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.

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.

Borders, Not Boycotts

Jeffrey Goldberg says that Israel and the Palestinians must get back to the table and decide on the borders of a new state:

Borders -- those are the issue, in my opinion. I used to think settlements were a main stumbling block. But they can be bypassed. If you can negotiate the borders of Palestine, the settlement problem dissipates. It gets ugly, also -- the extremists will make sure of that -- but it's obvious that settlements are secondary. Settlements that are outside the negotiated border will have to be dismantled (or their residents will have to take Palestinian citizenship) and those settlements inside the border become normal communities within Israel. We just have to get back to negotiations. I'm hoping President Obama, if he's reelected, will be visiting Israel and the West Bank by spring of next year to lay out his vision of how the two sides need to act.

The One And Only Two-State Solution

Scholar and blogger Peter Beinart has ignited a controversy by calling for a boycott of goods produced in West Bank settlements. On his behalf, Andrew Sullivan called on Beinart's critics to say what they'd do instead to promote the peace process. Beinart's proposition:

Today, the Israeli government—with the active consent of the organized American Jewish community—provides myriad subsidies for Jews to leave democratic Israel to settle across the green line. Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today, such policies are deeply self-defeating since they make a two-state solution harder ever. A settlement boycott could help to rebalance the scales. If critics disagree—and yet still profess a belief in the two state solution—then they should offer their own alternatives for how to stop the settlement growth that threatens Israel’s democratic future. I’m all ears.

My reply, e-mailed to Sullivan (I'll only check every five minutes or so to see if he uses it):

No fair. When Beinart writes, "Regardless of your opinion about the Palestinian willingness to make a two state deal today," he takes the solution off the table. Neither the U.S. president nor op-ed writers can stop settlement expansion. Only the Palestinians can, by accepting the best available territorial offer as soon as possible (and, I'm afraid, agree to punt on dividing Jerusalem). While we may be appalled by the settlement movement, it isn't a conspiracy to undermine the peace process. It's a function of Israel's complex social, theological, and political dynamics. That means that each time Palestinians have said no -- 2000, 2008, 2010, and 2012, in Jordan -- the inevitable result was or will be settlement expansion and a smaller, less coherent Palestine. It will keep happening until the PNA figures out that they're the ones, beside Israel, with the power. As a matter of fact, the Beinart initiative just provides more encouragement for the mistaken belief that outside leverage will get Palestinians a better deal. If they're going to have a state, if they really want one, it's time for them to say yes.

An' A One, An' A Two, An' A One

Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouthi, surveying the new tactic of nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation of the West Bank, says time is running out on the two-state solution:

[C]ontinuing Israeli settlement activity could soon lead us to the point of no return. Indeed, if we do not soon achieve a genuinely independent Palestinian state, we will be forced to press instead for a single democratic state with equal rights and responsibilities for both Palestinians and Israelis.

He also writes, "Our movement is not intended to delegitimize Israel, as the Israeli government claims." That depends on what the meaning of delegitimize is. Polls show that many Palestinians see the two-state solution merely as an intermediate step toward "a single democratic state" with an Arab majority, which would not only delegitimize the Jewish state but eliminate it. If Palestinians' true objective is a single state now or later, it's not hard to understand Israel's intransigence, since most Israelis desire the maintenance of a Jewish Israel.

If Palestinian elites want to demonstrate their commitment to two states coexisting indefinitely, they should stop waiting for Israel to stop building settlements, which isn't likely, for the U.S. to make it stop, which is even less likely, or for the alternative outcome of a single state, which is a fantasy. Instead, they should conditionally accept Israel's best current territorial offer.

Only Palestine Can Stop The Settlements

A heartrending story of a hunger strike in a West Bank village being gradually surrounded by "greater Israel":

Khirbet al-Tawil sits on the sides of a hill that descends into the Jordan Valley, between the Palestinian town of Aqraba and the Jewish settlement of Gitit. The village is accessed by a muddy road, which took us a long time to find. On the rocky terrain in between the fields, there were several buildings - either houses or shacks - next to animal pens and coops. When we entered the mosque, accompanied by two researchers from the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem and a researcher from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the residents were absorbed in lively conversation. It was noon, and they turned first to pray, kneeling on the wet rugs, their faces toward Mecca.

