Gideon's Blog

In direct contravention of my wife's explicit instructions, herewith I inaugurate my first blog. Long may it prosper.

For some reason, I think I have something to say to you. You think you have something to say to me? Email me at: gideonsblogger -at- yahoo -dot- com

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Thursday, May 29, 2003
 
Not that I expect a Hamas "truce" to come to anything, but isn't it interesting that the al-Aqsa brigades (founded at the behest of and still controlled by Yasser Arafat) are currently being more obstructive than Hamas? Methinks Hamas sees an opportunity to shoulder aside the rais, leaving itself as the sole force leading the resistance to Israeli "occupation."

Meanwhile, we're trying to bribe Lebanon to take care of Hezbollah. Which isn't a completely crazy idea, so long as Syria knows there are serious consequences to not playing along.

 
NRO's all excited about black conservatives: Deroy Murdock is stumping for Herman Cain to run for the Senate from Georgia, and Jay Nordlinger is all for Chief Justice Thomas should Rhenquist retire (something I suggested was both likely and logical some months ago).

But both authors - and conservatives generally - seem a bit embarrassed to be pushing a candidate for office in part because the candidate is black. They seem to think it violates their race-blind principles. Well, it doesn't.

This is politics. People are not chosen for political offices, elective or appointed, because they are "most qualified" in some sense that excludes their political effectiveness. They are chosen in part, and sometimes primarily, for their qualifications in that area alone. And it's crazy to say that race is not relevant in politics. Politicians balance all sorts of different interest groups - geographic, economic, religious, ideological, etc. Why are racial and ethnic groups different? Why is it OK to pick a guy with 1000 on his SATs who's close to the unions to run the Department of Labor but not OK to pick someone black for this or that post to make a political point? That's what politics is about!

The problem with affirmative action is that it injects politics (by Federal fiat) into every private decision by an employer or school. But it's pretty silly to complain about injecting politics into . . . politics.

So don't be ashamed. Let Bush appoint the first black Supreme Court Chief Justice. Heck, let him talk Alan Greenspan into retiring so he can appoint Roger Ferguson to be the first black Fed chief. And, having appointed blacks to two of the most powerful appointed positions in the nation - positions, moreover, that are relatively insulated from political interference, and hence more powerful - then let's see how race plays out in the '04 elections.

 
As an old friend and cantor at our old shul says: if this can be achieved, peace with the Palestinians should be a snap!

Wednesday, May 28, 2003
 
Needless to say, I agree.

Tuesday, May 27, 2003
 
So, I have only one question about WFB's latest: does this mean Anne Coulter can come back?

Friday, May 23, 2003
 
This week's parshah is bechukotai, the last parshah of Vayikra (Leviticus). The first half of the parshah concerns the rewards of following God's law and the punishments that will be levied by God if it is not followed. All three matters - obedience, reward and punishment - are construed collectively, as a matter for the people as a whole. The second half of the parshah concerns the dedication of various items to the Temple: voluntary gifts (as a fulfillmen of a vow), certain tithes, etc.

The section outlining the consequences of sin is actually divided in two. In the first section, (26:14-15) if Israel does not "keep all these commandments" but "denigrate My decrees, and grow weary of My laws" then Israel will have broken the covenant with God. Vvarious negative consequences follow: domination by enemies, failure of crops, and a general despair. And these punishments will be increased if Israel stubbornly persists in sin. Then, in 26:21, there is a different warning: if Israel goes with God qeri - that is to say, indifferently, or in a spirit of triviality - then additional disasters will befall. Wild beasts will ravage the population; enemies will invade and plagues will afflict the people; food and fuel will be scarce, to the point where the people are reduced to cannibalism; and, ultimately, Israel will be exiled. And then, while Israel is in exile, the text specifies (26:35), the Land will enjoy the sabbatical years that it did not receive when Israel was in the Land. Finally, in exile, the text specifies (26:39): "those of you who survive yimaqu (will decline, or perish) of ther sins in the lands of your enemies, and of the sins of their fathers with them yimaqu."

