At a certain point, atavism exhausts itself. I can’t say when that will happen, but it certainly could be sooner than most people think. There will always be dead enders, but we’re talking about the mood of a people here, not the extremists alone. Yes, Sadat was killed, so were Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but what they died for lived on and triumphed. I hope the same can be true of Rabin.

As for nukes, I can hardly imagine that Iran would actually launch a nuclear war against Israel. If they did, they would certainly lose, and their country would be destroyed, and what remains would not be at all friendly towards the clerics who brought on their country’s nuclear annihilation. Israel has over 200 of the most sophisticated nukes. Iran will have at best a few crude fission weapons. And no, I can’t imagine Saudi Arabia or the Egyptians attacking Israel if they pre-emptively strike Iran. In fact, I think they would secretly love it if Israel did that, since Iran is their regional rival, not their ally. They don’t want to see a nuclear Iran any more than Israel does. And they certainly don’t want to be drawn into a nuclear war with Israel, especially in that they don’t have any nukes themselves. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.

And yeah, a Jewish State in the Sudentenland does have a certain light-hearted ring to it.

For some reason the idea of a Jewish homeland in Sudentanland tickled my funny bone. Thanks for my first smile of the day.

The Cold War and South Africa are not, I think, examples that support your thesis. Those were zero sum games in which there were clear winners and losers, wouldn’t you say?

I further think that your confidence in the impregnability of Israel is quite misplaced. Yes, at this juncture no one can contest them in battle, though it would appear that Iran has “good and realistic hopes” to rewrite that equation. Once Iran nukes up…..and it seems to me quite clear that no one is prepared to stop them….well, then, game on as we used to say. But even minus frontal military action, there are enough loose nuclear weapons that I wouldn’t buy any property in Tel Aviv.

I applaud your (comparative) optimism. We need that, and I wish that I shared it. My read, unfortunately, is that Israel is in deep shit….pretty much the only thing that I agree on with that Netanyahu thug.

You assert that the day is past when all the Arab and Persian nations could band together to fight Israeli forces. It is possible we may soon see…..I would imagine the idea of a preemptive strike on Iran has some non-theoretical currency within at least some voices in the govt., to say nothing of in the Knesset. What do you think the reaction would be on the part of the Saudis or the Egyptians? I think they would have to attack. I further believe that Russia and China would support. Daniel Larison is correct when he says that a pan-Islamic combination can’t happen on it’s own initiative, but that doesn’t mean that one couldn’t be created. Needless to say, the scenario I am devising would immediately put Iran in pole position as de facto leader of the Muslim world.

Maybe I’m just engaging in paranoid fantasizing, a la Robert Stacy McCain. I certainly hope so, and the folks here are just the people to bring me back to reality if I am. But all of the above sounds depressingly realistic to me.

The demographic issue is troublesome to Israel, but by any objective messure, the Palestinians have been getting weaker and weaker over the years, not stronger. But certainly they are not going away. That doesn’t mean Israel is going to let demographics overwhelm them. They will simply continue with a paralyzed West Bank and Gazan occupation, keeping them utterly weak and divided with checkpoints and walls and blockades.

Look, I’m sympathetic to the Palestinian cause as well. It made no sense to compensate the murder of millions of Jews in Europe by creating a state for them in Palestine. Why not give them Bavaria or Sudentanland? But that’s all past, we are where we are, and the solution won’t come by pretending Israel and the Jews in Palestine are going away. It really doesn’t matter what the Palestinians believe in the bottoms of their hearts, any more than what the Jews believe in the bottoms of their hearts. Politics is rather heart-breaking. How many more hearts must be broken on both sides? Eventually, they both have to accept the reality of a livable compromise.

But you’re right, the Palestinians could continue to base their entire politics on resentment virtually forever. I just think there’s at least more hope than appears to be the case. The cold war could also have gone on for another century, so could apartheid, or segregation, or the troubles of Northern Ireland. But even the Croats and Serbs have made compromises for long periods of time. The Jews and Palestinians, comparably speaking, have a much milder history than many other conflicted groups. The Israeli occupation, nasty as it has been, has been much milder than many other military occupations and land disputes in the past. And the Israeli culture is much more amenable to genuine peace settlements than many others. Look at the deal with Sadat and Egypt. If Palestinians ever get the good sense to go Gandhi on the Israelis, they will win far more than they ever could by violence and resentment. Not that they will. Much as I sympathize with their plight, I think it remains the case that they are the greater obstacle to a peaceful settlement than the Israelis.

And the Palestinians really do believe, from the very bottom of their hearts, that Israel is illegitimate. Talking about how much better off the Palestinians would be if they just made nice sort of misses the point….they are acting on a super-rational level and they don’t, collectively, care about being better off – they care about winning. This is how Fatah ends up being the moderate party.

