The demise of the Israeli left is a fact. Together, Meretz and Labor—formerly the twin pillars of the Zionist left—currently hold 11 Knesset seats, four fewer than Avigdor Lieberman’s ultra-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party. But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. Ignored by most political commentators is the strange and unexpected death of the Israeli right. And like all good thrillers, this one, too, is a murder mystery.

At first glance, pronouncing the Israeli right dead sounds like a bit of sophistry. The current governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is widely regarded as the most stringently conservative in Israel’s history. Since being voted into office in 2009, it has, among other achievements: de facto outlawed the public commemoration of the Nakba, the Palestinian narrative of the events that led to Israel’s establishment in 1948 and to the expulsion of nearly three quarters of a million Arabs from their homes; passed a bill requiring new immigrants to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, a stroke of legislation that mainly targets Palestinians from the West Bank who wish to marry Israeli Arabs and become Israeli citizens; enacted the anti-boycott bill; and threatened to establish official committees of inquiry targeting human-rights and civil-rights nonprofits. But this busy résumé hides the fact that the political and ideological leviathan that shaped so much of the country’s character for its first five decades has been supplanted by a new and foreign political culture that would have been utterly unrecognizable to Israelis even a decade ago.

One major influence on that culture arrived in Israel from Russia after 1989, along with the million or so immigrants who made aliyah after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While it is never wise to speak of a culture as if it were inalterable and hereditary, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that, to the extent that Russian political culture can be discussed, it is a ghastly oppressive enterprise. This is, after all, a nation that has spent much of the past millennium stumbling from one oppressive autocracy to the next. The majority of Russia’s population lived, until as recently as 1861, as serfs. As Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of history at Harvard and a former Soviet expert, suggested in a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, given the Russians’ iron-fisted history, they have traditionally expected their leaders to be groznyi, a word that, applied to Czar Ivan IV, was improperly translated as “terrible” but really means “awesome.” This, Pipes wrote, explains why a 2003 survey found that 22 percent of Russians supported democracy, while as many as 53 percent actively disliked it. Pipes called this phenomenon, still very much in force today, a flight from freedom, and he explained it had much to do with Russia’s perception of itself as a country under permanent siege. The prominent newspaper Izvestiya, he noted, captured this spirit perfectly when it described Russians as “living in trenches,” surrounded by enemies.

It takes a very small leap of imagination to see how perfectly this mentality translates into Hebrew: In Israel, aspiring politicians born in the former Soviet Union found that talk of trenches and enemies made for stellar political currency.

The most renowned example of this new autocratic style is, of course, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s current foreign minister. The Moldovan-born politician started his career as Netanyahu’s assistant; within less than two decades, he surfaced as his former boss’s most valuable political partner and, some say, puppet master. Lieberman’s path to power was simple: Whereas most other right-wing politicians spoke sotto voce about ideological opponents, he favored incendiary statements. The Israeli left, he told a radio interviewer in 2007, was responsible for all the nation’s woes. Appearing on television that same year, he compared a prominent civil rights group to concentration camp capos. He snubbed or humiliated foreign dignitaries who would not play by his protocol, refusing, for example, to meet with the former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva when da Silva chose to skip the customary visit to Theodor Herzl’s grave. While most Israeli pundits saw such acts as petty and harmful to Israel’s standing in the world, most Israeli voters think Lieberman is groznyi: In mock elections held in Israeli high schools in 2009, a majority of students said they would vote for Lieberman.

But Lieberman is far from alone. Nearly every one of the current government’s repressive bills was sponsored by politicians who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union. The Nakba law, for example, was sponsored by the Moscow-born Alex Miller of Yisrael Beiteinu. The anti-boycott bill was the brainchild of Ze’ev Elkin of Likud, who emigrated from Ukraine. The bill to form official committees of investigation targeting the left, defeated last week in the Knesset, was formed by Faina Kirschenbaum, also from Ukraine. The list goes on.

Even some staunch Likudniks have been appalled by the Russification of the Israeli right. Most vocal among them was Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Knesset and one of the party’s most prominent figures. A day after the anti-boycott bill passed, the chairman took the unlikely step of criticizing the parliament he himself headed. His ire was reserved for his colleagues on the right; they, he argued, are a disgrace to the legacy of Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist Zionism and the ideological founding father of Israeli conservatism.

“I stand ashamed and mortified before my mentor, Jabotinsky, for not having succeeded in protecting the individual, whom he likened to a monarch, against the parliamentary fists of the majority,” Rivlin wrote. “It might have been hoped that in an era in which Jabotinsky’s followers are scattered across the whole political spectrum, from the coalition to the opposition, things would be different. But in the absence of an ideological backbone, it appears that even the deep commitment to democracy and individual freedoms of those who call themselves his successors is conditional. It is the State of Israel that is compelled to pay the price of political interests that supersede national interests.”

Other Likud stalwarts were equally horrified. Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, for example—the son of Eliyahu Meridor, a former Likud Member of Knesset and close confidant of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin—gave repeated interviews in which he called several of the legislative initiatives brought forth by Lieberman and his associates “very dangerous.” Lieberman wasted no time: Meridor, he told the Israeli media, was a “fineschmecker,” a derogatory Yiddish term for an elitist dandy.

And, as American legislators are learning, once politics becomes a zero-sum game, it is very hard for moderate and mindful legislators to thrive. Ze’ev Elkin, the author of the anti-boycott bill, is a great example. When former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon abandoned the Likud to form Kadima, he was searching for a token settler to add to his new parliamentary faction as a nod to his former supporters in the settler movement who had largely abandoned him in light of his commitment to withdraw from Gaza; he found Elkin. In Elkin’s native Ukraine, the young politician had been known as a capable and committed Zionist activist. After emigrating to Israel in 1990, he excelled in his academic studies, earning degrees in both mathematics and history. When interviewed by Sharon’s associates, he expressed views that were right-of-center, but he stood out as a pragmatic, fair-minded, and soft-spoken individual, a perfect choice for Kadima’s transideological aspirations. Elected to the Knesset in 2006 as a member of Kadima, Elkin soon realized that the winds were blowing away from Sharon’s centrist platform. In 2008, he quit Kadima and joined the Likud. Within a few years, he learned that the only way to survive in a perpetually rightward-moving political universe was to move even further to the right. This, claim some who have long known Elkin, is what’s really behind the anti-boycott bill he sponsored. Aviad Friedman, the Sharon aide who recruited Elkin to politics, told the Israeli daily Maariv last week that “the anti-boycott bill may be good for Elkin when he faces off his rivals in the Likud, but it is very bad for Israel, and I think that deep inside, Ze’ev Elkin knows this well.”

The ideas of the Russified Israeli right find a clear reflection in current Russian political culture, down to the details of the bills that Russian-born Israeli politicians sponsor in the Knesset. In his 2004 State of the Union address for example, Vladimir Putin, then Russia’s president, announced his intention to investigate nonprofit human rights organizations “obtaining funding from influential foreign or domestic foundations.” Accepting international funding is standard operating procedure for many nongovernmental organizations the world over, but Putin’s speech insinuated that those who criticized the government and profited from foreign funds were disloyal to Russia and somehow dangerous. Within a few years, Putin and his henchmen have succeeded in creating an environment in which it is nearly impossible for NGOs to operate successfully, thereby severely crippling the possibility of a robust political opposition. Faina Kirschenbaum’s proposal to investigate left-wing NGOs, and her allegations that the foreign funds some of those NGOs receive—lawfully and transparently—are a sign of nefariousness, are a page out of the Putin playbook.

The blame for the death of the Israeli right, however, lies not only with Russia but with the United States as well. Orchestrated mainly by Netanyahu, a parade of American political consultants began marching into Israel’s electoral battlefields in the 1990s, changing what was previously a cantankerous but civic-minded political culture into a toxic terrain of secrets and lies familiar to anyone who has grown up on American campaign ads. Take a look, for example, at this extended ad for Labor from 1988. Even in the midst of mad inflation and shortly after the breakout of the first Palestinian intifada, the party’s leaders, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, used their on-screen time to calmly address potential voters, offering up the key points of their political plans, sitting at a desk.

