The Honeymoon's Over

He can't fire Bibi

My comment on Thomas Friedman's column about the Israeli election yesterday was one of 21 designated as "NYT Picks":

Bibi can afford to be honest thanks to the sea change in U.S. attitudes. Israel's historic left-leaning U.S. supporters cared more about democracy for democracy's sake than do her new friends on the right, who don't seem to worry much about disenfranchised Palestinians on the West Bank. With a GOP Congress and a better than even chance for a GOP president, Bibi's sitting pretty for the time being as far as keeping the U.S. is concerned.

At home, if he's being honest about abandoning two states, he probably envisions a plan along the lines of Naftali Bennett's -- annexation of the West Bank with a glacial phasing-in of Palestinians' rights. Meanwhile the Palestinians will continue to lobby in international forums for de facto statehood. These visions will inevitably and perhaps violently clash. Maybe that's just what Bibi's evangelical end-time friends in the U.S. want.

Israelis can run their country however they want. But I'm feeling more and more like Israel is morally equivalent with China, Germany, and Japan as far as U.S. policy is concerned. Relations among countries need to be reciprocal and mutually beneficial. Since 1948, our main interest in Israel has been that we loved her for the sake of who she was and what she stood for. I still respect that, but the honeymoon's over. I don't have to love Israel's democracy if Israel doesn't. And I am not going to favor a Mideast policy driven primarily by end-timers. I don't like their influence in Iran, and I don't like it here.

Liveblogging Romney

Mitt Headroom

7:38 p.m. PT: Got to love the playlist gags, though I'm surprised Ryan mentioned '70s artists AC-DC and Led Zeppelin instead of Gen. X artists.

7:40: The day's immigration theme continues. Will this and Rubio's speech help the GOP get right with Hispanics?

7:43: Feeling the middle class's pain: "You took two jobs at nine bucks an hour." Gas bill hitting $50 (but what exactly are you going to do about that, Mitt?). Good line: "I wish President Obama had succeeded, because I want America to succeed." Take that, Rush.

"I was born in the middle of the century in the middle of the country, a classic baby boomer." John F. Kennedy is first presidential reference, as usual in acceptance speeches regardless of party. Hey, I remember that night in July 1969: Neil Armstrong's "soles on our soul." A great way to work him into the speech.

7:46: George Romney's working class background. "My friends cared more about what sports teams we followed than what church we attended." A natural, easy delivery, verging on the mawkish; but that's okay. "Every day my dad gave my mom a rose," until the day he died, when there was no rose. Killer story. His voice is cracking -- as he segues quickly into a play for gender equality as he goes transparently to work on the gender gap.

7:50: Life wasn't easy as a trust fund scion. It's important to connect and personalize. His tribute to Ann is touching. But what are you going to do?

7:52: Republicans know that Obama can't tap into his faith story this way.

7:53: "If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn't you feel that way now, when he's President Obama?" This is Karl Rove's playbook: Treat Obama with respect; more in sorrow than in anger; acknowledging the excitement of his election. He's right about Obama's inexperience, though not that Obama really thinks that jobs come from government.

7:55: Oh, those hardscrabble Bain days! And then there was the $25 million IRA. Weird reference to not investing LDS money and risking hell. OMG: The Episcopalians' Church Pension Fund invested with Bain Capital, resulting in a lot of "happy retired priests," almost none of whom, Romney no doubt realizes, will vote for him. He's showing a certain puckishness.

8:00: "Except Jimmy Carter, and except this president": He's had his mind on 1980 for a long time.

8:02: "These [suffering Americans] aren't strangers. These are our brothers and sisters." Indeed. So if you're elected, we'll be watching the safety net shredding in the first Romney-Ryan budget.

8:04: Twelve million new jobs. Great! I'm listening. Energy independence by 2020? I've heard heard that before, beginning with Nixon. Skills training? Great -- but you segued immediately to school choice, which has nothing to do with retraining workers, which will cost money. Will Ryan spare any? Free trade? Okay, but then more jobs lost to cheap-labor countries. Investments disappearing? That's not currently a risk in a low-inflation environment; and the stock market has roared back under Obama. Reducing taxes and streamlining regulations. Replacing Obamacare to fuel economic growth? Disconnect. Why didn't you repeal Romneycare in Massachusetts to encourage job growth?

8:07: "Life," marriage, freedom of religion. Social issues get a 30-second sentence.

