Israel's blind, crushing, doomed war on Gaza has ended the Jewish people's 65-year-long reprieve from anti-Semitism since the Holocaust, a reprieve that encompassed most of our lifetimes, during which even dedicated Jew-haters bit their tongues.

No more. Amid the cacophony of justified condemnations we hear the strains of an older, creepier chorus. It is not too much to say that Israel has brought this upon itself, but it is also not too much to say that some rather perverse people have wanted and orchestrated it, as well.

I don't mean that strong critics of Israel should quiet down. It's long past time to break the U.S. media's taboo on talking about Israel's blunders as frankly as Israelis themselves famously do. I do mean to say that Israel's conduct of this war would be hideous and heartbreaking enough without the encouragement it's getting not only from its impassioned and sometimes duplicitous defenders but also from from critics who don't know their history and sometimes sound as if they don't really want to know.

And there is a deeper political problem: Like the bloody combatants of the IDF and Hamas and Hezbollah, word warriors on both sides don't see that the odds of winning justice through state violence and through wars of liberation have sunk since World War II. The commentators' blindness is as willful as the commanders'. And as fateful. And not just for Palestinians or Jews. (I discussed this subject for 20 minutes with Brian Lehrer on New York's NPR station last night. Here it is.)

Look with me briefly at an accomplished writer on each side of this war -- Chris Hedges, a scourge of Israel, and Jeff Goldberg, a sinuous defender. Then look at how Abraham Burg and Jonathan Schell argue, far more constructively -- and from no less experience -- that although human nature hasn't changed, the costs and consequences of violence have, as have the most effective ways to defeat tyranny and secure human dignity.

You may not think that we need to hear from such dreamers at a moment like this. But Burg and Schell are the realists. Historic shifts in freedom's always cloudy prospects have confounded not only grand strategists and their apologists in national-security states (Britain, the U.S., the U.S.S.R., and fortress Israel), but also guerrillas and supporters of national-liberation movements (in China, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Palestine).

Neither group seems aware that movements led by Gandhi, King, Mandela (after prison), Havel, Michnick and the principals in Northern Ireland have re-constituted and re-defined political power away from violence, sidelining established tyrannies and the would-be tyrants and nihilists within their own movements.

Writers and observers can help this transition if they believe that creative, disciplined non-violence isn't merely a dream of chumps, naifs, or schlemiels. Tough, savvy veterans of conflict have shown that we don't have to rush toward the dead ends toward which the combatants and enablers of IDF and Hamas are beckoning us.

In 2002, amid the war on terror and the run-up to the Iraq war, Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent in Bosnia, Latin America, and Israel, published his mordantly titled book War is a Force That Gives us Meaning. More recently, he has published American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America and a torrent of articles about injustices perpetrated by elites at home and abroad, not least through and by Israel.

Characteristic of Hedges' torrent of condemnations is this passage from "The Language of Death," a Jan. 12 post in Truthdig:

"The incursion into Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase of the decades-long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building ringed Palestinian enclaves where Israel will always have the ability to shut off movement, food, medicine and goods to perpetuate misery. The Israeli attack on Gaza is about building a hell on earth."

Hedges may well have read the cooler but otherwise wholly compatible assessment of Israel's 42-year mishandling of Gaza which I showcased here on January 4, by Darryl Li, a former public information officer for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. Hedges and Li could do more to advance justice if they'd help us answer questions about violent resistance such as the following:

Is Hamas is what it is mainly because Israel's policies are what they are? Or is there more to learn from a serious account of how and why Zionism and Palestinian nationalism arose at the same time?

Would Hedges (and Li) prefer a two-state solution, or Israel's absorption into a bi-national, democratic state whose majority would be Palestinian? If they'd prefer the latter, would human rights and civil rights fare better there than they have under Israeli occupation and for Israel's 1.5 million Arab citizens within the 1967 borders? What new balance of Israeli responsibility and Israeli-Palestinian interdependency might release these enemies from their degrading mutual loathing?

When Israelis say that they see no Palestinian or Arab disposition to serious self-government, to what extent are they right? To what extent are they just racist? To what extent are they rationalizing their expulsions of Palestinians in 1948 and their obsession about their own security at the expense of everyone else's? Have they been devoured by war as a force that gives them meaning? Won't peace depend on getting the balance of truth right as much as it does on condemning the fighting?

Finally, does Hedges, who often recounts his first-hand witness of Israeli soldiers shooting Palestinian children for sport, think it inevitable that every drop of blood drawn by the oppressor's lash will be avenged with blood drawn by the Arab sword, perhaps until Israelis are driven into the sea, having brought their destruction upon themselves? Does Hedges also accept the 19th-century blood-and-soil assumption that Jews never belonged in the Middle East, anyway? Or does he see a better way to reconcile power and justice?

