One can easily look back over the past 40 years and say what a great historic mistake it was to settle the West Bank. The occupation of a people, the expropriation of land, the fostering of Jewish religious intolerance are all sad byproducts of the settlement project.

But there is one crucial prerequisite to holding that view, which is that Israel has not been attacked since 1973 and the Arab states that surround Israel are, if not all at peace with it, appear for the time being to accept that attacking Israel is not a good idea.  In other words, the security buffer that the West Bank provides does not appear to have been needed.

But looking at it from the standpoint of policymakers in the 1960's and 1970's, the picture looks very different.  On two occasions within six years of each other, Israel faced existential threats. In both wars, had Israel lost, it would have meant a second holocaust.  Arab countries surrounding Israel were implacable in their fanatic hatred and hostility, having recently suffered one of history's worst military humiliations in 1967.  Palestinians had begun their campaign of terrorism, most notably at the Munich Olympics.  From that perspective, holding on to the West Bank as a land buffer between Israel and the hostile neighbors to the east was entirely logical, reasonable and understandable. 

It is this security-oriented viewpoint that is lost in all the lamentations about what a folly it was to settle the West Bank.  For those who viewed the West Bank as crucial to the country's security, settlements were an integral part of the project to cement that territory to Israel forever so that Israel would never have to go back to borders that made it 9 miles wide at the narrowest point. 

Now it is certainly the case that the settlement project took on a life of its own, driven by religious zealotry among other factors. But the fact remains that for policymakers, the security issue was always paramount.  So to ignore it and only focus on the religious issue, only serves to reinforce the point that the left cannot be trusted with security.  Given the anemic standings of the Peace Now-led Labor party in the polls, most Israelis would appear to agree. 

Kadima will win because they have put forth an argument that Israelis intuitively understand - that the Palestinians will not soon change their ways and become partners for peace, dismantling the largest settlements in the West Bank is impossible, but Israel no longer faces the existential threats it did 30-40 years ago.  So the cost of holding on to all the land outwieghs the marginal extra security it provides.  It is this hard-headed calculation, based on a real strategic vision, and not the illusion that a return to the 1967 borders will bring peace, that will carry the day.

The response by BradTheDad is merely another example of the moral debasement of Zionism.  The only significant fact in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that Israel has occupied the Palestinian Territories for the last three decades in a subjugation that has been as callous as it has been brutal.  Everything else is secondary, whether it be that Jews ruled this land two-thousand years ago or that Lord Balfour promised a Jewish homeland on this land.

The main difference between the ravings of the Iranian President and those of irredentist Zionists who seek to end the Palestinian existence is that the irredentist Zionists are a lot closer to their goal.  It is mendacious for friends of Israel to use terms like existential threat when Israel is the only nuclear power in the region and has by far the most effective military force.  Indeed, this military force routinely terrorizes the Palestinian people in a manner inconsistent with international law and common morality.  Let no one doubt that the suffering of the Palestinian people during the last three decades has vastly exceeded that of the Israeli people.

The early decades following the end of WWII saw the start of the post-Colonial era which finally sought to end the suffering wrought by colonization and the consequent subjugation of aboriginal people.  The world has changed since then and now universally recognizes that occupations are evil.  Universally - except for Zionists and their supporters.  They are wrong.  The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories is evil and should be regarded as the act of an outlaw state - such as Iraq, Iran or North Korea - rather than the act of a state joined to the comity of Nations.

It is mendacious for friends of Israel to use terms like existential threat when Israel is the only nuclear power in the region and has by far the most effective military force.

Ah the certitude of the armchair general.  Yes, next you're going to argue that a nuclear Iran poses absolutely no threat at all to Israel because look at how well mutually assured destruction worked during the Cold War.

And you're quite sure that the quiet borders that exist today will remain forever so?  And you're quite sure that the incompetently led Arab armies that got thoroughly smacked by Israel in 1967 will always be so?  And you're quite sure that a nuclear deterrent will work against millenial End Times-seeking religious fanatics as it did against rational communists?  And so on.

Do us all a favor: if you want to argue the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is immoral and evil, fine.  No one is going to deny you the right to define your own notion of immorality.  But leave the security judgments to people that actually know what they are talking about, OK?

Now it is certainly the case that the settlement project took on a life of its own

A life of it's own, you say?  Not a policy, not something the government was complicit in.  It just, like, grew.  And the scientists and the military just couldn't kill it.

What're you hiding, Dad?

A life of it's own, you say? Not a policy, not something the government was complicit in. It just, like, grew. And the scientists and the military just couldn't kill it.