8:08: Ridiculing Obama's concern about climate change and global acceptance. "My promise is to help you and your family." I'll say this: He's got impeccable timing. He's smooth and confident, and his speech is perfectly modulated to address his problems (women and Hispanics) and exploit his advantages (poor economy).

8:10: Nixon wouldn't like two minutes on foreign policy. Grudging credit to Obama for killing bin Laden. Brief reference to an old enemy, Iran, and Romney's new enemy, our friendly rival Russia. Ritualistic Cuba-bashing to help in Florida; I was unaware that Obama had gone soft on the Castros. He's wrong that Obama threw Israel under the bus and wrong to continue to ignore the Palestinians.

8:12: Good peroration on "that united America, so strong that no nation would dare to test it." But "the constellation of rights that were endowed by our Creator?" No: We were endowed by our Creator with the rights. You don't endow rights.

8:14: Good, effective speech; probably the best he could have done.

Romney And The Death Of Peace

The New York Times profiles Mitt Romney's chief adviser on the Middle East, Dan Senor, who inspired Romney's statements about Israelis' cultural superiority in comparison to Palestinians. Romney has made similar statements about other neighboring peoples, such as Americans and Mexicans.

During Romney's visit to Israel, he failed to mention the Palestinians or the peace process in what was dubbed a major foreign policy address. Senor may have been behind that astonishing development as well. Senor told reporters that if there's to be a two-state deal, Palestinians would have to drop their demand for a right of return. The Bush and Obama administrations favored letting Israel and the Palestinian Authority work the issue out during negotiations.

Obama's peace initiative was prematurely hobbled by his and the Palestinians' insistence that Israel suspend West Bank settlement expansion as a precondition for recommencing direct talks. While the president's tactics left something to be desired, he was at least trying to be an honest broker, putting pressure on both sides in keeping with the policies of his recent predecessors. All in for Israel, Romney has no such instincts and intentions. For today's Republicans, empathy for the underdog Palestinians and the nuances of an ancient struggle with plenty of error on both sides have evidently run their course.

Of course the Romney-Senor position -- at least as politically unsustainable for Palestinians as the settlement demand was for Israel -- may be just another sop to U.S. Jewish voters. Let's hope so. As Romney administration policy, it would probably doom the peace process. In that case, having just so fulsomely praised Israel's commitment to democracy, Romney and Senor would need to have a secret plan for figuring out how Israel could continue to call itself a democracy with two million disenfranchised Arabs living under indefinite military occupation.

Giving Romney Too Much Credit

Two views on Mitt Romney's cultural superiority speech. Peter S. Goldman at the Huffington Post says Romney was playing to a home town audience, and not just U.S. Jews:

He is asking for votes by telling the story of a mystical America in which life is equally fair for everyone, one in which winners and losers reflect their innate virtues. So help yourself to a giant tax cut, wealthy Americans, because you've earned it! And look in the mirror, struggling people who may need help, because you are the loser spawn of damaged culture.

This is something Romney could never say quite so explicitly at home -- at least, not without running the risk of being branded insensitive and maybe a racist. But the upside of owning this message seems clear: He cultivates support among those distrustful of government, the usual means of rectifying systemic injustice such as that which separates white America from black America, and Palestine from Israel.

Jacob Heilbrunn at the National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, argues that Romney might be right:

Are the Israelis solely to blame for the plight of the Palestinians? Or is Romney pointing to a larger problem, one that has afflicted the Arab world? It's surely not racist to point out, as Thomas Friedman repeatedly does, that there is something rotten in the Middle East, that kleptocratic tyrannies have held back their populations over the past century, that the Arab world remains far behind the West economically, despite its incredible oil wealth, and that Israel's existence has permitted Arab leaders to use it to deflect attention from their own grievous shortcomings, particularly when it comes to education and social programs. For his part, [David] Landes, who taught economic history at Harvard, was trying to explain why the West had come out so far ahead of the rest--part of his effort was to refocus attention on Max Weber's theory of the [P]rotestant work ethic. Does that ethic also prevail in, of all places, Israel?

I'd say both writers give Romney too much credit. He was being neither as diabolical as Goodman proposes (his aides seemed pretty upset about the story) nor as insightful as Heilbrunn. It's fine to talk about Arab leaders holding their people back. It's a terrible idea to talk about superior and inferior cultures, which sounds too much like a euphemism for race and religion.