What is going on here? First, assuming I am right in splitting the tochecha (curses) into two sections, it seems to me significant that Israel's rebellion against God's commandments triggers consequences that take place within the Land while Israel's indifference to these commandments culminates in exile. Moreover, the purpose of exile is articulated as giving the Land its needed rest. If we rebel against God, and sin, we are still mindful of Him, and He can chastize us into returning to His commandments. But when we are no longer mindful of Him, we effective usurp His authority, setting ourselves and our own concerns above His. The expression of this usurpation in the text is, effectively, that we deny God's ownership of the Land, and refuse it its sabbaths, and therefore God exiles us from the Land, to make clear His ownership.

As noted, after the tochecha and the promise that Israel will return after repentance (26:42: "I will remember My covenant with Jacob, even my covenant with Isaac, even my covenant with Abraham will I remember, and I will remember the Land"), the text shifts gears, and discusses voluntary gifts to the Temple in fulfillment of vows. Why end the book of Leviticus on such a note? It appears anti-climactic.

Rabbi Avraham Fischer does a good job running through the various explanations of why the text might be ordered this way. For R. Hirsch, these (particularly the section on voluntary gifts) are not commandments, and hence failing to do them does not constitute disobedience, and should not trigger the curses, and doing them does not provide expiation for sin. That is why they are placed after. But R. Fischer adds a more interesting explanation: in each of these cases, holiness is conferred by human beings rather than by God. This distinguishes these cases from the cases that dominate Leviticus, where holiness stems from God and our job is to be properly mindful of that holiness, and therefore to remain holy ourselves.

But why put these laws after the tochecha? Perhaps because repentance is the greatest way that one can add holiness to the world. And perhaps because, after repentance, one is uniquely moved (and empowered) to voluntarily consecrate the world to God.

Thursday, May 22, 2003
 
Jeepers, John: the thinking man's Thos. Friedman?

At a minimum, I'd best write something about philosophy now. Okay, here goes.

The three key names for me in political philosophy are Burke, Madison and Hegel. Burke because he figured out how to marry Whig optimism with Tory traditionalism, and provided us with all the most important rational arguments for presumptive conservatism as well as a general idea of how to tell when that cliff of presumption has been successfully scaled by the advocates of change. Madison because he gave us the best thought about how to organize a large, liberal polity in human history, and gave us a clue of how the liberty of the ancients might, ever so slightly, be insinuated into a political system founded on the liberty of the moderns (through sacralization of the Constitution - see American Compact by Gary Rosen for an excellent treatment of the argument). Hegel because he understood history as having the structure of a political argument, which I think is fundamentally correct and an important insight, and incidentally because he saw reconciling the liberty of the ancients with the liberty of the moderns as the great political project of late modernity, which I believe it still is. I've described my political philosophy before as National Liberal, though I don't expect the term to take off because "national" is kind of a radical-right term (not that it ought to be, but it is).

Epistemologically, I'm a moderate Pragmatist. I like William James more than anyone who expects to be taken seriously ought to do. I basically do believe that the way you test whether propositions have truth value is whether they enable you to *do* something, and, relatedly, that knowing what something is means knowing how to sort it from other things rather than being able to define its essence in some perfect language. Being a Pragmatist means being an anti-Platonist, but it goes beyond that, and really radical Pragmatists go off the deep end and start asserting that everything is a "social construct" which is, of course, literal nonsense. I'm not terribly well-read in Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Mathematics questions. I don't know why a general Pragmatist orientation isn't enough to simply make these problems go away, but I have enough respect for people who delve deeply into these problems to suspect that they are not meaningless. I will note as an aside, however, that Thomas Kuhn was *not* writing philosophy, but rather sociology, in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Which was, by the way, a pretty good book, and largely mis-appropriated by radicals; Kuhn certainly didn't think that scientific knowledge *itself* is a social construct, or anything loopy like that.

