Department of Actual Research - Unqualified Offerings bestirred itself to do something approaching work. It e-mailed Tony Judt (see below) about his NYRB piece, and he graciously replied with speed and concision:

I meant the right of return (to Israel, however defined) that is built into Israeli law.

I admire Tony Judt greatly. If you made a list with a column of Things Tony Judt Is Right About and another for Things Tony Judt Is Wrong About, the first column would be much, much longer than the second. But I have to put the current issue in the Things Tony Judt Is Way Wrong About column.

The lesser reason is the continuing relevance of the original Zionist rationale in our times - Israel as a refuge for the Jews in a hostile world. There are real problems with this rationale, not least the question of whether an Israel that depends entirely on the good will of a single country (the US) for its survival can be said to provide a refuge for anyone, or whether it is potentially-changeable America that is providing the refuge. But there remain countries that Jews may soon want to fLee, including countries Judt knows well. France comes to mind. So does Germany. Life in an American protectorate can be better than life in countries whose governments will make no effort to protect your life or property from violent bigots.

The greater reason is the respect owed Israeli sovereignty. Those of us who support a two-state solution perforce support the continuance of Israel along with the creation of Palestine. This site has been pretty forceful in saying that a real Palestinian state must be sovereign. Well, so must Israel. Israel was founded to be a Jewish state. It has the right, as a sovereign nation, to decide who can move there. Beyond that, given a real Palestine, a Jewish "right of return" to Israel proper harms no one. For that matter, if Palestine wants to allow members of the Palestinian diaspora to return to its territory, that's no skin off Isreal's nose.

Professor Judt didn't offer any reasoning behind his statement in either his article or his e-mail. It's not like he owes Unqualified Offerings any explanation. But I'd be interested to see him explain his reasoning sometime, in NYRB or elsewhere.

Jim's Assignment Desk - Of course! Unqualified Offerings exclaimed, smacking its virtual forehead. Eve Tushnet is just the one to write the "Elvis Costello, Catholic Writer" essay that UO has always wanted to read!

Geek Heaven - Snuck out of the office today at lunch to see Spiderman. As I told a woman in the refreshment line, "I'm not pathetic. I just know who I am." More about the movies virtues, and what keeps it from being perfect, anon.

And the new Elvis Costello album is actually quite good - at the very least. (Three listens so far.) More on its virtues, and anything that keeps it from being perfect, anon.

In the meantime, you can read the infallible Stephen Hunter's favorable Spiderman review.

There's Good and Bad in Everyone Dept. - The hyperstatist, cheese-eating surrender monkeys in Europe have one thing going for them: they're ratcheting down the drug war over there, according to this Washington Post story.

And There's a Story in a Book About It - Kevin also notes the publication of Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire - And Both Lost. The book is by Dan Raviv, who coauthored a famous book on the Israeli secret services.

It all fits together!

Au Contraire Fanboy - Reader Kevin Maroney takes issue with the Post story on the business of comic books cited below:

That doesn't sound right--the big collapse in comics sales was in 1995, not 1997. However, Marvel was, until two or three years ago, flooding the market with unprofitable titles; they've really cut their line back in that time, so maybe, just maybe, that's correct.

Oh, and Marvel isn't the only comics publisher participating in "Free Comics Day". Still, 750,000 copies of a book is only about 200 copies per store in the US--so, yeah, shops are going to run out, if the word gets out to the public about the promotion.

He agrees with Unqualified Offerings that "Even leaving aside the problems of erratic distribution, for a newsstand or other general retailer, American comics are a low-price, low-margin ware" (UO: "Comics had low price points compared to magazines and low margins") but notes, intriguingly, that DC explored a potentially more attractive alternative format.

Marvel and DC should have used the easy money of the direct market to explore new formats for comic books to make them viable on newsstands. In fact, DC came up with one in the mid-1990s; a magazine publisher called Welsh developed _Superman and Batman Magazine_, which ran for about a year and was by all accounts pretty successful--half a million sales at a time when the main _Superman_ books were selling between one-half and one-third that many. Then Marvel bought Welsh and cancelled the magazine. Oh, well. I don't know why no one else has tried it.

Don't Look Now... but "The Bush administration has reached an informal agreement with Saudi Arabia to jointly step up pressure for a negotiated peace accord in the Middle East, senior U.S. and Saudi officials said Wednesday," according to Barry Schweid of the Associated Press.

The leak has "State Department" all over it. Nevertheless. They're going to have a cow at the Weekly Standard.

Unqualified Offerings has one question: What if it, like, works?

Wild Speculation: Is it possible that the Saudis scared themselves with their tacit complicity in the September massacres, and are trying to walk themselves back from the Abyss? And that Dubya and his team are in on it with them?

There's a New Sharif in Town - Istanblog has been running for, say, almost two weeks now. The so-far pseudonymous Istanblogger is "An American Living in Turkey," which should leave him well-placed to observe if we go through with the supposed plans to attack Iraq late this year or next year. But beat the rush and start reading Istanblog now.

Note: He's stolen the David Bromwich line I liked so much for his site motto, and he's written several items about The W - W - W - Wa -

I ain't gonna say it.

Already, mind you, the proprietor of Istanblog has discovered that this line of work isn't all it's cracked up to be:

I've sunk to some weird kind of low if I'm posting refutations against William Safire columns. Next I'll be refuting the claims made in spam mails.

At least he hasn't sunk to barking at Mary McGrory yet!

A Fanboy's Notes - The Spiderman movie would mean a big jump in sales of comic books. If there were comic books. The Post has the sad, if perhaps overstated, story:

Turns out the readership for comic books has been in steep decline over the past decade, to the point where their core audience is now men ages 18 to 30. Add that to the fact that Marvel has been climbing out of bankruptcy for the past three years, publishing just 28 million copies in 2000 compared with 150 million five years ago.

You can, in fact, find comic books if you're willing to go out of your way. There are eight comic book specialty stores in the Washington area, the biggest being Big Planet Comics in Bethesda, Vienna and the District.