I have read some of Hedges' and Li's writings, but I haven't yet found their answers to such questions. I do know enough to say that the passage I've quoted from Hedges has to do not only with Israel and Palestine but also with his well-justified but not-so-well focused rage at injustice and hypocrisy in the world, especially the kind sown by the American national-security state and its apologists. Hedges has become a volcano, erupting in Truthdig, Harper's, and elsewhere.

Recently, for example, he wrote with molten fury of the supercilious disdain he'd experienced at the hands of preppies and parvenus while in college. He has also laced into "America the Illiterate," the Christian right, Bush's nuclear apocalypse, fellow war correspondents, and more.

Hedges, who grew up in Maine and in rural parishes in upstate New York, where his father was a Presbyterian minister, comes from a tough, old, working-class Yankee culture for which I have a fond if somewhat testy regard. A one-time Harvard Divinity School student, Hedges erupts along the venerable if somewhat wearying lines of a New England Puritan jeremiad, the denunciatory sermon whose purpose, in the hands of such latter-day Puritans as the abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe, has been to blast open new pathways to redemption on earth, if not in heaven.

America would be poorer and meaner without these prophets. They strengthened Lincoln's melancholy commitment to the divine inexorability of bloody justice, steeling him to fight the Civil War to its bitter end. But who is The Union in Palestine, and who are the Rebels? Israel in Gaza now resembles Sherman in Atlanta, but if you look around just a bit, you find that Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran have been playing a long, slow game to turn the tables. They are tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, and the demographic and now moral odds will soon favor their theocratic, blood-and-soil vindication.

Hedges knows that his own ancestral Yankee Protestantism blessed the dispossession and slaughter of the inhabitants of the lands his family now calls home. He knows that it also anticipated and encouraged Zionism. The Rev. George Bush, for example, a New Hampshire Presbyterian by upbringing, the fifth-generation lineal antecedent of our departing president, and the first professor of Hebrew and Arabic at New York University in 1835, wrote a long tract on the Book of Ezekiel that foretold the restoration of the Jews to Palestine from all over the world for Armageddon.

If Hedges (and certain editors at Harper's and Truthdig) feel even subliminally that they have a thing or two to live down, displace or project onto the Jews, the stars certainly have certainly aligned right for eruptions like Hedges' most recent post.

But there is more to it than that. My own sense is that both Israel and Palestine will have to undergo their own civil wars to defeat the fanaticism that is now driving them, but Hedges' anger seems to have driven him to a somewhat reductionist analysis of causes and consequences. A similar moralism sometimes led supporters of "national liberation movements" to look away when those movements became brutal, tyrannical and even genocidal, in lands we thought they had liberated, but I cannot say that Hedges has gone that far. Rather, he confines his blame of Hamas to an elliptical line or two. He does give Israeli dissidents some credit, but he seems to hold no more hope for them than he does blame for Hamas.

A few days after Hedges' condemnation of Israel appeared in Truthdig, the New York Times op-ed page ran Jeffrey Goldberg's "Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas." There, as in virtually every article of Goldberg's I can recall, we learn that Goldberg, a Long-Island-born Israeli army veteran, has once again defied amazing personal dangers - as he did in the African bush, in Lebanon, in Gaza, and more - and walked right up to question people who, he gives us to understand, would just as soon slit his throat as squint at him. In a variation on this theme, other Goldberg articles parade his apparently easy familiarity with great leaders, from John McCain to Ehud Olmert, who for some reason talk to him as frankly they would in a private conversation with a brother-in-law.

I can't pretend to account for how Goldberg accomplishes these journalistic feats, but I do think I can take account of what they accomplish. If Hedges has become a volcano of denunciations of American imperialism and elitism and its spawn, Goldberg has become a geyser of irresistibly entertaining, informative, cagey, and often duplicitous neo-con explanations for everything, from the likelihood of a Saddam-Osama connection or of the fractured nobility of McCain's presidential bid to the Israelis' damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't bravery in the face an Arab world that, we are assured, has wanted to exterminate them since long before 1948, let alone 1967 or last month.

The one exception to Goldberg's neo-conservative propagandizing I can recall is a chilling piece he wrote for The New Yorker in 2004 about fanatical Jewish settlers on the West Bank. He has not written for the New Yorker for awhile now and seems more comfortable with the crypto-conservative Atlantic Monthly, where he has a blog, and with such crypto-conservative New York Times opinion editors as Chris Suellentrop and Sam Tanenhaus, who, in that paper's titanic struggle with Rupert Murdoch, have embedded themselves among its liberals somewhat as Allah's enforcers have embedded themselves in a Palestinian population that is now not so happy to have them. It is thanks to such editors that we have no shortage of op-ed pieces by Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, or the American Enterprise Institute's Danielle Pletka. And they have certainly opened the spigot for Goldberg.