I've got some idea of what some of the problems are in Philosophy of Mind, but in that area I prefer the guys who are close to the cog-sci practical end of things. I like Jerry Fodor a lot, and I agree with him in being a nativist (believing that we have inherent knowledge that enables us to categorize and hence make sense of our sensory input) rather than an empiricist (believing that we are born a "blank slate" and learn how to make sense of the world in response to stimuli), but I also agree with him in being skeptical of the explanatory power of the "massive modularity" thesis in explaining consciousness. I'm inclined to treat consciousness as a "singularity" - all the explanations I've read from cog-sci people like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Pinker come to a point where there is a bit of slight of hand and then suddenly consciousness appears to be explained away as an illusion, a line of argument which I also find to be literal nonsense (illusions are observed phenomena, and this line of argument is an argument that there is no observer; whence, then, the illusion?).

I take a relatively postmodern approach to religious questions: I am uncomfortable with the suggestion that religion makes readily falsifiable truth claims (e.g.: Jesus died, experienced bodily resurrection, and ascended to heaven, all attended by signs and portents like global darkness) and more comfortable treating all these claims as mere hermeneutical rules - i.e. we are to act as if such and such were literally true. I recognize that this is a potentially dangerous road to take in that it may undermine religious belief, and that it is certainly a *belated* approach. But it also works for me (and, being an epistemological Pragmatist, I suppose that makes it True). And it does seem to me that, since the advent of modernity, the alternative to a postmodern approach is either a fundamentalist one or a secular-fundamentalist one, both of which are more dangerous, I think, than the postmodern approach. But I'm not terribly confident about this particular point. Apart from that, I have a lot of sympathy for Franz Rosenzweig's approach to Judaism specifically. He's kind of the Jewish religious equivalent of Burke: the guy who figured out how to marry traditionalism to the modern emphasis on individualism.

Does that cover most of the ground? It'll have to do for now.

Monday, May 19, 2003
 
And finally for tonight (I have a 6am meeting tomorrow - oy!): here are my 2c for what the general ground-rules should be for peace negotiations with willing Arab parties - be they Syrian, Palestinian, Saudi: what have you.

1. Recognition of Israel as a legitimate, sovereign state should be a precondition to negotiations, not the end result of negotiations. This is the only thing that Oslo got right, although it botched that, too, in that the Palestinian side never had to make it really clear what precisely had been recognized. Denying Israel's legitimacy means we're negotiating not about 1967 but 1947. Negotiations should resolve border disputes, refugees, water rights, trade and diplomatic relations, etc. They should not be about basic legitimacy.

2. There is a perfect symmetry between the expansion settlements and the "right to return." The settlement enterprise is premised on the notion that the Jewish people, and the state of Israel, have a claim to the entirety of historic Israel west of the Jordan (which it does). It therefore implicitly denies any Palestinian claims to sovereignty. The "right to return" is premised on the notion that the Jewish people have no claim to any territory west of the Jordan river; that, in fact, the Palestinians are the only indigenous people, and that therefore Israel must consent to being turned into an Arab state with a Jewish minority. It seems to me, then, that if conditions are going to be mandated from on-high, and if Israel is going to be mandated to cease the settlement enterprise and dismantle settlements (some of them illegal) set up since 2000, then the Palestinians must similarly be mandated to abandon the "right to return" to whatever borders ultimately encompass sovereign Israel. That's a fair exchange.

3. All refugee claims should be considered together, and compensated from a common fund. Look: there are lots of displaced people from the Arab-Israeli conflict. More than half of Israel's Jewish citizens are of Sephardi origin, and many of them were expelled from their homes in the Arab countries. More than half of those who consider themselves Palestinians similarly live outside of the P.A. territories; some are citizens of Israel, some live in refugee camps (and have for generations) in Lebanon; some are citizens of Jordan; and some live further afield or out of the region altogether. All these people have some legitimate claim to compensation of some sort, and as part of any settlement some process should be established to vet their claims and provide such compensation. I think the fairest way to deal with these claims would be to have an American commission rule on compensation in each case, and have the French and the Belgians actually pay.

