Pardon the Interruption - Blogger was down some of last night and today when Unqualified Offerings attempted to blog. Soon, soon, UO must get off Blogger.

On the bright side, correspondence with Patrick Nielsen Hayden of Electrolite reminded UO of Alfred Bester's classic short story, "5,271,009," which was immeasurably important to this site as a young man. Must reread, though not in Russian.

With This Rock, Um... - According to this online Lebanese daily, the Hashemites may soon be withdrawing from their starring role in neocon fantasies.

Overall, the political mood in the country is marked by growing distrust and hostility between the government and society. Persistent cleavages in Jordanian society threaten to burst into the open as pressures escalate. Relations between citizens of Jordanian and Palestinian origin, always tense, are greatly inflamed by the events in Palestine and the radicalization of citizens of Palestinian origin.

The impact of the events on the Jordanian economy has further strained the social fabric. The impressive facade of rapidly developing West Amman conceals a stagnant economy; the beautiful new hotels are mostly empty and deeply in debt. Pro-Western Jordanians feel that they have done everything the US could ask ­ making peace with Israel, implementing a difficult International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment” program and joining the World Trade Organization. They resent that their sacrifices do not seem to be rewarded with any palpable American sympathy for their predicament.

Aware of these pressures, King Abdullah has adopted positions as far in line with popular sentiment as he dares, aggressively warning against any attack on Iraq and passionately advocating the Saudi peace initiative. The king has sought the cover of a united Arab position, in order to urgently press the Bush administration to adopt a more balanced approach.
With striking unanimity, Jordanians say that the anti-American sentiment in the country and in the region is like nothing they have seen before. Before the slow descent of the intifada into war, many Jordanians endorsed the regime’s vision of a new Jordan defined by its modern, pro-Western political, economic and cultural agenda.

They Might Be an Endless Source of Reader Mail - Kevin Maroney - this site is considering naming him an Adjunct Fellow at Unqualfied Offerings - writes

How, you may ask, do I know that I saw them in 1990? Well, I saw them in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They set up a voter registration table in the front of the nightclub, and urged people several times to register to vote, so that they could vote for Harvey Gantt instead of Jesse Helms in the Senate race later that year. At one point, they lead the crowd in a chant of "You can vote for Gantt, or you can be wrong."

So I think it's pretty fair to assume that they're liberals, for the definition of "liberal" which is "not insanely right wing".

Oh, and the narrator of "Purple Toupee" isn't stoned; he's just ignorant. The song is a parody of "Raspberry Beret"'s faux-60s; this is the *real* faux 60s.

Unqualified Offerings tried to find its loyal readers a link to an mp3 of the Hindu Love Gods version of "Raspberry Beret" just now, but couldn't. Install AudioGalaxy, I guess.

Return of the Autogoogle - Jeepers! I'm the Tenth Henley now!

Who is Number One?

You are Number Ten.

The Real Third Rail - Forget the Middle East. Forget Iraq. What really stirs people up is cross words about They Might Be Giants. RGB (that's the new official UO abbreviation for "reader and gaming buddy") Bill Dowling sends this surprisingly relevant anecdote:

I told [my wife] what you wrote about They Might Be Giants and she said that John Flansburgh (the one that looks ilke my Uncle Tom) told her (at a release party for Apollo 18) that he was very uncomfortable with the song "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" due to the politics involved.

Hm. How convenient! But Bill is honest as the day is long.

Coincidentally, Flansburgh plays the crypto-good cop role in a lengthy and eloquent defense by reader (though not gaming buddy) Matthew McIrvin. To UO's rallying cry of "Context, context," he replies:

They do indeed have pretty liberal politics, as they've stated in interviews and such, but they're hardly a protest band, and it seems odd to accuse them of PC anti-Western hypocrisy based on one and a fraction songs.

He cites several songs. Unqualified Offerings believes that even as Matthew describes them, about half the examples tend to prove this site's point. For that reason, Matthew's full text is provided so you can decide for yourself.

