Brooks on Israel/Palestine

I'm not quite sure I grasp what's supposed to be going on here. Most notably peace has not, in fact, broken out between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The hopeful signs we're seeing lately are just signs that we may see a return to peace talks. But of course the failure to have such talks is precisely what critics of the Bush Israel policy have been criticizing Bush for. The proximate cause of all this is that with Arafat dead, the Bush/Sharon policy of not negotiating with Arafat is non-operative. But if Bush and Sharon had never adopted that policy, we could have had hopeful talks years ago. Maybe those talks would have come to nothing, but maybe (indeed, I would say "probably") they will still come to nothing now.

But what really needs commenting on here is Brooks' dishonest take on Israel's security wall, which Brooks defends on the grounds that it has been successful in reducing the incidence of anti-Israeli violence. And, indeed, it has done this. But the subject of controversy regarding the line wasn't over its existence it was over its location. A wall built to defend Israel proper would have met with no opposition from me or most other responsible critics of Bush and Sharon. Indeed, such a wall combined with a withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers to behind a defensible, wall-guarded border is roughly speaking what we critics have been asking for. The wall that's being built, however, snakes to-and-fro through the West Bank, linking up settlements and slicing the Palestinian territory into non-viable bits. Many of us have somehow gotten this notion into our heads that this means Sharon intends to leave the West Bank settlements where they are, continue to defend them, and slice Palestinian territory up into a bunch of non-viable bits. Now maybe we're wrong. I hope we're wrong. I suspect Bush has it in his power to ensure that we're proved wrong, and I hope he'll exercise that power. But from where I sit we don't seem wrong, and if we're right there will be no peace.