Today’s Haaretz surprised us with the following (apparently temporary) headline: “Haaretz Poll: Most Israelis See Obama as Fair and Friendly.” This, of course, seems to fly in the face not only of my own unscientific cab-driver canvasing, but of many other polls that have appeared in the last year as well. Yet I knew something was up when the article, after repeating the assertion that “a sweeping majority of Israelis think [Obama's] treatment of this country is friendly and fair,” doesn’t actually tell you the numbers. In fact, after this attention-grabbing first sentence, it drops the subject entirely, going on to talk only of Israelis’ opinions about Netanyahu, building in Jerusalem, and so on — but not Obama.

What’s going on? Shmuel Rosner lets the cat out of the bag. It turns out that when asked their opinion of Obama’s attitude towards Israel, Israelis were given three choices: Hostile, Fair, Friendly. Note that “fair” here is not a positive statement but a placeholder for “neutral.” And the numbers are: Hostile: 21%; Fair: 51%; Friendly: 18%. So the poll deceives by using the word “fair” instead of “neutral,” forcing the respondent to say something positive-sounding when he may not have meant to. And then Haaretz deceives by asserting that a “sweeping majority” of Israelis see Obama as “fair and friendly.” This is, of course, ridiculous: it would be just as accurate to point out that an even more sweeping majority see him as “fair and hostile.”

By midmorning Israel time, Haaretz had scrapped the headline and moved the “sweeping majority” assertion to the third paragraph. Yet, as of this writing, they’re still using the “fair and friendly” line, and I’m sure it will be repeated all over the place in the days to come.

The Palestinian Authority just pushed off plans to honor Dalal Mughrabi by renaming a square just outside Ramallah after her. Her claim to fame? In 1978 she headed up one of the most horrific acts of terror every undertaken in the name of Palestine. In the attack, she and 11 others under her command landed on a beach north of Tel Aviv and started shooting and hurling grenades at passing cars and buses on the highway. They then hijacked a bus. Anyone who tried to escape was gunned down. Thirty-eight Israelis, including 13 children, were killed in the Coastal Road Massacre. Another 71 were wounded. In response, Israel launched an assault on southern Lebanon, where her Fatah bosses were based.

We don’t know why the PA has delayed the renaming of the square, but they insist that it’s not because, say, she might not put the Palestinians in the best light. On the contrary, reports the Jerusalem Post:

Adnan Dumairi, a senior PA security official, said that the ceremony had been delayed for “technical reasons.” He denied that the decision was the result of Israeli and American pressure. … “No one in the world can prevent the Palestinians from being proud of their history and heritage,” Dumairi said. “This history and heritage is part of our life.” He said that “had it not been for the blood and sacrifices of martyrs like Mughrabi, the Palestinians would not have been able to reach peace agreements and other achievements.”

And so, while Vice President Biden was busy “condemning” Israel for building housing units in its capital, the Palestinians were bogged down on when to best lionize their martyrs. But make no mistake: the Palestinians are proud of their achievements, just as the Israelis are of theirs.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suffered a personal calamity yesterday when his wife Landra and daughter Lana were injured in a chain collision on a Virginia interstate. Although both mother and daughter are apparently out of danger, Landra Reid’s injuries included, according to Reid’s spokesman, a “broken nose, a broken back, a broken neck.” Anyone who has suffered the sudden and serious injury of a loved one knows this must be consuming all his thoughts, and will instinctively utter a prayer for her recovery.

Which is why I was struck by the following few lines in the New York Times’s coverage of the accident:

Reid, D-Nev., went to the hospital after being notified of the accident and returned to Capitol Hill for a meeting with White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on efforts to pass health care legislation. He went back to the hospital Thursday evening.

I really don’t mean to sound nitpicky. I understand that the American people have been waiting a long time for progress on health care. And that in the face of personal tragedy, there is something stirring about Reid’s commitment to the needs of the nation. I also understand that his wife’s injuries, though serious, are not life-threatening. Yet there is still something very upsetting about not giving the guy a day off to be with his wife and daughter, who may have just escaped a far worse tragedy. I don’t want to speculate whether he insisted on attending the meeting, or whether it was Emanuel and Pelosi who pushed it; even if he insisted, they should still have just canceled. Nor does it help to take the ultra-cynical view and say that, hey, they’re all politicians, and they will always put politics ahead of everything. Because even according to this approach, what does it say about what the voters are looking for in their leaders? Shouldn’t it be to the politicians’ advantage to appear as caring individuals who understand that there are just times when you drop everything and deal with the real things in life — especially if they’re asking for the nation’s trust in caring for the sick and injured across America?

But I’d rather not go down that route. I’d rather just chalk it all up to the inscrutability of human things, and wish the best for Reid’s family.

The New York Times has taken the plunge. In a report today about the Israeli government’s decision to build 1,600 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood — which, like most of Jerusalem, lies across the “Green Line” separating pre- and post-1967 territory, the NYT headline proudly refers to the “new settlements” that are, according to another NYT headline about the responses to the declaration, “clouding” the visit of Vice President Biden to the Middle East, who had arrived to announce the renewal of indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians. An earlier version of the piece, which has since been edited, described Jerusalem as home to “thousands of settlers.” This whole terminology is fairly new, but we can hardly blame the Times. It is, after all, the official position of the U.S. government.

Netanyahu is denying that he knew of the decision, and the NYT piece takes him at his word. Many commentators in Israel are not so quick to believe it, seeing in his denial a classic Bibi move to fake Left, go Right, deny and obfuscate whenever it serves his purposes. Assuming he really did know about the decision, why did he do it? And if he didn’t, why doesn’t he intervene to stop it?

The NYT puts the blame on his coalition partners: ”when he formed his coalition a year ago,” we are told, “he joined forces with several right-wing parties, and has since found it hard to keep them in line.” This is, of course, a bizarre distortion: Netanyahu chose his coalition partners as a product of their strength, which in turn reflects what the voters actually wanted on issues like these. It’s also a distortion because the left-wing Labor party, which is in the coalition, doesn’t seem to be pulling out any time soon. And it’s a distortion because the Kadima party, the leading opposition party and the only alternative to Netanyahu’s coalition partners, was founded on a platform that included the indivisibility of Jerusalem.

What Netanyahu knows, and Biden apparently does not, is that the vast majority of Israelis, including those who favor a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians, do not, and will never, look at Jerusalem as a settlement or at residents of its neighborhoods as “settlers.” We can fully understand why Biden might have thought the move to be “precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now.” At a time when he’s trying to show the American public that he and the president are capable of bringing a new era of peace in the region, such an announcement certainly does not make his job easier. But unlike the U.S., Israel is an actual party to the negotiations and has a right to draw red lines. One such line that must not be crossed is undoing the unification of Jerusalem that happened in 1967 and that still captures the imagination and commitment of both the great majority of Israelis and a very large number of Diaspora Jews. Jerusalem is home to more than 700,000 citizens, of whom two-thirds are Jews. It has granted far greater and more liberal access to non-Jews worshiping at its shrines than the Palestinians have ever done with regard to Jewish (and Christian) freedom in the territories it controls. This is a great deal to ask in time of ongoing war.