"James K. Polk" (on Factory Showroom, though it appeared earlier on an EP) ostensibly celebrates the seizure of half of Mexico by the US. Do they really mean it? No, but I can't tell the difference between the layer of irony here and that on "Istanbul."

"Purple Toupee" (Lincoln) seems to be the garbled reminiscence of a baby boomer who was too stoned during the Sixties to figure out what was going on.

"Kiss Me, Son Of God" (Lincoln) is a dark song from the POV of a charismatic religio-fascist tyrant who got his revolution through class-war rhetoric. Granted it was a time when corrupt TV evangelists were all over the news, but the tyrant sounds more Khomeini-esque (actually, that "I look like Jesus..." bit sounds more like a prescient description of Osama bin Laden).

"I Should Be Allowed To Think" (John Henry) is a funny lampoon of campus radicals with fantasies of entitlement and oppression. It begins with two lines from "Howl", and the narrator goes on to complain about the Man tearing down his band posters and speculates that he's unable to have original thoughts because of an evil government agent.

For the record, I'm putting "Polk" and "Kiss Me" in my column, with "Purple Toupee" as a maybe until I listen to Lincoln again. (There are plenty of left wing critiques of sixties indulgence as fundamentally bourgeois, middle-class, counterrevolutionary, what-have-you. Among the best of these is T-Bone Burnett's "The 60s," written in and for the 80s, with its memorable closing chant, "Keep all the bad / destroy all the good.")

But Matt's not done. He saves his best for last:

They're completely free of the Luddite tendency of modern leftists; they're obviously enthralled by science and technology, which shows up in too many songs to list. There's self-hatred, yeah, in lots of John Linnell songs, but it's the *personal* self-loathing of an awkward nerd at odds with his own body (John Flansburgh writes much less of this).

Exhibit A, though, is another cover, "New York City" (on Factory Showroom, originally by an obscure girl group named Cub). I can't hear an atom of cultural self-loathing here-- it's a freaking *patriotic anthem*. The chorus is so exaggeratedly happy that I initially assumed it was ironically intended... but by the second repeat I realized that, no, it isn't at all. It's one of the great love-New-York songs.

Post-September 11, this is the only TMBG song that brings tears to my eyes, and the list of New York locations in the bridge (all of them still standing) sounds like a battle cry.

Thanks to Bill and Matt both. In the interests of world peace, here's a link to the official They Might Be Giants website. And here's Google's top-ranked unofficial site.

Reading Between the Lips - Charles Dodgson, who will be high on the list Unqualified Offerings sends to Tapped, has the inside scoop on the Bush administration and Venezuela.

Speaking Truth to the Connected - Virginia Postrel on the Kausfiles acquisition:

As the required cynical aside (with a nicer ending), let me note that critics who think the blogosphere is full of people mentioning their blogger pals should take a look at the pal-promoting alumni of The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Harvard Crimson.

Next? - Andrew Sullivan's book club is doing Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist this month. On Sullivan's main site, he's had quite a lot about the vicious campaign of slander and misrepresentation of Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn that he and others feel created the climate in which a left-wing environmental extremist assassinated Fortuyn this week. Lomborg has been subjected to attacks of similar intensity.

Do you see where Unqualified Offerings is going with this?

Thinking Outside the Box - There's a solution to the middle east mess in here somewhere.

(Thanks to reader/gaming buddy Mike Jacobs for the link.)

Department of Corrections Department - Ginger Stampley writes to point out that her most recent item on bilingual education has nothing to say about or to Mickey Kaus.

Hot Off the Press - Leon Hadar writes to say that Cato has just published his new study, Pakistan in America’s War against Terrorism: Strategic Ally or Unreliable Client? The link is to the HTML page for the executive summary. You can get the full document in PDF from the bottom of the executive summary page.

One More Time - Ginger Stampley has more to say about bilingual education, Mickey Kaus and Unqualified Offerings.

