an administration that has gotten us engaged in a war in Iraq that has not only cost American lives… but it’s now being called the $3 trillion war…And I would share with you that the cost to the security of Israel is incalculable.
I was in Israel [as Ambassador] when this was being contemplated and when it started… Now, you’ve heard the nonsense which is out there which suggests that Israel or the Jewish community or the Israel lobby pushed this war on the administration. And I can tell you it is nonsense, because there was not one Israeli official and not one Israeli academic who suggested that this war was going to end well. They all warned against exactly the problems we have experienced since this war started…

Knowing this, Kurtzer said, he considered which candidate was likely to improve Israel’s situation. The answer was Obama, and the reason is very simple:

We have one candidate who is prepared to do diplomacy. Only one candidate…
We have had eight years of no diplomacy, and you have two candidates out there who tell us they don’t want to talk to our enemies…
There is one candidate who believes in diplomacy and his name is Barack Obama.

There’s nothing complicated about what Kurtzer is saying. Strangely, though, some Jews seem to be having doubts. Marc Ambinder cites Gallup’s tracking polls , showing that currently 61% of Jews would vote for Obama, 32% for McCain. This looks like a blow-out, but it’s actually a considerably poorer showing than a Democratic presidential candidate normally gets among Jews. (Note that the percentages are based on aggregate of tracking polls for the entire month of April – presumably because the number of Jews polled on any given day is too small for any sample. So the numbers are out of date; they’re from a long period; and they’re from a time when Obama was taking a lot of blows. Caveat lector.) Those figures, in turn, lead to articles such as this one in the New Republic, suggesting that a poor showing among Jews could cost Obama Florida.

I assume the swing voters among Jews aren’t leaning toward McCain because of his deep knowledge of the economy, or because they can count on him to appoint justices who will protect the separation of church and state. Presumably, at least one strong reason is the suspicion fomented by rightwing mass-emailers that Obama is somehow bad for Israel. The stuff recycles; a political reporter reports that Obama has a Jewish problem; the media herd grabs the story; the less-informed believe the next crank email they get because – hey – didn’t you hear that Obama has a Jewish problem?

Kurtzer has it right. In four easy steps, here’s why Obama is the best candidate for Israel:

1) As the ambassador says, the Bush administration has been a disaster for Israel. The war in Iraq has empowered Iran. It has pushed a wave of refugees into Jordan, endangering the stability of Israel’s neighbor and strategic ally. The Bush administration has managed to miss every diplomatic opportunity for renewing the peace process with the Palestinians. When Bush came to power, the Second Intifada was still in its early stages. Bush turned his back on any negotiations that could have slowed or reversed the escalation. He missed the chance when Arafat died. As detailed in a report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last year, and more recently in a Vanity Fair investigative article , the Bush administration’s actions led directly to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas. The administration’s veto on Syrian-Israeli negotiations has blocked Damascus from making a deal in which it would switch allegiances from Iran to the West, and end support for Hezbollah. The outcome is the current crisis in Lebanon, which could soon fall entirely under Iranian control.

“There is a major gap between the perception that Bush has been good for Israel and the reality of Israel’s terrible circumstances,” former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk told me back in 2004, with immense diplomatic understatement. Since then, the gap between rhetoric and reality has gotten much wider . (Indyk, I have to note , has been supporting Team Clinton, showing loyalty to his original political patron but not the best foreign-policy judgment.)

2) John McCain promises another four years of Bush’s mistakes. McCain’s understanding of the Mideast is so weak that he doesn’t know the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite. McCain wants to continue Bush’s failed policies in Iraq. McCain actively sought the endorsement of John Hagee, whose policy on Israel is based on eager expectation of apocalypse, bloody battles on Israeli soil and the conversion of the Jews. As I’ve noted before , Hagee has expressed uncommon sympathy, in writing, for Yigal Amir, the terrorist who assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in order to prevent peace. If Hagee’s constituency is the one that McCain wants to satisfy, he will avoid any diplomatic involvement in the Middle East. Israelis will pay the price in ongoing conflict and in rising Iranian influence.

3) Since Hillary Clinton says she’s still in the race, I have to point out that she is running on a Mideast policy that is more hawkish than Bill’s positions, and more hawkish than the Israeli government.

The most forgiving explanation I’ve heard is that she is pandering to those Jewish voters who don’t realize that Israel’s centrist leaders have reevaluated the country’s strategic needs – or that she is still caught in the post-9/11 mindset that a Democratic has to be even more bellicose than a Republican to show she’s not soft. The less forgiving explanation is that she really is hawkish, as demonstrated in her disastrous vote for the war in Iraq.

4) The one candidate who speaks in clear terms of taking a new approach to the Mideast is Obama. This is what scares the small coterie of American Jewish rightists who would eagerly fight to the last Israeli. If you care about Israel, you should hit “delete” when you get their emails.