One of the worst things about the Oslo Accords was the logic that said, “Let’s take care of the easy things first, and wait on the hard issues until later.” And so, while the Palestinians were allowed to create a heavily armed, ideologically belligerent, terror-supporting government in the territories Israel vacated, Israel gained nothing in terms of security, while the “hard issues” like Jerusalem and the repatriation of millions of Palestinians remained up in the air, not as questions to be resolved, but as threats hanging over Israelis’ heads: You can give us these, and face demographic and symbolic decimation; or you can refuse, and face a renewal of violence. When it became clear to Arafat that Israel had no intention of giving in on these core issues, all the “trust” that had been built was suddenly meaningless. He launched the second intifada, and the rest is too well known.

In making the move on Jerusalem, the Israeli government is trying to avoid the ambiguities that were the undoing of Oslo. Anyone hoping for a successful negotiation leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, they are saying, had better forget about the division of Jerusalem. Sometimes, it’s the timing that drives the point home.

One of the big questions surrounding the Goldstone report is whether the Israeli government made a mistake by refusing to cooperate with the mission. It was, admittedly, a serious gamble: If Goldstone’s “fact-finding” commission were in any way sincere in its efforts to present a balanced view, Israel would be giving up on a real opportunity to make its case to the world; on the other hand, if the commission had already decided from the outset to blast Israel and accuse it of atrocities, then to cooperate with the commission would have been to grant it a legitimacy it might not otherwise have had.

Part of an answer came in recent weeks from the mouth of none other than Desmond Travers, a retired Irish army colonel who was one of the commission’s members (h/t, JCPA and Haaretz). In an interview with the Middle East Monitor, Travers unleashes a pile of telling quotes. First, he points out that “the number of rockets that had been fired into Israel in the month preceding their operations was something like two.” For this reason, he “reject[s]… entirely” Israel’s excuse for the whole operation, since Hamas had anyway stopped terrorizing. This statement, blithely ignoring the thousands of rockets Israelis endured in the years leading up to the operation, or the fact that Hamas continued shooting rockets at Israeli civilians despite many warnings and more limited retaliations, is infuriating to anyone who watched as Israelis in Sederot and other communities suffered repeated barrages, and should alone be enough to call Travers’s objectivity, or at least his judgment, into question.

Second, he dismisses Israel’s claims that Hamas hid its missile stockpiles in Gaza mosques as “spurious.” What about the photographs? “Unless they can give me absolute forensic proof, I do not believe the photographs.” Well, we do have to wonder: If incriminating photos of missile stockpiles do not meet the threshold of “facts” that the commission was meant to find, why the head-spinning gullibility in repeating all those accusations of Israeli war crimes, which were almost entirely based on unverified hearsay?

Third, he makes the claim that when the IDF was in Lebanon, “a significant number” of Irish peacekeepers had been “taken out deliberately and shot” by Israeli forces. This of course would be a grave accusation if it could be taken even slightly seriously. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I confess I’ve never heard this one before, although it’s true that some of these rumors rise and fall so quickly that it’s hard to follow them all. But I couldn’t find a trace of it in a Google search. Could it be that he’s heard a rumor and repeated it to justify his evident bias? Or that he made it up himself? Either way, it has nothing to do with Gaza, and therefore can only add to our sense that this man was anything but objective from the outset.

There is so much more, and it’s worth reading the interview in full. Not least, for example, is the evident glee with which he watches as Israeli officials have difficulty traveling in European countries because of accusations like those in the Goldstone report. Or the telling revelation that Goldstone himself was responsible for the one-sided mandate of the mission, which was supposed to look into Israeli violations but not those of Hamas. Or his flat-out denial of any of the mission’s members having ever made statements that might suggest their anti-Israel bias in advance of the inquiry — even though Goldstone himself has been a notorious basher of Israeli security measures for many years now, and other members of the mission made their bias about the Gaza war well known before the commission was appointed. (For a few examples, see this report by the European Center for Law and Justice, scroll down to p. 26.)

If Travers is in any way representative of Goldstone’s commission, we can all feel a little more comfortable with Israel’s decision not to cooperate.

There are times when I am deeply grateful that CONTENTIONS stopped hosting comments. I do not think I could handle the people who would respond to this post. Because inevitably there will be some who insist that something can be art when it is simply horrible. Let them take their comments elsewhere!

I am speaking, of course, about a monstrosity that has appeared in Copenhagen. A model of the entrance to Auschwitz, complete with a little train car, made out of gold — gold taken from the teeth of Holocaust victims. See for yourself. Maybe someone will say it is a hoax and relieve us of the notion.

I do not know what the artist thinks about Nazism, about Judaism, about anti-Semitism, about violence, or about art. I do not care. According to Haaretz’s captions, he put a Rolex watch in the tower, to hint at Switzerland’s complicity. I just don’t care. To me this is worse than political art, worse than feces-laden art, worse than almost anything called art. If art is meant to be a human thing, what can we say to an artist who does not seem to realize that we still count among the living the victims who passed through those gates? That every gram of gold that he touched may yet belong to someone? That it was extracted not with novocaine in a benevolent dentist’s office, but there, and then, and in that way?

Do not get me wrong. I do not believe the Holocaust is a “sacred” thing, that it is a black hole, an ultimate or absolute that cannot be compared with anything else, or that Jewish or Western identity should be built around it. The crime of this artist is not sacrilege but something else for which I do not have adequate words. Artistic inhumanity, perhaps. I just cannot understand what he is thinking, what the curators are thinking, what the backers for the gallery are thinking. And please, do not explain it to me.

It has been nearly three years since the Israeli foreign ministry decided to “rebrand” the country’s image through a silly campaign that included pictures of beautiful sabrinas with little clothing profiled in Maxim magazine. Oddly enough, the campaign didn’t work. In the meantime, we’ve had the Goldstone Report, Swedish accusations of IDF soldiers ripping apart the bodies of Palestinians, some still alive, and selling their organs, and so on. The diplomats scratch their heads, wondering why Madison Avenue wasn’t the answer.

In the past few weeks, however, three major events have propelled Israel to the forefront of the public debate in a much more positive light. Following the unsuccessful undie-bomber attack on a Detroit-bound airliner, Americans effluviated about the need for improved airport security, and suddenly everyone was aware that Ben-Gurion airport has not had a security breach in a generation, despite the fact that its passengers never have to part with their favorite nail clippers or the 6-oz. bottles of perfume they picked up in Tel Aviv. The difference, it seems, is not that Israelis indulge in racial profiling, but that their security personnel are intensely trained to recognize the fact that people who know they are about to die behave differently than ordinary airline passengers (who knew!). Although that’s oversimplifying things, the fact is that Israeli airline security really does put a far greater emphasis on the human components of terror prevention: recognizing behaviors, building a network of informants, and so on.