Beyond that, issues like the municipal borders of Jerusalem, water rights, national borders of any Palestinian entity, the status of Jewish settlers on the other side of the Green Line, Israeli security provisions for a presence on the Golan or in the Jordan Valley - these are all negotiable matters if the other side is interested in peace and coexistence, and they always have been. There is a huge majority in Israel today for Sharon and his policies. If Israelis thought he was missing the boat on a chance for peace, they would dump him in a minute. But more even than terrorism, it is the obvious unwillingness of the Palestinian side to consider diplomatic positions that could actually lead to peace and coexistence that convinces Israelis that there is no such chance right now. And this covers Mahmoud Abbas as well; he has said things here and there against terrorism, and he is not directly implicated in the manner of Arafat, so Israel can work with him (they hope) on security and loosening up restrictions on the Palestinians. But there is no Palestinian Sadat, someone willing to go to Jerusalem as the Jewish capital and truly seek peace. Until there is such a man, willing to risk a bullet to end the tragedy of Palestinian history, that tragedy will not end.

 
I dunno, don't you think this rhetorical tack - the terrorists have declared war on Mahmoud Abbas - plays into this rhetorical response - don't hand the terrorists a victory by scuttling peace efforts.

Look: the terrorists attack when Israel makes concessions and they attack when Israel refuses to make concessions. They attack when the P.A. looks like it is winning and they attack when the P.A. looks like it is losing. They attack when Arafat is strong and they attack when Arafat is weak. The only thing that stops them from attacking is killing them first. If that hasn't sunk in by now, it never will.

I wish all the best to Mahmoud Abbas. Anwar Sadat was an admirer of Hitler, and, as readers of this blog know, I don't hold it against him, so I don't care if Abbas is a Holocaust denier. But the precondition for any kind of negotiated settlement with the Palestinians is the elimination of Yasser Arafat - not through exile but through trial and punishment. Nothing else will even begin to make headway. If Israel can't make up its mind to do something about him now, they probably never will.

Of course, once they do, the job won't nearly be over. But as long as Arafat is at liberty, we're still in the phony war stage.

 
I haven't blogged Martin Kramer's Sandstorm often enough (probably because Stanley Kurtz doesn't tell me to often enough). He warns us about the nice Jewish boy who's been assigned to write Iraq's new constitution. Apparently, the kid has a soft spot for Islamists, having bought into the notion that they are the Muslim world's version of civil society - a thousand Arabian points of light and all that.

On the one hand, I understand where the Espositos and Feldmans are coming from. They've read their Tocqueville, and they know that democracy requires this thing called civil society, and that religion plays a vital role in that regard. But they seem oblivious - probably due to political correctness - to the downside risks that are readily apparent. Anyone who knows anything about the Algerian GIA and allied terrorist groups knows that, had they taken power, we would have seen a Taliban-like orgy of horror in that country, fully equal to the civil war that followed their exclusion from power, but with no prospect for ultimate reconciliation. Even Gilles Kepel, another optimist about the trajectory of the Islamic world, doesn't have such thick rose-colored glasses to wish that the Islamists had won in Algeria.

But my big question for the Martin Kramers is: what is to be done? We now "own" one of the core Arab-Muslim countries: Iraq. How are we to build a functioning nation there? How are we to encourage those Muslim clerics who maintain a more traditional, "prophetic" stance towards authority - criticizing it for moral and religious lapses from out of power, while declining to seize power themselves - without undermining their legitimacy? Kramer himself knows that the "moderates" we want to encourage have little and declining credibility on the "street." So what's the strategy for changing that?

I wish I knew.

 
Is it my imagination, or was it only weeks ago (right before the start of the Iraq campaign) that Amir Taheri was demanding that the U.S. not take too vigorous a hand in Iraq, but let the Iraqis quickly organize their own democracy? Well, now he's singing a somewhat different tune: the Iraqi exiles, formerly the natural leaders of the country, are now "argumentative, suspicious, given to plotting against one another, and enamored of their often-bizarre ideas;" meanwhile the locals invited to take part in discussions about forming a government are either "the kind of busibodies, loudmouths and opportunists one finds in any confused political situation" or Baathist thugs bent on undermining the American authorities (or, he neglects to add, agents of the government in Tehran). Apparently, "what Iraq urgently needs is an authority" but one that is not just another "mustachioed strongman."