By 1996, political ads looked a lot scarier—the ominous voice-overs, the allegations that political opponents are not just wrong but dangerous: They’re staples of a particular style of campaigning introduced to Israel by the American Arthur Finkelstein, the spin-master Netanyahu had hired. Finkelstein had made his political fortune in the United States by applying simplistic tags to the mostly liberal candidates he’d helped unseat. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in his catchy formulation, was “too liberal for too long,” and the 1992 Democratic candidate for Senate in New York, Robert Abrams, was “hopelessly liberal.” Both men lost despite overwhelming odds in their favor—Cuomo to George Pataki, Abrams to Alfonse D’Amato. Liberals lost, too: Finkelstein had helped turn the very term “liberal” into a bad word.

In 1996, Finkelstein was recruited by Netanyahu to run a rather hopeless campaign. Rabin, the popular leader of Labor, was assassinated a year prior to the election by a right-wing fanatic whose act was preceded by months of vehement demonstrations featuring signs portraying the elderly prime minister wearing a Nazi officer’s uniform. Netanyahu, the leader of the opposition, was severely criticized after Rabin’s death for fanning the flames of hatred and failing to denounce the violent language and imagery favored by his supporters. To make matters worse, Netanyahu’s opponent was Shimon Peres, Rabin’s closest political ally and co-recipient with him of the Nobel Peace Prize. Early polls predicted an easy victory for Peres. This was when Netanyahu called in Finkelstein.

The American adviser applied the same tactics that worked so well stateside, but he turned up the heat considerably. He orchestrated ads showing the aftermath of suicide bombings. He devised numerous spots showing Peres with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, accusing Peres of blindly succumbing to Arafat’s schemes. Most memorable was his leading slogan: “Peres will divide Jerusalem.” It was false; as prime minister, Netanyahu signed on to the very same peace accords that Peres and Rabin were committed to, and none of them advocated the de-unification of Israel’s capital. The slogan was scary, and it worked wonders: Netanyahu won by slightly less than 1 percent.

Finkelstein’s engagement was the first time an American consultant was so deeply involved in an Israeli campaign, but it wasn’t the last—nowadays, many Israeli politicians, left and right, hire Washington’s brightest minds to orchestrate their quests for power. In less than a decade, Israeli political culture, once staid in a C-SPAN sort of way, has become a horror film, with ads and jingles featuring fear, loathing, and blood.

It is, of course, naïve to expect any political culture to remain unchanged and free of outside influence. But when a transformation as massive as the one that has swept the Israeli right in the last five or 10 years occurs, it is time to stop and recalibrate. Old-time Israeli right-wingers like Dan Meridor and Reuven Rivlin are far more likely to see eye-to-eye these days with Meretz’s Nitzan Horowitz, say, than they are with Elkin and other members of Likud.

A few weeks ago, when the anti-boycott bill passed into law, I walked to my bookshelf and pulled out a volume. It was my wedding present from my father, a book bound in thick, rich leather, on its cover a copper emblem featuring the map of Israel crossed by an outstretched hand grasping a rifle and the words rak kach, meaning “only this way.” It was the emblem of the Irgun, the paramilitary organization that fought to expel the mandatory British regime from pre-state Palestine. The book’s author was the Irgun’s last commander in chief, Menachem Begin. It was inscribed to my great-grandfather, Chaim Leibovitz.

“Let justice be the cornerstone of Israel,” Begin wrote in Hebrew, “established with labor, with tears, with suffering, with battle, with blood.”

If only the same spirit still guided the Israeli right.

Now Jack O’Connell, the CIA’s Amman station chief from 1963 to 1971, writes in his wide-ranging and loosely argued new memoir, King’s Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, that the reverse is actually true: It was Hussein who alerted Nasser to the impending attacks, in two separate cables, the night before the Israeli Air Force struck. And how did Hussein get this intelligence? O’Connell knows: “I told him.”

It’s an astonishing claim. At the time, the United States was trying desperately not to get involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, mainly to avoid opening a new front against the Soviets at a time when U.S. forces were already fully engaged in Vietnam. The Israelis had sent a string of envoys to Washington in hopes of securing President Lyndon B. Johnson’s backing, and they’d all come away with nothing more than a tacit understanding that Johnson wouldn’t stop them from launching a war. Yet on June 4, after the U.S. embassy in Amman got word from the U.S. military attaché in Tel Aviv that the Israelis planned to start demolishing Egypt’s airfields at 8 a.m. the following day, the CIA man decided, on his own, to relay the information to a foreign head of state. “I was not authorized to tell him any of this,” O’Connell admits. “I didn’t report this to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

O’Connell wound up retiring from the CIA to go into private practice as Jordan’s lawyer in Washington, and his book is a courtier’s account—written, he says, to fill the gaps in the historical record left by King Hussein’s failure to complete a memoir before his death in 1999. It’s doubtful that, if Hussein had lived to write his own version, he would have included the hottest anecdote in O’Connell’s book: During a weekend retreat at the beachfront Jordanian resort of Aqaba in the summer 1967, shortly after the war, Tyrone Power’s ex-wife laced Hussein’s drink with LSD in a desperate attempt to get the married 31-year-old king in bed with her teenage daughter. “The way his aides described it,” writes O’Connell, who wasn’t present, “the king was seated in a chair but was no longer capable of discerning where his body ended and the chair began.” Help arrived in the form of a CIA medical team from Athens, dispatched with Langley’s approval.

But it’s also hard to imagine that Hussein would have authored such an angry book. Most of the stories involve what O’Connell reads as the repeated betrayal not just of Hussein’s efforts but of any commitment by either the Israelis or American Jews to achieve long-term peace. He tells a story about Arthur Goldberg, the labor lawyer appointed by President John F. Kennedy to the Supreme Court, who then stepped down to become Johnson’s ambassador to the United Nations. O’Connell writes that Goldberg took a threatening tone at a meeting in November 1967, and bragged about his “blank check” from the American Jewish community. “They will buy whatever I decide upon,” O’Connell quotes Goldberg saying. In O’Connell’s view, Goldberg—an official of the American government—had no business serving only the interests of the Jewish community. He writes that Goldberg not only reneged on the backroom agreement he made guaranteeing Hussein “minor reciprocal border rectifications” from the prewar lines in exchange for peace—but also somehow engineered the disappearance of the only written document that could have proved the reversal in the U.S. position.

Later, Henry Kissinger appears as a villain for his role in the run-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War. O’Connell goes through a complicated deductive exercise based on photographs and Kissinger’s memoirs to argue that, during a meeting in early 1973 outside Paris, Kissinger must have told the Egyptians they would have to “create a crisis” by going to war again with Israel in order to provide pretext for the Nixon Administration to re-engage with the Middle East. “We can never have a complete account of what was said at the meeting,” O’Connell writes. “But whatever words were spoken, I am convinced the Egyptians came away with the understanding that they had to go to war for the Americans to become involved in making peace.” (Kissinger did not respond to requests for comment.)

The work O’Connell has to put into making his case against Kissinger highlights the difference between history written by a historian and history written by a spy—someone who is party to events that are not generally recorded in publicly available documents, if at all. Many of the people mentioned are dead, a fact that O’Connell takes pains to point out in the text. Of those still living, one, the former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution (and Tablet Magazine contributor), flatly denied telling O’Connell what he is quoted as saying—that during the first George W. Bush Administration, Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, asked the Israeli embassy to vet the names of her potential Middle East aides. (Rice’s office did not respond to a phone call left seeking comment.)