Obama is the one candidate who had the sense to oppose the war in Iraq. He’s the one candidate whose statement on Israel expresses support for a two-state solution, which is the country’s path to peaceful future and is today the consensus position in Israel. He’s the one proposing a clear break from the disastrous Bush policies, and a turn to trying diplomacy.

Ah, say the cynics, but why believe that diplomacy could work? As Haim wrote in his recent post on the Geneva process,

…in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the devil is not in the details. The devil is the conflict of narratives.

That is, the two sides have such a different account of history, of what is at stake today, and of the meaning of symbolic events and landmarks, that they seem unable to negotiate. They don’t even agree on what went wrong in previous talks (as I explain in this article from the American Prospect).

But narrative isn’t fixed. The past isn’t dead; it’s constantly rewritten. The meaning of symbols can shift – to exacerbate conflict or make compromise possible. A few rare leaders understand this, and work to recast the stories and the symbols. In his speech on race, Obama showed that he is capable of aiming for that. If he can apply that skill to the Mideast tangle, there’s a chance he can move diplomacy forward. He’s certainly the only candidate who seems to be considering how to do so. Dan Kurtzer is right.

My cover story for Foreign Policy magazine, on seven myths about Israel and why they’re misleading, is still available only to paying customers at FP’s own site. But it’s been reprinted by a Texas paper that was kind enough to put it online .
Update: The article is no longer on the newspaper’s site, but at least for now can be read via Google cache here.

Here’s myth #4:

“Israel’s existence is in danger.”

Not anymore. When Israel declared independence May 14, 1948, its Arab neighbors responded by invading. “It does not matter how many [Jews] there are,” said Arab League Secretary-General Abdul Rahman Azzam. “We will sweep them into the sea.”

Instead, disorganized and inexperienced Arab armies quickly crumbled before them. By the war’s end, Israel held more land than the United Nations had allocated it.

Before the June 1967 Six-Day War, as Arab states massed their forces on Israel’s borders, Israelis feared a second Holocaust. Israel’s astonishing victory showed that it had become the regional superpower, a status confirmed when it repulsed Egypt and Syria’s surprise attack in October 1973. Five and a half years later, the peace agreement with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat neutralized Israel’s most formidable foe.

Today, there is no conventional military threat that remotely compares with the alliance led by Egypt. Left isolated by the Israeli-Egyptian peace, Syria has carefully observed a cease-fire since 1974. Afraid to risk full confrontation, Damascus has supported substate forces such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. They employ terrorist tactics and rocket fire.

Those methods have claimed many Israeli civilians’ lives. But on a national level, they’re equivalent to a chronic illness, not a fatal disease.

For the rest of the debunking exercise, click here .

What if you make a peace agreement and nobody comes? That’s the fundamental story behind “A Possible Peace Between Israel & Palestine: An Insider’s Account of the Geneva Initiative.” It’s a fascinating look into the conflict and the “peace industry.” Contrary to the intention of its author, political scientist Menachem Klein, it raises more doubts than hopes about the future of the peace process.

(Caveat lector: I translated this book, and two previous books by Klein into English. He’s a neighbor and friend and fellow-member of Kehilat Yedidya.)

The failure of the Camp David summit in the summer of 2000 was a watershed for Israel-Palestinian relations and for the Israeli peace camp. The failure of the peace initiative intensified distrust and suspicion on both sides, sending the region into a dangerous slide of renewed violence, which culminated in the outbreak of the second Intifada at the end of that year. And for many in the Israeli peace camp, the breakdown of peace talks seemed to falsify their long-held belief that the Palestinians were partners for peace.

But a small number of advocates of Israel-Palestinian accommodation maintained that the Camp David talks should be continued, even as the government of Ehud Barak slid towards electoral defeat–and even afterwards, when the government of Ariel Sharon abandoned negotiations with the Palestinians.

Klein, who has long been involved in planning for and participating in peace negotiatons, numbered among this group. Under the leadeship of Yossi Beilin on the Israeli side and Yassir `Abd-Rabbu on the Palestinian side, Israelis and Palestinians conducted a series of encounters that led in the end to a detailed draft peace agreement, known as the Geneva Agreement.

These citizen-negotiators believed that if they could show the Israeli and Palestinian publics that an agreement was possible, the publics on both sides would pressure their leaders to achieve it.

Offering an unusual but instructive account that combines detached academic analysis with personal experience as a negotiator, Klein shows how the citizen negotiators addressed the hurdles of Jerusalem, refugee rights, and borders and how specific solutions were reached. Klein, who speaks fluent Arabic and has had close working relationships with many Palestinians over many years, is able, more than any other Israeli writer, to explain the Palestinian point of view and why the offer made at Camp David, which seemed so generous in Israeli eyes, looked unpalatable to the Palestinians. He also addresses the fact that the Camp David failure was due in part to differing styles of negotiation, deriving from culture, history, and the character of each side’s leadership.

