Palestine

In Today's times, David Margolick tells us about "the nicest terrorist I ever met", detailing the extreme beliefs of the recently assassinated leader of Hamas, Abdel Aziz Rantisi. If you've had the luxury of growing up in peace, Rantisi's endorsement of endless conflict seems almost alien.

Also, Walter Russell Mead editorializes that, based upon his experience with the people of the Arab world, the greatest source of antipathy toward the United States is not the U.S.-Israeli relationship, but the "widespread belief that the United States simply does not care about the rights or needs of the Palestinian people. He suggests what some, such as Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery and the U.S. group Tikkun, have suggested for years:

America's Middle East policy is unnecessarily zero-sum. We can be more pro-Palestinian without being less pro-Israeli. Indeed, to the degree that American policies help create support for compromise among Palestinians, pro-Palestinian initiatives can help Israel too.

(As if on cue, even the King of Jordan is responding to Arab anger over Bush's endorsement of Sharon's plan to annex portions of the occupied West Bank.) In The London Guardian George Monbiot presents a different perspective on zero sum games. He argues that the Bush Administration's policies toward the conflict are driven by the views of a certain subset of Christian fundamentalists:

For 15% of the electorate, the Middle East is not just a domestic matter, it's a personal one: if the president fails to start a conflagration there, his core voters don't get to sit at the right hand of God. Bush, in other words, stands to lose fewer votes by encouraging Israeli aggression than he stands to lose by restraining it. He would be mad to listen to these people. He would also be mad not to.

According to that hypothesis, as with his reported short-changing the troops in Iraq on funds and equipment, Bush is willing to put sensible policy far behind his goal of being reelected.

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