Big Time - Overlawyered.com honors Unqualified Offerings by citing "Big Government Ruined My Long Weekend," an item from early April. UO has long considered Walter Olson a great Force for Good, so it is tickled pink.

That Time Again - More on Israel and the "right of return," in an e-mail from Leon Hadar. He points out that the principle of ethno-religious nationalism is hardly unique to Israel and the Jews.

I read your comments on Tony Judt's piece in the NYROB, and specifically the short exchange on Israel's Law of Return. Two points on the Law of Return: One, the concept of "organic" nationalism, as opposed to nationalism based on territory/citizenship is the one that is common in East and Central Europe, where Zionism was actually born. In fact, even post-Holocaust democratic Germany has a citizenship law that determines the right to immigrate and receive German citizenship based on ethnicity and blood ties. Hence, there are many third-generation Turks who cannot get German citizenship, while an immigrant from, say, Russia, who has German "blood" can get it automatically (The Germans have recently taken some steps to change their immigration law). Similar rules apply in other Eastern and Central European countries. The Baltic governments, for example, have decided to revoke the citizenship of Russian families who have been residing there since the start of the century. I'm not even pointing to the situation in other parts of the world, Japan, for example, where only "pure" Japanese can become citizens (Americans and Koreans who have lived there for decades have been denied citizenship). The point is that the Israeli Law of Return is not so unique as Judt and others make it sound.

Two, in any case, the Americanization and liberalization of Israel in recent years has produced a debate on whether the Law of Return is compatible with progressive democratic and liberal (Anglo-Saxon and Western European) concepts. The debate has taken place in the academia, media, and the courts and has be part of a general discourse on "post-Zionism," that is, on whether Israel should become a more "normal" state and society (including reforming its economy along free market lines, adopting a constitution, etc). In an article I published in World Policy Journal, "Israel Enters the Post-Zionist Age: Being Normal and Loving It," I focused on this debate, including over the Law of Return. Unfortunately, the collapse of Oslo and its aftermath has put all of this on hold. But taking into consideration that a large number of the immigrants from Russia are not Jewish and that you already have a large community of non-Jewish "guest workers" in Israel (close to 500,000 according to some statistics), and, of course, there is the existence of the Arab-Israeli community (about 20 percent of the population), and you can see why the debate on the Law of Return will continue to dominate the Israeli agenda in the coming years. Too bad that you don't see these issues being raised on the Arab side, at a time when Arab societies are becoming more Islamic-based (hence, the emigration of Christians from those countries) and less tolerant.

The bottom line is that the Law of Return would remain an important issue for Israelis, but there is no reason why it should be on the agenda of Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Of course, if Israel would have decided to annex the West Bank and Gaza and give citizenship to the Arabs living there, while trying to remain a democratic system, the Law of Return would be abolished, because of a very simple reason: The majority of the Israelis would then be non-Jewish and would vote to do just that, which explains why the majority of the Israelis are opposed to the Greater Israel idea.

In case there was any doubt about where Unqualified Offerings stands on the issue, it has no problem with the law of return and continues to believe that, within Israel proper, it is Israel's business.

The blog, Leon: Do it.

A Matter of Time - Reader John W. Brewer sends a fascinating e-mail explaining just when Constantinople got the works.