On Saturday, the day after "Spider-Man" opens, comic book stores across the country will offer free editions of several titles, including Star Wars, Justice League, Tomb Raider and Ultimate Spider-Man. The promotion is designed to introduce or re-introduce readers to comic books. (To find out if a local store is participating in the giveaway, go to www.freecomicbookday.com)

For this stunt, Marvel printed an extra 750,000 comic books -- for the entire country. (Reality check: There are 30 million boys between the ages of 5 and 19 in the United States, and they're all going to see this film.)

Unqualified Offerings, a largely lapsed comic book reader, is of two minds about the undeniable changes in the marketplace. It's sad that kids can't buy cheap, fun comics easily these days. The hobby isn't really replenishing itself. However, the signal change for the better in the lifetime of Unqualified Offerings is that the good stuff stays around. Used to be if you wanted to find out what, say, Jack Kirby's Fourth World was all about because you were too young to catch it the first time, you had to search out and pay through the nose for back issues. Thanks to the omnibus reprint market, you can pick up an awful lot of memorable stuff in handsome trade paper volumes at reasonable prices. The phenomenon seems to have destroyed the back issue market, probably depressing the speculation-driven sales I saw people engaging in in the 70s and 80s. And I've heard the claim made that by catering to the enthusiast market, comics publishers killed the general reader market.

I'm not convinced. There's a good chance comics were doomed if they kept stubbornly trying to fill the cheap sensationalist entertainment of choice for pre-teens niche. And the focus on older readers means there's some pretty good writing out there at any given time.

The old comic book paradigm - here's your newsstand, here's your rack, fend for yourself - was financially problematic. Comics had low price points compared to magazines and low margins. The only way that could be even a minimally attractive use of shelf space was if the retailer didn't have to worry about them. I believe in the old days the retailer literally didn't know what comics he would get: the distributors controlled that. Nor did the retailer necessarily care.

This drove the enthusiastic reader nuts, needless to say. The high-volume purchaser had the incentive to become quite sophisticated about his (mostly "his") wants. The fan hated the clueless general-purpose retailer, the general-purpose retailer wondered what the hell the dork in front of him was fussing about and nobody made any money. Clueful retailers started opening specialty shops; clueful readers sought them out; and clueful publishers realized that the Community of the Clueful were hungry, hungry, and they could do a very good job of feeding them.

It would've worked too, if not for you meddling kids - er, lawyers...

Meanwhile Marvel, the comic book company that created Spider-Man, was engaged in its own series of mergers and takeover struggles between tycoons Ronald Perelman and Carl Icahn and, later, the toy-manufacturing team of Avi Arad and Ike Perlmutter.

Tomorrow! The Spiderman movie opens tomorrow! Bwahahahaha!!

For Good...Or Evil - Returns on the new font size and layout are mixed. Reader and old pal David Saia, proprietor of The Jackie Starlight Homepage writes

I hadn't been able to read your site since I tried a long time ago because the font was so freaking small -- I kid you not / I had same problem with Suz Redfearn's 'GermBag' -- but today I check it out for the first time in months and Wow -- you just chose TODAY to increase th'ol font size. Well, I LOVE IT!

On the other hand, reader, gaming buddy and link-floater Mike Jacobs said this evening

It makes the articles look longer so I don't want to read them.

Which can't be good. So the jury is still out.

Meanwhile, The Scene has replaced the longstanding dishy photo with a dishy drawing. Not sure how I feel about that! But um, Virginia? That's not a "blast weapon" in Dynama's right hand. It's THE RAW CORRUSCATING POWER OF HER DYNABLASTS coming from the hand itself!

If you're going to be a superhero, you're going to have to learn this stuff.

That Is Not What I Meant At All. That Is Not It At All. And I don't think it's what Tony Judt meant either, though I could be wrong. Gary Farber writes

Jim Henley comments on Tony Judt's NYRB piece. Though Jim doesn't, I have to disagree with this line of Judt's:

There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one.

I don't see Israel ever abandoning the acceptance and solicitation of Jews everywhere to make aliyah and immigrate to Israel. It would remove Israel's raison d'etre and core identity. It isn't going to happen unless Israel changes so drastically it might as well cease calling itself "Israel." To not understand this is to lack all understanding of Israel.

Perhaps it's a case of reading my own views into another writer, but I didn't take "the anachronistic Jewish one" to refer to what we usually think of when we think "right of return" and "Israel" - the right of Jews to settle in Israel proper under the sovereignty of the Jewish state.

There is a different "right of return" that I assumed (and now hope) Judt meant, one that isn't often called that - the right asserted by Israel's settler community and their political patrons of Jews to live under Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza. There's an asymmetry there that no peace process could survive: "We can come back and live on your land under the rule of our own kind because our distant ancestors walked there, but you can't come back and live on our land under anyone's rule even if your mom or grandma lived there." The settlements are "a right of return for me, but not for thee."

That's what I think Judt meant. It's certainly what I mean. Jews from, oh, say, Norway should still be able to come to Israel proper and live. But what happened in the early 90s, when large numbers of Russian immigrants were settled in the West Bank at government expense (and not just the Israeli government, fellow taxpayers), can't happen. Not so long as Israel, sanely in my view, refuses to let Palestinian refugees return to Haifa and Tel Aviv.

If Judt meant something else, I would disagree, and even be disappointed.

(Thought: Where does this post fit on the "Weekly Standard Blog Parody" meter?)

Good Things Come to Those Who Whine - Somehow Leon Hadar noticed UO's petulant outburst about which bloggers he did and didn't write to, and favored this site with a couple of e-mails. Hadar has always been a sober observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He makes a plausible argument that not only might Jordan intervene in the West Bank, it must, for its own sake:

I could probably add a few more reasons why the "Jordanian option" (so-called so as to distinguish it from the earlier version which assumes that the Jordanian would just get back to the West Bank and annex it) won't work... But there are several reasons why Jordan would have to take those steps. First, in reality, Israel/Palestine/Jordan are for all practical purposes an integrated geographic, demographic, and economic entity On one hand, you have the Palestinians who actually constitute a majority of the population in that entire entity. Almost every Palestinian family has a branch in each of those three political units. On the other hand, you have the Israeli-Jews and the Arab Beduins/Hasemites who have a common interest in containing the power of the Palestinian majority. So ... you have a very interesting balance of power here that explains why these three units are doomed to interact and intermingle, as they have been doing since the 1920s, including the informal division of the West Bank between Israel and the Hashemite after 1948. This is the big picture. Two, King Abdallah may be breathing a sigh of relief now, but if the situation in the West Bank deteriorates, and you'll have more "Netanyahs" followed by more "Jennins" (and it gets worse and worse after each cycle Palestinian terrorism/Israeli reprisal), you are going eventually to start seeing tens, and then hundreds and thousands Palestinian refugees trying to cross the Jordan River into Jordan, not unlike in 1948. It's inevitable, especially if Sharon takes advantage of a potential Iraqi missile attacks on Tel Aviv that would follow as U.S. military assault against Saddam and sends Israeli troops to "finish the job" in the West Bank. Under those conditions, King Abdallah by sending his troops to the West Bank (with Israeli and American green lights), would prevent a worst case scenario (the flooding of Jordan with refugees, and you know the rest), and would be seen as the savior of the Palestinians. My point is, that at the end of the day, he won't have much choice here. And, three: My guess is that the Bushies are serious about ousting Saddam. I'm opposed to the idea (for several reasons). But one consequence of an establishment of the pro-American regime in Baghdad is that you are going to have the basis for a new pro-Western Arab bloc consisting of Jordan and Iraq, which would provide Abdallah with the kind of military and diplomatic backing he needs (ideal situation: sandwiched between Israel and Iraq), which would permit him to take risks. When the dust settles -- and mark my words here! --- some form of an Israel/Palestine/Jordan is inevitable. And could actually work.

Note that Hadar is not talking about Jordan keeping the West Bank. He's talking about Jordan midwifing Palestine for Israel and the US. It sounds a great deal like "Disgorgement Plus."

There's more to say about Leon Hadar's ideas, and how they hold some promise for bridging the "Postrel-Henley Gap" when Unqualified Offerings doesn't have to go to work. (Everyone recognizes that the Middle East matters only insofar as it relates to Steven Postrel's and my debate, right? Excellent!)

(Note: This is an excellent time for this site's readers to calibrate their irony meters.)

A Fanboy's Notes - Nobilis has reached US warehouses and is supposed to be two weeks away from stores. Spiderman opens in three days. And the new Elvis Costello record is discussed, sometimes savagely, here and here. UO hasn't had a chance to listen yet; but be warned, it thought The Juliet Letters a masterpiece, though a lot of people consider it pretentious nonsense, and holds the Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory to be a fine, moving record. (The magician Teller's famous review of Juliet is, naturally, online.)

It All Fits Together! - Objectionable Content has a lot to say about a lot of different stuff, and damned if he isn't going to try to say it in a single post!

And speaking of tiny fonts, Christ, Jim, do something, huh?

Another Country Heard From - David Kimche, former Rabin aide, former Director-General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Iran-Contra figure and architect of Ariel Sharon's disastrous Lebanon invasion in the early 1980s, not only thinks separation (UO still prefers "disgorgement") is a good idea, he's committed his organization to gathering a million Israeli signatures in favor of the idea.

WITHDRAWAL from the Gaza Strip and from the isolated settlements in Judea and Samaria would lessen the tremendous burden in manpower, materiel and budget of the defense forces; enable them to be used more effectively to lessen the threat of terror attacks; reduce the points of friction between Israelis and Palestinians; lessen the danger of violence spiraling out of control and into a regional conflagration; and, above all, it would safeguard the continuation of a Jewish, democratic State of Israel by saving it from the negative demographic trend which is turning the Jewish population between the Jordan River and the sea into a minority...It would free us from the moral burden of lording over another people. It would break the taboo against dismantling settlements.

(Link via Tres Producers.)

Northern Opponents Watch - Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan...

Osama bin Laden was able to escape the clutches of US troops in Afghanistan thanks to a powerful military commander currently serving with the Afghan government, a rival warlord said.

Commander Hazrat Ali helped the alleged terrorist mastermind flee from the eastern Tora Bora mountains during an intense US-led offensive last December, strongman Haji Zaman told reporters in this northwestern frontier city.

Ali was recently appointed security chief and commander of the country's eastern zone by Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai, replacing the sacked Zaman.

Zaman said Ilyas Khel, another Afghan commander, had been appointed by Ali to guard the route by which bin Laden made his escape.

"Ilyas Khel was a supporter of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and Hazrat Ali knew it," he said.

He said he was unaware of bin Laden's current whereabouts and denied allegations that he was himself instrumental in the al-Qaeda chief's escape.

"This is a lie. I captured 55 al-Qaeda fighters during the operation in Tora Bora and handed them over to the government," he said.

Never Mind - Michael Isikoff, whom conservatives and libertarians thought was a pretty good reporter when he was being inconvenient to Bill Clinton, says that the only story that seemed to tie the September hijackers directly to Iraq is...a load of crap.

Then, in the chaotic days after September 11, a Czech intelligence source inside Prague’s Middle Eastern community saw Atta’s picture in the media and reported that he had seen the same person meeting [Iraqi diplomat and likely spy] al-Ani at the Iraqi Embassy five months earlier. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman publicly confirmed the story to CNN during a visit to Washington last November. But the uncorroborated report, some Czechs now concede, should have generated more skepticism. “These [informants] tend to tell you what you want to believe,” says Oldrich Cerny, the former director of Czech intelligence.

On closer scrutiny, however, the evidence became even less convincing. Although Atta had indeed flown from Prague to the United States in June 2000, the Czechs had placed the alleged meeting in April 2001. The FBI could find no visa or airline records showing he had left or re-entered the United States that month. The bureau does have records showing Atta was in Virginia Beach— where officials suspect he was casing U.S. naval facilities in the area - and Florida in April. “Neither we nor the Czechs nor anybody else has any information he was coming or going [to Prague] at that time,” says a U.S. official.

But intelligence officials have been reluctant to set the record straight— both out of reluctance to embarrass an allied government and because so many anti-Saddam hawks in the Bush administration had embraced the story.