Funny, this is the argument some of us were making at the time for a much stronger American administration, for not relying on the locals or the exiles. Indeed, some of us were concerned that too easy a victory would make the occupation more difficult because the Iraqis would not have the caution of a conquered people. Doesn't sound like we were so nuts.

Anyhow, it would be nice if Taheri would acknowledge his change of tune.

Sunday, May 18, 2003
 
Well, give the enemy this: whenever we start to get optimistic about solving the root causes of terrorism (Iraqi tyranny, Israeli occupation, whatever) they remind us of the real source of their grievance: our existence.

So they attack a Western compound in Saudi Arabia, killing 34, mostly Westerners.
They attack Jewish and tourist sites in Morocco, killing 41, mostly Jews and Westerners.
They attack government offices in Chechnya, killing 75 Russians and Chechens.
They attack a bus in Israel, killing seven Israelis.

Now observe the contrast in responses to the last attack from the Russian and German foreign ministries. To the German foreign ministry, the terrorists are "enemies of peace." To the Russians they are just enemies.

That's why America's relationship with Russia, unlike its relationship with France and Germany, is not being derailed by obstruction over Iraq. In the end, the Russians understand that this is a global war with an unappeaseable enemy. Yes, I understand that they have less than idealistic motives for seeing it that way. So do the Israelis; so do the Indians, for that matter. But that doesn't make them wrong. After all, Jacques Chirac has his own base motives for posturing in precisely the opposite direction.

The terrorists are indeed the enemy of peace. They are waging a civil war in the house of Islam to control first that house, then, eventually, our house. 9/11 was supposed to be their Reichstag fire, the spectacular event that would catapult them to power. And even if they never get close to power, they can kill a lot of us - and destroy the prospects for normal life in the Muslim world - in trying. We have to kill them first. And Mahmoud Abbas, Pervez Musharraf, Abdallah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud and for that matter Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder and the rest of that crowd should know the risks of obstructing that effort.

Friday, May 16, 2003
 
You know, it's been quite some time since I posted anything about the weekly parshah. This is NOT because I'm not reading it. It IS because I've gotten out of the habit of reading it before Saturday morning in synagogue, with the result that I have nothing to say about the parshah until the week is done and it's old news (until next year).

I do want to get back in the habit, but I don't want to make yet more promises I'll only fail to keep. So here's a quick look at this week's parshah, Behar ("On (or At) the Mountain").

Behar deals primarily with the sabbatical and jubilee years, the seventh and fiftieth years of a cycle in which land would first lie fallow and then be returned to its "original" owners, debts cancelled, slaves freed, etc. The concept has been seized upon in recent years as the basis for a kind of statute of limitations on economic failure; thus, Pope John Paul II called in the year 2000 for a jubilee-year cancelling of the debts of poor countries.

But the relationship of the jubilee to property is interesting. Leviticus 25:23 reads: "You shall not sell the land permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are aliens and sojourners to Me. And in all the land of your inheritance, you shall give a time of redemption for the land."

This is not an injunction not to sell to other nations permanently, because contracts to sell land to other Jews are also cancelled at the jubilee. So this is not about a special, covenantal promise to God's chosen people - not precisely. (Moreover, some kinds of land are excluded: specifically, houses in most walled cities may be sold permanently under specified conditions, while houses in unwalled villages, land in the country, or any land associated with the Levite cities may not be sold permanently.) Somehow, the text is suggesting, there is a fundamental connection between a family and its ancestral "portion" - apart from or in addition to God's covenant with the Jewish people with respect to the Land in its entirety.

