"there is a major push in the pro-Israel community to establish a lobby that supports the two-state solution"
Is there any politician in USA who doesn't support a two state solution? Is there any Jewish lobby in USA that doesn't support a two state solution ?

Someone writes: "While Jordan and Egypt have peace treaties with Israel, there is not a true peace there."
Really. Not one Israeli or Egyptian soldier killed in battle since the Carter peace treaty was signed. Not one.
Prior to the signing, the number of Israeli dead was 5,000. Egyptian, 20,000.
The Jordan treaty has been just as effective.

It's peace. And there are thousands of kids with fathers, women with husbands, and mothers with sons who will sing its praises.
As for the two-state solution, the "mainstream" Jewish organizations give the concept lip service. They support two states but with so many conditions as to make said support tantamount to opposition i.e. none of them favor getting rid of the settlements.

So did they oppose Clinton Plan? Did they try to kill it? Did Bush oppose this plan and try to stop Clinton?
Did Clinton’s effort fail because of “mainstream" Jewish organizations?
So we are going back to the Carter book. So only if Carter, yours and Arafat version of event in 2000 are correct while Clinton and Ross versions are false then "mainstream" Jewish organizations are obstacle to peace. I’m sorry, but you are barking up the wrong tree.

Yes.

But these are definitely not a democratic "reforms" you are talking about. The only way to a true peace in the Middle East that does not involve returning the refugees and ending the Jewish majority state is the replacement of Egypt and Jordans current pro-Israel authoritarian governments with direct colonial rule by the US or some other pro-Israel power. 

Then Lebanon and Syria have to be put under the same rule.

Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq and the other states are less critical since they do not share borders, but if they are not put through this program problems certainly will persist.

Then the populations of all the countries would have to be reeducated/brainwashed.  Parents would have to be prevented from teaching their children what the parents themselves consider the truth of the historical injustice of the creation of Israel, which supporters of Israel consider hatred.

Then after some amount of generations of that, peace will be possible.

Otherwise, Israel will have to accept the refugees and accept that a Jewish majority state created in the 20th century on territory that at the time had a non-Jewish majority is not a stable situation.

what we have now is, in my imagination, a two state solution.

I was reading MLK's writings the other day and was reminded that blacks got 3/5 of a vote in 1789 and about Plessy vs. Fergusan in which Justice Brown finally declared:

It amazes me that the Palestinians are going through the same mess that the blacks went through many years ago.

Maybe Obama will bring some moral clarity to the situation and move things forward.

Peace will be possible only when both Israelis and Palestinians will convince themselves that they have EQUAL spiritual and historical rights over the Holy Land. Thus, the can live together side by side in every street, they have to go to the same schools, to enjoy doing business, to share the same joys and the same pains, to comply with the same laws and so on.
The two-state solution should be temporary, it will reflect that the two parties definetly accept each other as neighbours. But sooner or later, Israelis and Palestinians will demolish the wall of intolerance and start a new glorius future for all the region.

Did Clinton really have a plan? The fact is Jewish settlers in the occupied territories actually doubled during the Clinton years and Clinton was no moron; he knew that was happening. It was probably an 8 year "shell game without a pea" that Clinton was playing with the Palestinian side.

How about a little truthiness here.

Opponents of the peace process say, "you can't make peace with the Arabs. Just one bullet and the Arabs repudiate the agreement and Israel is at war."

The truth: Egypt's Pres. Sadat signs a peace agreement with Israel in 1979. Islamic crazies killed him in 1982. 24 years later, the peace agreement is still in effect.

Israel's Yitzhak Rabin signs a peace treaty with the Palestinians. A Jewish crazy kills him. Bibi Netanyahu becomes Prime Minister, repudiates the peace agreement, and it is never implemented.

Rabin's murder killed the peace process. Sadat's had no effect.

The Likudniks who post here need to read something other than their AIPAC talking points.

Do you really believe that Israel would be helped if its neighbors had modern governmental systems? I don't think you do. MJ Rosenberg surely does not.

Personally, I never much cared whether Israel's neighbors were democratic so long as they were willing to live in peace with Israel.

Jordan, for instance, is not a democracy in the western sense but it is precisely the kind of neighbor Israel needs. Egypt is not a democracy but is at peace with Israel. A democratic Egypt probably would not be. So let's lay the democratic crusade aside (which, of course, we do anyway if we don't like the choices made by the voters in these various countries).

It sounds like the so-called progressives who support dictatorships are on Israel's side.