No doubt Admiral Woolsey is still out there somewhere, looking for clues and reminding the dozen or so W.T. Tyler fans in the world of the pathetic Frank Dudley in Last Train From Berlin. Isikoff:

To be sure, administration hardliners aren’t ready to give up. Newsweek has learned that Pentagon analysts are still aggressively hunting for evidence that might tie Atta, or any of the other hijackers, to Saddam’s agents. It may yet turn up, but for now, at least, the much touted “Prague connection” appears to be an intriguing, but embarrassing, mistake.

If Design Govern in a Thing So Small - Ginger has a lengthy post about weblog design, text readability, font size and browser compatibility. She says she even increased her font size recently at the best of Gary Farber. It makes me wonder if my own font size is too small. (We keep nice narrow columns here, as we've mentioned many times.) I'm going to play around with it a little. One thing about the nice narrow columns is that, since this site seems to have a proclivity for interminable chin-pulling pieces, they stretch way the hell down the page. But we have our standards.

UPDATE: Eh. Font's bigger. Column slightly wider to accomodate. Not sure if I like it or not. Soliciting opinion on the change now. (Note: If the site looks the same to you, empty your browser cache and reload the page. Good chance to flush those porn files.)

Capitalism - In - SPAAAAAACE! - The Space Settlement Initiative site says the key to actually getting our Mars and Moon colonies is property rights. Far be it from Unqualified Offerings to disagree.

Must There Be an Unqualified Offerings? - For much of Tony Judt's much-discussed New York Review of Books essay on the Middle East this week, Unqualified Offerings wondered if it even needed to exist. UO first encountered Judt in the early 90s when he wrote, for NYRB, important, clarifying essays about ethical and philosophical sickness among European intellectuals during the Soviet era. (Particularly French intellectuals.) In the latest NYRB work, he brings the same acuity to the problem of the Holy Land.

In 1958, at the height of the Algerian crisis, with Arabs bombing French cafés in Algiers, Paris tacitly condoning the use of torture by the occupying French army, and paratroop colonels demanding a free hand to end terror, the French philosopher Raymond Aron published a small book, L'Algérie et la République.[1] Cutting through the emotive and historical claims of both sides, Aron explained in his characteristically cool prose why the French had to quit Algeria. France lacked both the will and the means either to impose French rule on the Arabs or to give Arabs an equal place in France. If the French stayed the situation would only deteriorate and they would inevitably leave at some later date—but under worse conditions and with a more embittered legacy. The damage that France was doing to Algerians was surpassed by the harm the Republic was bringing upon itself. However impossible the choice appeared, it was nonetheless very simple: France must go.

Many years later Aron was asked why he never engaged the heated questions of the time: torture, terrorism, the French policy of state-sponsored political assassination, Arab national claims, and the colonial heritage of the French. Everyone, he replied, was talking about these things; why add my voice? The point was no longer to analyze the origins of the tragedy, nor assign blame for it. The point was to do what had to be done.

In the cacophony of commentary and accusation swirling around the calamity in the Middle East, Aron's icy clarity is sorely missed. For the solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict is also in plain sight. Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do. Palestinians can be neither expunged from "Greater Israel" nor integrated into it: if they were expelled into Jordan, the latter would explode, with disastrous consequences for Israel. Palestinians need a real state of their own and they will have one. The two states will be delineated in accordance with the map drawn up at the Taba negotiations in January 2001, according to which the 1967 borders will be modified, but nearly all of the occupied territories will come under Palestinian rule. The Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are thus foredoomed, and most of them will be dismantled, as many Israelis privately acknowledge.

There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one. Jerusalem is already largely divided along ethnic lines and will, eventually, be the capital of both states. Since these states will have a common interest in stability and shared security concerns, they will learn in time to cooperate. Community- based organizations like Hamas, offered the chance to transform themselves from terrorist networks into political parties, will take this path. There are numerous precedents.

If this is the future of the region, then why is it proving so tragically hard to get there? Four years after Aron's essay, De Gaulle extricated his countrymen from Algeria with relative ease. Following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge. Is the Middle East so different?

Okay, I'm liking this part because it echoes my own arguments. But it's a great comfort having someone as smart as Judt on your own side - even greater than having a creep like Michael Ledeen on the other side. More Judt.

Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness. For some, this lies in the primordial presence of an ancient Jewish state on the territory of modern Israel. For others it rests in a God-given title to the lands of Judea and Samaria. Many still invoke the Holocaust and the claim that it authorizes Jews to make upon the international community. Even those who reject all such special pleading point to geography in defense of their distinction. We are so vulnerable, they say, so surrounded by enemies, that we cannot take any risks or afford a single mistake. The French could withdraw across the Mediterranean; South Africa is a very large country. We have nowhere to go. Finally, behind every Israeli refusal to face the inevitability of hard choices stands the implicit guarantee of the United States.

The problem for the rest of the world is that since 1967 Israel has changed in ways that render its traditional self-description absurd. It is now a regional colonial power, by some accounts the world's fourth-largest military establishment. Israel is a state, with all the trappings and capacities of a state. By comparison the Palestinians are weak indeed. While the failings of the Palestinian leadership have been abysmal and the crimes of Palestinian terrorists extremely bloody, the fact is that Israel has the military and political initiative. Responsibility for moving beyond the present impasse thus falls primarily (though as we shall see not exclusively) on Israel.

But Israelis themselves are blind to this. In their own eyes they are still a small victim-community, defending themselves with restraint and reluctance against overwhelming odds. Their astonishingly incompetent political leadership has squandered thirty years since the hubris-inducing victory of June 1967. In that time Israelis have built illegal compounds in the occupied territories and grown a carapace of cynicism: toward the Palestinians, whom they regard with contempt, and toward a United States whose erstwhile benevolent disengagement they have manipulated shamelessly.

Just as this site is wondering if it has a single opinion Judt is not capable of expressing better, he kindly says something with which one can disagree:

There is no magic moment when the walls come down, but the sequence of events is clear: first comes the political solution, typically imposed from outside and above, often when mutual resentment is at its peak.

Judt feels the key to peace is outside intervention. I think the record, particularly in the Middle East, shows that the opposite is more nearly the case. The actual breakthroughs, the ones that either worked (Sinai) or might have worked (Oslo) have been initiatives of the local actors themselves. It wasn't Kissinger's shuttling but Sadat's initiative that brought peace to the Suez. The negotiators of Oslo not only thought up the idea themselves, they attempted to keep negotiations secret from even the United States. We not only weren't the patrons of Oslo; we were shut out. Because the US is more or less continuously trying to jumpstart some peace process or other in the Middle East - and other parts of the world too - you get a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc effects when peace does break out somewhere.

