Jim, really enjoy your well written pieces on journalism. Truth digging without being swayed by the interests is the kind of free press that protects the first three estates.

On further reading of both pages, while I find much to agree with in Hedges' work, I am worried about your erroneous conflating of apartheid South Africa with the American segregationists. There are superficial similarities, while the critical difference is the segregationist Alabamans and Georgians (to name two) here in America had the overarching Federal presence, including National Guard troops, enforcing legally mandated desegregation. In South Africa, ultimately, the government, which was institutionally racist from the top down, recognized the inevitability of change within the context of ongoing resistance from the ANC, among others, as well as massive and increasing pressures from outside.

I do not find the situations similar enough beyond the surface to warrant considering them in the same sentence.

To the extent there are Westerners who defend Hamas's atrocities, they need to be opposed. But again Jim Sleeper seems to be in some universe where the US political mainstream needs to be reminded that Israel isn't the only faction in this fight that kills innocent people. In the universe where the rest of us live, Israel's killings are excused by virtually every American politician and where the problem is that most people have a wildly romanticized notion of how Israel won its land, became a majority Jewish state, and how it fights its wars.

When people start equating Israel with apartheid South Africa, and Fatah with Inkatha, then it'll be time to point out that Hamas suicide bombers are like ANC thugs who necklaced their opponents.

Jim Sleeper writes:

"It's a mistake to cite Niebuhr's conviction that violence was necessary against Hitler because he wouldn't have been softened by a Gandhi. That leaves the impression that Israelis would respond like Hitler were they confronted by a massive, disciplined nonviolent Palestinian movement, in the glare of the international media."

The words "massive" and "glare of the international media" are the real sticking points here, because look what happens to peaceful anti-war protesters in Isreal (this article is from today's Guardian):

"During a peaceful anti-war vigil outside a Tel Aviv air force base, several members of the fire brigade turned on one protester, drenching her relentlessly with water from their hoses, before approaching her and ordering her into the station in order to "give us all head".

" A veteran activist, [Sharon} Dolev has suffered a great deal during her 20 years of campaigning in the Israeli peace camp ("death threats, being shot with rubber bullets, hate mail, beatings"), but said that this incident was "the first time that the establishment felt safe in [taking action such as this]".

"It used to be a big deal if bus drivers criticised protests and vigils in public," she recalls, "since as employees of the state, they were not allowed to express political opinions in uniform." Now, however, the firemen felt so secure of escaping punishment that they even bombarded her with firecrackers during the attack, telling her "now you know what it's like to live in Sderot".

When video evidence emerged on an Israeli news website of her ordeal, readers' comments were predictably scathing of Dolev and her fellow protestors for daring to speak out in the first place against the IDF's operation. "Of the 380 comments, all but 10 were in support of the fire brigade," said Dolev. "Some readers even called openly for our murder, urging the police to shoot us, or saying 'Why use water – use acid instead'."

However, Mr. Sleeper will be pleased that Sharon Dolev eschews making comparisons to Nazis (as apparently many Israeli doves do):

"It's all too easy for the Israeli authorities to say 'we didn't build an Auschwitz for the Palestinians, so everything's ok', but in reality everything is not ok." She believes that history has come full circle, and that instead of learning the lessons of the Holocaust, "we have become the racists ourselves".

"Isn't Gaza a ghetto?" she continues. "OK, we don't use the Palestinians' hair for cushions, but the [stage is being set for the] same kind of process of dehumanisation here." Working in a joint Israeli-Palestinian organisation in Gaza in 1989 gave Dolev her first exposure to "the banality of evil", she says. "It wasn't seeing a soldier get scared and shoot into a crowd, but rather seeing a girl sitting in her house and getting shot by a stray bullet. And then, when she needed to be transferred to a Cairo hospital, the Shabak officers saying only she could cross, and no one else. A 12-year-old girl, in a vegetative state, and they wouldn't even let her mother accompany her. That is the banality of evil."

She talked of 700 activists imprisoned during operation Cast Lead:

"They arrested some on the charge of disturbing public order, others on even vaguer charges. And some were even detained for 'damaging the nation's morale' – a charge which doesn't even exist [in the statutes]. There is no law in Israel anymore."