However, the grounding for this connection, this essential ownership of one's ancestral land that cannot be nullified by sale, is, paradoxically, a finite human being's fundamental inability to own anything. "You are aliens and sojourners to Me" - none of you own this land: I, the Lord, am its sole owner. And for this reason you are to return the land after 50 years - not to me (or my designated representatives: priests, kings, prophets, etc.), but to its ancestral owners. The "natural" social arrangements of the settlement of the Land - each family and clan and tribe with its ancestral portion, and the Levites with their cities - is revealed, surprisingly, as harmonious with God's fundamental ownership of the Land.

The relationship between freedom, property ownership, and the ultimate sovereignty of God is complicated. God does not say: at the jubilee, the government will distribute property from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Neither does He say: trade property as you will, and freely, and whatever results is in accord with the divine will. The jubilee, it turns out, is less about redressing the injustices of ordinary economics than about getting back to what is essentially one's own - and essentially one's own because it is a gift from God, and therefore in harmony with Him. It is the same with slavery: the text countenances slavery, including enslavement of Israelites. But at the jubilee they must go free - not because it is somehow an affront for a person to be property, but because the Israelites already have a master: God. And they eventually have to return to His service.

Thursday, May 15, 2003
 
It's like a joke by some standup comedian: why haven't we found any WMD in Iraq? Because Saddam couldn't afford them after building all those palaces, but his generals were too afraid of him to tell him so. A theory that crazy just has to be true, eh?

Monday, May 12, 2003
 
Okay, I'm obviously not getting to bed early.

John Derbyshire confesses that he's a "metropolitan conservative" by which he means that he would not vote for a sodomy law, would not vote to ban abortion, and would not vote to teach creationism. And he worries that makes him - and the National Review - somewhat inauthentic.

I'm sorry, John, all that makes you is English. Let's try some other hot buttons and see how you measure up:

* Would you vote to ban public-sector unions?
* Would you vote to eliminate the income tax?
* Would you vote to mandate all universities that receive any federal funding have ROTC on campus? And that all public high-schools host junior ROTC?
* Would you vote to withdraw from the U.N. immediately?
* Would you vote for severe penalties for harboring or employing illegal immigrants, tight border controls, and other similar measures?
* Would you vote to require public schools to allow student-led sectarian prayers on school grounds?
* Would you vote to greatly expand the application of the death penalty?
* Would you vote for enhanced domestic spying powers for the Federal Government targeted at specific ethnic, national or religious groups, on national security grounds?

I could go on. Feeling better?

I'm sure there are bible-mad creationists out there with a soft spot for illegal immigrants. For that matter, I happen to know ultra-Orthodox Jews who think the sun revolves around the earth but who are firm believers in the welfare state. And I know there are plenty of abortion abolitionists who have qualms about the death penalty or about the civil liberties consequences of the war on terrorism. Everyone's got their own hot-buttons.

I'm not saying there isn't some real meaning to the distinction you're drawing between metropolitans and provincials. But don't worry: you line up with the "provincials" on plenty of issues.

 
Abject apologies to my remaining readers. Once upon a time, this space boasted multiple posts per day. But in the month of April there were only 12 posts and in the month of May, well, this is the first, and it's an apology.

I plead a combination of Passover, a heavier load at work, and a vacation that I have just returned from. But that is small comfort to you who are still checking in at this site, who expect to get something interesting to read at least weekly. So I will try, really, to do better going forward.

I really do need to get a good night's sleep tonight, because, having been away, I'm going to come to work tomorrow to a stack of work several feet high. And I've been on vacation, not reading the news regularly and not logging on at all, so I have really no idea what to blog about.

So I'll blog about something that never changes: the situation in Israel.

Actually, I think there's a real chance that something will change on that front, but I don't know if for the better or for the worse. I think a moment of decision is coming for both the neo-cons and the realists in America, and for both Bush and Sharon, a decision that no one really wants to make. The decision, long avoided, and now looming: will America intervene, militarily and directly, for the first time, in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I thought this decision was coming once before, in 2000, but I was wrong. Here's why I think a decision is coming now, and why it will be unpleasant for all parties.