[Update: Reader "P Nielsen Hayden," who does not go by "Patrick Hayden" or "Leslie Nielsen" or "John Hadl," writes to point out that the first posted version of this piece linked to Airstrip One rather than Judt's NYRB article. "My ears are bleeding. Libertarian isolationists everywhere will pay," writes P Nielsen Hayden. Unqualified Offerings regrets the ears.]

To Go By Contraries - Emmanuel Goldstein, proprietor of the Airstrip One weblog, good-naturedly refers to Christopher Montgomery, who took over Goldstein's Airstrip One column, as his "improvement" on the feature. I wouldn't go that far, but Montgomery is a damned entertaining writer and today's contrarian take on the EU's "intentions" is especially provoking:

That is to say, if a British Foreign Secretary went to Brussels and laid down actual-factual proposals showing how the individual EU member states could be abolished and superseded by a Federal European state, by far the most probable outcome is that his continental peers would have to stare down at their tasseled loafers and mumble something quiet about how they didn't really want that thing they had squealed in favour of for so long.

Read the whole column. Montgomery wishes the EU would actually form their superstate, without Britain, so the Brits would have a big lumbering entity to play off against - us, my fellow Americans.

On the disappointing side, Montgomery hasn't produced my Sandbaggers DVD yet either.

You're Either with Unqualified Offerings or You're with the Terrorists - Thanks to Jane Galt and A Coyote at the Dog Show for linking to UO's item about British blog imperialism.

But say, shouldn't it really be "janegalt-dot-COM?" "Dot-NET" sounds sort of, well, collectivist.

New Media for Old - Another thing that comes readily to old-media writers is promoting their wares. They learned to either get jobs or keep those submissions in the mail long ago. So when experienced reporter Howard Owens started his blog, he sent a bunch of us e-mails asking us to announce it. (He seems to imagine that a link from Unqualified Offerings is actually worth some hits.) And he put some thought into it too, referring specifically to my recent piece about weblog winnowing to demonstrate familiarity with this site. Hey, UO knows that trick! ("I particularly admired the poems ______________, _____________ and _______________ in your Fall issue...") Howard describes himself as "a thoroughly conservative, non-aligned voter. I belong to no political party and have no allegiance to any political agenda. I believe fiercely in the values of American conservatism, though I do not always agree with prevailing conservative opinion." His site is very professional-looking, and he'll even sell you the design code for $95.

Holes Within Holes - Comes now the point where Unqualified Offerings really addresses what Steven Postrel identified as the central point of his original e-mail, which is linked somewhere below, and linked from Virginia Postrel's site too. I've been dilatory in getting to this for a few reasons:

1) I do this in my spare time, after work and wife and kids have gotten their modicums (modica?) of attention.

2) Believe it or not, the original piece took a lot out of me, and I wanted to leave it alone for awhile.

3) Things I mean to get to have a way of slipping away from me.

4) Sometimes if you leave a job undone, someone else does it for you. Ironically, considering the recent brouhahas (brouhahi?) over "libertarian isolationism," the blogger doing the job is Brink Lindsey.

Here is Steve's original point one, in his first e-mail to me:

IF there is to be a Palestinian state, and that state is to be hostile, and that state is to be on the West Bank, and that state is to be allowed the sovereign right to build up its own defenses and get aid from wherever it wants, THEN the Israelis will have to fight that state from an incomparably worse position than the one they enjoy today, just to get back to a position where they have the SAME options that they have today. As a bonus, you can kiss the Hashemite rule of Jordan goodbye, because Arafat (or his successors) will collaborate with Syria and Iraq to destabilize and take over there too (>50% of the Jordanian population is Palestinian now). I'm not sure in which order those two things would be most likely to occur, but the "libertarian isolationist" policy you advocate looks like an avoidance of these hard realtiies to me. There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence, the Arabs see concessions as weakness, and once an independent Palestinian state is in place it will be time for "phase 2," as Arafat or one of his buddies put it.

The part of this paragraph that I dealt with at length was the claim that "There is zero tolerance among the Arabs for Israel's presence," both in "Scorpions and Undershorts" (link a few items down) and in subsequent posts about Lebanon, deterrence and the control of Arab non-state actors by their patrons (e.g. Hezbollah and Iran). I argued in a fair amount of detail that the historical record shows repeated, if not necessarily enthusiastic, accomodations with Israel by Arab countries. I did not address the argument of the first sentence at the time for a specific reason: I had previously argued that all the alternatives to Israel unilaterally hawking up a Palestinian state in the territories by a kind of geopolitical Heimlich Maneuver were strategically and/or morally bankrupt. (The options were, once again, extermination, ethnic cleansing, disgorgement and More of the Same.) For that reason, I placed no value on having those options as such. Steve does and that deserves to be noted now and deserved to be noted then.

I still think he's wrong, though. The true Israeli aim should be to have not options but security. Particularly not bad options.

Another reason that this item avoided the top of the to-do list is that it involves dealing with a fair amount of theology: Steve's arguments against disgorgement rest on what I consider faith claims, and I don't share the faith. As a small example, he originally wrote to me "I want to respond to your well-written and provocative posts advocating passive policies by Israel." I utterly reject the characterization of unilateral disgorgement as "passive." At the time, it seemed polite to gloss over that part. But it's a faulty construction. Disgorgement on the Henley Plan has nothing of passivity about it. I can't speak for Tony Adragna, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan, John Braue or any of the others who have advocated some version of unilateral separation from Palestine by Israel, but my vision of disgorgement is far from passive. Not least because I recognize full well that this would be the first time in history one country created another country that was, at least formally, at war with it. Brink Lindsey's characterization seems to me to be far more accurate than Steven Postrel's

The reason I prefer evacuate-and-isolate is that Israel takes the strategic initiative.