The United States has a modern government.  US citizens privately send assistance to IRA terrorists or would-be terrorists to this day.  A democratic Egypt would be just as modern, and just as disdainful for your definition of terrorism as Americans.

I'm not going to waste time trying to argue with you about how the refugees who resulted from the creation of Israel are different from those created by India's partition.  Even if I could convince you, there would be no point. 

I'll just say that Arabs see the Palestinian situation as more ofan uncompensated theft, therefore more of an injustice, and therefore different.  It is not the case that Pakistan's population was angry until the Pakistani government prepared the population to accept it. 

As you complain about in the case of Egypt and Jordan, preparing populations to accept something they do not is not what governments do. If you want a government to do that, that government cannot be ruled by Egyptians or Jordanians, it has to be ruled by Israelis or Americans.

How do you prepare a population to accept something it currently does not, even in the long term? If you have a better way than re-education camps let's hear it.

You say accepting the refugees is a false issue at best.  It would satisfy Arab demands and lead to peace and it does not require recolonization by the US.  The US so far is failing to maintain minimal leverage over the Iraqi government that represents 25 or so million people.

Other than accepting refugees, how are you going to install governments that re-educate their populations against the wills of those populations? 

You don't intend to ever do that.  You intend for tension and war against the entire rest of the region to continue indefinitely.  You intend for Israel and the US to support autocratic governments in Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  You also intend to work as hard as possible to install such governments in Palestine and Lebanon.

You are the one fighting to keep Arabs under 7th century political systems (Why 7th century?  There were dictatorships before then but there were no modern authoritarian dictatorships of the Egyptian or Jordanian form until much later.)

Progressives such as myself but unlike you and Rosenberg, want a solution that will allow the US to support democratic movements throughout the Middle East. 

Good thing Egypt is a dictatorship and since Sadat has never been able to implement a foreign policy that its people would vote for.

You are really presenting this as a good thing.  Do you feel any shame at all about that?

Why not accept the refugees, then you can use 2 billion dollars a year to bribe Egypt to hold fair elections instead of using the bribes to enrich corrupt leaders who will execute an unpopular foreign policy.

It amazes me that the Palestinians are going through the same mess that the blacks went through many years ago.

My god, what a fatuous, brain-dead argument.  It is wrong on a whole host of levels.

For the sake of argument, let's start with the assumption that both Palestinians now and blacks in the pre-Civil Rights era were "oppressed".  The question is then how to achieve "liberation". The fact is that the blacks in the US were able to gain the moral high ground and win the support of the majority of the country - not just liberals - by practicing non-violence.  It was the strategy and tactics of Martin Luther King, a direct intellectual descendent of Gandhi, that delivered change for black Americans.

The contrast with the Palestinians could hardly be starker. King not only preached nonviolence but also reconciliation.  Who among the Palestinians - or indeed among the Arabs as a whole - preaches a message of accomodation and universal brotherhood the way King did?  Who is the one laying out a vision of peace and rallying the population for it?  I challenge anyone to name even a single Arab of any influence or prominence who has uttered anything even remotely like that. 

MJ

You could have gone further. Both Egypt and Jordan have been working to secure the Israeli soldiers return, some sort of negotiation between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Olmert just met with King Abdullah. The peace agreements make all this possible.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Unrelating question: why do you participate in discussions, and Concert of Democracies folk do not?

The discussions on Israel and Palestinians are always heated, and yet we, and you, can participate in an exchange with many rounds. Perhaps people discussing ME have somewhat wider perspective: we may trade insults, but we do not blow up each other, so there are some blessings to be thankful for.

You are freer with insults than the strength of your arguments can support, a big-chested challenger of others. But is it laziness or just plain mendacity that keeps you from responding to others who challenge the correctness of your "facts?"

Did you ever find those UN resolutions you claimed characterize the West Bank as "disputed territory," or do you now agree that they characterize it as "occupied territory?"

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2006/dec/17/jimmy_carter_israel_apartheid_and_the_shame_of_brandeis_university

I believe it is U.N. Resolution 242 that refers to disputed territory. The U.S. and Israel had the word "the" removed from the resolution. The idea at the time was that while most of the land would go back to Jordan there would be some modifications of the borders through negotiation.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

"Thats an interesting point about Mexico; I wonder how the criminal cartels involved in human smuggling and drug trafficking compare with an "organized resistance movement" in terms of how much harm they're doing to the US"

It doesn't matter. How criminal cartels harm compare to
911? How death caused by medical errors in US hospitals compare to 911? You can't expect people to be rational and calculating that much.
" How convenient that you left that one - the Kurds and Turkey - out!"
I don't know what's going on there but I remember that they were very brutal to Kursds 30 years ago.