Visiting Israel, Romney could have accomplished his mission of winning the votes of U.S. Jews while also demonstrating the capacity for nuance required of commanders-in-chief. Maybe he and his aides think we're tired of nuance. But in foreign policy and especially in the Middle East, you can never have too much. And yet in what was billed as a major policy address, he snubbed the peace process. Instead, he said something about Palestinians that sounded intellectual to try to make his neglectfulness look respectable.

Romney's Disconcerting Speech In Israel

After a rough visit to England, when he said that some aspects of its preparations for the Olympics were "disconcerting," Mitt Romney went to Israel and rallied in the special relationship department. Standing with the Old City behind him, dappled with the light of a Jerusalem sunset, Romney said:

I believe that the enduring alliance between the State of Israel and the United States of America is more than a strategic alliance: it is a force for good in the world. America’s support of Israel should make every American proud. We should not allow the inevitable complexities of modern geopolitics to obscure fundamental touchstones. No country or organization or individual should ever doubt this basic truth: A free and strong America will always stand with a free and strong Israel.

All true. And this:

Hopefully, this new government understands that one true measure of democracy is how those elected by the majority respect the rights of those in the minority.

No, that wasn't Romney calling on Israel to respect the rights of Palestinians. He was calling on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood president to protect his political opponents. Romney didn't actually mention the Palestinians -- not a boilerplate line saying that his administration would support a peace agreement that guaranteed Israel's security or even a passing reference to the two-state solution, which has been explicitly endorsed by Presidents George W. Bush and Obama and was tacit U.S. policy for many years before that.

On the 40th anniversary of the Munich massacre, I see no problem with a paean to U.S.-Israel ties. But Fox News and Romney's other supporters called this a major foreign policy address. Let's hope they're wrong, since ignoring the peace process and an entire people living under military occupation would be dangerously radical and destabilizing in a substantive speech. Let's just call it a play for Jewish votes and go back to watching the exquisitely-run London Olympics.

Peace Through Partnership

Alexander D. Baumgarten, who represents The Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., takes justifiable pride in the even-handed, classically Anglican position our church staked out on Israel and Palestine:

As one bishop pointed out to me after final passage of...resolution [B019], we just witnessed something nearly unprecedented in the past three decades since the General Convention began addressing this subject: bishops and deputies from a variety of viewpoints on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict coming together enthusiastically and vocally in favor of a single resolution that calls for all Episcopalians to join the conversation. Equally importantly, the resolution calls for us to invite others into the conversation: Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians. There are to be no outcasts in the conversation, and all voices are welcome on equal terms. I can attest firsthand how rare this kind of genuine dialogue and listening is in practice, and also how fruitful it is when it does take place.

One other very important theme comes out of this very important resolution: investment of our own treasure in the Palestinian economy, and commitment to visiting, and being in partnership with, the Anglican Church in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem, Suheil Dawani, a Palestinian from the West Bank, along with the Palestinian government, have repeatedly stressed the need for outside investment and the creation of economic infrastructure in the occupied territories in order to allow Palestinians to prepare for the creation of a future state. The Episcopal Church has recognized this before, but Resolution B019 gives new and important flesh to the concept.

Finally, it’s important to note what the General Convention declined to do. The House of Deputies overwhelming rejected a move to endorse boycott and divestment of Israel and the study of two documents that have been criticized by some – including the Episcopal Church’s chief operating officer, Bishop Stacy Sauls – as theologically problematic in their portrayal of Judaism. One deputy noted that these steps would have been “conversation stoppers” and that we can’t create a broader base of understanding and support for a just peace if we can’t successfully bring people to the table. Another deputy noted that economic punishment of Israel, which Bishop Dawani and the Palestinian government both have criticized, could end up hurting the Palestinian economy, as it is fundamentally intertwined with Israel’s.

Photos: Arab and Jewish schoolchildren in Jerusalem, June 2012
Hat tip to Norris Battin

Shedding Divestments

Mainline churches invest billions on behalf of their retired employees. Should they punish Israel for its occupation of the West Bank by selling stock in companies that do business in Israel or are accused of de facto support for the occupation? The Episcopal Church considers the question at its triennial General Convention this week and next in Indianapolis. Our bishop in Los Angeles, Jon Bruno, opposes divestment and boycotts, as does Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. From Indianapolis, Matthew Davies surveys all the pending proposals for the Episcopal News Service:

Jefferts Schori visited Israel and the West Bank in 2008. Asked about divestment, she told ENS in a recent interview that the Christian tradition “generally has not been to shun people. It has been to call people to greater engagement … and relationship, and I think that is especially needed in the land of the Holy One right now.”