To consider SP's "central point" in detail, I'll quote from his e-mail to Tres Producers:

1) If the Israelis remove themselves from the territories, will they also isolate the Palestinians from the outside world? If they do, then they will have turned the territories into a giant prison camp, which would almost certainly be unsustainable in the face of international and US pressure. Such isolation would result in starvation and disease on a mass scale, unless you want the Israelis also to act as wardens and run the prison camp, in which case there really would be no separation at all. Furthermore, if the Palestinians are not allowed to commute into Israel to work, they will not be economically viable, and will have nothing else to do but plot aggression.

In the Henley Plan - I'm sounding grandiose, but I want to be clear about the contours of Jim's Wall - no, Israel will not isolate the Palestinians from the outside world. The Henley Plan does not aim to produce a giant prison camp; it aims to produce Palestine.

Since the Palestinians are not isolated from the outside world, they will have at least the chance at basing their economy on something other than manual labor on behalf of Israelis. Being barred from Israel will nevertheless be an economic hardship. On one level, undue concern about this is almost stupefying: If two nations are at war, why would one nation let citizens of the other work in its territory? Why would the other nation even imagine that its citizens had that option? Unless one just doesn't think of the Palestinians as having a state even when trying to think about a Palestinian state, the worries seem strange.

Besides, this is one place where the active part of disgorgement comes in. Even after "conceding" statehood to the Palestinians, Israel still has cards to play, economic cards included. That's part of the Plan.

2) If the Israelis do not isolate the territories from the outside world, then the Palestinians will import weapons of all kinds from their various foreign suppliers. In particular, we can expect massive amounts of mortars and short-range rockets to be brought in, and man-portable SAMs if these can be acquired. With these, the Palestinians will be able to terrorize Israel, since the parties will be in close proximity and walls can't stop indirect fire weapons. The Palestinians will get lots of help from skilled Hezbollah specialists in tactics and maintenance for these weapons. At some point, chemical weapons may be employed, since these are relatively easy to synthesize from civilian-use precursor substances used in everyday industry.

There's an unambiguous claim here and an ambiguous one. The unambiguous one is that "Palestine will import weapons of all kinds," which I am sure is true. Then he says the Palestinians "will be able to terrorize Israel," which is not exactly the same thing as saying that they will do this. But he seems sure that they will. That is, he is certain that nothing will, in Brink Lindsey's formulation "induce the Palestinians to get off the warpath."

Again, I think this claim has more faith than reason or evidence behind it. It requires that a lot of myths be true - that Israel "offered the Palestinians almost everything they said they wanted," that only the Palestinians flouted provisions in Oslo, that the occupation and settlements not be a big deal, that only a powerless fringe of Israeli society was ever reluctant to surrender "Judea and Samaria" in return for peace, that there has not been an important faction in Israeli politics working hard to derail Oslo since it was signed; in short, that there be nothing but bottomless Palestinian hatred behind the collapse of Oslo and the present war. It also requires that Arabs be incapable of recognizing a balance of power. But let's imagine that it works out to be true in practice: that Palestine is not content and commences "Phase 2" on schedule, firing rockets and mortars over the border into Israel. To what sane strategic purpose?

3) If the Israelis respond to mortar and rocket attacks by shooting back piecemeal, they will not be able to suppress the incoming fire. Terror attacks don't require militarily important results, just random destruction, so massed fire and careful target registering would not be required of the Palestiinans; they could fire and move, hiding their launchers among civilians or camoflauged positions. The only way to shut off this type of attack will be to go in and perform an operation of the type the IDF has just completed, only under much worse military conditions against a more well-armed foe. IF they are lucky, the Israelis would win, with high casualties, the position THEY HAVE RIGHT NOW--the set of options {occupation, expulsion, surrender}. It would just be a long and expensive detour right back to square one, only with an even worse international position (bad PR from the Wall itself combined with the use of heavy weaponry in civilian areas).

Those who take the side of Israel's hawks advert to the horrors of the 1967 borders, with only 8 miles between Arab territory and the sea at Israel's narrowest point. Now recall what happened when Israel fought from those borders against a much broader coalition than it would be likely to face again, in any scenario where "Palestine" exists: it won. The war it won was called the Six-Day War, because that was how long it took.

Has the balance of power shifted against Israel in the meantime when it comes to conventional forces? Quite the opposite. Israel has proven itself able to take territory at will. Its devastation of Syria's air force and army during the Lebanon incursion in the early 1980s is credited with scaring the Soviet Union, Syria's supplier, into perestroika. In that war the only thing that saved the PLO leadership was the intervention of the United States. In terms of equipment, professionalism, motivation and sheer size, the IDF towers over both its real and its notional opponents. The idea that the Palestinians could, from a standing start, build a military that could succeed where every other Arab army in history has failed beggars belief.

Ironically, Israel's problems set in when it tries to hold territory - taking it is the easy part. Lebanon got bad for Israel only after it "won." Unconventional warfare is the only good card in the Arab hand. It seems fair to say that coiling in position to launch lightning warfare plays to the IDF's strengths. Under disgorgement, Israel is 8 miles wide at its narrowest point. Under occupation, Israel is no miles wide, because its enemy is inside its borders and free to roam.

Steve's critique of disgorgement relies not just on an outsized estimation of Palestinian hostility - he also seems to exaggerate their capabilities to a fantastic degree, while minimizing Israel's. And I would argue that, for the purposes of terror, suicide bombers are better than mortars and rockets. Mortars and rockets can miss. It's fair to say they usually miss. Suicide bombers don't. Pound for pound, they make better terror weapons.

So much for the military difficulties of the most fanatically hostile and stupid Palestine of the future. (Stupid because firing mortars at someone is an act of war, and it's really dumb to commit acts of war against a more powerful neighbor. Note: It's not necessarily dumb to commit acts of war against a more powerful occupier.) Let's look at the political issues. Steve says two things. From the Three Producers e-mail:

It would just be a long and expensive detour right back to square one, only with an even worse international position (bad PR from the Wall itself combined with the use of heavy weaponry in civilian areas).

From the Unqualified Offerings e-mail:

[Under the "Postrel Occupation"] they'll be reviled around the world, but I'm not sure they'd notice the difference at this point.