It's a little surreal to see folks projecting their hopes and dreams on to Obama.  Sure, the guy seems to have a realistic streak that lets him tell people what they don't want to hear.  But he also works pretty hard to maintain centrist positions on most issues.  I'm not expecting too many major revelations from him on the policy front.

Plus, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not that complicated: it's an intractable land war that will require concessions on both sides to solve.  The Israelis will need to face down the hard right factions in their society and give up substantial chunks of the West Bank...and the Palestinians will need to face down Hamas and accept something less than what they want.  See?  Piece of cake. 

Rabin's assination did not kill the peace process. The Second Intifada did that.

Sadat's assination did not kill the peace process because he was killed by the Moslem Brotherhood for internal Egyptian reasons. The logic of the deal, Egypt not spending millions on a military to fight for the Palestinians they don't really care about still made no sense to Mubarak.

AIPAC talking points? I wouldn't know what they looked like if hand delivered. Your position just seems somewhere between onesided, fantasy based, and illogical.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

I'm looking at the ten major causes of deaths in the US, in 2003. Of around 1.2 million, around 70,000 came from accidents and 25,000 from suicide.

9/11 caused approximately 3,000 deaths. Tragic, but examined in public health epidemiological terms, relatively minor. Terrorism will never be abolished, any more than the about 29,000 deaths from pneumonia and influenza. Physicians constantly balance risk of interventions, and, yes, cost, versus years of life saved. Terrorism, if treated as one more infection, becomes more something to be managed than something to drive the entire social fabric.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Save me the dramatics. There are far more home-grown than terrorist murders in the United States, but I don't hear quite the emphasis on crime prevention as on terrorism protection.

When it comes to terrorism protection, I believe that the people of the United States would be far better protected by having more attention paid to critical national infrastructure, and vulnerabilities that could cause far more death and destruction than the 9/11 attacks. I want to see much more attention, for example, given to the physical security of the chemical industry and the electrical power grid, than a never-ending procession of feel-good tightening of airline security. The overemphasis on airline security ignores the general al-Qaeda pattern of varying their means of attack; the common thread in their signature is not the target system but multiple coordinated attacks.

Tell me, what steps have and should be taken to prevent a Bhopal-scale disaster in the US? I would note that the initial German use of chemical weapons, in WWII, used 160 tons of chlorine on an 8000 meter front. Standard US chlorine tank cars carry 55 or 90 tons, often on railroad tracks running through dense urban areas -- such as a few blocks from the US Capitol. These railroad tracks have only minimal protection, at best, from attacks with hand-placed explosives or man-portable antitank weapons. I suggest a bit of study of the potential of a BLEVE incident with a tank car.

While chlorine is still an important industrial chemical, there are safer alternatives for water purification. Given that chlorine tanks on sidings at water plants are vulnerable to accident and homegrown terrorism, as well as that which comes from foreign sources, I see a much better return on security investment by hardening targets here before going off on questionable military operations all over the world.

Public health epidemiologists, I'm afraid, aren't as emotional as you are, and very much deal with the reality of deaths -- murder and not -- on American soil. With finite resources, interventions are often judged on cost per year of life saved.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Better analogy: Russia -- Chechnya -- Georgia. Chechens used Pankisi Gorge in Georgia. Chechens committed terrorist acts that are at par with 9/11. Russia did not bomb Georgia -- and yet how many lectures were written about Russian behavior!

This analogy is fairly strict: we are talking about nationalism-inspired terrorism and huge disparity in conventional military capabilities. Georgia, like Lebanon, is an "imperfect democracy".

Turkey and Kurds is another example. Even if Turkey was sending her military to Iraqi Kurdistan, they did not bomb the crap out of it.

I wasn't referring to the murder as dramatics. I was referring to your language as dramatic. Your sarcastic response on how unAmerican I am proves my point -- you prefer drama to dealing with realities -- including direct work both on preventing disasters and coping with them.

You are the one being smug in self-righteousness, rather than apparently actually dealing with consequences. Talk is cheap. Superior attitudes are cheap.

No, I didn't smell the Twin Towers. I was close enough to the Pentagon to feel the shock wave and hear the bang. Apropos of the Twin Towers, a friend got his team out because he went into what he called cold, controlled mode from 12 years of submarine duty. There was immense heroism in the Pentagon, but people acted rather than emoted.