The second event was the earthquake in Haiti. Within hours, Israel had dispatched more than 200 personnel, including rescue teams and high-level medical staff. They set up a full-fledged field hospital, the only one of its kind, complete with digital imaging, an ICU, and more. For the past couple of days, both this CNN report and this MSNBC one have been passed around the Internet, highlighting Israel’s hospital. In addition, today we learn that the Israelis also set up a global communications center, enabling journalists to use the Internet and phones via Israel’s Amos satellite. One American observer has described this as a “home run” for Israeli PR.

The third was the publication of Saul Singer and Dan Senor’s Start-Up Nation, which hit the New York Times bestseller list. Of all the pro-Israel books to come out in the past year, this one probably made the biggest splash: by highlighting what Israel is indisputably good at (business innovation), Singer and Senor succeeded in changing the subject and constructing a positive image of Israel that is not all war.

How come these recent events have been so successful at helping Israel’s image, while the “rebranding” stunt didn’t? I’m no PR pro, but it seems like the first rule in boosting your image is to not throw money at the problem but instead correctly identify what it is you want to sell. The Western public is deeply inured to vacuous PR. Just think of how many political candidates have been utterly devastated at the polls despite vastly outspending their opponents on ads, or how President Obama’s media-saturation assault over the past year has failed to prevent his slide in approval ratings. It really does come down to the product, doesn’t it?

So let’s take a simple test, involving three key statements Israel has made to the world in recent years. Which of the following do you think does the best service to the country?

1. Israelis have a fascinating, powerful, human-friendly, and human-sensitive instinct that makes them take care of Haitians, identify terrorists by their behavior rather than a TSA-approved checklist, and encourage creativity and entrepreneurship.

2. Israel has the Most Moral Army in the World, and when we blow things up, we do it with the fewest civilian casualties possible, given how ruthless our enemy is.

3. Israel has lots of attractive women.

The fact is that (1) is true and proved by events; (2) is true but only helpful as a rearguard maneuver when war is forced upon us; (3) is true but irrelevant. Israel has succeeded in Haiti for the simple reason that Israelis really wanted to help; took swift, creative, and effective action without letting bureaucracy get in the way; and only then made sure CNN and MSNBC crews had access. As for (2), it is true that the IDF did a reasonable job of using YouTube to show how bad the Hamas guys really were, but wartime is always bad for PR in most of the world, and all Israel could do was make the best of a rotten situation. And as for Maxim, it is very hard to avoid the conclusion that “rebranding” was anything but a waste of money and energy.

So I suggest a radical new approach to Israel’s PR woes: Be good. Do things that express your best side. And make sure everybody knows about it.

While everyone over here in Israel is tittering over the question of whether George Mitchell did or did not threaten to cut back on American aid to Israel if there is no progress in peace talks, it might be worth getting a little perspective on what those numbers actually look like, both for Israelis and for Americans.

In 1985, the year Israel started receiving such high levels of American aid, U.S. taxpayers gave Israel about $3.4 billion in economic and military grants. That year, Israel’s GDP stood at about $24.1 billion in current dollars. American aid constituted about 14 percent of Israel’s GDP — an enormous amount of support for a country struggling with both a severe economic crisis and an ongoing war in Lebanon.

In 1996, the year Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress and declared his aim of ending Israel’s dependence on American aid, total grants came to $3.1 billion, while Israel’s GDP stood at $105 billion. U.S. aid was then only about 3 percent of Israel’s GDP.

In 2008, U.S. aid was down to about $2.4 billion, while Israel’s GDP was up to $199 billion. We’re talking about 1.2 percent of Israel’s GDP.

So whereas nobody would consider $2.4 billion a trivial amount of money, the economic significance of that aid has dropped dramatically, as far as Israelis are concerned. Israel’s “dependence” on American aid is not zero, but it’s heading there.

But what about American taxpayers? Here, too, we see a dramatic drop in economic significance as measured as a portion of the U.S. federal budget. In 1985, the $3.4 billion was out of an overall budget of some $947 billion — or 0.35 percent. In 2008, Israel received $2.4 billion out of a total budget of $2.99 trillion — which looks like 0.08 percent, or less than one one-thousandth. A similar drop is seen when comparing the aid against the overall GDP of the United States: from about 0.081 percent down to 0.016 percent. So while the Israelis feel the lift of American aid less than a tenth as much as they used to, Americans feel its bite less than a quarter of what they used to.

At the same time, the makeup of U.S. aid has shifted dramatically as well. If in 1985, aid was about three-fifths economic and two-fifths military, in 2008 economic aid was down to just $120 million, with the rest as military aid. The shift reflects Israel’s economic success: it no longer needs American charity, and in fact gets very little. Military aid, on the other hand, reflects Israel’s contribution to advancing U.S. strategic interests — a proposition that can be legitimately debated but should not be confused with an anachronistic sentimentality for the plight of struggling Zionist farmers. (Note: I have focused on grants and deliberately left out the billions in military loan guarantees the U.S. makes to Israel, which are not a handout as much as a promise of business for the American military industry.)

Bottom line: U.S. aid to Israel has plummeted in the past two decades by nearly every reasonable measure. And anyone who thinks the Israel lobby is bilking American taxpayers out of a false and outdated sentimentality for Israel’s plight is not paying attention to the numbers. That kind of American generosity ended a while ago.

(Sources: here, here, here, and here.)

Every once in a while, archaeologists in Israel hit pay dirt, undoing years of speculative claims that the key stories in the Bible never happened. For decades, it was claimed that King David never existed — putting into question the pivotal stories of the books of Kings and Chronicles on which a great deal of the biblical narrative turns. But then, in 1992 at Tel Dan, archaeologists uncovered the first clear nonbiblical evidence of David’s reign, an explicit reference to the king himself.

Now it has happened again. For years, biblical “minimalists,” as they are called, have been telling us that most of the Bible had to have been written many centuries after its stories took place. Basing their view mostly on the lack of Hebrew texts being found that date back to the time of David and Solomon, scholars like Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University have insisted that the ancient Israelites back then didn’t have the textual skills needed to record the stories of the Bible and that, at best, the texts we now have were written in the 7th or 6th centuries B.C.E., three or four centuries later.

But last week, Prof. Gershon Galil of Haifa University revealed what may be the most important discovery in the last decade: he succeeded in deciphering a text dating to the 10th century B.C.E., written in an ancient proto-Canaanite script, discovered near the Elah Valley in Israel 18 months ago. (Click here for a reproduction of the text and analysis.) Employing verb roots that are uniquely Hebrew, the text tells readers to protect the widows and orphans and strangers in their midst — themes immediately familiar from the prophecies of Isaiah and other biblical texts, and mostly absent from any of the neighboring peoples’ texts. Judge for yourself:

1′ you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2′ Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]
3′ [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4′ the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5′ Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

Sound familiar? As Galil puts it, the discovery “indicates that the Kingdom of Israel already existed in the 10th century BCE and that at least some of the biblical texts were written hundreds of years before the dates presented in current research.”

