The New York Times reports that the “West Bank Is Tense After Arson at Mosque,” which is believed to be the work of Jewish extremists. Palestinian Arabs are rightly upset at this crime. So are Israelis. And therein hangs the tale of Middle East peace.
The fire at the mosque in the village of Yasuf appears to have been set last week by some Jewish settlers demonstrating their anger toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to temporarily freeze building in Jewish communities in the West Bank. Extremists have vowed to counter such moves by increasing tensions with the Arabs. If it is true that Jews committed this crime, this is clearly madness and is rejected not only by the overwhelming majority of the people of Israel but also by the overwhelming majority of the approximately 300,000 Jews who live in the settlements. Local Jewish religious leaders attempted to visit Yasuf to express their condolences, but they were prevented from going there. So instead they met with Munir Abbushi, the Palestinian Authority’s regional governor, and presented him with new Korans. Abbushi accepted the Korans but then stated that Palestinian independence would mean that all Jews would have to be removed from the region. The Palestinians reject the right of Jews to live in their midst under any circumstances and regardless of who has or has not committed crimes.
But if you really wanted to get a feel for how differently the two communities think about these things, ask yourself what would happen if, instead of a mosque, a synagogue had been burned down. But this is not a hypothetical question.
In October 2000, at the start of the Palestinians’ second intifada, the Tomb of Joseph, a Jewish holy site in Nablus that served as a synagogue and religious school, was literally torn to pieces by an Arab mob. As Palestinian Authority “police” looked on, the mob destroyed the building and burned the sacred texts inside. But instead of treating the crime as an embarrassment to the national cause, among Palestinians it was treated as a cause for celebration. Another ancient synagogue in Jericho was also burned down that month. And even before the intifada, the Tomb of Rachel, a Jewish shrine near Bethlehem, was subjected to continual attacks. It had to be surrounded by fortifications to keep both the building and worshipers from harm.
In 2005, the Israeli government evacuated Gaza and removed every single Jewish soldier and settler from the area. The only things left behind were buildings, including the synagogues that had served the Jews who were forced out. But rather than treat these edifices with respect, if only to use them for their own purposes, the Palestinians burned every one down in a barbaric communal orgy of destruction. Again, no apologies were forthcoming from the Palestinians. Nor did world opinion treat this incident as worthy of condemnation. The fact that the Palestinians could not bring themselves to let even one former synagogue stand was a frightening reminder that the two sides still don’t view the conflict in the same way. To the Palestinians, this is not a tragic misunderstanding between two peoples but rather a zero-sum game.
So, as much as friends of Israel are right to condemn the mosque attack, let us not forget that when the tables were turned and Jewish sensibilities were offended, the Palestinians were not only unwilling to condemn similar incidents but instead celebrated them. Until that imbalance changes, hopes for peace will never be realized.
You are still grasping at straws my friend. You are comparing drinking orange juice WITH a meal to a shot of whiskey in a bar surrounded by manly men? How many presidential candidates or ordinary folks have you see throw back a shot of whiskey with the cameras on? Drinking juice with a meal CANNOT be anything but just that. Let it go, my friend.
Normally your analysis and posts are excellent. Your post on Obama’s childish views wasn’t so good. Obama’s domestic and foreign policies are bad, but I disagree that they can be characterized as childish. It is interesting though that out of all your excellent posts, Sullivan only really links to one of your bad ones. Sullivan likes to pick his intellectual opponents’ low handing fruit to attack, but usually avoids seriously analytical rebuttals.
Speaking of juvenile thinking: “He (Andrew Sullivan) did it first!!!”
Your defense, claiming that the “overwhelming majority of the post” focuses on the vital issues…
His national security policy isn’t about national security. It’s about getting America voted most popular.
That’s the sum of your foreign policy critique? Perhaps you should stick to beverage analysis?
Nana, a truly savvy pol of O’Bama’s ancestry would have accepted the java, cracked, “any cream in that?” tasted it, said “my, that’s fine,” ordered an OJ and set about his business. These guys and gals know they’re in a fishbowl. Or surely should.
As for the “childish” bit, I wouldn’t have intellectualized quite so much, but this is, after all, a nee-o-con blog.
It was emphatically not an “introductory launching point”; it was the crux of the entire post. You are equivocating here, backing down and triangulating in the face of widespread ridicule of not only your writing style but of your entire thinking process. This episode diminishes you and has introduced you to thousands of people who have never heard of you before as a joke. There’s an introductory launching point you should be concerned with. Mark my words: professors in J courses all over the country are linking to this right this very moment, as an example of fraudulent commentary, worthless punditry, diminished standards and disreputable internet pseudo-journalism. Try to blame THAT on Andrew Sullivan. Take your medicine like a big boy. Would a little orange juice help it go down?
Come on, you can’t blame Andrew Sullivan; after all, Sullivan, who, as Hitchens has said, so obviously wants to have Obama’s lovechild, is entitled to a few prissy fits after Obama’s lost 24 points among men in Indiana this week, so is it any wonder Sullivan is in a petulant frenzy?
Rob Dawson, in his one, long run on sentence, makes three coded references to Andrew Sullivan’s sexuality. Preoccupied, much?
Warsaw, calm down. Abe was speculating–in an interesting way. So have others (Chris Matthews). This is a blog, not an Op Ed or a magazine article. It is OK to go out on a limb or toss out ideas.
And Sullivan sounds like an idiot quoting blog replies to buttress his argument. Like you can’t find some nitwit to say virtually anything?
HRC’s whiskey and BHO’s juice are in exactly the same category:
both were gestures.
One senator was being conspicuously friendly with whiskey-drinking citizens;
the other senator dryly snubbed an attempt of a coffee-drinking citizen to be friendly
with him.