Perhaps, however, I may have a little more exposure to emergency operations, where cavalier is not the word -- it is "controlled". Don't tell me about how terrible the smoke was ever had to choke down the vomit and force yourself not to become faint with a major trauma victim in front of you. I think of international colleagues on a world trauma and critical care medicine forum, and how getting emotional triggers a strong and negative peer response. Oh, there's emotion about what involves giving the best care -- don't get between a couple of surgeons with opposite views on the role of tourniquets.

Musashi spoke of the ideal warrior as one who fought as if already dead, in harmony. I rather hope that anyone controlling nuclear weapons is unemotional about it -- if one is found to get emotional, the Personnel Reliability Program yanks one off that duty.

And precisely what does your Republican reference, or any partisan matter, have to do with this, other than a way to sound generically superior? That reminds me, Sir, of the legendary Witchee-Watchee Bird, who always flew backward so he could see where he had been. One day, he damaged a wing, and flew in ever-decreasing circles until, shrieking imprecations at all, he flew up his own cloaca and disappeared. Perhaps you might consider such.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

The primary Hizbollah weapon was a single-fired Grad, with an approximately 20 kg unitary blast-fragmentation warhead. By design, the Grad series was intended to be inaccurate, since the typical Soviet use was firing battalions of 18 40-round launchers, with the rockets spreading out to cover area, unarmored targets in the open. Individual Grads are principally harassment rather than area coverage or specifically aimed weapons.

Could you substantiate that 2.1 million Israelis -- that would be 1/3 of the population -- were in bomb shelters? That seems a trifle high, especially when the threat has limited range. You are saying 1/3 of the Israeli population is within 15-20 kilometers of the Lebanese border, assuming the launchers are positioned right at the border?

A country should use weapons reasonably expected to destroy the attacking weapons, unless it chooses to use WMD or infrastructure bombing to destroy the entire enemy population, civilians or not. We have the information that Israel urgently requested replacement M26 rockets for the US M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System. The US no longer uses the M26 due to its limited range, accuracy, and cluster munition warhead that leaves duds in the impact area. In fact, the US provided the M270 with the understanding it would be used against appropriate military targets, such as trucks and artillery in the open, rather than civilians.

Israel also has US Firefinder (AN-TPQ/36 or 37) radar used to detect and aim counterbattery fire at enemy artillery sites. US doctrine is to prefer the M109 155mm howitzer with M107 unitary shells against targets in areas with civilians. Typically fired in salvos of six, and fuzed for airburst, the M107 does not leave unexploded bomblets over an area, and has minimal penetration against buildings. While Israel's intense censorship works against independent evaluation of their tactics, there is reason to assume that they preferred MLRS and aircraft bombs to quite fearsome, but more selective, 155mm tube artillery.

Aerial bombs, incidentally, take longer to target than tube or rocket artillery, and give the rocket crew more time to get out of the impact zone.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I was wrong. It's not 1/3 of population.
of the main city of northern Israel and the third-largest city in the country, with a population of about 267,800
and everybody else in the Northern Israel.
Here is an example:
http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2006/07/intel-employees-in-haifa-israel-in-wireless-bomb-shelters/
But I think my main point still stands.

Perhaps I am missing your main point. If, indeed, a nation can do anything to stop a threat, then why not nuclear strikes against the Hezbollah areas?

A simple answer, of course, is the doctrine of proportionality in just war theory. It would not be proportional to use nuclear weapons against relatively light artillery. I invite you to compare the destructive capability, in particular including the residual dangers to civilians of cluster bomblets, of M26 rockets used as counterfire to Grads. Each M26 delivers 644 M77 submunitions, of which 10-20% are duds and thus effectively create minefields. Compare the impact area of a Grad with a M26; the latter is much greater.

Israel's tactical censorship is one of its own worst enemies, as not being able to confirm, from independent sources, what munitions they used for counterbattery fire gives no good arguments for proportionality. The apparent targeting of the Lebanese civilian electrical power grid also is of questionable proportionality, or even a serious deterrent to Hezbollah.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

I don't think either Israel could destroy Hezbollah or Hezbollah could destroy Israel. A reasonable way would have been to limit damage, and also recognize that the Hezbollah weapons, as modern weapons go, simply were not that great a threat.