In yesterday's Times op ed Goldberg reintroduced us to the late Hamas chieftain Nizar Rayyan -- "husband of four, father of 12, scholar of Islam and unblushing executioner," an "important recruiter of suicide bombers until Israel killed him two weeks ago" - who in 2006, Goldberg tells us with feigned nonchalance, "confessed to me one of his frustrations." Rayyan despised his fellow Palestinians in Fatah as sell-outs to the Jews, whom he told Goldberg are descended from pigs and apes and are "a curse to anyone who lives near them."

Ever self-dramatizing, Goldberg wants us to marvel that Rayyan even talked with him - and talked theology with him, no less! He certainly makes clear that Hamas' intractable belief system discredits Israeli leaders' expectation that "Hamas can be bombed into moderation." But he hastens to add, on the evidence of the same fanaticism which he has so entertainingly presented, that "Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation," either.

"The only small chance for peace today," Goldberg concludes somewhat airily, "is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States, and mainly, Israel, must help Hamas' enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of [Hezbollah in Lebanon] and Nizar Rayyan."

Does Goldberg really have any faith in this hope, which he twirls like a velvet cape in concluding his frightening performance? Mightn't this have been the moment to raise the possibility that Israel's invasion of Gaza has discredited Fatah and its leader Mahmoud Abbas, who is now widely thought by Palestinians fleeing Israeli bombs to be the obsequious collaborator with Israel that Rayyan always claimed he is?

Mightn't this also have been the moment for Goldberg to note that Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, of the Nation of Islam, both subscribed to the same theology that considered whites, and especially Jews, as descendants of pigs and apes? Goldberg might then have noted that Malcolm changed toward the end of his life and that, last summer, Farrakhan made a penitential, almost obsequious endorsement of Barack Hussein Obama, who exemplifies for Muslims and Jews a peace-making way to campaign which Goldberg didn't understand or expect would win.

No matter, for surely Goldberg's Times piece has had its intended effect: It has cajoled or scared at least some liberal Times readers into concluding Israel must fight in Gaza to the bitter end.

Maybe so, and maybe Goldberg's scoop on the thinking of Rayyan explains why. Except that, on January 2, shortly after Rayyan was killed, Chris Hedges wrote, in Truthdig, "I often visited Nizar Rayan...who would meet me in his book-lined study...." Hedges is a lot more regretful than Goldberg that when Israeli F-16s attacked that house, Rayan "was decapitated in the blast. His body was thrown into the street by the explosions. His four wives and 11 children also were killed." Other reports, including Goldberg's say that two of the four wives were killed, but Hedges is engaging in literary protest as much as reporting. When he acknowledges briefly some things about Rayan that would lead most of us to conclude he had to be stopped, you know that a "but" is coming:

"Rayan supported tactics, including suicide bombings, which are morally repugnant. His hatred of Israel ran deep. His fundamentalist brand of Islam was distasteful. But as he and I were students of theology our discussions frequently veered off into the nature of belief, Islam, the Koran, the Bible and the religious life. He was a serious, thoughtful man who had suffered deeply under the occupation and dedicated his life to resistance. He could have fled his home and gone underground with other Hamas leaders. Knowing him, I suspect he could not leave his children. Like him or not, he had tremendous courage."

The rest of Hedges' "but" is his description of Gaza City itself. Here he rises briefly to reportage of the kind Orwell might have given us, on the deprivation and squalor which Israel has enforced upon Gaza. He doesn't question whether recruiting suicide bombers is a more effective a response, any more than Goldberg questions whether Rayyan's fanaticism justifies Israel's destruction of Gaza City and so many innocent people whom Israel itself had penned up in the area.

Both Hedges and Goldberg know of Avraham Burg, the former Knesset Speaker and head of the Jewish Agency and World Zionist Organization. An officer in the paratroop corps, Burg became disillusioned with the Lebanon war of 1982. In1983, he was wounded by a grenade, not in Lebanon but in a Peace Now demonstration he'd joined in Jerusalem. Both Hedges and Goldberg need a long sit-down with him now.

Hedges needs it because Burg, who shares most of his criticisms of the Israeli government and public, could broaden his understanding, sensibility, and horizons. And Goldberg needs it because Burg, who knows everything he does about Israel's enemies and more, has reached different conclusions about how Israel should respond.

Here I must let Burg speak for himself, as I did Darryl Li of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights on January 4. Then I will close with a few words about the writer and Yale lecturer Jonathan Schell, a veteran war correspondent in his own right and a brilliant expositor of the new prospects for re-balancing power and violence.