But the other hallmark of spy memoirs is the desire for attention after careers spent on the shadowy sidelines of world events. So, it’s hardly a surprise when, toward the end of the book, O’Connell shifts from lionizing King Hussein to seeking credit for his own unrecognized contribution to the peace effort: the idea for a pan-Arab agreement that eventually became the Saudi-led Arab peace initiative. He writes that he first raised it with officials in the Clinton Administration in 1998, before the Wye River Accords were signed, and later gave a version to Hussein’s son after the king’s death in 1999. The Jordanian diplomat Marwan Muasher, the kingdom’s first ambassador to Israel, said that O’Connell’s account on that score is true. “I have the original proposal,” Muasher told me in a phone call. But on other issues—including the account of what Nasser knew in 1967—Muasher said he only knew the stories he had heard from O’Connell over the years. “I have,” he said with a slight chuckle, “no independent documentation one way or the other.”

Presumably, when Benjamin Netanyahu gets to Washington next week, the Hamas-Fatah deal is going to be at the top of his talking points. Even those in the pro-Israel camp who were pushing the prime minister to make concessions to the Palestinians recognize that this new partnership jeopardizes the entire peace process. All the money and prestige the United States and European Union have poured into the Palestinian issue has come to this: The carefully tended moderate camp has merged with the extremists. Of course, some will argue that the deal is a sign of Hamas’ weakness and that Fatah will help moderate the Islamic Resistance movement that rules Gaza. In other words, Palestinian unification is all about exposing the Palestinians’ true colors. If you’re a peace-process pessimist, it shows Fatah’s latent extremism; if you’re an optimist, it will make clear Hamas’ pragmatism.

I, too, think the deal reveals something important, which is why I am a big fan of Hamas-Fatah reconciliation—not because I think it will make peace likely, but because I think it is the only way to expose the hypocrisy and moral rot that has been at the core of Western thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict for more than 30 years.

Osama Bin Laden’s death offers a good opportunity to take stock of the larger incoherence of American Middle East policy, whose most outstanding feature seems to be an inability to tell our friends from our foes. One easy yardstick to use might be this: If you enthusiastically support a man whose grand strategy consisted of killing as many Americans as possible then you are our enemy. So, why are we seemingly insensible to the fact that Hamas mourned Osama’s passing and its leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, the elected prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, said that his killing was a “continuation of the United States’ policy of destruction”?

I’m actually more comfortable with Haniya’s public devotion to Bin Laden’s memory than with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad’s conviction that the al-Qaida chief’s death will “mark the beginning of the end of a violent era.” To be fair, though, I suspect Fayyad really means his encouraging words, but in terms of American strategy his statements are useful only as fodder for Western publications that have an interest in furthering the fantastical narrative of Palestinian moderates waiting patiently in Ramallah to make peace while enduring the daily humiliations of a pointless Israeli occupation. Fayyad also says he was “not aware” of Hamas’ condemnation of the killing, which is absurd because his life depends on his knowing what Hamas says about everything—just as his U.S.-sponsored salary and the institutions he seeks to build require him to oppose Hamas. In short, Fayyad is an American invention, the latest in a long series of moderate phantoms that we summon forth to hide the gap between the way we want the world to be and a reality that is often cruel but not often difficult to fathom.

The original model of the imaginary Palestinian moderate was none other than Yasser Arafat, a lifelong believer in one Palestine, who never peddled any illusions about his ultimate aims or the violent methods he was willing to employ in order to achieve them. The myth of the moderate Arafat, the Nobel peace prize winner, the Palestinian Mandela, was a Western invention. His 1974 U.N. speech promising either an olive branch or a freedom fighter’s gun was clear: If I don’t have peace on my terms, there will be death. This was two years after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and only months after he’d personally ordered the assassination of American diplomats in Sudan. What was Arafat’s peace? He was always clear about this—it meant Israel’s destruction.

To fulfill those ends, Arafat tried to topple the king of Jordan and then drove Lebanon to civil war in the 1970s and ’80s. When the Israelis and Syrians finally drove him out of Beirut, Western policymakers rescued Arafat from watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in Tunis. A Palestinian-Israeli agreement was to be part of Bill Clinton’s peace dividend, and the Americans gave Arafat a makeover. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he was reconstituted as a man of peace.

Arafat never asked for the Nobel Peace Prize he shared with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in 1994. It was given to him as part of a Western pantomime. He announced his intentions clearly when he said that the Palestinian movement had made a “strategic choice” for peace. But if peace itself isn’t the point, then what could possibly be the larger strategy, except the final elimination of Israel?

But why blame Arafat, or any of the Palestinian leadership, including Hamas, for taking American and European money, not giving anything in return, and saying they want more? They believe they’re in the right and that the land they get from Israel is theirs by right. The Palestinians, after all, do not see themselves as the beneficiaries of an international goodwill society, to whom they should be grateful. They are a real people who fight, kill, and die for what they believe in.

The Hamas-Fatah unity government does not lay bare the Palestinians’ hatred of Israel, which has been obvious for decades to anyone who reads the statements of Palestinian leaders or the textbooks they distribute to their children. It says nothing about the Palestinians themselves, for the Palestinians—moderates and radicals alike—have never been opaque about their goals. The debate between Palestinian moderates and radicals is a debate over the means, and the timetable, for reaching a common goal. They’ve been encouraged by Western mendacity for decades, and they’ve played a weak hand well.

Rather, Palestinian unification reveals the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the American and other Western policymakers who have been peddling a fantasy of Palestinian moderation and peaceful coexistence for more than 30 years. It is time for us to realize that the suggestion that fine words about peace will discourage people from shooting at each other is not clever or hopeful or even naïve: It is actively immoral. The Palestinians aren’t the liars; we are.

Sure, there are good reasons to pair the Jew hating Richard Nixon with the Jew hating, but self-loving Henry Kissinger. Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat go together like pastrami and kosher salami. But, deep down, you know it’s weird that Jews needed a chaperone until 2009, while Charles Lindbergh made the cut the very first time around in 1927.

Below, Time Magazine’s People of the Year who didn’t like, actively hated, or were, as we say, not very good for the Jews.

Charles Lindbergh (1927)
Pierre Laval (1931)
Wallis Simpson, duchess of Windsor (1936)
Adolf Hitler (1938)
Josef Stalin (1939)
Richard Nixon/Henry Kissinger (1972)
Ayatollah Khomeini (1979)
Yasser Arafat (1993)
You* (2006)

*Yes, you.
You could call more often.
What, do you want to kill your parents?

Person of the Year 2010 [Time]
Earlier: Jews Give It Up
‘Time’ Names Bernanke ‘Person of the Year’
Related: Why Kissinger Dismissed the Soviet Jews
Richard Nixon Explains Anti-Semitism
Why Rabin Shook Arafat’s Hand
Carl Paladino’s Betrayal of Reason

The area outside of the coffee shop is peppered with images and slogans that could only be found in Israel: a map of the country with the Palestinian areas removed; a soldier with the slogan “no legs, no problems”; a stencil of the national anthem, with the words changed (“the land of Zion and Jerusalem” has been replaced by “the land of Palestine and Jerusalem”). And, though Nocturno is a favorite hangout for art students from the Bezalel Academy, it’s hardly the only such canvas.

Graffiti has long been the focal point of the collective imagination here. In one form or another, it can be found everywhere from Hebron to Bethlehem, engaging both Israelis and Palestinians from all points on the political spectrum. Famously, it has also attracted scores of high-profile outsiders with statements to make, including the biggest names in the graffiti and street art worlds.

Israel has long had a unique passion for exchanging slogans in the street. In 2007, the country’s best-known hip hop outfit, Hadag Nahash, penned a tune in collaboration with the novelist David Grossman. Titled “Sticker Song,” it took its lyrics from the bewildering array of political slogans that can be found on bumper stickers up and down the country.