Let me point out, if it isn’t clear already, that I am deeply sympathetic to the Palestinian position. I don’t look forward to the destruction of Israel or anything like that but I do understand where the Palestinians are coming from. As to backbreaking resentments, the Serbs and Croats seem to have no problem carrying their monkey around, so I can’t see why the Palestinians couldn’t do it for another century or so.

thanks, and thought I’m not optimistic, I think the basic path to resolution involves letting go of the past and looking at where one’s own best interests lie. At some point, the Palestinians do have to accept Israel’s existence, like it or not. They have nukes, for God’s sake. They aren’t going anywhere. And at some point Israel has to accept the fact that they can’t keep on as they are and find peace and happiness. Both parties have much more to gain by making a peace than they do from continuing war. They could actually create a very prosperous region, rather than a hellish one. They don’t have to address all previous wrongs, they just have to create something that works for now and into the future. I’m not saying they’ll wake up tomorrow and forget all that’s happened, but it’s probably getting easier, just by the sheer weight of all that’s gone on. At a certain point, you can’t carry all those resentments around anymore. It’s backbreaking. One desires relief. And there’s no other outlet for relief other than peace. Decisive war is simply not possible in this situation, and that should be obvious to everyone.

Now, of course we don’t want to be stuck there, but we are. Failing to recognize that, and fantasizing that we can just walk away, doesn’t get us out of the situation. We have huge commitments there, and constituencies much larger than AIPAC that demand we stay involved. The only way for us to get out is to get the situation resolved. Otherwise, we are just dreaming. The fact that we don’t want to be stuck there should motivate us to get it resolved, because that’s the only way for us to get disentangled.

It also is not helpfull blaming everything on AIPAC and likeminded entities…. I am far from a friend to the Israeli govt., but even I am not willing to see them wiped out.

So…..I think we pull a China….Let the parties know that their are some things that will get out attention, such as actual combat, and that otherwise we will steer clear. As Israel has a vast military advantage to begin with, that wouldn’t even be as even-handed as it sounds.

The israel/Palestine situation is Tar-Baby. You don’t have to be Pat Buchanan to realize that you don’t want to be stuck there. Ignore Krauthammer, NRO, Frum. et al.

You are quite right on the first point. On the second, it appears Obama has a lot more support than you might suspect. I don’t think he’s taken this tack without considerable forethought, and getting considerable backing. AIPAC is finding it harder than they thought to find allies on the settlements issue. More likely scenario is for Netanyahu to either cave, or be voted out, and Kadima comes in.

The U.S. can’t just “go paleo” all of a sudden. Even if one wants that as a goal, getting there means resolving these kinds of entanglements, and not creating new ones, until we are free of this kind of mess.

Well OK, the world can wait patiently for some kind of “reversion toward the mean” related to dopey, dysfunctional Muslims and Jim Crow wanna be Israelis. But the fundamental question is, what is the U.S. stake in it?

Cold War – our business. Northern Ireland – not our business. South Africa – not our business.

“Rescuing” Islamic dysfunctional dopes – our business?

Subsidizing Israeli Jim Crow Wanna Be’s – our business?

Hand me the hot poker on the cold end…

Take a look at the problems I cited. THe Cold War was actually at its worst just before it was solved. Reagan’s military escalation had the Soviets in desperation mode. Andropov was seriously considereing a nuclear first strike, just before he died. It’s probably the case that he was murdered by Kremlin insiders to prevent that from happening. And then, viola, in a few short years the whole thing is basically solved and goes away. I never expected that to happen in my lifetime. WHich is just the point.

No one ever expected South African apartheid to end peacefully either. But just when things were getting to their worst state, the solution dawned to this “intractable” problem and it was over.

I’m not an optimist about the Middle East, but the very desperateness and length of the problem is the very reason there’s actual hope here. Politics is not like physics. Nothing that happens is an independent random event, as the molecular heating of iron rods is. Solutions tend to appear when things are worst, not when conditions are best.

Another example would be health care in the US. We are probably very close to a health care bill precisely because this problem has dragged on for so long.

The basic notion is that stress builds slowly, but when it cracks, it happens quickly. Long term stressful problems are actually less likely to stay that way forever. Something usually gives at some point. People are always wrong when they call a problem “intractable”. It’s a false analysis of the situation. There are many ways the middle east situation could be resolved in a reasonable period of time, like the ending of the cold war. It just takes a little imagination, and applying the right kind of force.

Validating the feasibility of an improbable event is all well and good. Just don’t put any money on it…

SteveM