The stone ruins of the ancient, magnificent houses in Khirbet al-Tawil attest that Palestinians lived here for centuries. The villagers recall the stories of their ancestors who lived here, but Gitit is encroaching from northeast and Itamar is expanding from northwest; Nativ Hagdud, Yafit, Tomer and Patzael, the settlements of the valley and the surrounding slopes, are gradually choking off the Palestinians' agriculture in the valley.

But who can stop the Israeli settlements if Israel won't? Neither international pressure, hunger strikes, nor worse. Palestinian negotiators should try to win a freeze on new settlements in exchange for accepting the broad outlines of Israel's current territorial offer. They should do it now, before their future stake shrinks even more.

Hat tip to Deb Neal

The Two Altered States Solution

I thought I was being naive by proposing that the Palestinians accept Israel's offer of 95% of the West Bank. I'm a hard-bitten realist compared to Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled, who call on the Jewish state voluntarily to transform itself into an Arab state:

Instead of pursuing the mirage of a two-state solution, would-be peace makers should recognize the fact that Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories in fact constitute one state that has been in existence for nearly forty-five years, the longest lasting political formation in these territories since the Ottoman Empire. (The British Mandate for Palestine lasted thirty years; Israel in its pre-1967 borders lasted only nineteen years.) The problem with that state, from a democratic, humanistic perspective, is that forty percent of its residents, the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza, are non-citizens deprived of all civil and political rights. The solution to this problem is simple, although deeply controversial: establishing one secular, non-ethnic, democratic state with equal citizenship rights to all in the entire area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

Just Say Yes

For a moment, imagine if Palestinians said yes to the creation of Palestine. An utterly naive proposition, I know. But instead of insisting on the chimera of “1967 borders with land swaps,” imagine if Palestinian negotiators in Amman provisionally accepted Israel's latest reported territorial offer, with the security wall essentially defining the international border and all West Bank settlements persisting as part of Israel. Many believe Israel must withdraw west of the 1967 green line, but let's assume that it won't and no one can make it do so. The concession would cost Palestine the equivalent of two-thirds of Anaheim’s land mass. If you find authorities who say it would actually be two Dearborns, the advantages of immediate statehood would be the same. What should matter is if Palestinians get enough land to run a country, settlements and all. A slightly smaller Palestine now would be infinitely better for its people and the region than a larger one in five or ten years or never.

Myriad issues would remain -- settlement security, water rights, transportation, and border crossing rights for Palestine’s citizens. If Israel balked at the PNA’s bold move, we would see which side was the stumbling block once and for all. If not, we may hope that in return Israel would stop building settlements and promise post-statehood talks on the status of Jerusalem, where Israel has the stronger claim (notwithstanding the likely presence on the holy mountain of pre-Davidic indigenous peoples). Israel thrived with its capital in Tel Aviv. For the time being, the Palestinians ought to be able to do so in historic Ramallah.

I understand President Abbas and Fatah would run afoul of their Islamist cousins, Hamas, by abandoning the green line and immediate access to a Jerusalem capital. The Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, plans to step down soon, some say because he has his eye on a bigger job. Would that be Abbas's? In Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu has to worry about his obstructionists, too.

But it's not just extremists who are delaying peace. Significant swathes of both populations aren’t sure they want two permanent states. Israel expresses its ambivalence, its resentment over having to cede land to Arabs and fear of what will happen to its security if it does, by continuing to build settlements on occupied territory. Palestinians expressed theirs by spurning prior Israeli concessions and letting the Obama peace initiative fizzle over the secondary issue of settlement construction. Many Palestinians, perhaps a majority, still don't believe Israel has a right to exist, and they may be thinking that someday soon, it won’t. Watching events in Egypt, they may expect that the Arab spring will give way to a winter gale of Islamist hostility toward Israel. Until the Amman talks, to increase the external pressure on Israel, Abbas had been focusing not on negotiations but UN recognition. Many Palestinians who do favor two states believe a demographic reunification of Israeli and Palestinian Arabs will eventually put an end to the Jewish nation.

Which is why a security wall state, or any other breakthrough anytime soon, is a fantasy. Palestinians and their advocates find it more advantageous to invoke the international consensus against the occupation, proclaim the illegality of settlements, and continue to make comparisons to apartheid (prevalent in the Arab, Muslim, and haredim worlds against women but not in Israel against Arabs). Israel and her friends prefer to talk about the Palestinians as an invented people who are Jordan's problem, remind critics that Israel won the West Bank in a war provoked if not started by Arabs, and reliably promise that it would win the next one against any nation or group that dislikes its negotiating tactics. But none of the maps and legends, the endless game of historical, geographical, rhetorical tit for tat, would matter if both sides were fully committed to having two permanent states – because if they were, the states would probably exist.

