Opening: Make Hilary Secretary of State (that is, remove the leader of the opposition from New York). Show the Arab and Muslim world--a place where honor matters--an abiding respect. Embrace the Arab League peace initiative of 2002 and frame the Israel-Palestine conflict in regional terms. Set out the long range goal of a Palestinian state, albeit in vague terms, but along with the insistence that settlements cease--code for some variation on the 1967 border. Draw Egypt and Jordan into the mix, implying their participation as forces on the ground. Open a diplomatic channel with, and through, Syria.

Middlegame: Cultivate the Palestinian Authority's new government, providing training to its police forces, while providing the promise of new investments to its business class. Use channel to Syria to bring Hamas into negotiations with the PA. Encourage rejection of Islamist radicalism in Palestine by implying American pragmatism; leave the Iranian regime to discredit itself and, in the process, the democratic pretensions of Hamas and Hezbollah. Challenge Israeli government on settlements' "natural growth" to establish future position on a 1967ish border. Work with Quartet to establish a consolidated front of world opinion and great power fiat; imply complete diplomatic isolation of groups in Israel/Palestine that defy the "peace process."

Attack: Broker a deal, with Egyptian participation, for the return of Gilad Shalit, in exchange for the release of Palestinian prisoners and the opening of the Gaza crossings. Visit Russia. Visit Damascus. Prepare the ground to isolate Iran diplomatically. Welcome the creation of a joint Palestinian negotiation team, led by the PA, but including Hamas officials; accept the principle that any deal will be put to a referendum; accept that all groups that agree to abide by a referendum can enter into a dialogue with Washington. Call for renewed, bilateral negotiations between Israel and the PA presided over by George Mitchell.

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This, from my friend David Shulman, an activist in the Israeli-Palestinian peace group Ta'ayush, who has written widely about acts of witness in the South Hebron hills--including in this blog:

While Prime Minister Netanyahu scoffs at Ahmedinajad's beatings of peaceful demonstrators, here is what happened yesterday, in broad daylight, at the village of al-Safa, inside occupied Palestinian territory. I am reporting the testimony of Dr. Amiel Vardi, and many other supporting testimonies. There is graphic photographic documentation, including a live video clip, which can be seen here. The pictures seen here are part of a series that can be viewed at this Flickr site.

Further photographic evidence will become available within the next day or two. (Israel has so far not resorted to blocking internet sites.) What Amiel reports is incontrovertible.

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I noted back in March that Israel's High Court of Justice has been the only firewall Israel has against encroachments on civil liberties; that defenders of human rights have relied, in effect, on a self-perpetuating community of liberal-democratic jurists, enjoying (by means of law and precedent) the ability to remain self-perpetuating. (Former Justice Aharon Barak gave voice to the unique status of the court rather poignantly a couple of days ago, when he argued that Israel must be, after all, "a state of its citizens," code for the equality of Arab citizens--which caused a storm of criticism.)

Two votes in the Likud-controlled Knesset this past couple of weeks will almost certainly end this run of liberal-democratic jurists. Think of it as a quiet coup by the Judeans. The first is the appointment of Uri Ariel of the Kahanist National Union to the Judicial Appointments Committee. "As of today," writes Haaretz's Yossi Verter, "the committee has a bloc of four rightist and radical-right politicians, including Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan (Likud) and Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman. All they need is a fifth member, probably one of the Israel Bar Association's two representatives, and they will have a majority on the committee and be able to do as they please. The three Supreme Court justices on the panel will become a negligible minority."

The second vote is an amendment that will require a majority of seven out of nine members of the Judicial Appointments Committee. If the amendment becomes law, which it almost certainly will, the government will have, in effect, a veto over appointments to Israel's highest court, "the most significant change," says the Israel Policy Center, "in the balance of power between the branches of Israel's government since the current system of judicial appointments was put in place in 1953."

The demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as "the state of the Jewish people" has at least three layers to it: The first is symbolic, without practical significance, and understandable. The second is partly symbolic, is meant to have future practical significance, and is contentious (though resolvable). The third, however, is legal, has great practical significance, and is, for any Palestinian (or democrat, for that matter), unacceptable. It is time to stop working through symbols and start saying what we mean.

1. Israel is obviously the state of the Jewish people in the sense that vanguard Jewish groups in Eastern Europe dreamed a Hebrew revolution, which launched the Zionist colonial project, which engendered a Jewish national home in Mandate Palestine, which earned international backing to organize a state after the Holocaust--a state that became a place of refuge for Jews from Europe and Arab countries--that is, a state with a large Jewish majority whose binding tie (to bring things back to Zionism's DNA) is the spoken Hebrew language.