Archaeology is not an exact science, and while books purporting to offer conclusive debunkings of the biblical accounts continue to sell well, they are usually grounded in the absence of evidence supporting the Bible, rather than in any hard evidence contradicting it. Yet as the renowned Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen once said, in archaeology “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And the evidence that does exist overwhelmingly supports the reality of ancient Israel in the land of Israel very much as described in the biblical books beginning with Joshua. Maybe not everything in the Bible has been proved, but there’s more than enough to indicate that it’s far from a string of myths about a fanciful kingdom that never existed.

For more than a century and a half, new “scientific” proofs of the falsehood of the Bible have been the surest way to establish yourself in the inner circles of academic fashion. Yet in most cases, these proofs unravel with the continued work of archaeologists, whether at Tel Dan in 1992, or in the discovery of King David’s Palace in the City of David in the early 2000s (full disclosure: I was at the time the editor of a journal published by the Shalem Center, which also sponsored that dig), or in the Elah Valley this week.

None of this proves that one has to accept the Bible’s authority as a source of faith or morals. But it does suggest that efforts to use science as a bludgeon against religion are not really working.

Let me get this straight: did Thomas Friedman just call for a literal civil war within the Arab and Muslim world, for the forces of moderation to rise up and physically destroy the jihadists once and for all?

His column in Tuesday’s New York Times is not fully clear on how violent he wants it. At first he talks about the problem of “Virtual Afghanistan,” the spread of anti-West ideas and the recruitment of jihadists via the Internet. ”We don’t need more NATO allies to kill more Taliban and Al Qaeda. We need more Arab and Muslim allies to kill their extremist ideas, which, thanks to the Virtual Afghanistan, are now being spread farther than ever before.” That sounds like the Friedman we know.

But then something weird happens. Judge for yourself:

Only Arabs and Muslims can fight the war of ideas within Islam. We had a civil war in America in the mid-19th century because we had a lot of people who believed bad things — namely that you could enslave people because of the color of their skin. We defeated those ideas and the individuals, leaders and institutions that propagated them, and we did it with such ferocity that five generations later some of their offspring still have not forgiven the North.

Islam needs the same civil war. It has a violent minority that believes bad things: that it is O.K. to not only murder non-Muslims — “infidels,” who do not submit to Muslim authority — but to murder Muslims as well who will not accept the most rigid Muslim lifestyle and submit to rule by a Muslim caliphate.

Friedman starts with the “war of ideas within Islam,” uses the American Civil War as an example, and then goes on to focus on which ideas are legitimate in the Arab-Muslim world and which are not, and on how many fatwas have been issued against al-Qaeda. As though he hadn’t just said anything shocking.

Hello? The American Civil War was not only a battle of ideas. The “ferocity” he refers to, the lingering antipathy against the North today, was not because Lincoln issued a fatwa or recruited columnists in the South over the Internet or wrote a bestselling book. There was horrific, physical destruction involved. Is he saying that Islam “needs” a moderate-Islamic General Sherman to scorch the earth of Saudi-funded madrasses? Literally?

Because if he doesn’t mean it literally, the metaphor suddenly makes no sense. Certain ideas are deemed illegitimate in the Muslim world because simply expressing them can get you killed. Violence is a crucial component in the equation — that’s what it means not to be part of the democratic world. So if moderate voices are to turn violent against the extremists — even if the violence is not literal but only in the form of condemnation, stopping their funding, pursuing a “war of ideas,” and so forth — first you need to remove the threat of literal violence and create a free environment in which ideas can be aired without fear. But for that you need a much bigger change than just calling for the voices of moderation to wake up. There’s a good reason why they’re asleep in the first place.

So, Mr. Friedman, which is it? A literal civil war, like the one America endured? Or a figurative one, which you call on others to wage, bravely and at high cost, with little hope of victory?

Palestinian hopes for a unilaterally declared state suffered another setback today as the EU announced it would not recognize such a move. This comes on the heels of a similar declaration by the U.S. Both cited their commitment to a “negotiated” solution between Israel and the Palestinians. This followed an unequivocal statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that ”there is no substitute for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and any unilateral path will only unravel the framework of agreements between us and will only bring unilateral steps from Israel’s side.”

The whole bit about waiting for a negotiated settlement rings a little hollow, of course. Many of the world’s most successful countries achieved internationally recognized independence without the benefit of a negotiated agreement between conflicted parties, the United States and Israel being two obvious cases. If Palestinian national aspirations were so legitimate and a two-state solution the only answer, why wouldn’t the great powers recognize this much? And in such a scenario, what unilateral retaliation could Israel reasonably get away with?

Rather, the real problem with Palestinian independence — the elephant in the room, if you will — is that there is no viable Palestinian regime that can claim to run a sovereign country. Right now, the Palestinian territories are divided, ruled by two different Palestinian regimes. The one in Gaza is led by an internationally recognized terror organization supported by Iran and dedicated to war against Israel and violent conflict with the West. The other, in the West Bank, is led by a revolutionary-style regime that is deeply corrupt and still fosters and harbors terrorist groups like the Fatah-Tanzim, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. Efforts to negotiate a unification between the two sides have consistently failed, and one gets the sense that the only thing preventing an all-out civil war between Hamas and Fatah is the sliver of land that divides them (Israel, that is).

So the problem, it seems, is not between Israel and the Palestinians so much as among the Palestinians themselves. That this is the real trouble seems to be hinted at by none other than the Palestinian prime minister, Saleem Fayad. According to Fayad, a declaration of independence is really just a “formality” — or at least, it will be, once the institutions of statehood are established. It is not too hard to glean from Fayad’s statement, however, the hidden assumption that such institutions are not yet in place and may not be for the foreseeable future.

One wonders what would happen if the Palestinians really were to replicate the Zionist movement’s means of establishing a homeland: to build systems of government aimed at improving the Palestinians’ lives rather than channeling them toward endless conflict; to build an economy that emphasizes good business rather than corruption; to craft an educational system and public culture that fosters a positive, life-affirming vision of Palestinian identity and coexistence with Israelis rather than one built entirely on “resistance” to the “occupation.” If that were to happen, wouldn’t Israeli and world leaders have a much harder time denying Palestinian statehood? On the other hand, would they even want to? Should they?

Here’s a wild story, courtesy of YNet. T is a gay Palestinian who for the past 10 years has been living in Israel with his partner, an Israeli Jew named Doron. A few days ago, he heard that his father was ill, and he ventured across the border into the West Bank to visit him. When he tried to return, however, the IDF told him his permit had been lost, maybe revoked. T was stuck: he couldn’t go back home to Israel, and he couldn’t return to his village, for fear of being murdered because he is openly gay.

T was offered shelter by an Orthodox Jewish family, living in one of the settlements in the West Bank. Thanks to a generous, humanitarian gesture by one of those evil, nasty, gun-toting, messiah-heralding, baby-producing, Bible-thumping settlers, T has hope and room to breathe.

What do we learn from this? On the one hand, there’s the plight of Palestinians desperately trying to make their way out of their homeland to something better, and the trouble they face by the authorities of democratic states like Israel, and especially a security bureaucracy as lethal as its weaponry, even when they think they have permission to stay. On the other hand, there’s the touching personal story of the anonymous family of religious settlers willing to take T into their home — certainly not for the publicity (they remain unknown), and also not because they necessarily support equality for gays in society — but just because it is a mitzva to save the guy’s life.