I fear that your point may be premised in part on a historical misunderstanding. The Ottoman Turks acquired control of Constantinople by force and arms in 1453, overthrowing the pitiful remnants of the Byzantine Empire. The Ottomans made Constantinople their capital, but did not change its name, which remained Constantinople for the following approximately 470 years. I believe the Ottomans were often pleased to be seen in part as the successors to Byzantine culture and imperial legitimacy when it suited their purposes. After the First World War stripped the Ottomans of all of their possessions outside the borders of present-day Turkey, the last Ottoman sultan nominally struggled on until 1923 (or 22 or 24 or something like that) before being overthrown by Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk then put in place a fairly dramatic program of somewhat coercive cultural change, aimed at changing the Turks' self-image from being the dominant ethnic group within an old-fashioned multiethnic and multireligious empire whose legitimacy stemmed in part from the Sultan's role as Caliph of the entire Islamic world (with Islam thus being part of the glue that held the empire together) to being members of a modern-style ethnically-defined state held together by a somewhat chauvinistic sense of Turkish national identity, with Islam (which offered an alternative multi-ethnic and pan-national identity) being squashed to the extent necessary to accomplish this project (although the remaining Greek and Armenian Christian minorities did not fare well under the new secular regime). At some point during the 1920's, Constantinople was renamed Istanbul as one element in this program, which had lots of other symbolic elements such as banning the fez. I have read (but I don't know how reliable this is) that another element of the program was to purge the Turkish language of the numerous loan words its vocabulary had acquired over the centuries from Arabic and Persian, with the result that current high-school graduates have great difficulty reading poetry and other literary writings of the Ottoman era.

The bottom line is thus that the name change resulted from a change of ruling faction among the Turks, not the Turkish conquest of the Greeks. I am skeptical of the uncritical admiration of Ataturkism among many bloggers, since it incorporated many bad elements of bad Western thought (particularly a very French notion that modernity means a dirigiste "scientific" approach to the economy and that modernity means secularism expressed in the form of overt hostility to and suppression of traditional religious institutions), but the fact may remain that however imperfect the Ataturkist model is for moving an Islamic people toward a reasonable economy and political order there does not yet appear to be a less imperfect alternative that has been tried and worked. (Malaysia may be less imperfect, but it probably couldn't work the way it does absent the legacy of British colonial rule and perhaps some equally non-Islamic Chinese cultural influence as well.)

Sequence and order, time and stress, as the man said. It looks like what we have here is the actual imperialism (conquest of Byzantium) separated from the cultural imperialism by several centuries. (Though it does seem that the Byzantine Church hierarchy found it prudent to vacate Constantinople after it fell.) John Brewer's distinction between the Ottomans and the Kemalists is pointful, though it remains the case that Turkey could only change Constantinople's name because Turks had conquered it.

He also sticks up gamely for They Might Be Giants, noting that

the song Istanbul was (per a bit of Googling) a top ten hit in 1953 for the Four Lads, who were presumably not appealing to the nerdy '80's college-student multi-culti demographic, it may be a bit unfair to attribute They Might Be Giants' decision to record the number (which was news to me) to that sort of motive.

Unqualified Offerings is unconvinced - so far as it knows, the Four Lads never recorded a song like "Your Racist Friend." Context, context is our rallying cry.

Not Time Yet - Virginia Postrel suggests that maybe we should, you know, actually learn the circumstances of Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn's murder before deciding Whatitallmeans. This threatens the entire basis of, among other institutions, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Judt in Time - Reader Kevin "We Do the Work, So You Don't Have To" Maroney writes

So I was puzzling over Tony Judt's statement about the Jewish right of return (which I have discussed with both of you over the last week), when I came across

a 1997 Lingua Franca article about Israel's "New Historians." The article explains why the New Historians would tend to agree with Judt that the "right of return" is anachronistic. I still don't agree, but the article is still worth checking out. Israel's revisionist historians seem to occupy roughly the same social space as practitioners of the "New History" in the US, and I suspect that they receive the same level of respect and affection from traditionalists. But Israel's revisionists have gone hammer and tongs at the mythic component of their country's history.

Speaking of Caveats with Studies - Mickey Kaus cites a study deprecating the effectiveness of bilingual education programs. Ginger Stampley deprecates the study. Kaus:

I say that if non-affluent Fillmore is now doing almost as well as Simi Valley, immersion has triumphed, and bilingual ed advocates are doomed to an increasingly desperate attempt to deny the truth. ...

Stampley:

What the report shows is that immersion beats bilingual education at teaching English. Well, duh! Immersion will force you to learn English pretty quickly. But bilingual education is also supposed to keep kids from falling behind in academic subjects like math and the physical and social sciences while they learn English. The LA Times story contains no indication of how the students tested for English proficiency are doing in any other subject.