As I have mentioned, US Army counterbattery doctrine would have been far more appropriate to take out the rocket launchers -- airburst 155mm rather than MLRS or air strikes in populated areas. Since some resupply apparently came in through the airport, air strikes on the runways would be quite reasonable -- they are not in a populated area, and can be repaired quickly after hostilities stop.

Attacking supply lines has to have reasonable expectations. One medium cargo aircraft flight per day could have kept Hezbollah well supplied with rockets, or a few trucks. When one speaks of destroying the enemy, there are similarities, of course involving very different weaponry, with the US-USSR MAD paradigm. The differences are that neither Israel nor Hezbollah can destroy one another, or stop continuing attacks.

Again, I despair of extreme Israeli secrecy preventing independent observers to get a good idea of what was happening. Clearly, Hezbollah knew what Israel was doing; the censorship, in my opinion, was to keep information from the West, especially the public.

From what did come out, however, the Israeli ground incursion was strikingly incompetent. IDF seemed unprepared for tactics involving heavy antitank missiles, both against tanks and against infantry under cover, that the Chechens had been using since at least 1999.

The attacks on the Lebanese civilian electrical grid seemed pointless in getting Hezbollah to do anything. It was clear that the Lebanese military was unwilling and/or unable to control Hezbollah, so threatening the civilian infrastructure of Lebanon wasn't going to accomplish anything. Yes, it may have appealed to some Israeli political factions.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Chechen operations were quite a bit more deadly than Hezbollah"
Yes, I've heard that at least 70.000 Chechen civilians were killed {?}. So I'm not sure what's your point.

Also, Israel did not bomb crap out of Syria so what's your point?

I believe I answered your second question. The ground operation into Lebanon, from open-literature sources, would not have seemed an IDF operation without the IDF flags. The overall level of incompetence, in taking significant IDF casualties by being surprised by well-known Chechen-derived tactics, in poor fire discipline in attacking UN observers, was striking. While the US certainly recognizes its own problems with combined armor-infantry teams in built-up areas, Israel appeared to forget US as well as their own experience. IDF patrols led by tanks seemed to forget about top attack on tank armor.

The longer-range fights equally seem to have used questionable tactics. Israel might have helped itself by being more open to neutrals about its tactics; certainly Hezbollah technical intelligence could tell what was hitting them. From open literature, MLRS and fighter-bombers seemed to be preferred against individual rocket launchers, rather than unitary warhead howitzer airbursts. Yes, MLRS and fighter-bombers have greater range than M109 155mm howitzers, but the GRAD is a 15-20 kilometer range weapon and, depending on specific ammunition, the M109, a precise weapon, has 18-30 kilometer range.

Bombing the airport was proportional in direct military terms and was an excellent target for psychological reasons. Bombing ground transportation routes to stop rocket resupply sometimes went for good targets and other times to quite questionable dual-use ones.

Bombing the electrical power grid was a disproportionate attack on primarily civilian facilities. When the US attacked electrical power in Iraq and the Balkans, the targeting was principally a part of the Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) mission. In particular, the Iraqis seemed to rely, unwisely, on civilian power for radars and command centers. While there were unquestionably air attacks that caused major, long-term damage, the carbon filament weapons and the bombings of transformers/switchgear rather than generators was intended to facilitate repair. Hezbollah, on the other hand, did not run a large fixed air defense network, so cutting electrical power to it would not have a major effect on its combat capabilities. Attacking the electrical grid did have a substantial effect on civilian infrastructure.

It occurs to me that there might be a useful parallel to WWII when people speak of "destroying" Israeli targets. WWII city bombing, ignoring the more complex calculations for incendiary and nuclear weapons, still needed to deliver thousands of kilograms of explosive to do major damage to cities. With slight variations, GRAD rockets deliver 20 kilograms at a time. As opposed to the original Soviet design that delivers 30 rockets at a time from 18 truck launchers, insurgents using GRAD and the earlier Katyusha tend to launch singles or very small numbers at once. This sort of concentration doesn't even approach Soviet tactical fire densities, much less "destruction", which has a specific meaning with respect to artillery and bombing.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Howard, in the early sixties I somehow got on the mailing list of the Greater New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to the Human Animal (GNYSPCHA?).  They were proposing a robust R&D effort to develop the O-bomb, a chemical bomb that would cause orgasm among the lucky folks in the target zone.  Their greatest concern was how to overcome the inevitable huge traffic jams as people rushed into the hit zone.  As a weapons expert, have you studied this particular bomb?

Neoboho