“These slogans are like capsules of Israeliness,” said Sha’anan Streett, the frontman of Hadag Nahash, when I met him at Nocturno. “They mirror the rhetorical ping-pong which is becoming a substitute for proper debate in a country that has lost any sense of hope.”

A similar sentiment haunts the walls 40 miles west, in the very different city of Tel Aviv. Locals have grown accustomed to images of the “Character,” a spindly, black-and-white vision of fragility, always struggling under an invisible weight, with a heart-shaped hole in the center of its chest. The Character is the creation of an Israeli artist who goes by the name Know Hope.

“The Character expresses the complex burden that Israelis grow up with,” said Know Hope, at his studio in Jaffa. “I weave moments of human fragility into a political statement.” Some of his best pieces, he said, are on the separation wall. One portrays the Character having his severed arm sewn together by a bird. Another has him pulling bandages out of his heart-shaped hole, on which is written: please believe. Later, beside a downtown café, I find another of his pieces: the Character holding a weeping bird to his mouth, as if about to breathe life into it—or devour it.

Several hours north, in the settlement of Hebron, the graffiti looks quite different. In 2001, the IDF closed down a Palestinian market that was built on disputed land, as it had become a flash-point of violence. This has had a profound impact on the local economy, and now the place is a ghost town. On the rows of boarded-up shops are strings of spray-painted Stars of David, accompanied by belligerent slogans, the most radical of which—“death to the Arabs”—has been (badly) painted out.

In the Palestinian territories, the graffiti is dramatically different again. According to Matt Rees, a crime author and former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine who accompanied me across the checkpoint, graffiti in Palestine tends to be linked to the militant groups. Slogans there are color-coded according to faction, he said: Yellow for Fatah, red for the PFLP.

On a recent afternoon, Rees and I passed through a little-used checkpoint into the West Bank. As we entered the Duheisha Refugee Camp, all around us were graffiti portraits of Intifada-era martyrs. Most prominent of these was an imposing image of Ayat al-Akhras, the third and youngest female suicide bomber, who lived her whole life here. The unsigned portrait, completed in 2002, has been recently given a fresh lick of paint.

Perhaps the most famed piece of graffiti in the region is located on the nearby partition wall, a part of which has become a Mecca for international graffiti artists since the reclusive British sensation Banksy painted here five years ago.

Banksy’s work brought the region prominence and with it the possibility of commercial advantage. Rees introduced me to two Palestinians, one of whom said he used to be a bodyguard for Yasser Arafat. They took us to a location where they had stashed a piece of a wall from someone else’s house. On it is an original Banksy: a soldier frisking a donkey. Although they worry about Palestinians being compared to animals, they wanted to sell it. “We will use the money for the children of Palestine,” the ex-bodyguard told me.

But graffiti in the region doesn’t only get inspiration from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—it’s also used as a language for domestic Israeli issues. In Jerusalem, in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Meah She’arim, the anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Neturei Karta sect has plastered the neighborhood with anti-statehood slogans.

“God wants the State of Israel to be totally dismantled,” says Yoel Kroiz, a leading figure in the radical organization. “Since the establishment of the State of Israel, we haven’t had one day of peace. Jews should be living as a minority within a Palestinian state. That’s the only way to end the conflict.”

Kroiz, who was detained last year for an alleged tear gas assault on a woman he considered immodest, sees himself as part of a long tradition. In his cluttered quarters, he showed me his dust-covered collection of Orthodox street-posters, which stretches back over 90 years. Among the religious edicts and signs protesting the desecration of ancient graves is his anti-Zionist collection. “We mourn the existence of the State of Israel,” says one. “Arabs, yes, Zionists, no,” reads another.

On a wall a little further down the road, the two extremisms are in collision. “Death to the Arabs” has been scrawled on a wall by a member of the hardline settler movement. An ultra-Orthodox radical has crossed out “death,” changing the slogan to “Palestine to the Arabs.” The conflict of views here—all types of views—is nowhere as clear as on its ancient walls.

Jake Wallis Simons is a U.K.-based novelist, journalist, and graphic artist.

Yaakov “Kobi” Shimoni, also known by his stage name, Subliminal, didn’t sign that letter. As the self-proclaimed father of Israeli hip-hop, Subliminal has become over the past decade by far the most prominent solo hip-hop artist in the country, acquiring a fan base of thousands of teens and young adults—many of them Israeli soldiers. Subliminal has performed to sold-out arenas in Israel and the United States and has sold over 150,000 records (from a variety of solo, duet, and collaborative projects), an impressive number in the modest Israeli market. The business daily The Marker estimated that his latest solo album, Just When You Thought It Was Over, grossed well over 4 million shekels (about $1.2 million) in combined album sales, ringtones, and downloads, which places him among the top-earning Israeli musicians today.

Although a rapper by name, Subliminal radically defies the archetypical characteristics of traditional hip-hop performers. He doesn’t drink, smoke, do drugs, or fight, and he preaches against these things in his music. Sporting a self-styled wardrobe he refers to as “chic-Zionism,” his bling is a colossal diamond-covered Star of David necklace. He wears baggy pants, oversized knee-length jerseys, and sideways baseball caps—the style of a “gangsta rapper” without any of the “gangsta” features. Like a reformed rapper who lacks those rebellious qualities that for good or bad may actually make rap interesting in the first place, Subliminal offers his fans a sterilized hip-hop spectacle: Snoop without the weed, Eminem without the rage, or Tupac without the guns.

What Subliminal lacks in belligerency, though, he makes up for with his signature trait: patriotism. In the wake of the Ariel controversy, Livnat, the culture minister, publicly chastised Israeli artists for their politicization of art, calling on them instead to “leave the political debate outside the realm of culture.” But Livnat’s request was as unreasonable as it was futile, as Subliminal’s immense popularity proves.

In the past, critics have viewed Subliminal’s mass appeal with an elitist suspicion that led them to dismiss him as a populist rightwing extremist. But with such broad strokes, critics also forfeit the chance to explore the complexity, contradiction, and outright confusion that characterizes Subliminal’s music, lyrics, and public persona, and the problematic political culture that he represents. For anyone seeking to understand Israel’s right turn in recent years—a trend exemplified by the government’s decision to require loyalty oaths from its non-Jewish population—Subliminal’s music seems like a good place to start.

***

How does a nice Jewish boy from the Tel Aviv suburbs appropriate a cultural form of protest once reserved for inner-city black youths? I sat with Subliminal one evening this August, drinking coffee in a quiet bistro in the modest northern Tel Aviv neighborhood where he grew up and still lives, just a few houses down from the home of Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni. He is dark skinned and wide bodied, with a trim beard and black clothes, and the first impression he gives off—by his own admission—is the air of an Arab. If not for his Cheshire-cat smile, he could easily be mistaken for an intimidating figure. (“When I go abroad people are always surprised to meet me,” he said. “No one believes Jews could look like me.”)

The son of immigrant parents—his father fled Tunisia and his mother Iran—Subliminal, 31, came of age during the chronically unstable days after the Oslo peace accords. Like many teenagers at the time, he listened to American rappers like Public Enemy, N.W.A, and Notorious B.I.G. Like other youth around the world, Subliminal found a message to which he could relate in those rappers’ dissident culture and protest lyrics. “I have always been a proud Zionist,” he explained. “But when I was growing up, being a Zionist was tantamount to being the outcast. The prevailing vibe around me was more in tune with the anarchic messages of [popular Israeli rock artist] Aviv Geffen and his motto that we were ‘a fucked-up generation.’ ”

In Subliminal’s eyes, Geffen’s controversial call to not serve in the army epitomized “negativity.” As a result, Subliminal started writing lyrics challenging those peacenik attitudes and adapting them to the rhythmic riffs he had been precociously composing since he was 12. “Hip-hop was a godsend that gave me the tools to wage my own protest,” he said. “A protest on the side of good and in favor of all those ideals that no one was talking about anymore, like Zionism, Judaism, and traditionalism.”