Unqualified Offerings has long suspected that bilingual education is a racket and hurts kids, "educating" them to read neither english nor spanish well. But Ginger is largely right on the methodology problem. The one modification I'd make to her critique is the need to consider how students perform in subjects other than english longitudinally. Frex, does immersion today mean better math scores for immersed students five years from now?

Cats and Dogs Living Together - Okay, it's more like cats and fleas living together, and Unqualified Offerings is the flea, but this site salutes Instapundit for breaking the "Socialist Sweden: Third-World Nation" story:

The median income of African American households was about 70 percent of the median for all U.S. households while Swedish households earned 68 percent of the overall U.S. median level.

This meant that Swedes stood "below groups which in the Swedish debate are usually regarded as poor and losers in the American economy," Bergstrom and Gidehag said

Caveat: The study cited is from a pro-business Swedish lobby. But the proof will be in whether the figures are sound, not in who commissioned the study. And the delightful study showing that Sweden has more crime than the US comes from the UN, nobody's idea of a pro-business lobby. (And Sweden has its crime level without even UN peacekeepers to help them reach that level.)

This Came Back Up - Regurgablog has more about maps and his e-mail from the Palestinian Authority, discussed here yesterday. (Scroll down to "We Can Fact-Check Everyone's Ass.") His piece is very worth reading. I still think he's making a lot of a "Man Bites Dog" incident: he wrote to PR people and got a PR-like response.

Here's a not-so-big secret. Both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict would far rather have the whole thing than part of it, and both sides will take the whole thing if they think they can get it. They love Palestine the way Henry V loved France. The war will stop when both sides would rather have peace than their maximal dreams. What Americans can do to hasten that day is unclear to me.

If Blogging Were Easy Everyone Would D - Oh. This looks like good news: Brendan O'Neill of Spiked has started a weblog, cleverly titled Brendan O'Neill. This site's longer-time readers know O'Neill for his Spiked article, "The Strange Battle of Shah-i-Kot," which Unqualified Offerings commended to the world back in March.

The redesigned and sharp-looking (and soon to be banner-free) Istanblog wishes that Leon Hadar would start his own weblog. Oh the irony. When he wrote Unqualified Offerings, LH hinted that he may do just that. A Leon Hadar weblog would, as the young people say, totally rock.

Steve Postrel should start his own weblog too.

Split-Screen Republicanism Watch

We do the National Greatness stuff overseas and the leave us alone stuff at home. Sign me up.
- Andrew Sullivan

From today's Robert Novak column...

A rift between George W. Bush and House Republican leaders became obvious Thursday when the bloated farm subsidy bill passed. The GOP leaders were appalled by this caricature of government excess, but the president sent a contrary signal: He would sign any farm bill passed by Congress.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans had heard that song before. President Bush had made clear he would sign any education bill, and had indicated he would not veto any campaign finance reform. Nor has the president pledged to disapprove a fat emergency spending bill raising the level for further appropriations.

Speaking of Nobilis - According to an official announcement on the Nobilis mailing list, it ships to distributors tomorrow. So it will start hitting stores next week.

Speaking of Superheroes in General - Mike Jacobs posted this link to my Nobilis site.

During the Depression, sickly Steve Rogers lived in poverty with his widowed mother, who died overworking herself to provide for her son, leaving him to survive as a delivery boy.

Alarmed by the rise of Nazism, Rogers decided to join the military but was deemed "too frail." After he begged to be accepted, Rogers was tapped for Operation Rebirth, given a "secret serum" and subjected to a rain of "vita-rays," according to the Encyclopedia of Superheroes. The weakling was reborn as Captain America, a comic book figure who could lift over a quarter of a ton and run 30 mph, with reflexes 10 times as fast as normal.

Nowadays, his treatment would be called a biotech workup.