But the biggest story, I think, is that he needed shelter in the first place. For all our hopes pinned on Abbas and the rest of the Fatah-led PA crew, it’s still a fact that an openly gay person risks his life by entering a Palestinian village. And the same is true in many places across the Arab world, and in Iran as well. The fact is that for all our desire to understand the “other,” to sympathize with the plight of civilizations different from our own and, to embrace their struggle against oppression while denouncing our own “colonialism,” the fact remains that at least part of what makes them different from us is not merely quaint or alien but reprehensible. That we are in effect extending a hand of tolerance to those who expressly renounce tolerance, and who make little effort to hide their murderous side.

Here there are no excuses to be made for Abbas: the problem with the Palestinian Authority is not that it lacks proper mechanisms for the enforcement of gay rights, that it just can’t get its anti-gay groups under its rein. The problem, indeed, is not with the regime, so much as with an entire society that doesn’t believe in gay rights and has no intention of protecting them. And that for them, the rejection of gays extends far beyond denying them civil rights into denying them human ones. Until this changes, if it ever does, why would any self-respecting Westerner take such people’s side?

When you affirm one civilization in favor of another — whether it’s your own, or that of your adversary, or just taking sides in a faraway conflict — you are affirming not just the people in that civilization but the values they cherish as well. For better or worse.

Human Rights Watch really ought to lay low for a while. Over the past few months, the once-admired watchdog admitted to fundraising in Saudi Arabia as an anti-Israel organization and discovered that one of the writers of its anti-Israel reports is a big fan of Nazi memorabilia. Yesterday, the organization’s founder, Robert Bernstein, published a blistering op-ed in the New York Times accusing the organization of abandoning its mission and becoming obsessed with attacking Israel. (See Noah Pollak’s analysis of HRW’s rebuttal here.)

So what does HRW do? It tries to prove its even-handedness. It has announced that, in its opinion, Hamas — the universally reviled terror organization that has never found an anti-civilian tactic too crude to embrace, the jihadist group that made suicide bombing a form of martyrdom, that lobbed thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian centers and brought on the entire 2009 military operation in Gaza — that this Hamas ought to conduct a “credible investigation” into accusations that it, too, committed war crimes. In a letter penned by the organization’s Middle East and North Africa division head, Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW applauds Hamas’s recent acceptance of the Goldstone Report. ”In the past, Hamas tried to justify the unjustifiable by defending unlawful rocket attacks,” Whitson said. “Having now promised to follow the Goldstone Report’s recommendations, Hamas has no excuse for not carrying out serious war crimes investigations.”

Like it did before? Hamas has, of course, promised it will do so right away, and we’re all very glad to hear it. But of greater interest is what such a letter says about HRW. I remember that great scene in The Treasure of Sierra Madre when Walter Huston, the older prospector, yells at his younger and less stalwart fellows, “You’re so dumb, there’s nothing to compare you with!” It’s one of my favorite movie lines because it captures the fact that sometimes something is so outrageous that the mind gropes in vain for an effective metaphor. Asking Hamas, a recognized terrorist group, to conduct an investigation into its war crimes is like, like … what? Is it like asking a Mob family to investigate charges of racketeering in its ranks? Or like asking a congenital liar to go to confession? How about asking a convicted mass murderer to investigate reports about his violent tendencies? Around the free world, people are imprisoned just for membership in Hamas. What could such a letter mean?

Maybe we should let Human Rights Watch just keep opening its mouth.

Something has happened to American-Israeli relations in the past few months. On Iran, suddenly Israel is voicing clear support for American dialogue with Iran, and the U.S. is voicing increasing impatience with the Iranian regime. On the Goldstone report, we are hearing that the U.S. intends to do what it can to quash it and to make sure nothing in it becomes operative in forums like the International Criminal Court. We’re even hearing today that the Palestinians may withdraw their support of the report, under U.S. pressure. On negotiations with the Palestinians, we have heard that the U.S. has effectively dropped its demands that Israel freeze settlements as a precondition for negotiations and that Obama explicitly used the phrase “Jewish State,” accepting one of Israel’s key demands. What’s going on?

The simple answer is that the Obama administration has shifted course, backtracking from its now infamous declaration that there ought to be “daylight” between Washington and Jerusalem. There are many reasons for this: Netanyahu has repeatedly outmaneuvered and out-speeched Obama, whether in the wake of the latter’s catastrophic Cairo address in May or in the UN last week.

But a more striking reason probably has to do with internal U.S. politics: Obama has discovered that Congress is not in his pocket, and that with midterm elections a year away, sitting senators and congressmen have no desire to ally themselves with an increasingly unpopular president perceived as hostile to Israel. Polls are showing growing alienation among American Jews from the administration’s Israel policies. In one poll, 51 percent oppose Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze, while only 41 percent support it–a big surprise considering that U.S. Jews have traditionally opposed Israeli settlement policy.

One starts to wonder whether American Jews are voicing their feelings about Obama’s Israel policy, or even about Obama’s presidency, more than about settlements per se. If that’s the case, then Obama’s internal political troubles may be far more serious than he knows.

Quick question: How far does Hugo Chavez’s rhetoric have to go before Western leaders, above all those of the United States, stop dismissing it as “mere rhetoric”?

I’m just curious because, well, he sure sounds like a real, serious enemy in league with the West’s most dangerous foes. In a telephone interview with Venezuelan TV from Tehran on Friday, he declared that Iran is “a true strategic ally, a staunch ally” of Venezuela. Whom is this alliance directed against? In Chavez’s view, Tehran and Caracas are “facing the same enemy, which is the U.S. empire and its lackeys. And we will defeat the empire and its lackeys.”

And lest anyone think there’s no Israel angle in all this — there always is — Chavez has not hesitated in the past few days to brand Israel as a “genocidal” regime. ”The state of Israel has become a murderous lackey at the service of imperialism,” he said. “It’s a genocidal government. I condemn that Zionist government that persecutes the heroic Palestinian people.”

Convinced yet?

Three reports from the past two days suggest a renewed effort to shift the strategic arms balance in the Middle East in favor of Syria and Iran. In one, a Russian official admitted to having contracted to sell advanced fighter jets to Syria—a state that is one of the few countries still listed on the State Department’s list of terrorism sponsors.

In another, a Kuwaiti newspaper is quoted as reporting that the Hezbollah arms cache that recently blew up in southern Lebanon held chemical weapons—suggesting that Hezbollah’s next terror assault on Israeli civilians may be far deadlier than in the past.

But the most disturbing report comes from a Beirut newspaper, which says that the Lebanese government has accepted an Iranian offer to provide the Lebanese military with advanced anti-aircraft systems. This would mark a remarkable change in posture on the part of Lebanon, which until now has attempted to distance itself from Hezbollah’s overt ties with Iran. For years, Western governments have struggled to keep Lebanon neutral at worst, yet these efforts have been frustrated by Hezbollah’s growing influence.