By the end of the decade and after completing his military service, Subliminal fused his tough-guy image to his original mix of quick phrases, patriotic paeans, and electronic beats, often augmented by a catchy melodic chorus. Local record producers took note. Together with his former partner Yoav Eliasi, known as “The Shadow,” and several other collaborators, Subliminal has recorded four studio albums and a number of chart-topping singles in the last 10 years. He has also founded his own hip-hop record label, called TACT.

Unlike American hip-hop, which developed in stark opposition to anything that could be associated with the establishment, Subliminal’s self-proclaimed “Zionist hip-hop” has always followed an inverted model. (He half-jokingly told me, “I am the establishment.”) While Public Enemy called on listeners to “fight the power,” Subliminal instead decided to join it. “This is Israel, not America” he explained. “If I see a cop chasing someone down the street, odds are, you will see me running along to help out the cop.”

Subliminal makes no apologies for borrowing from hip-hop’s musical form while leaving its combative lyrical content behind. His long-standing cooperation with government institutions remains a noticeable source of pride for him. Over the years, Subliminal has worked with the prime minister’s office, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Education, and numerous charities that benefit the Israel Defense Forces. He has recorded songs to help prevent traffic accidents. In support of Holocaust education, Subliminal teamed up with renowned violinist Miri Ben-Ari to make a hip-hop version of the sacred Jewish prayer Adon Olam. His songs have a palpable pedagogic quality that can sound like a public service announcement, with explicit suggestions to get a job, study hard, stay off drugs, avoid violence, and respect women. As one of his latest singles preaches, “Whoever acts well, lives well.”

***

Subliminal’s unprecedented success came with a price. His institutional solidarity, nationalist lyrics, and jingoist theatrics often lead him to perform on flag-draped stages to chants of “Who here is proud to be a Zionist?” Israeli critics have branded him a fascist, a right-wing extremist, and a hip-hop sellout. An editorial on the popular Israeli news site Walla went as far as to call for a boycott of his music. “I have been called a fascist, even a Nazi, but I could never really understand why,” Subliminal said. “The truth is that what the media has always thought of me is the opposite of what the average man on the street was thinking.”

Talking with Subliminal has the feeling of listening to a man dictate his memoirs. He has a personal anecdote for every question and an endearing family story to go with any answer. Although at times unabashedly self-aggrandizing (“I am not ashamed to say that I am by far the best hip-hop artist in Israel,” he told me) and occasionally simplistic and infantile (“Why can’t people just say that I am good?”), Subliminal’s words are passionate and his intentions seem sincere.

Listening to all of his music at once can feel like taking in a full DVD box set of after-school specials, with a broad set of subjects: hope, patriotism, strength, unity, order, faith, and peace. There is no mention of hatred, racism, Islamophobia, Israeli occupation, or other touchstones of Israeli radicalism. The image of violence—the sine qua non for any self-respecting extremist—is unequivocally presented in a negative light and shunned rather than sanctioned by his music. “When a song makes a left-wing stance they call it protest,” says Arye Avitan (aka “Tchulu”), who owns a chain of hip-hop clothing stores and is a veteran music producer who has mentored many young rappers, including Subliminal. “But when it suggests something remotely right-wing, they immediately call it fascism.”

Subliminal’s earliest hit, “Live Day by Day” (co-written with Eliasi), debuted just as the Oslo accords began to fall apart, and the lyric “The country swings like a cigarette in Arafat’s mouth,” elicited a barrage of criticism, even though the idea echoed what prominent left-wing politicians like Ehud Barak were saying in speeches at the time. Subliminal bemoaned the selfishness, crime, poverty, avarice, and fanaticism that have pervaded Israeli society (“We are all at fault that everything here sucks”), but his song sounded less like a right-wing anthem and more like Tupac’s popular rendition of the Bruce Hornsby classic “The Way It Is.”

While Subliminal’s lyrics may send out mixed signals, his personal convictions are much less ambiguous. “When Rabin was murdered, I cried for days like everyone else,” he said. He adamantly also denied being “a right-wing artist” and further claimed that if he thought the Palestinians could be trusted he would support “doing everything possible” to secure genuine peace. In response to radical right-wing activists attending his shows, Subliminal began performing with the Israeli-Arab rapper Tamer Nafar, though the two have since fallen out over Nafar’s increasing anti-Israeli militancy. Maybe most surprising was to hear that Subliminal’s ideal political party was Kadima under Ariel Sharon—the same moderate centrist party that led Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005.

***

Subliminal prods critics, but in his music there is no discernible, distinctive political agenda. Instead, there are only crude nationalist emotions guiding listeners through a wasteland of broken promises from both the left and right. But if Subliminal does not fall squarely under any prevailing political category, then where do we place him? The rapper himself defines his political identity as Zionism. But less than reflecting a cogent set of ideas, Subliminal’s Zionism seems to symbolize an internal confusion.

Two distinct themes emerge in Subliminal’s music. The first is disappointment with the peace process. In “Live Day by Day,” Subliminal sings: “Ask me where we’re at, it’s nowhere; living in a land without peace, where everyone is sinking into a dream.” In his catchy hit “Tikva,” from his and Eliasi’s 2002 album, The Light and the Shadow, this theme continues: “You promised us a dove, but instead a buzzard has swarmed from above. We are living in a dream, talking about peace but still squeezing on the trigger.” And from the hit song “Divide and Conquer”: “To think that an olive branch symbolizes peace? Sorry, it doesn’t live here anymore; it’s been kidnapped or murdered. Where is God in all of this?” But this recurring pattern of disillusionment doesn’t so much express an inherent objection to the peace process as reflect disappointment in its results. After all, Subliminal, like most Israelis today, once embraced a two-state solution on the basis of land for peace.

Listen to “Tikva”:

The second distinctive quality of Subliminal’s music is that it is tied to the past. Disillusioned by the present, Subliminal has found inspiration in old Israeli pop hits and traditional Jewish hymns, and this remixing of old songs with new beats has become one of his trademarks. Haaretz critic Amos Harel has called Subliminal’s musical realm a “third-rate gangster’s paradise.” But unlike his hip-hop heroes Puff Daddy, Jay-Z, or Coolio, who he at times appears to imitate, Subliminal romanticizes—instead of resurrects—the past.

He has remixed “Flowers in the Barrel,” a victory song from Israel’s 1967 war, originally recorded by an IDF army band, and the Hanukkah chant “Banu Hoshech Legaresh,” which celebrates the Maccabees. But the most famous display of his retro style is the hit single, “60 Years Old,” released two years ago on Israel’s 60th anniversary, and featuring the legendary kibbutz chorus “The Gevatron.” The remix orientalizes an early-1980s folk hit with an onslaught of derbekkeh drums and swirling ethnic background vocals, and it layers on lyrics with nostalgic longings:

We learn from our experience,
So let’s remember what once was, and do it right,
Let’s take responsibility, ’cause this country is ours,
We won’t accomplish anything, if we don’t remember where we come from

In choosing a song originally written as an apotheosis for the mythologized kibbutz, Subliminal has sought to appropriate the implicit qualities of strength, solidarity, and sacrifice, which are embedded in that myth. The cultural critic Rubik Rosenthal has called this rendition an adequate reflection of the “chaos” gripping Israeli culture, because it suggests “a chain of values that have almost nothing in common with contemporary Israel, nor with its conceivable future, but rather maybe with what once was her past.”

“I want us to live like people here used to live way back,” Subliminal said when I asked about his excessive nostalgia. “I am my father’s son. And I want to preserve the traditions from my father’s generation. In his time, people cared about each other and about the state of Israel. Today, an entire generation has forgotten that, and it’s my task to help them remember.”