Ha ha.  Very droll.  Perhaps some inartful phrasing on my part but certainly some willful misinterpretation on your part.  I never claimed it wasn't official government policy to settle the territory, only that the original security-based reasons to do it came first and were always paramount.  The religious/nationalist arguments assumed a greater importance later. 

If you are an American you live in a settlement. When are you leaving?

Israel has occupied land it gained after the Arab world tired to exterminate it. When Sadat's Egypt offered peace he received back all of the land Israel captured except Gaza which he apparently did not want. If the Palestinians instead of trying to wipe out Isreal as Hamas still calls for tried negotiating a Palestinian state long ago was a whole lot more likely.

I am also curious. The Arab nations tried to destroy Israel in 1967 and again in 1973. What do think would happen if Israel went back to the 1967 borders in 1974?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Jo-Ann Mort

Golda Meir's denial of a separate Palestinian people, this was in the days when King Hussein was still the official spokesan for the Palestinians, was a mistaken. You wanted the Israelis not to have built any of the settlements. What would have been the consequences for Israel in say the Golan and other areas?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I have no interest, and neither should you, in leaving security judgments to a continued succession of Israeli Prime Ministers and Generals who have demonstrated repeatedly that they do not give a rats ass for the security of the Palestinian people.

Can you think of any country that cares about the security of people that are sworn to its destruction? Why would any country do such a thing? It's like taking the definition of security and turning it upside down.

It is not the responsibility of Israelis to worry about the security of their enemies.  It is their responsibility to worry about the security of Israel.  As long as Palestinians pose a security threat, they will be treated as an enemy.  As soon as they decide to give up their violent ways and behave like civilized human beings, they can be treated as such.  And before you label me a racist, consider how racist it is to watch the utter depravity with which the Palestinians have conducted themselves in the last 30 years, with all the deaths of innocents - not just Israelis - that they have caused and not say a word about it.  Like most Israel-haters, you simply take for granted that Palestinian behavior is justified or worse, is part of who they are and so who are we to sit in judgment?

So much emotion. So much righteousness.

Like they say: oy-vey.

It takes a certain amount of belief to depict the Isreal project as a pure, holy and noble undertaking where the friends of God won the nation they deserved and the ennemies of God failed in their sinister attempt to destroy his children. Parts of the story are like this, but that is not the whole story and it is our willingness to ignore the inconvenient parts of the story that makes books like The Accidental Empire necessary.

Isreal was created the same way that America was created or South Africa was created or Canada or Australia or Northern Ireland. A settler community with superior social organizaiton and or technology fought and displaced a less fortunate race of men.

There is no moral superiority to be claimed. I have a personal bias towards Isreal because they are Western and share my social and political values, but I can't translate that into a claim that Israelis have a de facto superior moral claim to the land than the Arabs who lived in Palestine in the early 20th century and therefore the Palestinians of today.

Once you admit that neither side has a superior moral claim,  then you can look at the policy options with clear eyes.

Until then as they say, fowrget about it.

You've actually hit upon a pro-Israel argument that few people make, but I think it is one of the strongest.  Just about every country in the world has a history that involved, at one point or another, the conquest or displacement of people.  There are countries like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where this involved white settlers conquering indigenous people.  But there were certainly conquests among the pre-Columbian civilizations of North America.  Similarly, other European, African, Asian and Latin American countries all have histories of conquest, either by Europeans against natives or by one native group against another.

Yet only Israel is singled out for special opprobrium.  Only Israel's conquest is judged to be so uniquely evil by people like Colore Oscuro that it requires special denunciation.

Why is this?

Let's see, by this logic, it should be pretty hard to find colonial, or neo-colonial occupations that still exist after WWII.  After all, we've reached a consensus about how evil colonial occupation is, right?  And if those other occupations still exist, they should generate just as much worldwide condemnation as the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians does, right?

Wrong.

Let's take a look at the world's occupations, shall we?  Well, we have the remnants of European colonialization in places like the Caribbean and the Pacific.  But these are almost all benign and more or less welcomed by the colonial subjects (although it is bizarre that in places like the Bahamas, the final legal authority is the British House of Lords).  But what about other, more controversial occupations, like the Russian occupation of Chechnya (or indeed any of the myriad ethnic groups throughout Russia).  What about the Moroccan occupation of Western Sahara?  What about the Indian occupation of Kashmir?  What about the Chinese occupation of Tibet?

Now don't get me wrong.  I'm not arguing that because these other occupations exist, that makes the Israeli occupation of the West Bank OK.  But with the possible exception of the Chinese occupation in Tibet, one searches in vain to find an occupation elsewhere in the world that generates quite so much outrage.  Of course, one also searches in vain to find another occupying power whose enemies wish to eradicate it.  Finally, one also searches in vain to find another occupying power that actually offered to return the disputed territory and got nothing but terrorism in response.  For those searching for why the Israeli occupation is unique, there's your answer.