If such a military deal goes through, it will signal a major shift in Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

I would guess there weren’t too many people online when Haaretz today had an open Q&A with Saeb Erekat, the eloquent senior Palestinian official. It was, after all, around lunchtime in Jerusalem, which is very early in the morning in the U.S. The lack of traffic was also suggested by the very small number of questions that ended up getting answered—just seven.

So it was a funny thing to discover that when I submitted a question I considered something of a softball, it was ignored or perhaps rejected. It was short. It went like this:

Do you unequivocally denounce the use of violent attacks against civilians, including attacks carried out by Palestinians against Israelis?

No answer. Funny, I thought the Palestinians had repudiated terrorism, at least officially.

Since the mid-1990s, the State Department has kept an official list of states that sponsor terror—a list that included, back then, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Libya, and Iraq. No new states have been added in some time; in fact, several have been taken off the list: Iraq, after the regime was changed; Libya, after Qaddafi cut a deal with the U.S. that included restitution for the victims of the terror attack over Lockerbie, Scotland; and most recently North Korea has been dropped, for no apparent reason. The list has teeth: in addition to various sanctions, states appearing on the list lose their sovereign immunity in American courts in terror cases, because a state engaging in terrorism, the reasoning goes, is no longer acting in its capacity as a state and should therefore be subject to the same criminal and civil proceedings as anyone else engaging in wanton violence.

One wonders whether it’s time for Venezuela to be added to the list. For many years, its neighbor and close American ally, Colombia, has suspected Venezuela of actively supporting the FARC rebels, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. But according to at least one high-ranking Israeli military official, FARC is not the only such group enjoying the Venezuelan regime’s support: Hezbollah, it turns out, has established a major presence there as well, supported by the regime in “investing significant efforts to carry out terrorist attacks against Israeli targets and Jewish institutions in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Peru,” according to today’s YNet.

Obviously, the State Department should not take the Israelis’ or the Colombians’ word for it and must conduct a thorough inquiry before making any moves. Yet the failure to dig deeper suggests a dramatic shift in U.S. policy on international terror when compared with not only the Bush administration but the will of Congress as well. Since 9/11, U.S. policy and law have aimed at showing zero tolerance for terrorism, the centerpiece of which strategy has been to make sovereign states accountable for the terrorism they support—not just through the occasional military replacement of their regimes, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also through a wide range of legal and diplomatic sanctions.

So here’s a question someone should ask at Secretary of State Clinton’s next press conference: By ignoring the increasing accusations against Venezuela of actively helping multiple terrorist organizations, is the Obama administration signaling a change in policy toward terror-sponsoring states in general?

Two headlines today give us a sense that the Democratic-led Congress is looking to play a more significant role in countering the Obama administration’s heavy-handed approach to Israel. First, House majority leader Steny Hoyer gave an interview to the Jerusalem Post in which he praised Prime Minister Netanyahu, sharply criticized the Fatah conference, and declared that Congress had differentiated between East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank—nothing less than a slap in the face to the administration’s explicit refusal to make such distinctions.

Second, 71 U.S. senators sent a letter to President Obama calling on him to press Arab states to take major steps toward normalizing ties with Israel:

Such steps could include ending the Arab League boycott of Israel, meeting openly with Israeli officials, establishing open trade relations with Israel, issuing visas to Israeli citizens, and inviting Israelis to participate in academic and professional conferences and sporting events. We also believe that Arab states must immediately and permanently end official propaganda campaigns which demonize Israel and Jews.

These seem like pretty obvious requirements for any possible reconciliation between Israel and the Arab world. Yet it is the Senate, not the Obama administration, that has undertaken to enumerate them publicly. Combining this letter with the Hoyer interview, we get the sense that congressional leaders have decided that the change in U.S. policy on Israel has gone far enough.

Rightly or wrongly, many people around the world are breathing more easily today knowing that Avigdor Lieberman — Israel’s foreign minister, the head of its third-largest political party, and a man loathed by supporters and opponents of Israel alike — may soon be out of their hair. Several of us have offered intricate speculations as to why Lieberman had been relegated to the role of diplomatic ambassador to Russia and Latin America, while dealing with the U.S. and Europe appears to be left in the hands of Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But recent news supplies another possible explanation: if the foreign minister is about to be indicted on corruption charges, it’s better if his profile were as low as possible to begin with.

Yesterday Israeli police handed the case over to the state prosecutor’s office, which will decide whether to indict — a decision that should be forthcoming in the next couple of weeks. If radio news reports are to be believed, the indictment is highly likely. Lieberman, while denying the charges, has said that he will nonetheless resign his positions as foreign minister and head of his party if indicted. Then, of course, there would be the trial, which could stretch out.

The Lieberman case is yet another in a long string of police investigations, indictments, and trials of high-ranking public officials of the Jewish state. To list just a few: the multiple claims against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the indictment of President Moshe Katzav on sexual-assault charges, the conviction of Finance Minister Avraham Hirschson, and, of course, the endless criminal proceedings against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

What are supporters of Israel to make of all this? Two main narratives have emerged.

According to one, this is all one big politically motivated campaign to discredit and crush anyone on the Right who attains too much power. According to this theory, the justice system in Israel — judges and prosecutors alike — is dominated by supporters of the Left, who have no qualms about trying to achieve by criminal law what they fail to achieve at the ballot box. Supporters of this viewpoint point to the fact that it’s always people on the Right who have to face intensive investigation into their private lives, and even if they are technically guilty, there are plenty of left-wing politicians equally corrupt who yet seem immune from prosecution. Sharon’s criminal inquiries always seemed to move forward during the periods when he was being tough with the Palestinians; as soon as he announced his plan to withdraw from Gaza, the inquiries stalled.

For his part, Lieberman has been quick to point to the fact that the investigations against him have dragged on for more than a decade, and only when he finally rose to a position of power did they move into high gear. Even his planned resignation is not a matter of legislated law but the product of a Supreme Court ruling — again, part of the ruling elites — that requires senior officials to quit if indicted. Criminal justice, some argue, has become a tool for the Left to subvert democracy by negating electoral results through prosecution.

There is, of course, a second narrative. It goes like this: Since the founding of the country, Israeli politics have been deeply corrupt. For the past decade or more, however, the justice system has made a crusade of changing the norms of Israeli politics, seeking to uncover corruption wherever it is found. If a disproportionate number of dirty politicians is exposed on the Right, maybe that’s because those on the Right are less committed to universal norms and ethics or they’re not as good at covering their tracks.

According to this view, every successful prosecution is just another rotten apple out of the barrel, a step toward consistently applying ethical norms of conduct to Israeli public life. Even if mistakes are occasionally made, we should nonetheless applaud and support the efforts of the justice system.

I sincerely wish I could report that the second narrative is the true explanation for our current state of affairs. I do believe that many of Israel’s leaders are corrupt, and the evidence — not just what’s a matter of public record but also my personal, firsthand account — suggests that many scandals are kindled by solid evidence of wrongdoing and a genuine desire to root out rampant corruption. Israeli public life should emerge from corruption, and the best way to achieve this goal is by sending a strong message that corruption does not pay — through investigating, trying, and convicting those guilty of it.