***

There is something in Subliminal’s reconstruction of the past into a grand palliative for the present that is much more reminiscent of conservative political thinker Edmund Burke than rapper Biggie Smalls. The disillusionment from the unfulfilled promises of peace, and the consequential longing for a mythologized past to alleviate the disappointment, are neither fascist nor populist traits but rather conservative ones. Subliminal’s unwavering dedication to the stability and continuity of the state and its traditional institutions, his reverence for Jewish heritage and faith, his profound commitment to family, and his uncompromising respect for law and order, have the markings of an archetypical conservative ideology. Irving Kristol famously described neoconservatives of postwar America as having been “mugged by reality”—a fitting label for the disenchanted generation of Israelis to which Subliminal belongs.

That such a label doesn’t fit all or even most Israelis does not undermine the fact that it speaks to enough of them. In the wake of last year’s parliamentary elections, Haaretz observed that the most distinctive characteristics of the current Knesset is that it is more right-wing and younger than any before it. The rise over the past decade of what Subliminal refers to as his own “mass movement”—primarily made up of younger Israelis—certainly helps explain why.

Like with any conservative ideology, the attempt to navigate the present through the past is destined to leave many Israelis mired in contradiction, as Subliminal himself remains. “I think that being pro-Palestinian is a very good thing,” he told me. “But I also think that being anti-Israeli is something against which I am willing to fight until my last drop of blood.”

Consistently ambivalent, Subliminal claims that brains and not brawn will resolve the conflict; yet every idea he offers in one way or another falls back on force. When I confronted him with the timeless Israeli dilemma—is it good to die for your country?—he answered, hesitantly: “No, it’s not good to die for anything, period. But, if you have to die for something, it might as well be for something as important as that.” This recurring oscillation reflects the immaturity of those Israelis who want everything but are willing to give up nothing. They dream of a genuine peace but are not prepared to sacrifice in order to gain it. They believe that only overwhelming military power can guarantee Israel’s security, while overlooking the fact that their continuing corruption by such power may contribute to their insecurity in the first place.

Subliminal’s pacified hip-hop won’t resolve any of these dilemmas. But political demands still saturate Israeli popular culture, which suggests that art may yet open a window of imagination through which politics could one day redeem itself. That Subliminal’s next album will probably not provide us with any solutions doesn’t mean we should not keep listening, and hoping, that at the very least, it will help us better understand the complex problems at hand.

Listen to an unreleased Subliminal track, “Fuego”:

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for Maariv.

Born in Jericho, on the West Bank, raised under Israeli military occupation, and educated in Arizona (where he received an undergraduate degree in finance and then an MBA), Areikat toggles back and forth between the somber acknowledgment of competing narratives of nationhood and oppression, sharp political gossip, and more muted versions of the fiery speeches about colonization and dispossession that made the secular Palestinian national cause a favorite among Western students in the 1970s, in the days before Islamists seized the mantle of resistance.

Yet for all the fluidity of his style and the intelligence of his presentation, there is something insubstantial about Areikat that seems less like a personal failing than a product of the fact that his title is a well-meaning lie: He is an ambassador without a country, the emissary of a dream-state without borders that has commanded and frustrated the imagination of the world for over 40 years. The deferral of the Palestinian national dream through war and peace, international conferences and agreements, self-inflicted wounds, settlement and occupation, year after year and decade after decade, has become one of the defining characteristics of a dream that refuses to die yet resists being born. The delivery date is always pushed back another year or two, and then another year. Arguments about whether the failure lies with Israel or the Palestinians, Arafat, Sharon, Clinton, Bush or Obama, meddling Iranians, Likud hardliners, Baruch Goldstein or Hamas, the Holocaust, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, or the Sykes Picot agreement of 1916 have lost their savor even for the bitterest ideologues. The world won’t stand for it any longer, but then the world moves on to something else. With the West Bank ruled by the Israel Defense Forces and Gaza ruled by Hamas, the Palestinian people seem more divided now than at any time since their national movement began.

Areikat displays excellent control over his body language and enjoys playing games. When I arrive to meet him in the lounge of a busy tourist hotel in midtown Manhattan, I find him seated with a glass of water in front of him and his jacket and tie slung over the back of the opposite chair. He watches me, curious to see whether I will ask his permission, move it myself, or sit down and then lean forward for the rest of the interview. When I move his jacket to a nearby chair, he smiles and then stands up to shake my hand, while continuing to talk on his cell phone to Ramallah in Arabic about his meeting with the editorial board of the New York Times. I set out the instruments of my trade on the table and listen in on his conversation until he is done.

For decades many Jews in Israel and America denied that there was such a thing as a Palestinian people. I think that most people in our community today see that as a shameful thing. However even as the Jewish community has stopped for the most part propagating this kind of false and insulting narrative, we wonder why there is not a similar recognition on the part of Palestinians of our deep historical and emotional connection to our national homeland.

One hundred years of struggle over that piece of land that was called Palestine produced a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions. We witnessed the rise of national movements that were struggling to create homelands for their own people, and neither one wanted to acknowledge the presence of the other. I think of the early Zionist slogans of a land without a people for a people without a land, all the books and the papers and the statements that were made by the early Zionists and the Israelis after the creation of the state of Israel, the denial of the existence of the Palestinian people, and then later the denial by the Palestinians of the existence of the state of Israel, that they have to go back to where they came from. I remember former Prime Minister Golda Meir saying that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people in the early ’70s. I remember Palestinians saying that the only Jews in the land of Palestine are going to be Palestinian Jews. I think the bloody conflict brought leaders on both sides to their senses. We have seen at least, from the Palestinian side, since 1988, a clear acceptance of the existence of the State of Israel.

I wrote a cover story for the Atlantic about the Ra’is, Yasser Arafat right after he died, and I interviewed all the Palestinian leaders who were close to Arafat, as well as the leading Israeli, American, and international policymakers who dealt with him. One story that I heard many times is how the Camp David negotiations fell apart when Arafat would not acknowledge that there was a Jewish temple in Jerusalem.

This was used by Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren in his recent op-ed in the New York Times, and I just want to know, how did he base his statement. On what information?

Bill Clinton tells the story, too. I also interviewed Madeleine Albright and Ehud Barak about it, and they said the same thing. They remembered that Clinton was very angry. He said, “Look, it was in the Encyclopedia Britannica, how can you say it was not there?” And Arafat said, “There was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It didn’t exist. It’s a myth. Maybe it was in Hebron. Maybe the Jews came from Saudi Arabia.” You know the kind of nonsense he used to talk.

People forget that Chairman Arafat was the first Palestinian leader to take the major risk of signing an agreement with Israel that recognized Israel’s right to exist. I don’t think there would have been any other Palestinian leader who would have had the courage to do that. And they just, in a moment of rage because you know he didn’t go along with a plan that was submitted to him at Camp David, decide to make him the bad guy.

OK. Now that we are sitting across the table here in New York 10 years later, under completely different circumstances, let me ask you this: Was there ever a Jewish temple in Jerusalem?

I’m not a historian.

I have the reference right here from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Is it wrong?

I’m not a historian.  What are you trying to get to? That Jews were present then?

Were they?

President Abbas in his meeting with the leaders of the American Jewish community in June said that yes, the Jews were in the Middle East, and that one-third of the Quran talks about Jews.

Are the people who say they’re Israeli Jews today related to the people who were Jews in the time of the Quran?

It’s for historians to establish the link. I believe many Jews who lived at one point in that land continue to live in that land, and their descendants stayed in that land.

So, today’s Palestinians are the real Jews?

Everywhere in the world, Jews follow the nationality and citizenship of the country where they live. In the United States, you have American Jews, who live in the United States. You have French Jews. And this was the original argument between us and the Jews. Why can’t you be Palestinian Jews?

Is Judaism simply a religion, or are Jews also a people—like Kurds or Armenians?