The oddest claim is "bad PR from the Wall itself." Again, on the Henley Plan, the Wall is part and parcel of Israel creating Palestine on something very much like the territory of the Taba map and - property rights advocates, please note - offering meaningful financial compensation to those Palestinians dispossessed in the wars of 1948 and 1967. Creating a Palestinian state is good PR Compensating the dispossessed is too. And if the new state of Palestine makes war on Israel, necessitating reconquest and reoccupation (for however long), then Israel will be able to say honestly what it can not convincingly say now - that it really did try everything for peace. Steve needs to minimize the difference in political difficulty between an Israeli defensive war against a Palestinian state that Israel creates and the Stasi-level occupation he advocates because one of the main intended benefits of unilateral disgorgement is precisely PR.

So let's consider whether attitudes toward Israel around the world could get worse enough that Israel would notice. So far, Israel is putting up with carping from the intelligentsia of small democratic countries and vicious libels from the intelligentsia of small undemocratic ones. Hey, what could be worse. How about the Pinochet Plan? How about Israeli politicians unable to travel abroad (except to the United States) for fear of arrest? Since every Israeli Jew has to do a stint in the IDF, how about every IDF veteran unable to travel abroad (except to the United States) for fear of interrogation (and possible detention) on suspicion of "war crimes?" How about sanctions? How about the loss of US financial and military support? A decade or two down the line, when the New Cold War between the US and EU is in full swing, how about a "humanitarian intervention?"

Oh yes, it can get a lot worse. At least some of the above strike me as likely consequences of the Postrel Occupation: Pinochet and sanctions. They strike me as likely outcomes of continuing on the present course, for that matter. None of them seem like plausible reactions to disgorgement.

4) During the period when the Palestinians had de facto control of their own state, protected from intervention by Israel's policy of "separation", they would also have time to try destabilizing Jordan, whose population is majority Palestinian. With a war taking place next door, in which their brethren were slugging it out with the Jews on more-equal terms, the passions of the average Jordanian are likely to be inflamed with the hope of imminent victory, and the collapse of the Hashemite dynasty in Jordan is a plausible (though not probable) outcome.

First, I certainly hope Steve has sent Glenn Reynolds a long e-mail explaining that the Hashemites are not nearly so formidable as he takes them to be. And yet, are they as vulnerable as they're painted here? Jordan has been heavily-Palestinian for quite the long time now, which didn't stop it from making first a secret and then a public peace. The Jordanians appear to have broken Abu Nidal. King II died peacefully in bed and King III seems to be doing okay for himself. In Steve's vision, the Hashemites take a strangely passive role in their destabilization. But these are the people who won Black September. We've already dealt with the question of whether Palestine would be fighting the Jews on more-equal terms: only barely more equal is the best one could say. While we're imputing future reactions to other people, I'd say the average Jordanian is likely to wonder what the hell his idiot cousins in Palestine think they're doing.

The worst-case scenario is that the government of Palestine takes over the territory of Jordan outright - the worst case for the Palestinians of the West Bank. Because irridentist Israelis and their supporters in the US (the Commentary crowd) have often told the Palestinians to "go try Jordan" if they want a state of their own. If Palestine conquers Jordan, the dream of Israel's maximalists is half fulfilled. Now they can reoccupy and ethnically-cleanse the West Bank at the slightest provocation, because hey look, the Palestinians do have a state, it's right over their like we always said.

5) The Wall would be perceived by all Arabs as a sign of weakness--the Jews are tiring! the Jews are giving in!--and would stimulate aggression by Hezbollah (Iran's proxy), Iraq, and possibly Syria (although I think Assad can be deterred).

I want to agree that at least some Arabs (and Persians) will see the Henley Plan as a sign of Israeli weakness. The question is whether it will be actual weakness. The answer is that Israel will still have the sixth-largest military in the world and a cache of "weapons of mass destruction." Let me state right out that the Henley Plan anticipates the real possibility that Israel would have to slap an emboldened aggressor down once or twice after fulfilling the dreams of Palestinian nationhood. (It is also very possible that Israel will manage to vitiate the goodwill factor of creating Palestine by holding on to too much territory east of the Green Line, refusing to settle the "right of return" financially, continuing to piss off its Arab citizens etc., making war more likely.) Let's face it, Israel will win those wars and win them handily. And the post-bellum situation will be a recognition, if reluctant, of Israel's continuing power, the tangible fact of a country the Palestinians won't want to lose, a far better PR situation for Israel and an Israel proper where killers can not explode at nearly the rate they do now.

Looking over Steve's Cliffs Notes of his argument

In short, hopes that Israel can avoid the painful realities of the situation by retreating behind a physical barrier are vain. Because the Palestinians must be prevented from acquiring weapons and organizing their forces, the Israelis must maintain a strong presence among them. (Economic reality also dictates Palestinian employment within Israel.) This presence prevents the destruction of Israel by relatively efficient weapons, but it opens the door of vulnerability to the less efficient weapon of the suicide bomber.

I think I've now addressed everything (by disagreeing with everything).

I'll close with just a couple more comments on Steve's "serious occupation." This is from the Tres Producers e-mail:

In order to minimize the suicide bomber threat, the Israelis will need a much more intrusive occupation, one that provides physical security to Palestinians, protecting them from one another as well as from Israelis. A much more intensive use of informers will be needed, to the extent that no Palestinian feels that he can safely plot with another. Provocation in the schools and local media will have to be ended. And economic self-betterment of the Palestinians will have to be encouraged, protecting their property rights, removing the more obnoxious settlements and allowing the Palestinians to spread out, constructing needed infrastructure, etc.

After a few years of this policy, civic opposition to the Israeli occupation will spontaneously develop along nonviolent lines. This opposition will garner great sympathy from the international community and from within the left-to-moderate-blocs in Israel. At that point, the Israeli government will be able to negotiate a land-for-peace deal with leaders whose interest will be in peace, with a people who have something to lose by choosing war. By that point, too, we can hope that we have put a more acceptable regime in charge of Iraq, cowing the Saudis, the Egyptians, and the Iranian government (which may be dissolved by its own people).

