One of the reasons I enjoy reading my friendly blog competitor Jay Adler is that he is very smart and can construct very good arguments. Today he took a good look at the ongoing Peter Beinart-Jeffrey Goldberg exchanges and he nailed it:
Now, I share Beinart’s displeasure with the West Bank settlements, always have, but they exist in a formidable complex of history and policy. It is a judgment to focus on the settlements above all else, and a bad judgment. I wrote to Goldberg suggesting a question to Beinart for part III of the discussion. Apparently, Goldberg is not yet letting me choose his interview questions for him, but I’m working on him. I suggested he ask Beinart why Beinart had not, instead of the above, written the following reformulation of it, which would, of course, have changed his entire article.
But over the long run, the best way to undermine Netanyahu and Lieberman and people like them is to give hope to those Israelis and Jews who do want a two-state solution. In Barak, and even Olmert, we had such leaders. Surely in those circumstances continued anti-Semitic education in Palestinian schools, Muslim calls for the destruction of Israel and rejection of every Israeli peace offer, which simply convinces Israelis that they will never have a genuine partner in peace, is deeply self-destructive. I want the major American Palestinian groups to say so, loudly. Instead, they deny the Palestinians are in any way responsible.
Jay has gotten to the heart of the mystery. People who genuinely support the Palestinians' (imagined) desire for a state should be doing everything in their power to convince the Palestinians that the path to a state lies more with Gandhi than with Yasser, yet typically such supporters instead either ignore or excuse Palestinian blood lust. The underlying dynamics of their support are the subject of a great deal of learned pontificating but I will leave it for now that their support of Palestinian statehood is marred by their refusal to acknowledge that a state is not the primary intent of the Palestinians and this inconvenient truth is so destructive to their liberalism and attendant self-regard that it must be ignored as a way to preserve intact their mental structure.
Sadly, Jeffrey Goldberg did not use Jay's question.
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