During an Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles gathering in March, Jefferts Schori urged Episcopalians to “invest in legitimate development in Palestine’s West Bank and in Gaza” rather than focus on divestment or boycotts of Israel.

If people have particular concerns about corporations’ policies, she told ENS, “then positive engagement would mean to become a shareholder and go to a shareholders meeting and challenge the administration of the corporation. It’s a positive response rather than a negative one.”

By a narrow margin, our Presbyterian brothers and sisters said no to divestment yesterday at their biennial meeting in Pittsburgh.

The P Factor In Palestine

The Palestinian Authority may be getting set to exhume PLO leader Yasser Arafat's body from its tomb in Ramallah to see if he was poisoned by polonium, traces of which were just found on his personal effects. He died in 2004, reportedly of a massive stroke, two years before elements of the Russian intelligence services used the substance (which you need a nuclear reactor to produce) to kill ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko.

Litvinenko was the first known polonium victim, which could help explain why it would've been missed in the investigation of Arafat's death. Investigators also might have missed it because it didn't happen. Pro-peace blogger Richard Silverstein has more details and a considerable amount of speculation about Israel's possible role here. At the New York Times, Isabel Kershner describes Arafat's mixed legacy and the current situation for Palestinians, whose reaction to definitive news that Arafat had been murdered is anybody's guess:

Revered by many as the revolutionary founding father of Palestinian nationalism, he was also reviled, particularly by many Israelis, who considered him a terrorist. He was among three recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in accepting the Oslo accords, a blueprint for peace with Israel, but nearly 20 years later his promises of a Palestinian state remain unfulfilled. Corruption was also rampant under his leadership.

“We have moved from at least having the impression under Yasir Arafat that our national aspirations could be fulfilled to survival mode,” said Zakaria al-Qaq, a political scientist at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. Nowadays, Mr. Qaq said, Palestinians are concerned about whether or not their salaries will come in, referring to a worsening financial crisis that has caused the Palestinian Authority to delay payment of June salaries to its employees

Why Bibi Waits And Sees

Let's look at this strictly from Israel's perspective. Say it chose to annex the West Bank, arguing, as sovereign nations will, that it won the land from Jordan in 1967 with its blood and treasure. While dealing with the bloodcurdling global outcry, Israel would have to decide whether to grant citizenship to the region's two million Arabs. Israel's population would then be about 5.8 million Jewish and 3.5 million Arab (compared to 20% Arab today). If Arab growth rates continued to outstrip non-haredim Jews', voters would probably soon put an end to Israel's status as a Jewish state.

If Israel annexed the West Bank but didn't let its Arabs vote, it would deserve being called an apartheid state. Many Israelis put security above democracy. But such a grave violation of Israel's democratic principles would be unthinkable to tens of millions of its citizens and international friends.

Instead, say Israel and the Palestinians finally made a deal on two states. Then your problem would be strategic unpredictability instead of the iron law of demographics. The main question is whether Palestine would go in the direction of secular Muslim Turkey or fanatical Iran. You'll be able to make a better guess when you see where Egypt goes with its Muslim Brotherhood president. The two-state deal would be freighted with massive security guarantees. For the foreseeable future, Israel's armed forces would outmatch anything Palestine could muster. But Tel Aviv and Haifa would be easy targets for missiles fired or bombs smuggled from just a few miles away.

So if you were a relatively enlightened Israeli leader, sworn to protect your country at all costs, what would you do? Friends and enemies will tell you that your responsibilities include justice for those living under occupation for over 40 years. You understand that, but you still keep coming back to job one. Besides, you don't have to say yes to a two-state settlement if Palestinians keep saying no.

My guess is that your preference would be to keep watching and waiting, not taking any action you're not compelled to take on the strict grounds of national interest. Writing in the aptly named National Interest, published by the former Nixon Center, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar seems to have put his finger on it:

Israel never overtly spurned a two-state solution involving land partition and a Palestinian state. But it never acknowledged that West Bank developments had rendered such a solution impossible. Facing a default reality in which a one-state solution seemed the only option, Israel chose a third way—the continuation of the status quo. This unspoken strategic decision has dictated its polices and tactics for the past decade, simultaneously safeguarding political negotiations as a framework for the future and tightening Israel’s control over the West Bank. In essence, a “peace process” that allegedly is meant to bring the occupation to an end and achieve a two-state solution has become a mechanism to perpetuate the conflict and preserve the status quo.