When Palestinians say they recognize "Israel," they are implicitly recognizing this reality; they are acknowledging, to paraphrase Irving Howe, the name of our desire. At the most visceral level, when Israelis insist Israel be recognized as Jewish, they mean they want this narrative recognized, the same way they implicitly acknowledge the peculiar formative sufferings of Palestinians at the hands of Zionism when they say "Palestinians" and mean "not Jordanians or southern Syrians." When Palestinian spokespeople speak to Israeli reporters in Hebrew, they are recognizing Israel in the most poignant possible way.

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As I write, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mainly young Iranians are deciding whether or not to risk going out into the streets. There is little someone like myself can add regarding the poignancy of their decision. Yet one thing seems obvious: a generation of Iranians has been changed by these rallies--changed in roughly the opposite way they would have been had Israeli military intelligence got its way, and won American and IDF agreement to an aerial strike on Iranian nuclear facilities earlier this year.

Even in the face of mass protest, not only did Mossad chief Meir Dagan refuse to admit the obvious--that an attack would have caused widespread carnage, put Iran on a war footing, and preempted its twittering liberalism--but he's had the audacity to predict to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee what nobody could possibly know at this point, that the protests will peter out; that, anyway, a Mousavi government would be worse than Ahmadinejad's regime, for it would give Iran's nuclear program a prettier face. ("To hell with those students; the PowerPoint is done.")

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The last word on why President Obama can do what none since Eisenhower could--or would.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about it is how much it reminds one of Menachem Begin's response to Anwar Sadat in 1977. You get the feeling that the words are not simply tactical but come from Netanyahu's deepest convictions. Yes, he has declared a willingness to entertain the idea of a Palestinian state, so long as it is demilitarized. (For the record, Palestinian leaders in Fatah and the West Bank have never made an issue about having an army big enough to pose a threat to Israel--again, read the Geneva Initiative--and have often called for international forces to replace the IDF.) But he couched the point in Revisionist historical rhetoric that seems more an effort to wrest key Congresspeople from Obama than address the Arab world. My friend Sam Bahour in Ramallah told me he thought perhaps Hamas had written the speech, for all the good it would do Abbas.

Netanyahu has put, as Begin put, so many conditions on getting to a Palestinian state that one can understand the reluctance of Palestinian negotiators to get back in the room: recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people (readers of this blog do not require me to elaborate on why, as stated, this is impossible), Jerusalem, united, as the capital of Israel, natural growth of settlements, and so forth. Television commentators here immediately pronounced the speech a concession to Washington, at the same time as wondering if Washington will buy it. My unsolicited advise to Obama and Mitchell: put the speech in your pocket, declare it a breakthrough, and (as I said earlier today) start presenting details of a deal without imagining that negotiations will produce one.

Anticipating Bibi's speech, his coalition partners and Likud officials are flooding Israeli radio with interviews, insisting that settlements are not an obstacle to peace; that "natural growth" is, well, natural ("should parents tell their children they have to live elsewhere?"). Their claims will strike the ears of informed Americans the way old cigarette commercials do. You blush for people who think others this gullible, or wishful, or hooked. For my part, I have been waiting for an American government to insist on a total settlements freeze for over 30 years. One didn't have to be a genius to see the danger.

Still, there is something about the anticipated stand-off between Netanyahu and the Obama administration that makes me queasy. Had Ronald Reagan, following Jimmy Carter's lead, demanded a total freeze in 1980, then we would have had something. Today the demand reminds me of the Steve Martin bit about the implacable customer at a restaurant who, having waited too long for his dinner, complains to the maître d' that he can be appeased only by being served his steak "15 minutes ago."

Sure, Obama needs to make a clear break with the past, indeed, to make a show of force to Israeli rightists. But insisting on a total freeze today, when settlements have turned into substantial towns full of mobilized youth--towns whose residents should be understood as on a scale somewhere between Pat Robertson and David Koresh--seems false. The real goal is a fair, recognized border between two states as soon as possible, so that both sides will know how to plan. Focusing on a total freeze means insisting on the symbol, which cannot seriously be delivered, and deferring the fight over what is symbolized, which will require a hard line from America and the world anyway.

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Haaretz tried something this morning that feels curiously right in unexpected ways. To celebrate "Hebrew Book Week," the paper asked a dozen or so of Israel's best selling writers, Yoram Kaniuk, David Grossman, Etgar Keret, to go out and cover something. The result feels both reassuringly retro and visionary at the same time.

Retro, because the radically secular implication of Hebrew culture is not so easily taken for granted these days. When Netanyahu says "Jewish state," and both Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef and Las Vegas spiritual leader Sheldon Adelson nod approvingly, I know I am in trouble. Actually, the very name of the week in question implicitly acknowledges a continuing (dare I say Zionist?) delight in the sheer novelty of a Jewish experience grounded in an inclusive national language. Which is why Israelis still celebrate "Hebrew Book Week," after all--something like the French ordering French fries. Adam Lebor captures this celebration in his lovely piece about Tel-Aviv in the current Condé Nast Traveler.