Land Swaps Vs. Land Grab?

Details emerging from the Israel-Palestinian talks in Jordan suggest that Israel wants to keep all its West Bank settlements, effectively turning its security barrier into a national border. On this 2008 map, compare the green line (the 1967 border) to all the other lines (portions of the fence in place or in the works, diverging from the green line to enclose or protect Israeli settlements), and you see what Israel would get to keep.

Santorum: Harsher Than Netanyahu

Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan for this exchange about Israel and the Palestinians between Rick Santorum and an outgunned if well-meaning young interlocutor. Santorum makes a manifest destiny argument: Israel won the West Bank (in a war neither man dates correctly) and gets to keep it. Watch this and you'll be whispering lines to the kid: Unlike the U.S. with Texas and New Mexico, Israel has never sought to annex the West Bank. Or try this: What good is it when someone wanting to be president takes a harsher view than Netanyahu? Or: Saying "There's no Palestinian" is ignorant, cruel, and dangerous. Or even: Hey, Rick, you argue like a teenager in a dormitory.

Palestine? N.I.M.K.

As Jordan prepares to host the first talks between Israel and Palestinians in over a year, Ethan Bronner outlines the kingdom's aims and stakes:

King Abdullah is...eager to send a message to Hamas, the militant Islamist group that governs the Gaza Strip, that despite the rise of Islamism in the region, the Palestinian Authority remains, in his view, the leader of the Palestinians. Mr. Abbas has started talks for a unity government with Hamas, but they are proceeding slowly.

The king also has a very specific interest in a moderate Palestinian state being established in the West Bank and Gaza — he has tensions with Islamists in his own country and in addition, he does not want to encourage any thoughts of a Palestinian state being established in Jordan instead, as some on the Israeli right advocate. More than half of the inhabitants of Jordan are Palestinian.

Jordan and Israel share a common interest in focusing Palestinian nationalism on the West Bank and Gaza to prevent its being focused on either of their states. Mr. Netanyahu and his aides say they also worry that any Palestinian state in the West Bank would ultimately be overrun by Islamists.

The Israel Paradigm

On Dec. 21, Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" featured an interview (podcast available here) with Anthony Shadid of the New York Times, who has covered the uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world and was held prisoner by Qaddafi's forces in Libya. His accounts of getting in and out of Syria and the terrifying incident in Libya, where his driver was killed, are riveting. He spoke movingly about watching history unfold in Tahrir Square and throughout the region:

I think when you look across the Arab world, absolutely, but even elsewhere, this idea of old kind of paradigms coming to an end and that people are searching for something that can represent them better, that's more meaningful to their lives, that somehow maybe transcends these older institutions that have held sway over so many places for so long - interestingly, I mean just as a kind of footnote here, or even, you know, a side note here, is that you often hear this from Islamists. When I was talking to Rashid al-Ghannushi, a very prominent Tunisian Islamist leader, he made the very same point to me, that what he was seeing going on with Occupy Wall Street, with the Arab Spring, was that, you know, people were looking for ideologies that were different. Of course he was volunteering his ideology as a replacement, but I think that sense of things coming to an end is very powerfully felt in a lot of places right now.

Here's the challenge, as Shadid sees it:

Are these new systems of politics that emerged in, say, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, you know, Bahrain, Yemen, any of those countries, are they going to revolve around this access of citizenship, or are these societies going to divide along, you know, I think more kind of basic notions of sect or ethnicity or other notions of identity that feel very exclusive?

Although it wasn't mentioned in the 40-minute interview, Arabs actually don't have to look far for inspiration. Israel is multiethnic and democratic. While it's a majority Jewish state, Arab citizens, whether Muslim or Christian, worship as they choose, vote, and own property, as do women. It has a strong secular sensibility. Some 10,000 demonstrators took to the streets this week to protest plans by Israel's ultra-orthodox minority, the haredim, to subjugate women. The more that emerging Arab polities resemble Israel, enabling freedoms that have been scarce or nonexistent in Arab countries so far, the better off their people, and especially their women, will be. As for Palestinians living under occupation on the West Bank, they're the least free in Israel but still among the freest in the region. They'll be worse off if an independent Palestine follows the old Arab paradigm instead the new Israeli one. Here's hoping that as Fatah and Hamas grow closer, the Palestinian movement doesn't lose its taste for democracy and gender equity.