What makes the status quo tenable for Israel is the dramatic decline in the conflict, namely Palestinian violence since the end of the second intifada in 2004. Traveling with a group of St. John's Episcopal Church pilgrims, I've just finished my fourth visit to the region since 2007. Each time the atmosphere has been less tense. Palestinians are less hassled at Israeli check points and border crossings. Thanks to injections of foreign aid, the West Bank economy is doing well, though fiscal problems are brewing. Perhaps it's a little like China, where the availability of jobs and opportunity makes people less frantic about being deprived of political self-determination. The West Bank's Fatah leaders are being good citizens, focusing on economic development and diplomacy instead of violence -- though there are signs that some Palestinians are angrier about the lack of progress toward a Palestinian state. People we met even complained less about Israeli settlements. All in all, shrugged shoulders seem more common than balled fists.

So again, you're an Israeli leader. What do you do? Justice and fairness for Palestinians -- of course, of course, you get all that. But give them all a vote in Israel? No way. Your country's founders died to create a sanctuary for Jews. Annex Palestinian land but make them second-class citizens? Your founders died for freedom, too. Risk Hamas having the deciding vote in Palestinian foreign policy? Not on your watch.

Sure, things could go south again on the West Bank -- renewed terrorism, even civil war. Maybe a U.S. president will finally threaten to cut off some or all of your $3 billion in annual security aid. But you'll decide how to react to those developments when they occur. You'll see how things look in the morning, and the morning after that, and next year. All in all, amorally but understandably, maybe you really would just wait and see.

Friedman's Pyramid Scheme

Thomas Friedman acknowledges the Muslim Brotherhood's toxic anti-western, anti-women (he says "anti-feminist," but let's be real) views. But he is vaguely (guardedly is too strong a word) optimistic about its new president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, when it comes to his relations with the west and Israel, not because of anything notable about Morsi but because Egypt, which doesn't have significant oil reserves, needs tourist dollars:

So Morsi is going to be under enormous pressure to follow the path of Turkey, not the Taliban. Will he? I have no idea. He should understand, though, that he holds a powerful card — one Israelis would greatly value: real peace with a Muslim Brotherhood-led Egypt, which could mean peace with the Muslim world and a true end to the conflict. Of course, that’s the longest of long shots. Would Morsi ever dangle that under certain terms? Again, I don’t know.

Beit El Than Nothing

While we were in the Holy Land last week -- around the time I saw this sign on the Jericho-Jerusalem highway pointing both to Ramallah, the Palestinians' headquarters, and Beit El, an Israeli settlement on the occupied West Bank that's one of the thorns in the Palestinians' side -- there was a similarly ambiguous development in the Middle East peace process. A few dozen Israeli families peacefully vacated buildings in a Beit El neighborhood called Ulpana that the country's high court had deemed illegal (good news). Then the government announced it was adding 350 residences to other settlements, including 300 in Beit El itself (which sounds like bad news, since it adds up to a net increase in West Bank settlers). The New York Times reported:

[W]hile Palestinians and their supporters saw the court ruling as a moral victory, the practical result is an expansion of the settlement enterprise. Several experts said the agreement further diminishes the prospects for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and some saw the deal as a sign that [Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu was leaning toward a unilateral rather than bilateral approach to the issue, with Israel essentially defining the borders of a future Palestinian state.

On Sunday, the justices relented a bit and said the illegal buildings didn't have to be demolished until November. That's Israel (and often democracy) for you -- one step forward, .95 or 1.05 of a step back. No matter when the homes are demolished, the Ulpana operation is scant cause for optimism. Getting Beit El's 5,600 residents to leave as part of a two-state settlement would probably not go as smoothly. Most are orthodox Jews, including many Russian emigres, who consider their home part of greater Israel. The site's association with the great patriarch Jacob would make things especially complicated on the day the IDF was sent to roust the townspeople.

But a little bit more good news is that there are settlements, and there are settlements, as we St. John's pilgrims learned on June 24 at the Holy Land Hotel in east Jerusalem during a thoughtful talk by Ophir Yarden, an Israeli veteran, self-described religious Zionist, and peace activist who teaches at BYU's Jerusalem Center.

To get us started, Yarden surveyed the vast Talmudic landscape of Israeli opinion on security and the peace process, helping us understand that there's a legitimate-sounding response to every opinion and nostrum offered by foreign visitors who've been watching the news or reading the paper and decide we've figured it all out. He especially stressed taking care about our terminology. When someone mentioned the controversial separation wall, which we'd seen the day before at Bethlehem, he reminded us that forbidding Berlin Wall-like structures comprise just five percent of the barrier dividing Israel from the West Bank. Security fence, he said, would be a less-provocative description, since its construction (if not all of Israel's opportunistic choices about its location) seemed justifiable as a security measure during the second intifada in 2000-04.