That is something you have to work out for yourselves. At one point, we believed that Jews are followers of religion, and not a nation and a people, and I’ll tell you why. In order to be one people, one nation, you have to be homogenous. Look at Jews all over the world, you see American Jews who are blond and with green-blue eyes. You see Yemeni Jews who are dark like me with brown eyes and brown hair—not brown anymore for me—and you see French and Russian Jews who are a mixture of this and that. So, basically a lot of historians on the Palestinian side and the Arab side say, “Well, if they were a people, one nation, they would be homogenous, 90 percent alike except for 10 not-alike, as we Palestinians are.” Some of us still make the same arguments of the ’60s and the ’70s: “No, they are not a nation, they are the followers of a faith, they should live in every country as citizens of that country.”

That approach didn’t work out so well for us in Europe.

I think you have been very much influenced by the Holocaust. And the thing that my Jewish listeners, audience, or readers should understand is that we Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust. As a matter of fact, Palestinians, in the early years of the Jewish migration to Palestine, tried to help the Jewish immigrants as much as possible, to make them feel at home.

In our community, we’re taught that the toleration of Jews in most Muslim empires was greater than it was in Christian Europe. But we also hear that, for example, the other day the head of the Palestine National Council, Salim Zanoun, said that the Palestinian people can never recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

I said it yesterday!

Why did you say that?

Israel is a political establishment that claims to represent Jews all over the world. I very much doubt that Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu represent every Jew in the world. I know there are Jews who don’t agree with Netanyahu.

You know the saying: Two Jews, three opinions.

But what I want to say about tolerance is that the Jewish-Muslim relationship enjoyed much more years of peace and tranquility than the Christian-Jewish relationship or the Muslim-Christian relationship. My grandfather was a partner with a Jewish man in a bakery shop in west Jerusalem. When he was—when my grandfather left in 1948, he left everything, he left his home, he left his bakery, he left everything, but he was a partner. My mother used to tell me stories about how they lived in peace and harmony. That’s why a lot of people argue that the politicization of Judaism led to the friction and the conflict with the Palestinians. In the beginning we used to say, “We are not against Jews or Judaism.” We were against Zionism as a political theory.

So, explain why it’s impossible for the Palestinian people to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

We have no problem whatsoever with what Israel calls themselves. Israel can call themselves “The Great Empire of the Jewish People.” But don’t ask me to recognize that.

Why not? You want us to recognize the validity of your narrative of Palestinian people-hood.

We are still negotiating an end to this conflict. Let’s say that tomorrow the Palestinian leadership comes out and says, “OK, we’re ready to recognize the Jewishness of the state.” What implications would that have, immediately, on the Palestinians? You know that in our view the refugee problem is the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today we have 6.5 million registered refugees out of 10 or 10.5 million Palestinians. One out of six refugees in the world is Palestinian. By accepting Israel’s claim now, that they are a Jewish state, we are telling the Israelis: Forget about the refugees, forget about their plight, no right of return, no U.N. General Assembly resolution 194; we are giving up the refugee issue, we are taking it off the table before we even started negotiating.

Secondly, you know that there are between 18 and 20 percent non-Jews who are living in Israel, who are mostly Palestinians, and who are part of the Palestinian people. By accepting the Israeli plan that they are a Jewish state, we are undermining the rights of this minority, who are already suffering discrimination at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

Doesn’t the U.N. partition resolution on which you base your own national claims for a Palestinian state already recognize Israel as a state for the Jews—a Jewish state?

The partition plan of 1947, which I talked about yesterday at my speech at Columbia, did give 54 percent, 55 percent to a Jewish state, and 45 percent to an Arab state. The Arabs rejected that. Israel launched war and won the war, and they expanded their territory from 55 to 78, but the only time in my memory that a Jewish state was really mentioned was in the partition plan 181. Does Israel want us to go back to that? Fine.

So, you refuse to call Israel a Jewish state, but if they gave you more land it would be OK?

We’d be getting double the amount of land. Who would refuse that? But do you really want to turn that now into a political maneuver by trying to put forth a condition that you know in advance the Palestinians are not going to accept? The real issues are: ending the conflict, ending the Israeli military occupation, allowing the Palestinians to be independent, and providing security for Israel.

When you imagine a future Palestinian state, do you imagine it being a place where Jews, if they wish to become Palestinian citizens, could own property, vote in elections, and practice their religion freely?

I remember in the mid-’90s, the late [PLO official] Faisal Husseini said repeatedly “OK, if Israelis choose to stay in a future Palestinian state, they are more than welcome to do that. But under one condition: They have to respect and obey Palestinian laws, they cannot be living as Israelis. They have to respect Palestinian laws and abide by them.” When Faisal Husseini died, basically no Palestinian leader has publicly supported the notion that they can stay.

What we are saying is the following: We need to separate. We have to separate. We are in a forced marriage. We need to divorce. After we divorce, and everybody takes a period of time to recoup, rebound, whatever you want to call it, we may consider dating again.

So, you think it would be necessary to first transfer and remove every Jew—

Absolutely. No, I’m not saying to transfer every Jew, I’m saying transfer Jews who, after an agreement with Israel, fall under the jurisdiction of a Palestinian state.

Any Jew who is inside the borders of Palestine will have to leave?

Absolutely. I think this is a very necessary step, before we can allow the two states to somehow develop their separate national identities, and then maybe open up the doors for all kinds of cultural, social, political, economic exchanges, that freedom of movement of both citizens of Israelis and Palestinians from one area to another. You know you have to think of the day after.

I’ve been traveling to the region since I was a child, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is that in the 1970s and 1980s Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs knew each other much better than they do now.

Following the Israeli occupation in 1967, the police station in my hometown of Jericho was headed by an Israeli police commander. I remember one time I went with two of my friends to a nearby Israeli settlement in Jericho, back in the ‘80s, to visit some Israelis who used to come to the shop and buy things from us. We’d have coffee and tea. The struggle was not crystallized yet.

I remember when I traveled to Europe in the late ’70s, and to the United States in the early ’80s, yes, we thought of ourselves as Palestinians, but we were traveling with Jordanian passports. Publicly we are Jordanians, but deep inside we are Palestinians.

That’s how many Jews feel about the passports that they carry.

I understand. When I talk to people about Israel’s obsession with security, I say I believe it’s genuine. I know that the Israelis exaggerate it. But I believe in many aspects it is genuine. I understand the horrific experience that Jews had during the Holocaust, but then I sit and say—

Your father didn’t do it.

Exactly. I am not the one. It was Germany. Germany was part of the Western community. I don’t want to get into religion, but they were Christians, not Muslims. Why should I pay the price for the political movement called Zionism, which said, “It’s time to reclaim parts of Palestinian territory that at one point were home for the kingdom of David, of Israel”—which you and I know was concentrated in the northern part of the West Bank. It never was in Jerusalem, it never was on the coast, it never was in Hebron.

Of course it was in Jerusalem.

No.

The City of David is right there.

No, I mean, it was from Shechem to the outskirts of Jerusalem. It was never the Palestine that they claim.

Continue reading: rockets, refugees, and “the idea that me and my family will come and live in your house.” Or view as a single page.

“I’m wonderful! I’m great!” chirps Rep. Shelley Berkley as she scoops ground coffee into a four-cup Black & Decker in her suburban Vegas home on the first morning of Rosh Hashanah. We’re headed out to stop at four different synagogues. “I’ve got to be the luckiest person in the world!” she says.

In this autumn of mass discontent with incumbents in general and Democrats in particular, the six-term congresswoman with nominal 2010 opposition is counting her blessings. At 59, she’s arrived at the place she’s always wanted to be, recognized as one of the most strident, hawkish pro-Israel voices in Washington while not sacrificing a bit of her brassy, Vegas-style pizzazz or otherwise strident left-leaning views. Even the evangelical Christian activist Gary Bauer says of Berkley: “Oh, I like her a lot. I think she’s gutsy, she’s articulate, she has a lot of flair.”