While I have no doubt that at least some of Lieberman’s accusations are based in fact, I maintain that justice should be served equally in order to be just. But it is far too easy for the justice system in Israel to control both the pace of investigations and their political distribution. And Israel is far too small and politically charged a country for me to believe that most people in positions of authority act fully independently of their political ideology.

The timing of Sharon’s investigations was uncanny. Every once in a while, members of the Israeli elites basically admit outright that Lieberman’s description of his own situation is in fact correct. For example, veteran journalist Amnon Abramovich infamously claimed that Sharon should be treated like an “Etrog,” a highly sensitive fruit to be protected from public criticism as long as he is pursuing the disengagement from Gaza — thus lending credence to the suspicion that investigations can be politically motivated.

Israel is a country founded on ideology; most Israelis have a tough time distinguishing between their opinions and the means they can legitimately employ in implementing them. A healthy democracy requires that people subordinate their most cherished beliefs to a political process that restrains arbitrary impulses. And while people in positions of power can be kept in check by a vigorous free market of ideas, Israel is a country too small for that market to always be efficient. Monopolies can emerge, which distort the debate. These are problems Israel struggles with every day.

J.E. Dyer makes an excellent point about Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s very real efforts to develop ties with countries outside the immediate American sphere. It should be pointed out that Israel enjoys deep and extensive relations with governments around the globe — from Latin America to Africa to southern Asia — mostly but not exclusively of a military nature. According to recent reports, Israel surpasses the U.K. as the fourth-largest military exporter in the world (after the U.S., Russia, and France).

But in most cases, these relations have remained under the radar, with one or both sides preferring it that way. The change under Lieberman, it seems, is an effort to gradually move these relationships out of the closet. There are two reasons this might be happening now.

1. The Obama administration is making every effort to convince the world not only that U.S. relations with Israel are changing for the worse but also that it may be steering the United States toward a more limited role in the world. There has been lots of talk online about Obama’s being seen (we may assume deliberately) reading Fareed Zakaria’s book The Post-American World. Although most of what is said about this is silly, at a minimum it does suggest that Obama wants to be thought of as understanding which way the global winds are blowing in terms of American reach and influence. Against that backdrop, it is natural for Israelis to consider the worst-case scenario of a friendship with the U.S. that is not only diminishing but also of diminishing value in a post-American world. Israel’s survival instincts naturally kick in, and an effort to raise the profile of its ties elsewhere makes a lot of sense.

2. The very feature that makes Lieberman distasteful to many Westerners — his power-affirming nationalism — may make him more respected and, frankly, understandable in other parts of the world, especially in places like Russia and Latin America, where strongmen are respected rather than reviled. There is something ingenious about Netanyahu’s deployment of his foreign policy assets, from his assignment of Lieberman to places where he is most likely to be respected and his positioning of Michael Oren (disclosure: friend, former Shalem Center colleague, and fellow Commentary contributor) as ambassador to the U.S., to his own rallying of Israeli public support against Obama’s firm stance on settlements.

It is indeed way too simplistic to look at Lieberman as having been swept under the rug for inner political reasons. That this narrative has carried the day is itself one of Netanyahu’s most impressive diplomatic achievements.

Michael Totten draws attention to the apparent decision by Hamas to take a brief hiatus from active terror attacks in order to engage themselves in a “culture war,” which includes the production of at least one movie. Now it seems that over in the West Bank, the terrorists have started a culture war of their own. Their prime target: Bruno, aka the Jew and occasional Hebrew-speaker Sacha Baron Cohen. A few days ago, we learned that one of Bruno’s interviewees, a former operative for the Al-Aksa Martyr’s Brigade who spent seven years in an Israeli prison, was suing Baron Cohen for playing a “dirty trick” to get the interview and for implicitly portraying the ex-con as a “homo.” (”If someone here calls you a homo, it’s a very serious insult,” his lawyer said.)

And so, for just a few days, we all got to enjoy the splendid irony of an organization dedicated to killing innocent people trying to claim its right to preserve its pristine reputation as being straight — that is, of a convicted terrorist suing somebody for defamation.

But then, reason set in. “Wait a minute,” the folks at Al-Aksa apparently said to themselves. “We’re terrorists. We don’t accept Western institutions of law. ‘Doh!”

Alas, all ironies must end, either by correction or by dissolution into cliché. And so we learn that Al-Aksa has chosen the former route, issuing an apparent death threat to Baron Cohen. The supreme satirist has been forced to add bodyguards to his list of liabilities. The rest of us, however, can breathe easier knowing that terrorists can only pretend civil legitimacy for brief spurts before revealing their nefarious nature. So much for the culture war.

And whatever you do, don’t call them gay. It really makes them mad.

Here’s an interesting epilogue on the Human Rights Watch funding scandal I mentioned earlier this week. Just a few weeks after it was first revealed that HRW has been raising funds from the Saudi regime and advertising itself as overtly anti-Israel, and just a few days after this burst into the public awareness, its biggest competitor, Amnesty International, has distanced itself from HRW by releasing a blistering 65-page report on the practice of torture and other severe human-rights abuses taking place in Saudi Arabia. According to Amnesty’s press release:

Thousands of people have been arrested and detained in virtual secrecy, while others have been killed in uncertain circumstances. Hundreds more people face secret and summary trials and possible execution. Many are reported to have been tortured in order to extract confessions or as punishment after conviction.

Every once in a while, the free market overtakes the internationalists: Amnesty and HRW are presumably in permanent and intense competition for donations, and Amnesty cannot be blamed for seizing the opportunity to pull away HRW donors who were duly shocked by the Saudi scam. Amnesty is commended for singling out abuse in Saudi Arabia. Yet we cannot help but notice Amnesty’s almost total silence on Saudi Arabia prior to May of this year — even though there is nothing at all new about the kingdom’s record, as Amnesty’s own report makes clear.

When I was a kid, there was a public-service ad on TV with an old man sitting on a pier with his grandson, fishing. The boy mentions one of his classmates as being “one of my Jewish friends.” His grandfather corrects him: “That is prejudice. He’s not one of your Jewish friends, but one of your friends.” The point was astute and sensitive: When you look at someone as being one of your “Jewish friends,” you withhold something of true, human friendship because of the label you’ve added.

Odd how the word prejudice today has shifted from noun to verb without losing any of its heavy moral connotations. Today we hear that State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley has called on Israel to stop building in Eastern Jerusalem, calling on Israel to refrain from “unilateral actions” that might prejudice “the outcome of negotiations.” (Crowley actually uses the word prejudge, but it basically means the same thing, and the much more common rendering of the same argument today is prejudice.)

Yet only a tiny amount of thought, really little more than a blink of the brain, reveals how mendacious the use of the word is in this context. What does it mean to refrain from any action that might prejudice the outcome? We can imagine two neighbors struggling over a bit of land, and finally they agree to stop the conflict and sit down and talk things through. It is as though everyone has agreed to put the entire struggle between Jews and Arabs on hold so that we can finally get down to negotiations.