By the way, there is a difference between Israel occupying the territories and Russia occupying Chechnya, China occupying Tibet, Morocco occupuing Western Sahara etc.  In all these cases, part of the justification is that people whom we may deem to be under occupation enjoy full rights of the citizens, and are not subjected to expropriations, limitations of their movement, denied the right to vote (when applicable) etc.   In other words, it was territory that is conquered but people do not form a "conquered" category.

The other difference is that with except for Western Sahara, all other examples predate 1950s.

However, many friends of Israel seem to be cheated by the fact that the world frowns upon colonial conquests at the very moment when they want to vicariously participate in the last one. Everybody got his piece of fun and it is just Israel that is being picked upon because she is a tad late.

What a complete load of nonsense.  Yes, it was just "fun" that compelled Israel to conquer the West Bank, Sinai and Golan in 1967.  The fact that Egypt, Syria and Jordan waged war had nothing to do with it.  The fact that Egypt and Syria waged war AGAIN six years later is just irrelevant.

My point is ONLY that there are plenty of other occupations out there that don't get nearly the attention this one does.  There are two reasons for this.  First, the Arab and Muslim worlds have forced the issue of Israel to the top of the world's agenda and have cynically exploited the issue for their own purposes.  It is Arab single-mindedness, more than anything else, that has convinced the world that this issue requires special attention.  Second, the West sees Israel as a Western country, with Western values and expects that it should live up to Western standards of civilized behavior.  To the Western Left especially, that has meant above all an abhorrence of using military force.  Since the West expects no such civilized behavior of people like the Chinese or Indians, the protests about their occupations are much more muted. 

Now there are certainly other factors at work, such as the ambiguous status of the territories or the fact they were conquered relatively recently, but these are the main reasons why this conflict, above all others, seizes the world's attention.

Just about every country in the world has a history that involved, at one point or another, the conquest or displacement of people.

This point is frequently brought out in defense of Israel, but it makes little sense to me.  The argument seems to be that since the histrory of the world has been built out of a series of ruthless conquests and seizures, one wretched and barbarous crime after another, we should now sit back and tolerate such a crime, while it is still occuring, and while many of the victims of earlier stages of an ongoing conquest are still alive.  Some of us, however, aspire to lift the world out of the barbarous customs of the past, and to build an international legal order that is not based on the barbarian's code of spoils falling to the victors in war.

Tragically, two of the seminal developments in the creation of such an order - the creation of the League of Nations, and then the UN - were compromised from the beginning by their entanglement in the Zionist project.

I agree with Brad that the notion of a sort of Israeli empire from the Nile to the Euphrates was never more that a idle fantasy of a tiny handful of fanatical kooks, and does not represent the overwhelming majority of the Zionist movement or its leaders.  But I do believe that the leaders of Political Zionism, in all its main forms, had from the very beginning the goal of dispossession of most of the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, especially following the creation of the Palestine mandate. They had the goal of seizing control of that territory by a combination of war, expropriations and immigration - in defiance of the thoroughly solid political opposition of the inhabitants of Palestine.  Since these mostly Arab inhabitants of Palestine at the dawn of the Zionist project were, unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly opposed to losing their land through any one of the three methods just mentioned, the Zionist project was committed from the beginning to thwarting the capacity for self-determination of those inhabitants.

The familiar, tragic sob story of the original post, common among Labor Zionists, that the original Israeli dream was noble, pacific, egalitarian, secular, socialist and pure until Zionism and the Israeli state were captured by the evil Revisionists and their allies among the right-wing parties of religious zealots, or until the seizure of the West Bank, contains some elements of truth, but is a great distortion on the whole.  There may have been a certain number of naive and earnest kibbutzniks who believed their community pursued these lofty ideals - but only if they were ignorant of the policies of their movement's leaders.  This lame notion of an "accidental empire" is familiar in the United States as well, and ignores a history of deliberate, clear-headed moves by successive generations of powerful leaders - who knew precisely what they were doing.

Israelis live in the world they built with their own hands, and for the most part with clear minds. But it is also one which we in Western countries helped to build for them - and thus our countries bear heavy responsibility for the mess that has been created.  We built it in part through our misguided early support of the Zionist project, and the incorporation of the Balfour declaration into the establishment of Palestine mandate.  But mostly we built it through centuries of anti-Semitism, culminating in the Holocaust.  This created an unstoppable momentum in favor of this whole misguided, century-long project of colonial resettlement and state-building on the Western shore of the Arab world.  Much of this movement was well-meaning,  but much was itself driven by vaguely or overtly anti-Semitic motives toward solving the West's "Jewish Problem" by packing the Jews off to another land.  It seems odd that we in the West would choose to solve our own problem, however, by taking someone else's land.