But there is another remarkable thing about the paper this morning. It reads like a bundle of fine blog posts. There is voice and creative engagement in these pieces, which does not mean a want of facts or rules of evidence. As Ram Oren put it on Israeli radio this morning, we have a hundred ways of getting (and Twittering) breaking news qua happenings: the Supreme Court issued this ruling, the earthquake was this number on the Richter scale. But getting at the truth is another matter, and a writer has to ask, as Oren asks (using a somewhat materialist phrase, but never mind), "what is the value-added?" Haaretz did not quite ask that question this morning. But I suspect that, if it will still be here 10 years from now, it has given us a peek at the way it will survive.

The many questions in Yediot Aharonot's weekend poll gives us a feel for Israeli society, much like many touches give the blind man a feel for the elephant. My friend Jo-Ann Mort suggests that the key finding is a solid majority for evacuation of settlements; and its is true, and reassuring, that by 52% to 43%, respondents now actually favor a "freeze." But I think we might keep feeling around.

The responses do reveal Obama's window of opportunity. But the window is small and it will take consistent outside power, hard and soft, to pry it open. The questions are themselves a kind of code. The responses reveal a deeply divided country that would prefer not to confront its own divisions.

FIRST, THE BAD news. About 54% approve "natural growth" in the more than 150 settlements that already exist. So saying "freeze" new settlements may simply mean no new settlements are necessary to consolidate Israel's presence in the Palestinian territories, whatever the fate of this presence proves to be. Besides, the majority for a freeze, like the minority against "natural growth," includes Arab respondents. If we are speaking of Israeli Jews alone, the numbers are more discouraging.

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Immediately after President Obama's speech, Israeli television interviewed a strapping West Bank settler: "It was very professional," he said, "very well crafted. It focused brilliantly on the rights of man. But he also quoted the Talmud; and if he read that, then he knows that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel." This curious response suggests why, yet again, Obama's instincts are better than mine.

You see, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is full of people like this. In the end they will have to be confronted. But though the end cannot be allowed to seem far away, the end is not the beginning. Why push people into a corner before showing them the corner--before showing them also the people who will be pushing with you? Why not take things in their natural sequence which allows everybody to adjust to the new reality?

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Here is a little thought experiment. Imagine that both the Islamic world and the Palestinian nation suddenly agreed that the mosques on the Noble Sanctuary in Jerusalem's old city were not that holy after all; that the Jews were welcome to take them down and build a temple if they wanted to. Could Jews really want this? Okay, forget the animal sacrifices. I mean a temple that, whatever its rites, purports to be ground zero of divinity, the building of buildings on the spot of spots--the here and now of a holy of holies. If Jews believed in such things would they be practicing Judaism at all?

This is not a merely hypothetical question. Very few Jews speak seriously about rebuilding the temple in question, but very many--perhaps a majority--are deadly serious about the divinity of the mount in question. From the mayor on down, ordinary Jews in this city seem overwhelmed by the mount's gravitational pull. Close, it is said, matters only when playing at horseshoes, but close also matters greatly when playing at Jerusalem. Most reject out of hand any notion of surrendering Israeli sovereignty over the mount. They think next to nothing (to take just one example) of leveling the Arab neighborhood of Silwan in order to build a kind of biblical theme park close to the mount. Even secular writers say casuistic things like "there is no Zionism without Zion," Zion being the mount overlooking the mount. (In fact, the original halutzim, and Zionism's Emerson, Achad Haam, avoided the place, but never mind.)

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Amos Elon died earlier this week at age 82. I published this appreciation of him on New Yorker.com.

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(I wrote the following for this morning's Haaretz)
It may seem hard to believe, given America's vital regional interests, but the last president to develop a deal to mitigate Middle Eastern violence - and throw the full weight of his presidency and the international community behind it - was Dwight D. Eisenhower, in 1957. John F. Kennedy had no wars to respond to, and was largely concerned with preventing Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons. But ever since Johnson - since the Six-Day War, that is - one president after another has behaved as though America's role was limited to facilitating a negotiation between Israelis and their neighbors: a kind of regional Dr. Phil. Israel was the client state, yet presidents, in effect, worked to preserve its freedom of action. They might carp half-heartedly about settlements, or empower their secretaries of state to exert economic pressure about particular instances of foot-dragging (Kissinger on Rabin in 1975, or Baker on Shamir in 1991). But presidents did not - how did Colin Powell put it? - presume to want peace "more than the parties themselves."

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On Bloggingheads.tv, Sam Bahour and I explore the importance, and difficulty, of engendering the Palestinian private sector under occupation.