On the other side of the debate are Israeli hawks who oppose current U.S. policy, which calls for Israel to return to its 1967 borders with land swaps. Fretting that pre-June 1967 Israel was only a little more than nine miles wide at its narrowest point, critics claim the Obama administration and Palestinians want to impose indefensible "Auschwitz borders" on Israel -- failing to acknowledge, Yarden noted, that she capably defended the same borders in 1967's Six-Day War, when Israel won the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

As for the settlements, Yarden insists that they haven't yet doomed the two-state solution. He said that most settlers aren't religious zealots clinging to their birthright in Hebron or the rock where Jacob purportedly laid his head the night he dreamed about his ladder. Of the settlement population of 500,000, about 70% actually live in the suburbs of Jerusalem, many having been attracted not by ghostly voices of the patriarchs but the lure of cheaper, government-subsidized housing. Yarden said that if these 350,000 want their homes to stay in Israel, all Israel has to do is give up 1% of its territory elsewhere along the border.

The problem is that many of the remaining 150,000 live in communities like Beit El that are deeper in the West Bank, often complicate the geographical integrity of Palestine, and in some cases shelter residents who might not leave peaceably. Know all that, this pilgrim -- still taking care not to take sides -- hopes that Israel will stop building and expanding settlements and the Palestinians will stop saying no.

A State Of Suspension

A new poll shows that Israelis and Palestinians agree on at least one thing -- that the status quo will persist:

Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, 71 percent of Israelis and 68% of Palestinians surveyed viewed the chances for establishing an independent Palestinian state within the next five years to be minimal.

Nonetheless, 60% of the Israelis and 65% of the Palestinians opposed a one-state solution with equal rights between Arabs and Jews, according to the poll. Only 36% of Israelis and 31% of Palestinians supported such a solution.

More Rungs On Jacob's Ladder

Even in the digital age, a group of pilgrims in Israel and the West Bank is likely to end up feeling set apart from the world – hermeneutically sealed, you might say. Are those Crusader or Byzantine ruins atop Mt. Tabor in Galilee, or a combination of both (which is usually the right answer)? The cassocked monk who just brushed by us in Jerusalem's old city -- Armenian or Greek Orthodox? Does any of Queen Helena's 4th century building remain in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (yes, or so we were told; the center arch in the photo above)?

It's not that we didn't go on-line. But when we visited Wikipedia, it was to learn more about the history of the Freres Blanc, custodians of St. Anne’s Church and the pools of Bethesda, and to try to figure out which of the eight purported sites of the biblical Emmaus we had actually visited on Saturday morning.

We weren’t totally hermetic in our coenobiticality. News of pastoral crises quickly reached us – two friends’ unplanned hospital visits, another’s home being threatened by fire in Colorado Springs. We also heard in real time about the political firestorm sparked by the Supreme Court's health care opinion. But what I didn't learn until we were en route to LAX (and I opened the new issue of the Economist that had materialized on my Kindle) was that the walls bordering one of the sites we visited last week in Nablus on the West Bank, Jacob’s Well, had recently been shot up, the result of internecine Palestinian tensions.

The incident notwithstanding, I'm glad we didn't skip our Jacob's Well stop, which proved to be a favorite for several of our St. John's pilgrims. Because of Palestinian Authority reforms and improving economic conditions, the West Bank has been peaceful for the last few years. When there is talk these days of a third intifada, or popular uprising, it's about the chances of an armed struggle within the Palestinian movement between Fatah, which is working constructively with Israel, and Hamas, still officially dedicated to Israel's demise:

“There is no political horizon,” say disgruntled Palestinians. They increasingly question the point of the PA. It has failed to usher in a Palestinian state, and appears powerless to prevent Israeli military incursions or the relentless expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank. “All the windows are closed, and the political elite has no keys to open them,” says Raid Nairat, an academic. The West Bank’s 30,000 security forces seem unkeen on a recent quest for reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas that would force them to share power. Their recent round-up of 150 Hamas men helped dampen hopes of a deal.