Buonasera is getting more than a little hot here and is therefore glossing a lot of history and is settling on some pretty vague assumptions. In the first post, for example, Buonasera writes:

"I'm curious as to whether you believe bringing liberal democracy to geographical areas or other cultures is appropriate behavior! The results have been appalling."

I'd be interested to know what Buonasera means by "geographical areas" and "other cultures," especially with reference to Israel's presence in the Middle East. Today the Israeli Supreme Court overturned a ban on Arab political parties in the next election that a Committee on Elections had tried to impose. If that's what bringing liberal democracy to "geographical areas" or "other cultures" means, I can refer Buonasera to a number of Palestinians who'd be happy to have it.

Buonasera will reply that the court's decision is a crumb compared to what a proper Arab sovereignty over Palestine would be. Buonasera won't be able to tell us what that sovereignty would actually be like, and who it would really benefit and how, and what political and other rights it would provide, or whether we are supposed to care at all as long as it was "Arab lands for the Arabs."

The "blood and soil" notion behind Buonasera's question to me is not progressive multiculturalism but a reactionary, 19th-century idea that Arabs have seldom embraced or practiced. Throughout the old Levant -- in Baghdad, Beirut, and even Jerusalem and Hebron and Sefad, as well as Istanbul, Jews, Armenians, Druze, Arabs, Turks, Greeks, and others commingled for centuries, but in ways we liberal democrats should not applaud or want to return to, for reasons I won't go into here.

But let's assume that what I take to be the "blood and soil" premise of Buonasera's question is right. Does Buonasera know -- or will he think I'm just making it up -- that Hebrew was a language in Palestine centuries before it was called Palestine and a millenium before Arabic was a language there? (Arabic came with Mohammed, after 700 A.D.)

Now, since I can anticipate the leap Buonasera's mind will take in response to this inconvenient historical fact, I will repeat what my posts have made clear: I don't think that historical precedence entitles Jews to sovereignty over Palestine. So what if my grandparents in Lithuania read and prayed in the same biblical Hebrew that recounts the follies of Hebrew Kings in Judaea and Samaria in 900 B.C.? I have written several times here at TPM that Israel cannot remain both a democracy and a Jewish state, unless there really is a strict, two-state solution of a kind that probably wouldn't work and that I don't think I would welcome.

The only arrangement I could endorse would be one that combined respect for ethno-racial communities with respect for individual rights -- just what the Israeli Supreme Court affirmed today. I think that's likelier if the Jewish state is allowed and encouraged to evolve toward a new federation. Perhaps Barack Obama will help. Finger-pointing won't. Nor will counting the bodies, because, believe me, when it comes to slaughtering masses of people in the Middle East, you do not want to start counting.

Instead of that, I'd like Buonasera to tell us what other model he sees nearby aside from mine and how he would like to restore or bring it into being. What, in other words, does Buonasera believe, and what does Buonasera want?

Well, Buonasera, I do share your desire that Americans stop paying for Israel's sins, but I'd be glad if we could help it and the Palestinians resolve their dilemmas, even if that took big bucks and a firm but deft foreign policy.

I made a number of points in my response to you above that I don't see answers to (answers are admittedly difficult or unavailable, but that's my point). I also think you're loose with the history, which is way more complicated than we like to admit, but I can't get into it here.

I'll say one thing about it, though: Back when Arendt and Magnes (a founder of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem) were founding B'rit Shalom (Covenant of Peace)to explore cooperative and federative arrangements with Palestinians, Zionists had to deal with a lot of feudal and exploitative Arab big landowners warlords, not with the individual farmers whose "organic" relationship to the land was often a hard and bitter one, and not because of the Jews, who did make the deserts bloom.

So it's really complicated and tragic. Israel has made that easy to forget. That's its sin and its tragedy, as well as Hamas'. But our finger-pointing isn't the answer. Perhaps American power, wisely applied, can help.

Like many people, I have guarded but not soaring hopes for Obama's presidency, although I strongly supported his candidacy, as TPM readers know; and my hopes are even more guarded when I contmplate his chances of helping to resolve matters in the Middle East the way, say, Bill Clinton helped in Northern Ireland.