The symmetry is perfect.
My goodness, the obamaniacs are as deluded as poor ol’ Andrew. Warsaw, sometimes a blogpost is just a blogpost.
Los Angeleno: Risky, there, referring to commenters on this blog as nitwits considering that you, yourself, are, uh …or, are you trying to imply that you are in some separate category of commenter? One who can comment on others comments without actually being an actual commenter?
Isn’t it ok to go out on a limb in an op-ed or magazine article?
What is the difference between speculating and tossing out ideas?
So much to process here.
Bruce. tell that to Abe Greenwald who was humiliated by this blogpost. Just trying to be helpful here.
Mr. Greenwald:
You are correct about Andrew Sullivan.
But I come to “Commentary” expecting a higher quality of analysis than the feckless meanderings of Mr. Sullivan.
Testing
Touche! Fabulous post.
This is an absurd tu quoque. If Sullivan were arguing that Hillary Clinton’s whiskey-swilling offers a deep insight about her state of emotional and intellectual development, and thence to a deep insight about her approach to governance, that would be retarded. Replace “Hillary Clinton” and “whiskey” with “Barack Obama” and “orange juice,” and reflect on the consequent of that subjunctive conditional.
It’s subjunctive because that’s plainly not Sullivan’s argument. He is saying that Clinton’s booze-up was a transparently phony stunt, in keeping with other transparently phony stunts. But if, in other instances, he does do armchair psychoanalysis of Hillary Clinton, so what? The claim that “somebody else spews the same illogic that I do” doesn’t make your illogic any less illogical.
Also, mentioning the terms “foreign policy, taxes, and crisis management” is literally the least you can do. Your original post hasn’t the slightest thing to do with Obama’s actual foreign policy or approach to crisis management — and incidentally, giving the best speech on race relations in decades and following that up by quietly locking up enough support among superdelegates to make the finality of the Democratic primary clear to all but innumerates, strikes me as a pretty good job of managing a crisis. Unlike your candidate, we can’t all sign off on one massive foreseeable cock-up after another in the critical 1-1.5 years when the Iraq war had a shot of succeeding, and then consign indefinite numbers of Americans and Iraqis to years of misery, maiming, and death out of a failure to grasp basic concepts of decision theory like sunk costs.
As it happens, I agree with you broadly about not hiking capital gains taxes (though I have some specific ideas about tax reform — do you?), but you don’t get to play on my team if you think the reason to oppose higher capital gains taxes is to help Republicans win elections.
Koffler,
I actually wasn’t arguing that Obama’s choice in beverage offers a “deep insight about [his] state of emotional and intellectual development”. The diner incident was intended as an allegorical illustration to orient the reader. That I wasn’t as clear about that as I should have been is now obvious, and so here we are.
But, frankly, Sullivan DOES cite Hillary’s accepting a drink as an indication of her larger motives and character. I don’t find this outrageous, but he is giving it (as are you) that kind of weight.
As for Obama’s accomplishments – they are impossible to take away from him. Literally–heaven knows the Democrats would if they could, having seen him fizzle out over these past few weeks. But the fact that an extremely talented immature candidate has found support among an immature electorate doesn’t really speak to crisis management.
Abe
I think Andrew’s comments serve to point out that that one candidate feels the need to pander and the other does not.
As for Kool-Aid, what flavor does one drink in order to ignore John McCain’s childish temper tantrums, name calling, and all around bullying behavior? And how much do you have to ingest to dismiss his flip-flopping on issues ranging from ethanol to torture to our course in Iraq?
Tristan: If you think I was calling every commenter on this blog a nitwit, then re-read what I said. For the record, I think the vast majority of commenters on this blog are very smart and sophisticated and far from being nitwits. But yes, there are indeed some nitwits, even on this blog. And, yes, of course, you can go out on a limb in a magazine or Op-Ed, but, presumably, those venues don’t lend themselves to the kind of instant, informal, almost conversational style of a blog. But isn’t that obvious? My only point was that many people are overeacting to a perfectly appropriate, though speculative, blog post, acting as if Abe had declared that the entire Obama campaign could reduced to a glass of orange juice.
i didn’t automatically assume you were that stupid…until you equated discussing someone’s taking a shot of whiskey to discussing someone’s declining coffee in favor of orange juice.
and because drunk driving is noteworthy, we find it worthy of discussion that said candidate has fuzzy dice hanging from his/her mirror. when questioned about relevance, we shall say, “b-b-but they are both about driving!”
Who is Andrew Sullivan & why do I care what he thinks????
OK, I admit it – I know who he is …. and that he’s gone so far off the rails that I’m amazed anyone wanting to have an intelligent conversation would care what he thinks.
Senator Obama was right to turn down a friendly offer to share some coffee. Coffee is farmed by oppressed brown skinned people and sold to the decadent capitalist masses by Dr. Evil and his imperialist Starbucks Empire.
I think the Obama-Nation supporters here are mixing whiskey with their Kool-Aid. Or maybe psychedelic mescaline and herbal tea.
Los Angeleno: If you think I said that you called every commenter in this blog a nitwit, then re-read what I said. Andrew Sullivan quoted commenters on this blog and you said in response that some nitwits will say anything. Risky, that.
The whole point of all those comments yesterday was that Greenwald’s post was NOT perfectly appropriate and was speculative in a puerile and trivial and therefore vastly inappropriate way. And yet you persist. Smart? Um. Sophisticated? Sure dude, whatever.
tristan,
Greenwald’s post is not inappropriate, puerile or trivial just because Obamatons like you and Sullivan say so. Your hypocrisy is clear.