So there are some more roadblocks on the peace highway, more rungs on Jacob's ladder. It's hard to imagine Fatah and Hamas sharing power (until their goals converge), Israel making a deal with just Fatah (since it would reasonably assume that Hamas would undermine it), and Israel making a deal with a united Fatah and Hamas (unless Hamas permanently renounces jihad against Israel). A Palestinian civil war might actually be welcomed by those who think it would take the pressure off Israel to make peace. Better to hope that Hamas will be pulled to the center by its ongoing nation-building work in Gaza and the election of a Muslim Brotherhood president in Egypt who is fully committed to the peace process.

Unity And Alienation And Unity

If you go to a Roman Catholic church in Anaheim, but you're not a Roman Catholic, the priest might not want to serve you Holy Communion. While he's not allowed to refuse if you insist, it's technically against canon law. And yet on Saturday in Bethlehem, all we St. John's pilgrims, though most are Episcopalian, were communicated without any hesitation by an Italian priest during a solemn early-morning mass in the grotto associated with Christ's birth that is sheltered by the Church of the Nativity -- a moment of unity in Christ that felt, at least to me, every bit as powerful as the first Pentecost.

The church is one of three constructed in fourth-century Palestine under the direction of Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. You can still see her workers' beautiful mosaics preserved a meter or two beneath the church's modern floor. Today Roman Catholic and Greek and Armenian Orthodox Christians share its care and administration. It's generally in the news when people are shooting at each other or on Christmas. We St. John's pilgrims celebrated our Christmas early by singing "O Come All Ye Faithful" in the St. Joseph Chapel near the grotto, where pilgrim Damian had a contemplative moment.

Then thanks to our friend Iyad Qumri's peerless contacts, the Franciscans, Rome's traditional stewards in the Holy Land, invited us to attend mass with some pilgrims from Italy. The priest (was he visiting, or based here? I don't know. I didn't ask. This is the Middle East) celebrated in Italian, but the forms of the Holy Eucharist liturgy are familiar enough that we could follow along and say the responses in English. We weren't sure about the gospel reading until the priest said, "Non vi preoccupat (don't be worried)," when we realized we were hearing Jesus's teaching in Matthew 6 about the lilies of the field. Pilgrim Mike, whose fluency in Spanish gives him a good feel for Italian, could tell the first reading, which a nun proclaimed as pilgrims Alexendra and Brenna looked on, was from 2 Corinthians. So we all understood God's saving word, each in our own language. Did the priest know we weren't Catholic? Did he care? What would Benedict XVI think? I don't know. I didn't ask. This is the Middle East!

After the closing prayers, we each touched the star in the floor that stands for the Birth and Incarnation and creation's radical unity under God's perfect, evil-destroying love. This unforgettable moment of Christian unity happened in a town whose Christian population has dwindled to as little as 20% owing to falling birth rates, the second Palestinian intifada in 2000-04, and diminished economic opportunities. God's love may defy alienation, but the region's politics sometimes appear to defy God's love. Edward Tabash, an Arab Catholic merchant whose family have been Bethlehemites for centuries, told me that Israel's separation wall (shown here surrounding and cutting off a single Palestinian home) has devastated the local economy and driven thousands of Bethlehem's ablest, best-educated people to greener pastures, often abroad. So in one morning we experienced the chasm between what God wants and what we deliver. But that's okay, because after our meal in the grotto, we were invested with the power to move mountains and even walls.

What We Do

"It's what they do here." Spoken yesterday in Jerusalem by someone in our St. John's pilgrim band, these were the first coherent words that formed in my mind after I was awakened today at 4:30 a.m. by the Muslim call to prayer. It was really the jet lag, course. At home I'd sleep through the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing in the shower. Our shower. With the door open. So I didn't need a scapegoat for being up before the mockingbirds.

But lest I be tempted to pick on Islam anyway, there was that voice in my head. People believe and worship differently without being different. If we are to experience the reality and even inevitability of our conflicts, let it at least not be because of our love for God.

The comment was made, as I recall, during our discussion right before dinner with Bernard Sabella, a U.S.-educated sociologist and member of the legislative council of the Palestinian National Authority. During our astonishing first full day of pilgrimage, we'd visited the Temple Mount and Church of the Holy Sepulcher and prowled all four quarters of the Old City. We'd eaten fresh cherries and freshly-baked bread sprinkled with spices, drank fresh-squeezed orange juice while gazing at the Dome of the Rock, and dined with the Lutherans in the Christian Quarter. Kathy had stood atop the southern steps of the demolished Jewish temple, one of my favorite spots in Jerusalem, with Herod's wall behind her and, over her head, the al-Aqsa mosque and the arch of a gate Jesus Christ may have walked through -- surely ground zero of the great Abrahamic dialog.