The citizen negotiators reached an agreement, published it, and promoted it in a massive public relations campaign. But it did not fundamentally change the perceptions of the Israeli and Palestinian publics. Neither side was willing to make the concessions the draft agreement called for, certainly not in the atmosphere of distrust created by the failure of Camp David and the outbreak of violence.

Klein’s account is sobering because even this group of citizens, comprising the most reasonable and peace-minded figures on both sides of the divide, barely reached an ageement. The project nearly fell apart at several junctures, and the final draft was achieved only hours before the official signing ceremony. If these people–so unrepresentative of their respective publics–could barely do it, can we really expect national leaders, accountable to their populations at large, to do so?

Ultimately, there’s a problem with the Geneva model. Because in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the devil is not in the details. The devil is the conflict of narratives. And it’s in the distrust and disappointment created not only by decades of conflict, but also, paradoxically, by the very attempt to make peace, first with the Oslo accords and second at Camp David.

The Geneva process did not teach us anything we didn’t know already. From the time of Oslo, and certainly after Camp David, the broad outlines of the final status agreement have been clear. They were codified at Camp David in the principles laid down by President Clinton. Both sides know what concessions they need to make for peace. But, at present, neither side is willing to make those concessions. And, in fact, not unreasonably. The concessions require both sides to make major sacrifices, and more critically, to incur major risks. But, when the future looks uncertain, when leaders on both sides are weak, and when all the precedents favor a pessimistic view of the chances that the other side can be counted on to keep its word, what leader would take those risks?

Three days left to apply .

Reena Lazar of Peace It Together tells me that her organization is accepting applications until May 10 for this summer’s peace camp: A small group of Israeli, Palestinian and Canadian teens will spend three weeks together on an island near Vancouver learning leadership and communication skills and making films together. The follow-up program lasts for the full year afterwards.

I kid you not: You (or your 16-18-year-old kid) have been sitting around thinking about how adults have messed up the world, but also wanting to do something outrageously fun this summer, and now someone is offering you a chance to make a difference and also learn how to make films. On an island off Vancouver. If you are eligible and you don’t hit this link , then really! I don’t understand you.

OK, you won’t instantly make peace between Israelis and Palestinians. No one will instantly make peace. Some people offering you a chance to make a step in right direction. Excuse me, have you pulled your sixteen-year old over to the screen yet so that she can hit this link ?

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Our Children Will Repair What We Have Shattered

Readers of Gershom’s last post may be interested in an article I published in Nature last year on Elad’s role in running the site of the City of David excavations.

As I reported in the same journal earlier this month, a group of Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists recently unveiled a draft agreement about how archaeological sites and artifacts would be treated under a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

As Gershom notes, every historical or archaeological site can provide the basis for a variety of different stories. True, archaeological artifacts and sites provide hard facts that limit the kinds of stories you can tell. A Palestinian scholar who proclaimed that City of David structures dating from the eighth or ninth century BCE were actually from the early Islamic period would have a hard time getting anyone to take his case seriously because we know from other sites that buildings built in those periods have distinct styles and methods of construction. An Israeli who tried to argue that Arabs never ruled Jerusalem would run up against all those layers of Muslim and Arab remains that excavators have found all around the city.

But the facts are ambiguous enough to allow competing interpretations. An archaeological site open to the public should present vistors with the interpetations that are under serious academic debate. So if there are official tours of the City of David, they should summarize for visitors the current debate over the dating of key finds from the early Iron Age (the reigns of Kings David and Solomon, in biblical terms). They should also make note of the full range of the site’s history–Israelite, Islamic, Crusader, modern.

This does not mean that Israelis and Jews need be embarrassed to stress that the City of David and other such sites are of unique importance to our national history and culture. It’s only natural for Israeli visitors to the site to be interested primarily in what the site has to say about their own nation and identity. It’s right and proper for Jews to feel an intense bond to places and historical events recorded in their people’s literature and to be excited when archaeologists unearth finds that jive with and enrich the biblical account. But this pride need not and should not be exclusive. It is strongest when it does not seek to affirm our own identities by denying those of others.

If we and the Palestinians sign a peace agreement and then proceed to denigrate, or worse destroy, each other’s archaeological heritage, the peace will not last long. Neither will it last long if one or both nation feels it must give up its own stories. The strongest, most durable peace will be between two nations that are proud of their heritage, intent on maintaining it, yet open to listening to and acknowledging the stories from the other side.