The problem is: The struggle is not on hold. At no point have the Palestinians, be it their official Palestinian Authority leaders or their no-less-powerful Hamas overlords, declared a suspension of the “struggle.” Every day, Palestinian terrorists plan and attempt to carry out attacks on Jews for the sole purpose of “prejudicing” the outcome of negotiations. Hezbollah continues to arm, Hamas continues to smuggle weapons in through tunnels, Syria and Iran make plans for the next war.

Not only this: The Palestinians in particular and the Arab world in general are constantly furthering this struggle, undertaking unilateral steps with no aim other than prejudicing the outcome of negotiations — a euphemism for pursing their struggle to maximize any outcome in their favor. Today we learn that Jordan has begun stripping its Palestinians of their Jordanian citizenship in order to minimize the likelihood that they will be asked to stay in Jordan as part of the final decisions on refugees. But the prejudicing runs far deeper: Palestinian schools continue to teach their children that Israel is their enemy, that their true homes are west of the Green Line, and that only through resistance, jihad, and martyrdom can their lives really acquire meaning.

Yet on all these fronts, the American government is silent.

So, in looking at the U.S. thoughts on prejudice as a verb, we are again led to wonder about its original meaning as a noun. Maybe the administration should look back at that old ad and ask themselves: Is Israel one of America’s Jewish friends, or one of its friends?

We knew it would come to this. Over the weekend, the Obama administration showed just how radical the shift in U.S. policy toward Israel has been. It has demanded that the Israeli government withdraw the municipal approval of a building project in the Eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah. The land that houses the old, run-down Shepherd Hotel, which is to be replaced by an apartment building, was lawfully purchased by Jews. No matter: That part of town is seen by Washington as a “settlement.”

Today, U.S. officials made it even clearer when they reportedly told both sides that they see no difference between Eastern Jerusalem and rogue settler outposts in the middle of the West Bank. Understandably, the Israeli government has rejected the directive, and some reports suggest that the Israelis may have deliberately leaked the demand, for it plays to Netanyahu’s image as standing tall against American pressure.

Washington has a longstanding tradition of doublespeak when dealing with Jerusalem. On the one hand, Obama himself couldn’t help but declare his commitment (subsequently retracted) to a unified Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty while campaigning for office — and he even promised to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv, which is not the capital by any definition of the term, to Jerusalem.

At the same time, he is not the first presidential candidate to make that promise, nor the first one to forget about it when in office, in the process ignoring the express will of Congress. It’s those pesky State Department folks, you see, who keep advising successive presidents that now is not the right time. For 60 years, Israel’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government have found their seat in Jerusalem, and Israel’s “closest ally” still keeps its embassy by the beach. At least we Jerusalemites don’t have to worry about all those diplomat vehicles taking our precious parking spots.

It gets weirder. As I have pointed out before, the United States does not appear to recognize Israeli sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem — West or East. A federal-court ruling earlier this month underscores the simple fact that any American citizen born in Jerusalem, regardless of where he lives, gets a U.S. passport with the country listed as simply “Jerusalem.” U.S. citizens living in Jerusalem cannot get help at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv; they are directed to the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, which answers directly to Washington, rather than to the embassy.

Again, this stuff has been going on for a long time. It begins with a fundamental attitude on the part of successive American administrations, really dating back to the 1947 UN partition plan putting the city under “universal” governance. The point is, the reasoning goes, we don’t fully see the logic in giving Israel full sovereignty of Jerusalem. It’s not just about placating the Arabs, although that’s a big part of it; it is, after all, a city of international importance. Why should only Israel have it?

So in the interest of fostering a constructive dialogue with an American diplomatic universe that seems to have no interest whatever in Israel’s position on the subject, I’d like to toss out a few brief reminders.

1. Israel should have Jerusalem, first of all, because it already does. Jews have been a majority of the city consecutively since the middle of the 19th century. There is no issue here of occupation, of a Jewish minority displacing Palestinians in their land. Over the past century and a half, the city was divided for 19 years by an accident of war, split between Israel and Jordan, neither of which occupations having earned international recognition; and then it was reunited.

Thus was born the infamous and irrelevant “Green Line,” something that today exists on maps only. The Jordanians cleansed the eastern city of its Jews and burned down its synagogues. Then the Jews came back in 1967 and gave the city a greater degree of not only economic success but also religious, cultural, and political freedom than it has ever enjoyed under any of the different Muslim, Christian, and pagan regimes that preceded them. Consider, by contrast, the treatment of Jewish holy sites under Palestinian rule: Joseph’s Tomb, for example, was immediately set on fire, as were all the synagogues of the Gaza Strip. At the risk of “prejudicing” the outcome of negotiations through the employment of argument, why on earth should it not be Israel’s?

2. Israel should have Jerusalem because it is more important to Jews than it is to Muslims (or Christians, or anyone else). This may sound vaguely discriminatory or religionist or unpopularly theological or just unfunny, but the fact is that there is a difference between the “most important” holy city and the “third most important” city that is far more than quantitative. This is the geographical heart of biblical Israel, the focus of its golden age of David and Solomon, the political-messianic-metahistorical dream focus of three millennia of Jewish prayer. This is the heart of everything, and that heart beats not on Herzl Boulevard or Jaffa Road by the Central Bus Station but in Eastern Jerusalem, at the site where the First and Second Temples stood for about a thousand years before the glorious Romans burned them down.

3. Israel should have Jerusalem because there is no practical way to divide the city that would satisfy both sides. Never mind the bizarre MTA-subway-style map that would ensue, intertwining all the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods in the city. The real problem is that Israelis and Palestinians have totally irreconcilable views as to how such a division would work in practice — a difference so wide as to make the entire endeavor a pipe dream.

Israelis see any separation as similar to the one Israel has with Egypt and Jordan: a full border, with strict crossings and a fundamental divorce of economic life. This is essential to any deal — the entire idea of giving up land in exchange for peace comes with the heavy baggage of decades of terror attacks. But such a separation, we have been told repeatedly, is anathema to the Palestinians themselves, who rely heavily on Israeli jobs for their living and see any real separation a form of “siege” — turning their territory into a “prison.” (If you don’t believe this, ask yourself how the Gazans would react if Israel were to lift the sea and air restrictions on the Strip: Would they say “we are now free” or “we are still under siege”?) This problem is little discussed but will become a deal breaker the moment anyone starts talking seriously about borders or dividing the city.

Jerusalem is not just a consensus issue in Israel but also a deeply personal one. There is no erasing the thousands of years of yearning for Jerusalem in Jewish texts, nor the heart-wrenching failure of Jewish forces to capture East Jerusalem in 1948, nor the national catharsis of its reunification in the Six Day War, nor over four decades of astonishing development and construction and tourism and flourishing of religious life for all faiths since then. The idea that now, suddenly, a new American president, speaking of “settlements,” will change this reality is not simply offensive and alienating to Israelis only but also to Jews the world over. Rather than recognize his failure in the Middle East so far, Obama is exacerbating it. Israelis do not like to be bullied, and this is far more likely to steel the Israeli public’s resolve against American pressure than weaken it.