Being viewed with distaste by its neighbors and relegated to the global doghouse for dragging its feet on Palestine doesn't make Israel in particular or democratic values in general less worthy models. On the contrary, it's a helpful lesson for democrats in training. We may feel that Benyamin Netanyahu's hardline policies are wrong and that the wisest step for Israel in the wake of the Arab spring would be to set up a Palestinian state as quickly as possible. That Israel's elected government doesn't agree is a reminder that while despots, to whom we hope Arab nations are saying goodbye forever, don't have to listen to their people, elected leaders do.

The Puleeze Process

Sarah Palin came back from Jerusalem with the insight that West Bank settlement construction is a "zoning issue."

The Bloody Wheel Goes Around

The LA Times reports on unspeakable events not far from Jacob's Well in Nablus, where the Samaritan woman met Jesus and we St. John's pilgrims visited in January:

The brutal killings Friday night of five Jewish settlers in the tightly guarded compound of Itamar, southeast of the West Bank city of Nablus, sent shockwaves through Israel, sparking worries of renewed violence in the Palestinian territories and heightening fears of retaliation from the Israel Defense Forces or angry settlers.

Israeli authorities suspect that the killings, the deadliest attack inside a settlement in several years, were either a strike by Palestinian militants or a revenge attack by residents of the West Bank village of Awarta, where two Palestinian teenagers were shot to death a year ago as they collected garbage near Itamar.

Photo: Jerusalem's Temple Mount, viewed from the Mount of Olives

Apres Egypt, Apartheid?

Thomas Friedman:

[I]f Israelis tell themselves that Egypt’s unrest proves why Israel cannot make peace with the Palestinian Authority, then they will be talking themselves into becoming an apartheid state — they will be talking themselves into permanently absorbing the West Bank and thereby laying the seeds for an Arab majority ruled by a Jewish minority between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

What Really Counts: U.S. Words Or Billions?

Barack Obama must be feeling pretty powerful these days. Though he can't get a bill through the House anymore, the word from an abundance of commentators and bloggers is that the next 30 years of Egyptian history is his to write by virtue of a righteous turn of phrase.

The prevailing analogy is Jimmy Carter's policy toward Iran in 1978-79, when an authoritarian, pro-Western leader, Shah Reza Pahlavi, was driven from power and replaced by the theocratic regime whose leaders continue to confound us. Carter's critics made the hard to disprove (or prove) claim that the shah would've been able to hold onto power indefinitely with strong U.S. support. Late last week, Hugh Hewitt said as much when he ventured this critique of Obama's policy in Egypt in an interview with Charles Krauthammer:

[W]hen I heard [Obama's public statement about Egypt], I tried to put myself in the position of a Muslim Brotherhood activist listening, and I thought Obama cleared the way, immunizing them from any kind of crackdown. In other words, that Saturday will be a tumultuous, violence-filled day, because the President signaled to Mubarak, don’t use the army....Let me go back to 1979...If we knew then what we know now, would we have been better off if the Shah had instructed the army to fire on the mob, and even with the horrendous bloodshed that would have occurred....?

So theory one is that Obama can save our Egyptian ally from a mass popular movement with stronger rhetoric, encouragement of a brutal military crackdown, or both. Theory two comes from a potential Mubarak successor, Mohamed ElBaradei, who suggested this weekend that we'll get a more moderate Egyptian regime if the U.S. pulls the rug out from under Mubarak. On the basis of his own analysis of the Iranian revolution, Kai Bird agrees:

Recent events in Egypt recall the street protests of 1978 in Tehran when...Carter had to decide whether to remain loyal to the Pahlavi regime, a long-standing American-backed dictatorship—or whether the time had come to abandon the Shah and support a popular uprising demanding human rights and democracy. Carter tried to have it both ways, modulating his support for the Shah, calling for political liberalization, and warning the Shah against the use of state violence against unarmed protesters. Obama seems to be following the same script, and the results may well turn out to be equally fraught with unintended consequences....It is imperative that Washington finds a way to place itself on the side of those political forces advocating change and reform—despite America's historical baggage of temporizing with Arab kings and dictators.