From our genial, hard-charging guide, Canon Iyad Qumri, we pilgrims had heard somewhat more historical and archaeological data than we had retained. And now it was time for the intricacies of Israeli-Palestinian politics? Before dinner, did Iyad say? But Sabella kept it light. This wasn't his first encounter with jet-lagged pilgrims. "I don't like Israel, I don't dislike Israel," he said with a smile and shrug. His Palestinian Catholic family was displaced by the 1948 war of independence and settled in then Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem, where his father reinvented himself as a tour guide for pilgrim groups like ours. One day he sat waiting for his group to regather in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, his fez in the palm of one hand while he wiped his brow the other, and someone put a dollar in his hat.

As he told the story, Sabella laughed without resentment. And he evinced little if any irritation about the nearly four-year stall in negotiations for a Palestinian state nor even about the steady growth of the Israeli settler population. Perhaps he is among those who believe that his people's long-term prospects are good given the growth of Arab populations inside and outside Israel. "We need a political solution," he said, "but if comes, it will because of relationships and trust between people, not because of governments and bureaucrats."

He sounded most discouraged after pilgrim Bob Hayden described his Chicago boyhood, when children of all backgrounds and races played easily together and judged one another on the content of their characters and, knowing Bob as I do, the quality of their fastballs. Sabella replied that Israel's faith-based educational system increasingly discouraged relationships with Muslims and Arabs. That didn't ring entirely true given the secular outlook among many modern Israelis. Muslims and Arabs throughout the region also commit their share of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish curriculum.

It's a shame if anyone is teaching children to hate, either the Jewish children we encountered having a snack in the Old City or the Arab kids who walked by us yesterday morning, joyfully pounding their feet on the hard-packed ground of the Temple Mount. Under them and us was 3,000 years of history, buried but unquiet -- Muslim and Christian conquests, Jesus sitting at the feet of the rabbis and lashing out in anger at those who were selling salvation, two great temples, pre-Davidic Palestinians. What a story! The roots of centuries of conflict and all western civilization. We may not figure it all out in the next ten days, or in our lifetimes. Maybe the children will. At their best, it's what they do.

No Salaam Over Salam

Is Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas angry with his prime minister for snubbing Bibi last week?

One Man, One Party

Alon Ben-Meir says that Israel's political center and left could unite and put the peace process back on track -- if it weren't, that is, for the politicians:

[A]ll Israeli politicians are driven by blind personal ambitions. I do not believe that there is a single issue in connection with the Palestinian conflict that Labor, Kadima and even Barak's Independence party could not agree on to move along a unified political agenda to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What prevents them from doing so are personal struggles over who should occupy this or that post and what prerogatives they may or may not be able to exercise.

Arabs Aren't Springing

Hopes aren't high as the Israeli and Palestinian PMs prepare to meet in Jerusalem today, the first high-level contact in 20 months. Traveling in Asia, the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, refreshingly notes that his people's problems aren't all Israel's fault:

Abbas blamed the Arab countries for the severe financial crisis facing the PA. He noted that the Arabs have yet to fulfill their financial promises to support the Palestinians.

NATO In Nazareth?

Steven Strauss argues that the U.S. should promote peace in the Middle East by envisioning it as a focal point for a mini-Marshall Plan:

Offer incentives to both sides (paid for by the U.S. and other interested parties) that provide real reasons to make painful compromises. For both Israel and Palestine (conditioned on their achieving a real peace treaty) -- Entry into NAFTA (or analogous trade concessions) on favorable terms to promote economic growth. For Israel -- Entry into NATO, with a significant number of NATO troops stationed in front-line positions (so an attack on Israel becomes an attack on NATO), and reimbursement of costs for settlers evacuated from the West Bank. For the Palestinians -- Payment of all claims for people displaced during the various wars (by payment directly to the refugees), and citizenship in Western countries for any Palestinian refugees who cannot be resettled in the Middle East.

One More Time, With Feeling?

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Herb Kaion speculates that the Palestinians are interested in negotiating again:

[T]he tactic the Palestinians adopted since September 2010 – when PA President Mahmoud Abbas walked away from talks with [Benyamin] Netanyahu and seemingly turned his back on the idea of a negotiated settlement to the conflict in favor of trying to get one imposed on Israel – has not produced results.

The two leaders will meet next week. Kaion reports that the Quartet (the U.S., Russia, the European Union, and the UN) is expected to call tomorrow for another round of direct peace talks.