“Ancient Jerusalem Safari” said the sign on the side of the open-sided bus. It was parked this morning in the lot at the end of the promenade that stretches from UN Hill almost to Hebron Road. The promenade is an arc of stone walkways and stairs, of lawns and landscaping with a view northward of the Old City walls and the Dome of the Rock, which appear just close enough to be reachable, just far enough off to still be the double-page color illustration of the city at the end of the quest that I read about in a childhood book whose name I’ve forgotten but whose story I think I’ve remembered for a moment when I wake from a dream.

The promenade may be my favorite spot in South Jerusalem, partly because of the view and the quiet, partly because both Palestinians and Israelis spend time there. Riding my bike there on a weekday, I’ll pass Israeli joggers and women from Jebal Mukkaber in ankle-length dresses and sneakers out for their health walk. On one park bench I’ll see a young Orthodox couple, on another a young Palestinian couple – both having found a place public enough that it’s not immodest to be meeting there, private enough that they can really talk. In the morning, I usually pass several Jews praying by themselves, facing northward. In the afternoon, I’ll see a Muslim or three, kneeling toward the south. On Saturday afternoons, families from both sides of towns are picnicking and playing soccer. Whole congregations – especially ones that give women a role – come here to pray on the night of Tisha Be’av or at dawn on Shavuot instead of walking to the Western Wall, where the crowds of ultra-Orthodox brook no innovations in worship.

But on the middle days of Pesah and Sukkot, the promenade sprouts moveable police barriers and private security guards. Sometimes I’m stopped on the same route I cycle daily and I’m told either to show my backpack for inspection or that I can’t pass. During the holidays, when many Israelis have time off to travel and tour, the space is dominated by Elad – the rightwing group that settles Jews in Silwan, a.k.a. David’s City, the Palestinian neighborhood south of the Old City where the original ancient Jerusalem once stood. Elad also runs Segway tours of the promenade area on the holidays. All year round, it manages the archeological park in Silwan. How it has gained control of that public property is a story still only partly told (here’s one report). That’s besides the the unanswered question of who has approved its Pesah and Sukkot domination of the promenade.

I don’t know if the “Ancient Jerusalem Safari” is run by Elad or someone else, for profit or not. From the name, I’ll guess that the story told by the tour guide on that bus is much the same as the story told by Elad’s guides: There’s ancient Jewish Jerusalem, and there’s today. The milestones that matter in history are King David’s conquest, and the paratroops taking the city in June 1967.

I’ll leave for another time the grand archaeological debate about whether David and his united kingdom ever existed, and of the dating of the latest finds in the City of David. My own faith doesn’t depend on the precise historicity of the books of Samuel and Kings. Neither does my belief that this is the Jewish homeland depend on the finds of the latest excavation. In the large picture – the ancient past viewed across the valley of intervening centuries – Jews began their history here, and left, and returned.

But when you tell a story of the past, you never tell everything. Otherwise 3,000 years of history would take 3,000 years to tell. The problem with what I’ll call – for simplicity’s sake – the Elad narrative is what it very deliberately leaves out: Everything that makes Jerusalem’s history a story shared by others, a history of other peoples and faiths.

There are alternative tours of Jerusalem these days that show the Israeli checkpoints and the security wall snaking through the hills. I have no problem with telling that story – I do it often in print. But that is also a very selective telling. It contains the tragedy but not the mystery of Jerusalem

The beginning of peace in Jerusalem might be shared tours, Israelis and Palestinians together, with two guides. They would visit Jewish ruins, and Christian and Muslim ruins. They would tell about Solomon, wisest of kings, and also about Saladdin, a Muslim conquerer of Jerusalem so generous in victory that he became medieval Christian Europe’s paragon of chivalry. On the promenade, they would point to the Temple Mount, a.ka. Al-Aqsa, and tell both how God told Abraham there that he did not need to sacrifice his son and how Muhammad rose to heaven to receive the commandment of praying five times daily. The guides could also point to a Jew praying, and to a Muslim, and to the families playing soccer, and say, “This is the city where they live.”

J Street, the new lobby devoted to supporting Israel by supporting peace, goes public today. Here’s part of my column at The American Prospect:

Today’s public launch follows many months of organizing led by the new group’s executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, a media consultant and former Clinton administration staffer… Unlike existing Jewish peace groups, J Street is registered for tax purposes as a 501(c)(4) organization, meaning that it can operate fully as a lobby. A sister organization, J Street PAC, will endorse and raise money for candidates.

To win J Street PAC’s backing, Ben-Ami told me, a candidate’s position should be that “the single most important step to support Israeli security and U.S. interests is to reach a negotiated peace agreement, a two-state solution, between the Israelis and Palestinians. The group is looking for politicians who back policies of “engagement and diplomacy” in place of exclusive reliance on military options. Phrased less diplomatically, J Street seeks politicians who advocate a clear shift from the disastrous policies of the Bush years.

Read more here.