The war in Iraq has dramatically raised the stakes for our policy in the Middle East. Our intervention there would have been unexceptional if it had taken place in, say, Panama, an area no one really denies is in America's sphere of influence. By making the same kind of intervention in Iraq, we have taken far greater responsibility, not only for that country but for the region as a whole. The consequences of failure are much higher than they were before. And the implication of America in events that occur around the region is far greater than when our interventions were indirect.

As a consequence, America has lost a degree of plausible deniability with respect to events in Israel and its vicinity. We have effectively made it American policy to reshape the region in a certain direction. The benign neglect (as some would see it, myself included) with which President Bush attended to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no longer tenable. (By the same token, the malign neglect with which the past four American Presidents have attended to Lebanon is no longer tenable.) America is effectively obliged to deliver a solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict - not as a matter of justice or as a matter of back-scratching diplomacy, but as a matter of prestige and credibility. We have declared, in so many words, that we are in charge now in the neighborhood. What we allow to go on is now our responsibility, far more than it ever was before.

The problem is that there is no diplomatic solution to the Palestinian problem. As I have never tired of pointing out, Palestinian nationalism is essentially the negation of Zionism. It necessarily cannot be satisfied short of the destruction of Israel. Moreover, as a practical matter, even if Palestinian nationalism took a radical turn towards compromise, and the Palestinian people as a whole accepted Sari Nusseibeh's and Yossi Beillin's vision of two states and an end to Palestinian ms of a right to "return" to Israel, any Palestinian state created in Gaza, Judea and Samaria would have only nominal independence. It would be continually vulnerable to military incursion by its neighbors and absolutely dependent economically on Israel. A Palestinian state, even if nominally independent would be a practical dependency.

For that reason, for most of Israel's history Israel's official diplomatic stance was that Jordan was Palestine and that the territories seized in 1967 should (with some adjustments) ultimately be traded to Jordan in exchange for peace and normalization. Since Jordan abandoned all claims to Judea and Samaria, Israel's only plausible diplomatic avenue for solving the Palestinian problem has vanished.

In the absence of a Jordanian option, Israel has veered between the dream that Palestinian nationalism can be crushed, and the Palestinians can be induced to accept some kind of autonomy within a sovereign Israel, and the dream that Palestinian nationalism can be tamed, and a real peace can be made with a Palestinian state. Neither dream has come true.

The essence of the "road map" is the assertion by the United States that the second dream will now come true, by American fiat. As I have said, American prestige is enormously on the line in this undertaking. We can't announce such a plan and have it fail. And it does not matter whose fault it is if it fails. It can be obviously the Palestinians' fault or obviously the Israelis, and we can condemn those whose fault it is until we are blue in the face. The failure would still be our failure.

Regardless of whether the "road map" is ultimately implemented in a more pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian flavor, the essence of the decision to be faced is: when actual events veer off the road, will America intervene militarily to push them back on? Specifically: if Hezbollah, or Hamas, or Jihad Islami, or Yasser Arafat decide, subtly or overtly, to torpedo an agreement, what will America do? Restraining Israel will work up to a point, until Israel reaches the breaking point where the connection with America is deemed less valuable than the right of self-defense. At that point, Israel will take what steps it deems necessary to defend its security, which will make it clear to all that the conflict has not ended and the American peace initiative has failed. America will have to respond. How will it do so? By the same token, backing Israel and pressuring Arafat will work up to a point, until it is clear that there is no road map, no peace in the offing, only the continuation of the conflict. Again: how will America respond?

Colin Powell and the realists have been betting for a long time that there are Palestinian "moderates" who have both the will and the means to bring about an agreement with Israel that Israel can live with (and I mean "live" literally). The neo-con hawks have essentially been betting that there is a military solution to the problem of Palestinian attitudes - that if Arafat were removed and the P.A. decisively defeated, the Palestinians would change their tune and make a deal. They could both be wrong. If they are both wrong, then no American initiative, however structured, can bring peace. And if that is true, then the only way America could "deliver" on its implicit or explicit promises is by military intervention to separate the parties - in effect, by trading the Israeli occupation for an American one.