Ultimately, of course, everything depends on the antagonists themselves. Israel makes me want to throw up my hands, because, on the good side (and where else in the Middle East would this happen? Not Egypt!), the Israeli Supreme Court yesterday overturned a ban on Arab parties competing in the February elections, but, on the bad side, Israeli brutality has indeed at times sunk below the worst precedents. See Richard Silverstein's summary yesterday of an incident that hardens one's heart against Israel:

http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/2009/01/21/idf-in-gaza-murder-in-cold-blood/

Yet by the standard of Buonasera's closing paragraph in the longer message just above, the United States had no right to exist in, say, 1970, after the facts of the My Lai massacre and, indeed, the brutal folly of the whole Vietnam War had come to light. That's how many of us felt, at least fleetingly, at the time. Welcome to history -- present as well as past.

It is challenging to participate effectively in a hard-hitting discussion of one's posts, but I can't respond to comments from people who are reacting to my posts without having taken the trouble to read them. I mean, there are certain minimal requirements for entry into any discussion, and one of them is that before someone like Seth Edenbaum can respond to an argument or analysis, he needs to know what the person you're responding to has said and is arguing, beyond cherry-picking a sentence or two.

I'm not asking your to go back and read a book or anything before opening your mouth, Seth. But as the first paragraph of my post here explains, I've written four (now five) columns on Gaza. For example, why don't you at least try to read this short one from two days ago -- "UK and US Drop Their (and Israel's) Grand Strategy": http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/19/uk_and_us_drop_their_and_israels_grand_strategy/index.php
Or maybe the post that criticizes the neo-con propagandist Jeffrey Goldberg alongside the moralist Hedges, called "How (and How Not) to Assess Israel's Moral Self-Destruction": http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/15/how_and_how_not_to_assess_israels_moral_self-destr/index.php

Seth, if you are really as committed morally and intellectually to addressing these issues, do it. Don't just shovel someone's writing into the thread as if to suggest that a) I've never read it and b)I disagree with it. That's not where my criticisms begin, but you got too angry too quickly to understand them. When you say, "This entire post is a lie," you announce an end to discussion before you begin.

Sleeper's post is good, except for his labelling of Goldberg as a neo-con, but most of the comments here don't seem to appreciate it. Too bad.

The anti-Israel posts have a fascinating kind of visceral, personalized vehemence that is fascinating. You just don't see this kind of anger, say, against the Sudanese government for Darfur, or the Russians for Chechnya, or Sri Lanka for the Tamils, or what Mugabe is doing to his own people in Zimbabwe, or any other similar situation. Let's say that ALL of the 1300 Gazas killed were innocent children, and that the Israeli government at the highest levels had ordered the deaths. Would we pay any attention at all if this happened in Africa, or Sri Lanka? If Putin crushed another Central Asian uprising? Or let's say the civil war between Hamas and Fatah killed 300 fighters from each side, plus another 600 civilians. Would anyone really care? So is this anti-Semitism? It doesn't match the template of earlier anti-Semitisms (religious, political, economic) but it does seem to go hand-in-hand with a kind of philo-Semitism. The Jews, once idealized by the left as largely non-violent victims, have become indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors in their willingness to kill civilians. This notion, rather than the actual violence, is what is so appalling to Israel's vocal critics on blogs like TPM, because it shreds their romantic notions of Jews. It's that loss, not actual lives loss of the Palestinians, that upsets folk here so. The Nazi comparisons are absurd in the sense of counting 600 civilian dead as somehow similar to 6,000,000 dead, but they are symbolically significant.

Zimbabwe is probably the better model than South Africa as to what "peace" with Hamas would look like if it came today (and it's still what South Africa can possibly become).

The suggestion that we should suspend U.S. military aid to Israel is a good one, but I doubt that would change the Israeli strategy significantly; Israel would just produce more of its own weapons or get them from states like China. South Africa happened because Nelson Mandela was able to convince the whites that he could assure their security once they accepted majority rule. So far the Palestinians haven't produced a Mandela.

And still no response to statements of fact.