Let's forget "isolationism" for a minute. I am a libertarian. I don't know that Steve is - it's a seriously bad idea to assume someone's politics matches their spouses. But as a libertarian, here is what the Postrel Occupation looks like to me: a massive government program. Yes, as a good minarchist, I agree that the state's proper role is defense and security, but it is still the state. To put any faith in the Postrel Occupation, I would have to believe that the Israeli government is somehow free of the structural flaws of every other government. I would have to believe that Hayek's critique of central planning somehow didn't apply; that Public Choice Theory was not pretty clear on what the institutional imperatives of the occupiers would portend. I would have to believe that paternalism works if the IDF and the Israeli housing ministry are the paters, that a government that recently added a cabinet member who wants to disenfranchise Arab citizens of Israel would, for the first time in its history, take Palestinian property rights seriously while simultaneously taking more nearly absolute control over Palestinian lives than ever. And I would have to believe that a control regime so extensive that every occupation subject has to assume that he can't trust any other occupation subject he meets will lead to the political maturation of the occupied.

Call me an antigovernment extremist: I don't believe any of that. People being people, bureaucracies being bureaucracies and governments being governments, what you actually get with the Postrel Occupation is just a nastier occupation. While we're facing hard realities, there's one right there.

And Now for Something Completely Different - Anent the preceding, Ginger Stampley has reluctantly waded into the discussion of matters Middle Eastern. She has two meaty pieces this weekend that are worth everyone's time. The first I linked to below. This morning's piece elaborates on the vexed matter of ethnic cleansing and the limits of US support for Israel, including the strangely debatable question of whether there are or should be any.

But wait! There's more! I popped over to What She Really Thinks to get the link to Ginger's West Bank piece only to find another item that Ginger identifies as her "Last Word on Israel for a While, I Hope."

In Which Unqualified Offerings Revises and Extends Its Remarks - A passage in "What is the Opposite of a Stopped Clock," below, could be taken as a boast that only Tony Adragna, Steven Postrel and Unqualified Offerings have had anything interesting to say about the Middle East, or even about the relative merits of creating a Palestinian state versus intensifying the occupation. That is far from either the truth or my claims about it.

Well Now I'm Jealous - Leon Hadar writes to Tres Producers about matters Levantine but he doesn't write to me. What, I get nothing for reading Liberty all these years?

What's strange is that Hadar seems to give credence to the Jordanian Dream. One more time: Jordan gets what out of trying to clean up this mess, again?

What is the Opposite of a Stopped Clock? - Two of my favorite thinkers are Virginia Postrel and Ginger Stampley, and both have managed to get very nearly the same thing wrong. What are the odds? Virginia Postrel says specifically that

In his response [to Steven Postrel's proposal], Jim concentrated entirely on attacking the idea of "serious occupation" as an (undesirable but best available) alternative to a wall.

Ginger expands VP's claim beyond Unqualified Offerings itself to the blogosphere and even punditspace generally:

One thing I've noticed in all this discussion is that everybody is, as (V.) Postrel points out about Jim Henley's last round of argument on it, just knocking holes in everybody else's solutions.

Neither the general claim nor the specific claim are really true. Someone who reads my response to Steven Postrel's e-mail will see that, while I spend considerable time critiquing what Ginger aptly call's SP's nanny-state occupation plan, quite a lot of the article construes the historical record to show that a modus vivendi between Israelis and Arabs is not only possible but has been seen to occur. While this comes in the form of a rebuttal of someone else's argument - There is zero tolerance for the existence of Israel among the Arabs - its aim is to establish a positive claim. (The historical record shows that there is space for mutual accomodation, however grudging.)

But enough about me. Contrary to Ginger's claim, everyone in what I think of as the interesting part of recent middle east discussion in the blogosphere has staked themselves to a specific proposal and advocated for it - has, that is, promoted a positive vision. In the case of Tony Adragna and I, it has been different versions of a unilateral disgorgement by Israel of the Occupied Territories, drawing on thinkers ranging from the Likudnik American Right to the extreme Israeli Left; in the case of Steven Postrel, it's his vision of an altruistic, transformative occupation. Even Glenn Reynolds clings to his Jordanian dream with a doggedness that is, on some level, endearing.

Steven Postrel thinks his proposal is sound and that it would be utopian and suicidal for Israel to take my advice. I think my proposal is sound and that his own is at once timid and grandiose, fatally so. Because it matters whether his plan is more timid-and-grandiose than mine is utopian-and-suicidal, a certain amount of knocking holes in somebody else's solutions is necessary. Steven Postrel has put a great deal of energy into "attacking the idea of unilateral disgorgement as an (undesirable but best available) alternative" to ethnic cleansing, genocide, suicide and more of the same. He has had to do that, to attempt to show that there is a need for his own specific proposal. He then goes on to elaborate his own proposal in considerable detail. Since I think his "new" proposal is indistinguishable from the "more of the same" option I've already rejected, it's been incumbent on me to establish that.

Ironically for the purposes of Ginger's argument, VP's complaint that I "never really addressed" the central part of SP's original e-mail rests on the understanding that the "central part" was SP's critique of the practicality of unilateral disgorgement, not his proposed alternative; and further argues that my dereliction lies in not knocking holes in his holes. And this is true, though high up in his bill of particulars was an argument about what the situation in South Lebanon portends for Israel's relations with Palestine, and I've written quite a lot about Lebanon since. In those items, I've argued that what we really see in the Lebanon situation is that deterrence works, which means that both the Arab governments and Israel are showing themselves to be rational actors, which is a Very Hopeful Sign, and tends to support my views. That series of posts has constituted both knocking holes in other people's arguments and buttressing my own proposals. It's all tied together.

Jim's Assignment Desk - In which Unqualified Offerings takes its pathetic aping of Kausfiles one step further. Gary Farber links to a story about very bad places - psychiatric group homes in New York City

Stomach-turning, outrageous story of the horrific conditions of these places, many of which are larger than most state mental hospitals in other states. Endless paragraph after paragraph of people left to die, and their deaths not even investigated.

Oh, yeah, all the homes are privatised, and the owners are raking in huge profits, while the patients are left to die of heat stroke with no air conditioning, murder each other, and die in countless other uninvestigated ways. This is Willowbrook all over again, on a far larger scale. If someone can explain to me a solution for this that doesn't involve state regulation and enforcement, I'd be interested.

Unqualified Offerings nominates NYC-based More Than Zero for the job.