IMHO, this is really, really important. They take the hidden beliefs and desires of some vile people, and raise them into the light of respectibility.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that people like Palin aren’t primarily interested in making sure that the United States doesn’t deploy hypocritical foreign policy rhetoric. If they were then it might be appropriate to praise Palin for tellin’ it like it is when it comes to settlements, or to praise Bush for codifying as official US policy the disrespect for international law that was already this country’s standard operating procedure.

But Palin, Bush and their supporters in the media aren’t interested in making US rhetoric consistent with US policy. They’re interested in shifting the bounds of acceptable discourse so it becomes more vicious and aggressive, thereby making it possible to engage in actions that are even more vicious and aggressive than the rhetoric. Witness how the Bush administration’s rhetorical contempt for detainees’ rights, international law, etc., was accompanied by actions which went far beyond even the nasty language.

So anyone who’s concerned about Israel’s settlement policy shouldn’t applaud Palin for “straight talk” (or whatever). I think she’s a cretin, so I don’t think she’s knowingly playing some kind of devious rhetorical game. But she’s certainly useful to people who think that the big problem with US foreign policy is that we aren’t willing enough to kill and/or piss off foreigners.

Perhaps a two-state deal is possible and might bring a measure of stability, in which case a settlement freeze to help broker such a deal would be good for Israel.

However, if there’s a major war, provoked, say, by an Israeli raid on Iran and subsequent retaliation, and Israel wins, she might very well try to repeat the Nakba and kick Palestinians by the thousands out of the West Bank. After all, Kuwait expelled thousands of Palestinians in 1991, and more than two million people have fled Iraq since 2003, and all but a few human rights pests have kept mum about it.

Ethnic cleansers sometimes win. Are the Serbs returning to the Krajina, the Greeks to Smyrna, the Sudeten Germans to the Czech lands?

If you’re part of the ethnonationalist Zionist right, you might prefer to keep building colonies and keep the trucks and buses gassed up. Reprehensible; criminal in fact, but plausible.

The question for Americans is why we let the Israelis expand their colonies with our money, weapons, vetoes and émigrés.