Hewitt says we got Islamists in Iran because the U.S. didn't back the shah, thus opening the popular floodgates. Bird says we got them because we backed him too much, further seeding and radicalizing the deluge. There's a third theory, of course, which is that it doesn't matter that much what Obama says, that political outcomes will occur in Egypt principally as the result of internal political and cultural dynamics, just as in Iran. To an extent, Bird himself concurs:

The end of the Mubarak era will...spell an end to Egypt's cold peace with Israel. No post-Mubarak government, and certainly not one populated with Muslim Brotherhood members, will tolerate the continued blockade of their Hamas cousins in Gaza. Israel will thus be faced with additional strategic incentives to end its occupation of the West Bank, dismantle its settlements and quickly recognize a Palestinian state based largely on its 1967 borders.

This assertion complicates the picture even more. In Bird's view, Obama and his speechwriters can alter the course of events at a fluid moment such as this one and yet will be powerless to keep a new Egyptian government, whether dominated by moderates or hardliners and in spite of our $2 billion in annual aid, from railroading Israel.

Obviously Bird has high hopes along these lines. But if he's right that any new Egyptian government will actively support Hamas, then the revolution will probably be devastating to the peace process. Israel already has good cause to fear Hamas ending up in charge of a Palestinian state. If Egypt becomes an enemy again, I imagine Israel will at least be tempted to keep indefinitely the West Bank lands it won in the 1973 war against Egypt and its allies. If Egypt waxes even more aggressive, Israel may even be willing to vie for the Sinai again.

Nobody wants to see that happen. Whether or not it matters much what Obama says this week, let's hope that our $2 billion continues to speak loudly in the months and years ahead.

Pilgrims' Progress: Well Done, Daphne

We St. John's pilgrims saw this painting of Jesus Christ and the Samaritan woman along with other breathtaking images in the West Bank city of Nablus today, in a church built over Jacob's well, where the encounter described in John 4:1-30 occurred. We've visited no more sacred a place so far. Abraham visited here when it was called Shechem. Joshua gathered the tribes of Israel here and called them to renew their worship of God in sincerity and faithfulness (Josh. 24:14). For the Samaritans of Jesus's time, Shechem was as sacred as the Second Temple was to Jews in Jerusalem.

As for the gospel story, which the evangelist said occurred as Jesus made his way from Jerusalem to Galilee, this is the only place known as Jacob's well. There's plenty of ambiguity about the actual location of the Upper Room and Emmaus, for instance, but none whatsoever about this spot. Pilgrim Daphne (shown outside the church with her mother, pilgrim Ellie) lowered a bucket 150 feet down and raised it filled to the brim, and we drank from the same spring that the evangelist says nourished our Lord.

Photos weren't allowed. But we'll remember.

Jewish State or Democratic State?

Jeffrey Goldberg, visiting Israel, is wondering how much its leaders really value democracy:

[T]here's very little Israel's right-wing government has done in the past year or so to suggest that it is willing to wean itself from its addiction to West Bank settlements, and the expansion of settlements bodes ill for the creation of a Palestinian state -- and the absence of Palestinian statehood means that Israel will one day soon confront this crucial question concerning its democratic nature: Will it grant West Bank Arabs the right to vote, or will it deny them the vote? If it grants them the vote, this will be the end of Israel as a Jewish state; if it denies them the vote in perpetuity, it will cease to be a democratic state.

"Maybe Israel Has No Plan"

Jeffrey Goldberg on the new settlement construction projects Israel has launched in the West Bank, especially those, Ethan Bronner reports, "in more remote communities that are least likely to be part of Israel after any two-state peace deal":

I would like someone in the Netanyahu government to please explain the plan here. It would make things so much easier to understand if we just knew the plan. Is the plan to continue settling Judea and Samaria so that there is no chance whatsoever of creating a Palestinian state? And if this is the plan, then what happens to those Palestinians who are being denied a state? Will they be absorbed into democratic Israel, thus bringing about an end to the idea that there should be a single small country on earth where Jews can be a majority? Or are they going to be denied democratic rights, in which case, well, Israel as we know it will cease to exist. Or is there some other plan? Or -- maybe -- there is no plan. Maybe these things just happen.

Two Pretty Big Ifs

Robert Wright believes that the UN can dictate the borders of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza and then proclaim it into existence. If you wonder who would turn the abstraction into a reality, you have to go to the fine print on Wright's blog. There, he concedes that the success of his idea would depend on the fall of the Netanyahu government and the willingness of the Israeli army to disarm those defending the 400,000 Israeli settlers (like these guys in Hebron) who would be forced to leave their homes in the West Bank.

Sounds like the makings of a bloody mess. Partition of India in 1947, anyone?