So Unqualified Offerings' farsighted tax plan has promise! The Media Really Does Suck, though, as witness this stumble in the article:

Orphaned newsboy Billy Batson became the grown-up Captain Marvel with powers that included gaining super strength by saying "Shazam!" He could leap great distances and repel bullets with his body. In today's terms, Billy Batson is somebody who's got hold of the exoskeleton suit with similar attributes the U.S. Army is currently developing at MIT for $50 million.

No no no no no! That would be Iron Man!

Speaking of Jewish Superheroes - Reader and gaming buddy Bill Dowling points Unqualified Offerings to this.

Speaking of World Domination - Kevin Holtsberry, proprietor of Blogwatch III, has posted an embarrassingly flattering review of this site. He didn't even take Unqualified Offerings to task for its potty mouth. Thank you, Kevin. Your praise means a lot. UO asks only that you not devalue it by praising any other bloggers.

Unqualified Offerings didn't say that!

Bumps on the Road to World Domination - One of the distressing ways in which the blogosphere resembles real life is the general slowness of people to do my bidding. Eve Tushnet writes, anent her action item from Jim's Assignment Desk:

Elvis the Catholic? Not touchin' it. The man is brilliant, but I'd feel lousy even sinking a foot into the swamp of his relation to his (ex?)religion.

Nonetheless, you tempt me... "Little Palaces" is prob. my favorite song of his....

Someone needs to write about the Catholic Elvis, dammit. I would argue that it's impossible to "get" the 90s Elvis without considering religion. From "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4" on Mighty Like a Rose through The Juliet Letters to All This Useless Beauty, religion (Church of Rome variety) is inescapable. "Damnation's Cellar" on Juliet could be by CS Lewis and the Brodsky Quartet. And why? Fear of death is the obvious answer, looking over the songs from that period. I fear death myself, which is why, unlike some people, it doesn't bother me that Elvis didn't keep remaking the same records he made in his and my twenties.

So curse you, Eve Tushnet, for defying me - even if provisionally.

On the bright side, Amygdala has been quiet since Saturday, so Gary Farber is almost certainly working on that Peter Parker: First Jewish Superhero essay.

Liner Notes - Favorite snippets from the new Elvis Costello album, When I Was Cruel (so far):

From "Tart"

And you say that you only feel bitterness
When you know it's a lie, lie, lie, lie, lie...

From "Dust 2..."

But dust is always caught behind a coat of paint
Beneath the marble fingernails of kinds and saints

From "Dissolve"

And the stones in the track make work for the mechanic
The birds all fly from the branches in a panic

From "...Dust"

If only dust could gather into lines of chalk
Around a silhouette detective fiction walks

From "My Little Blue Window"

How am I ever going to make you see?
nothing in this ugly world comes easily...

My lovely hooligan
Come by and smash my pane
'Til I can see right through
My little blue
Window

From "Episode of Blonde"

I tried to keep a straight face but you know it never pays

From "Radio Silence"

Gangsters and world leaders
Require the same protection from attack
From this distance it's hard to tell the difference
Between a king and a jack
Between a poet and a hack

From "45"

So don't you weep and shed
Just change your name instead
What do you lose when it all goes to your head?

Jim's Assignment Desk - Sooner or Later, one of these is going to hit, if only by random chance. Peter Parker: First Jewish Superhero - assigned to Gary Farber.

We Can Fact-Check Your URL - Electrolite has moved. Update your links, gentle readers, to this. In the spirit of family togetherness, Making Light has moved too.

Our Good Friends, the Turks - This item does have something to do with Istanblog. In response to UO's noting the anonymity of the Istanblogger, he writes:

I haven't put my name on here mainly because I like to critique (constructively, I hope) the government here, which can be a bit dodgy. I doubt I really have much to worry about on that score, being a US citizen has lots of benefits, as does having a miniscule readership. But I'm antsy anyway, as my fiancee's family doesn't have such protections, and there are many small ways for annoyed bureaucrats to inconvenience a foreign resident who can never possibly have every bureaucratic i and t dotted and crossed.