I think there is some truth to the notion that Israeli crimes seem to be singled out in ways that other, equally barbarous crimes are not.  I think the main reason for that is that Israel is seen as an extension of the West, and thus held to the West's standards of international law and political morality.  Many Western citizens feel a level of guilt over the Palestinian dispossession that they simply don't feel about other equally vile crimes.  They don't feel that they are, in the same way, complicit in those crimes.

The harsh rejection of Israeli policies also partakes of the long global rejection of, and reaction to, Western colonialism - particularly in the West itself.  One might say Israel is singled out, but then again there really are few places left in world in which much of the West continues to backa blatantly colonial project of establishing a state on the territory of another people, by removing the native inhabitants and bringing in settlers from western nations.  It happened very often in the past.  But where else is it happening now?

We are always forced to accept, and live with, to some extent, the crimes of the past.  The question now is what must be accepted, and what can be rectified.  I think 1967 and UN242 is the watershed.  Until that time the world community's approach to Israel was imconsistent and ambivalent.  But I believe a fairly clear line was drawn in 1967, one which became a near-universal consensus, and that the goal should still be to implement that resolution, and push for an eventual Israeli withdrawl from all of the West Bank.

But once that occurs, borders firmly established, and Israel's other obligations under international law have been discharged, the world community must be prepared to accept Israel as a legitimate, non-pariah state, and be prepared to defend its integrity against terrorist or other incursions into its territory, and other assaults on its security.

But Israel must relinquish control of the West Bank before this normalized situation can occur.  The international community has already spoken quite clearly on this.  The West Bank is not a bargaining chip belonging to Israel to be exchanged for something else.  More importantly, it is not something that may be seized by settlers in the name of the State of Israel.  Yet the latter is clearly the ambition of a sizeable proportion of the Israeli public, and an even greater proportion of Israel's governments.

I still can't believe there are people who are so deluded as to believe that the main motive for the settlement movement has been security, even initially. This sort of rabidly partisan double-think is most unhelpful.  The main motive for occupation may be security.  But one establishes security out of an occupation by building military bases, fences and checkpoints - not by building towns, swimming pools, agricultural developments, infrastructure and elementary schools!  The latter are a security hazard, not a security enhancement.  However, they create the need for more security measures - which is their intention in the first place.  Lot's of "middle of the road" Israelis seem to have the attitude: "well I'm not 100% down with these settlements; but I do think that as long as there are people living there, we must defend them."  And so it goes - more settlements, more attacks on settlements, more soldiers to secure the settlements, etc. - with the settlement movement pushing the agenda.  The entire history of Israel is a history of expansion based on a strategy of new settlement, securing the new settlements, and then expanding into newer settlements from the new base - helped along by timely wars.

Amidst all the blather, you do make one point which I agree with, namely that Israel is held to a different standard because it is considered a Western country.  Just about everything else though is the usual pack of half-truths or outright lies that one hears regularly from the usual suspects of Israel haters.

I won't rebut everything here, as I've had enough for one day.  But I will repeat one point made many times.  If Israel was as hell-bent on conquest as you seem to think from the very beginning, it's behavior throughout its existence was very strange indeed.  Starting from the immediate acceptance of the Peel Commission plan in 1937 to the immediate acceptance of the UN Partition plan in 1947 all the way to the 2000-2001 negotiations, Israel has repeatedly tried to settle the conflict and accept half a loaf as better than none.  Why would they do this if they saw conquest as the only goal?

What people like you fail to understand is that like any country, Israel is made up of different strands of thought and different philosphies.  There has indeed been a strain of Zionist thought that wanted to maximize territory and throw out or subjugate the Arabs.  But it has ALWAYS been a minority viewpoint and when it seemed like peace was possible, like in the early 1990's, it has been marginalized.  In the early years, Ben-Gurion was hated by the so-called Revisionists like Jabotinsky precisely because he was willing to take whatever the UN plan offered and wasn't going to press for the maximum amount of territory.

What has happened in the past couple of decades is that this strand of Zionism has been augmented by religious Zionists and others who feel a deep bond with the land.  While that's what gets a lot of attention, it has never been anything other than a minority viewpoint in Israel.  But it has coincided with a much more common strain of thought that said the West Bank was necessary for Israel's security.  Together, these arguments have conspir