In a recent column for the Israeli daily Haaretz entitled, "Why the West Can't Win," Burg writes the following, as only Israelis, who've all served together in a citizen army, can sometimes write to one another but as the Times op ed's Suellentrop (who has just moved to the paper's Sunday magazine) seldom let anyone write in the Times:

"Beyond the two piles of bodies and the mourning and bereavement of both peoples, through the fragmented voices of Israel's leadership, it's already possible to feel the sour taste of the next combat loss. We haven't won anything since the Six-Day War. We managed to be saved from disaster in 1973, we got ensnared but survived in 1982, and there is no lack of other examples.....

"I think it's no longer possible to win wars. We're not the only ones who can't; the West as a whole is incapable of doing so. It's hard for me to remember a single war in the past 60 years that the United States clearly and decisively won..... Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed, and from there the West embarked on a new path.

"Western Europe almost totally abandoned the war option. It doesn't fight, and in any case isn't assessed on the basis of its ability to win wars. The United States, by contrast, went from isolationism to being the country chiefly responsible for Western state-sponsored violence. It.... knows better than anyone how to deploy its forces to the starting line, but from there onward something always gets messed up. Korea wasn't a wonderful victory, Vietnam ended in disgrace, and the Gulf wars are not considered great military achievements.

"It looks like something in the DNA of the West no longer allows it to declare war like it used to do.... The wars of the previous century, along with the Holocaust of European Jewry, taught the West several lessons, central among which is the abolition of the doctrine of war; the West went from destroying and humiliating the enemy to maintaining [the enemy's] ability to rehabilitate itself, preserve its dignity, change and become a partner instead of a rival.

".... That's where the new type of victory began - the kind that doesn't wipe out the possibility of dialogue with yesterday's rival. ..... The question remains as to how a just society fights enemies who do not share the same value system, and how to redefine what victory is.

"It seems to me that if the goal of a war is the destruction of the enemy, it is a war that is doomed to fail. For reasons that are well-known to us, it is no longer possible to annihilate nations or at least suppress their aspirations of independence. .... And if no dialogue with the enemy develops, then the war must be deemed a failure.

"It therefore appears that Israel's leadership in the Gaza war is due to fail in our names - just like the Palestinian religious leaders ushering their people to another failure rooted in ignoring the metamorphosis of the concept of victory, from subduing to talking, from slaughtering to bridge-building. Just as bridges were ultimately built above the tempestuous waters between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, between Dresden and London, and between Catholic and Protestant Dublin, there is a bridge between Sderot and Gaza. Those who do not tread on it will lead their nations to failure in all their wars."

But what is that bridge, when Gazans are being bludgeoned into submission and when Israel is facing Hezbollah's 30,000 rockets to its North, Hamas' intransigence to its South, a rising proportion of increasingly disaffected Arabs within its own borders, and Iran's connivances and nuclear ambitions to its East?

For those chastened and disciplined enough to go beyond Hedges' logic of Puritan condemnation of the beleaguered and somewhat paranoid Israelis and beyond Goldberg's logic of jaunty neo-conservative defiance, Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World is the best way to survey the history and emerging premises of the very different logic that guided Gandhi, King, the later Mandela, the European dissidents, and the peacemakers of Northern Ireland.

Schell does not address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but perhaps that's for the best. He does show how peoples that were as oppressed, beleaguered, and overpowered as the Palestinians managed to neutralize or even win over their venomous oppressors without eliminating them, and, indeed, without much bloodshed.

They managed to combine deep faith and disciplined social organizing - the kind Rudy Giuliani mocked at the Republican convention - with a Gandhian and a Hannah Arendtian understanding that power comes ultimately not from those who give orders but from those who obey them or replace them with a different, fairer order that grows from their own insistence on relationships of trust and democratic dialogue.

People long accustomed to obey others can and do learn instead how to act together, through an inner, inevitably somewhat spiritual as well as democratic faith that's disciplined enough to sustain power through mutual trust, not through reliance on outside ecclesiastical and military authorities that promise to save them from one another. In our own lifetimes, people who have learned this discipline have been able to dissolve vast systems of authority that had shrunk their freedom with false promises of deliverance.

Is it a fool's errand in the Middle East? Not necessarily, especially considering the alternatives. Again, Hedges, although he does not mention Burg, acknowledges Israeli dissidents like Ury Avneri, Gideon Levy, and Tom Segev, who, while sometimes threatened, have not been drowned out in the cacophony of Israeli debate. Many Israeli democrats are neither foolish nor embittered. It would be irresponsible of Americans who are disillusioned with Israel not to find ways to support them vigorously instead of savoring jeremiadically the prospect of Israel's destruction for its sins.

Whether or not the Muslim world can produce a Ghandi or a Mandela remains to be seen, but stories like Goldberg's are being written and published by people who do not believe that it can happen and want to spare anyone the thought that it can. In commentators as well as commanders, that kind of blindness sheds blood, and it licenses people who should know better to equate Jews with something they are not, but something they have come to resemble..