As everyone knows, the neocons cite Turkey as the rock on which the US will found not only the invasion and occupation of Iraq but the progressive transformation (through, um, invasion and occupation) of much of the Arab and Persian world - six or seven countries, by the famous count of Norman Podhoretz.

Istanblog, Not Constantinoblog - Unqualified Offerings finds that this weekend its thoughts run to Elvis Costello, Spiderman and Istanblog - this last, first.

There is the famous song, "Istanbul," that readers of the age of Unqualified Offerings probably know as a They Might Be Giants cover, with the catchy chorus

Istanbul, not Constantinople
It's Istanbul, not Constantinople

and the only other part of the song that sticks in the mind is the last line. In answer to the musical question why is it "Istanbul not Constantinople" we are informed

It's nobody's business but the Turks.

It's not hard to see what attracted TMBG to the number: their biggest weakness was the compulsion to make the listener understand just how reliably and sensitively multicultural and "progressive" they were. (Mind you, they wrote "Ana Eng," which forgives a lot.)

One Lee-tull problem: It's Istanbul, not Constantinople, because of a lengthy and determined war of conquest by those selfsame Turks. By golly, what the Turks did looks an awful lot like not just cultural imperialism, but plain ol' unmodified imperialism. By the logic of the song, it's "cultural imperialism for thee, but not for me." Which is to say that "Istanbul" is a perfect example of everything sensible people distrust about the PC left - the way it is compounded of self-hatred and hypocricy.

None of which has anything to do with Istanblog itself, but you know how these chains of association work.

We Can Factcheck Everyone's Ass - On the relaunched, redesigned and revivified Inappropriate Response, Moira Breen cites an item on Regurgablog. The item links to a map on the Palestinian National Authority website that suggests that the Pals might have problems sharing. Yikes! Regurgablog's proprietor, Scutum Sobieski, even wrote to the PA about it and posted their reply, which he finds vague.

Dear sir,

Thanks for your comments
Their is no change in policy.
the map shows the historical location of Palestine.
the Palestinian had to give up part of Palestine in order to attain
peace in the region.

Yours Truly

International Press Center

The reply does not actually sound that vague to Unqualified Offerings. The english on the PA website generally is not so fluent. However, further investigation turns up several more maps like the one on the PA website - maps that show "the whole schmear" unbroken, with no separate Israeli areas, Palestinian areas, or even occupied zone designators. There's a very small one here and a larger one here. These maps come, as the quick ones among you will have anticipated, from the official website of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Maybe they got their maps from the PA? Here's the most topographically-detailed one, labelled Israel within Boundaries and Ceasefire Lines - 2000. It shows the areas of "Palestinian responsibility" fir cuvil affairs and public order and such. Note that, while this map shows actual PA "responsibility" zones, it appears impossible to locate the Green Line anywhere. Here's a more detailed map of Judea and Samaria. Again, if you can find the Green Line here, or any indication whatsoever that the land of the West Bank other than the PA cantonments are somehow different, then you really know your maps.

This site did find a map that shows a qualitative distinction between Israel proper and the Occupied Territories that wooly-eyed utopians imagine to be the basis of a two-state solution: here. You get to that map by clicking the one Regurgablog discovered. The qualitative differences don't end with the colors. If you click on the West Bank area, you can get a more-detailed map of the West Bank. If you click on the Gaza area, you can get a more-detailed map of Gaza. If you click on the Israel area, you don't get a more detailed map. Note that, even though the map is the first official one this article has found that acknowledges a Jewish territory-Arab territory distinction, the PA can't bring themselves to label Israel as Israel on the map. (Israel is explicitly acknowledged as a fact of life in the text accompanying the West Bank and Gaza maps.) Insultingly, if you click on Jerusalem from the West Bank map, you learn that "Jerusalem is a holy city for the world's major religions: Islam, and Christianity." The minor religions - Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism etc. - seem less interested in the place to the PA.

Apparently both sides have their map problems.