An American intervention would be a mixed blessing for Israel. Israel would lose freedom of action. On the other hand, it would get rid of a very thorny set of problems, gain effective borders, and achieve these things with less loss of effective deterrent capacity than if it withdrew unilaterally. For the Palestinians, American intervention would be pretty much a unequivocal good, in that they would have traded a hostile occupier for one more likely to be generous and they would have established some measure of real independence from Israel, and diplomatically they would have lost nothing. For America, military intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be a big negative. We would have almost nothing to gain and a great deal to lose. There is no prospect that any significant number of Palestinians would welcome an American occupation, as many Iraqis and Afghanis have. And there is no prospect that such an occupation could be light-handed or brief. But having invaded and conquered Iraq, and having laid our credibility on the line with the road map, we could well wind up in a position where such an occupation is the lesser of two evils.

How could we prevent such an end-game? Well, it's too late not to invade Iraq, and anyhow there were overwhelming national interests that necessitated that intervention. And it's too late to abandon the road map; effectively, our prestige is already committed. So what can we do?

I'm going to climb on another hobby-horse of mine for my first suggestion: take on Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the most powerful and dangerous terrorist group in the region. It has killed more Americans than any terrorist group but for al Qaeda, and it is directly allied with both Iran and with Palestinian terrorist groups. The Lebanese would welcome American intervention against Hezbollah and Syria, as against the Palestinians who would never welcome us. Going back to Lebanon - the scene of our earlier defeat - and physically eliminating the terrorist group that dealt us that defeat might just give Arafat pause, and maybe even Sheik Yassin. After all, they don't really want an American intervention in the P.A., particularly if it was clear that, when we come in, we eliminate our enemies.

My second suggestion is: dictate diplomatic terms up front. Some final status issues still need to be negotiated. Others are no longer up for negotiation. The precise borders of a Palestinian state, any limitations on its sovereignty, the nature of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem, water rights, etc.: these things have to be negotiated. The so-called "right of return" does not. If that's negotiable, then it should also be negotiable whether there will be a Palestinian state at the end of the negotiation, or whether there will just be autonomous Palestinian cantons under Israeli sovereignty. America should make it clear: what is being implemented is a two-state solution. Any settlement of the claims of Palestinian refugees will not include a return to Israel. If the Palestinians don't want to sign up for negotiations on those terms, well, we've just saved ourselves a lot of time and trouble and can move right on to my next and last suggestion.

To whit: lay out the consequences of failure. Okay, so we mandate that the parties agree to a two-state solution. If the Palestinians come to the table saying: fine, we accept as long as we have full sovereignty over the Arab areas of Jerusalem, what are the consequences to Israel if they say that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of Israel and none of it is negotiable? By the same token, if the Palestinians refuse to give up the right to return as a precondition of negotiations, what are the consequences to them? Remember: we cannot go back to benign neglect. We can't simply give Israel a long leash and wait for the Palestinians to come to their senses, not once we've announced a timetable and so forth. So what are the consequences? Bush should welcome this particular suggestion of mine; it's right up his personal alley.

I am filled with foreboding about what is to come, but also with a strange sense of hope. Precisely because this President has real credibility, and has shown a willingness to make hard decisions, I feel like he really could break an impasse here. I have very little faith in the Palestinian people, and none in Yasser Arafat, but in the wake of the Iraq war I have a great deal of faith in President Bush. I believe that, as with the dance at the U.N., Bush will be willing to jump through whatever diplomatic hoops are placed in front of him to get the result he sees as necessary. But if jumping through the hoops doesn't get the result, he'll do what is necessary anyhow. Now I want to know: if he is really going to commit himself to delivering an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, does he - and, more important, do Rumsfeld and Powell - know what is potentially necessary? If so, and if he is prepared to do it, now is the time to start talking about it. It would clarify a lot of people's minds, and make that eventuality far less likely in the end.