Indeed, her only real political quandary right now is whether to continue to, as she likes to say, bloom where she’s planted in the House of Representatives, or seek grander glory. She is Nevada’s only safe federal Democrat this year—a notable contrast, in particular, to her mentor, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—and her state’s other Senate seat is likely to be contested in 2012 thanks to a sex scandal hounding its Republican occupant, John Ensign. She openly wonders whether she might do even more for her two primary causes, Nevada and Israel, from Congress’ upper chamber.

“I wouldn’t have a primary,” she tells a Chabad rabbi during our day together. “I would capture the Democratic primary without a problem. I have to decide if I’m willing to forgo a sure thing to go for the gold. If I lose, then I’m out. I’d be risking a lot.”

Few politicians do this sort of deliberating and strategizing so publicly, but Berkley is also the sort to call out her own party’s president when she sees him making what she views as grave missteps on Israel. Fewer still would, as Berkley did on Rosh Hashanah, empathize with an irate Jewish constituent and say that President Barack Obama has “blown it” with the Jews.

Then again, Berkley is also willing to stand at the end of her driveway in triple-digit heat waving down a tardy, lost reporter arriving for an interview and then sit him on a breakfast-bar stool to make him coffee. She serves that brew in a blue plastic mug that reads “My favorite congresswoman Shelley Berkley,” and then when I wonder what my journalist colleagues would think of me drinking from it, jokes with a dismissive wave and a cackle, “Oh, puleeze, they all have their own!”

Then, clad in a bold fuchsia suit jacket, a monochrome-swirled skirt, and black-and-white polka-dot shoes she brags she bought at DSW, she drives us away in the Ford Fusion hybrid she recently purchased to replace her gas-guzzling Cadillac. (She drives a SmartCar in D.C.)

We’re en route to Temple Beth Shalom for her aliyah, for which she’ll take out the tiny piece of gum she’s always chewing and leave it in a scrap of tissue on her seat. That seat is at the front row of the sanctuary’s second section, where worshippers must walk by her and she can schmooze.

This is her shul, the one she has belonged to since she was a 12-year-old Rochelle Levine and her parents moved her and her sister here from the Catskills to outrun her father’s gambling debts. The Levines had planned to relocate to California, but her parents were entranced by the glitter of the Strip after a detour to see the Hoover Dam, so they stayed. Las Vegas had about 130,000 residents then, and it had one synagogue.

“The first thing my father did when we got here was go down to the union hall and get a job, and the first thing my mother did was join the temple,” she recalls. It was the summer of 1963, and her dad became a waiter at the Sands Hotel-Casino.

Politics entered Berkley’s bloodstream quite early, motivated as much as anything by the tales her grandmothers relayed of the shtetls her family came from and the Nazi genocide that occurred there. “I wanted to be in a position that, God forbid anything were to happen to my people like what happened in the Holocaust, I would be in a position to help stop it,” she tells me. “When I decided to do this, I decided I was going to be a Jew who happened to be an elected official. I wear my Jewishness on my sleeve. I don’t apologize for it to anybody.”

She first became president of Las Vegas B’nai B’rith Girls, and later she was UNLV student body president. She worked on successful state assembly campaigns in 1968 for two political novices who would become U.S. senators, Reid and Richard Bryan. Berkley paid for her law degree by serving cocktails in Strip casinos, then she served a term in the state assembly and two on the board of regents before her 1998 election to Congress.

That was a heady transition. She attended the 1999 state dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a breakfast for Jewish members of Congress the following morning at which Barak predicted that a peace deal would come within 18 months.

“I walked out of that breakfast thinking, ‘I’ve only been here five months. I’ve already brought peace to the Middle East,’ ” Berkley says as we sit in the Beth Shalom lobby after her aliyah. “I thought, ‘What is so difficult?’ The reality is not so easy. I remember being interviewed and telling people what happened in the breakfast, but then the peace track with Syria fell apart because Assad demanded Israel give back the Golan Heights before they would sit down. That wasn’t going to happen. Arafat continued and continued and continued until he had wrung out every concession he could make. At Camp David, Israel offered 97 percent of the West Bank, control of Gaza, control of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, and Arafat walked away, started the second Intifada.”

Those early years set the tone for Berkley’s tenure in Washington. To her, it proved that the Palestinians don’t want peace, they want the destruction of Israel, and so it is incumbent upon the United States to stand firmly beside Israeli leaders almost no matter what.

That explains her rocky relationship with the president. Berkley was a staunch Hillary Clinton supporter who endorsed Obama only after Clinton conceded the nomination and only after Obama called and pledged his support for Israel as well as his opposition to storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, one of the top local issues for Nevada.

Then she was apoplectic when the administration “drew a line that didn’t need to be drawn” by condemning West Bank settlements in May 2009. Berkley believes Obama is trying to—and can—recover, and that his performance during the flotilla crisis was “excellent,” but that there is a genuine mistrust in the activist Jewish community toward the Democratic president.

“Nothing is irretrievable,” she says, shortly after making the remark to the constituent that Obama had “blown it” with the Jews. “But right now he’s in a very bad place with the organized Jewish community.”

She’s pleased to see Rahm Emanuel depart as Obama’s chief of staff. Berkley, who chairs a semi-annual gathering of Jewish legislators from the European Union and the United States, recalls often being asked why Emanuel wasn’t doing more for the Israeli agenda. Berkley and Emanuel, former colleagues in Congress, “weren’t the closest of friends then and nothing much has changed,” she says. Meanwhile, while she faults President George W. Bush for many things during his presidency, she believes the Republican president was more personally committed to Israel than Obama.

It’s this sort of blunt talk that impresses folks like Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council now on the executive board of Christians United for Israel. The two part ways on virtually every other issue, but on this they’ve formed an unlikely friendship.

“I think she’s a leader in this regard,” says Bauer, who recalls Berkley receiving the most rousing applause of any speaker at his group’s annual convention in July from a crowd he described as “overwhelming conservative, Christian, and pro-life.” “There are other people on Capitol Hill that will privately say to their constituents, ‘Of course I’m with Israel and I’m talking to the White House behind the scenes’ to get the policy better. But she’s been willing to say it publicly. This is the way you can tell when a political figure really feels something in their heart.”

Because of her prominence on Israel, Berkley’s own constituents occasionally seem to forget how liberal she is. She supports abortion rights, same-sex marriage, the Obama stimulus efforts, and the health reform bill. On Rosh Hashanah, as she dropped in on one Jewish group after the next, several people cornered her to explain her refusal to condemn the planned Islamic community center and mosque near Ground Zero in New York. The Chabad rabbi was particularly upset.

“You know what also made me crazy,” Berkley retorts in a thick New York accent, still intact despite a near half-century in Nevada. “Two things. First of all, I didn’t like the fact that opponents keep calling that area ‘hallowed grounds.’ This is downtown New York. There’s a porno place, a bar, and tattoo parlor. Not exactly hallowed ground. And, number two, I’m very cognizant of the fact that we are such a small minority and I thought if a Jewish congresswoman starts condemning other religions and building where they have the right quite frankly to build, that’s going to turn around on us.”

Berkley happens to be on fairly good terms with the Muslim community in Las Vegas. A Muslim friend, Dr. Ikram Khan, played shadkhen in arranging her first date with her second husband, Dr. Larry Lehrner, and Berkley says Lehrner’s practice is half Muslim. The day after our Rosh Hashanah tour, she visited a mosque to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Aslam Abdullah, the executive director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, says he finds Berkley to be accessible, friendly, and respectful.

Accessible, indeed. This is a congresswoman who admitted to me on my “The Strip” podcast in 2006 that she missed a vote on Gulf Coast relief after Hurricane Katrina because she was recovering from plastic surgery. (Republicans reacted with a press release, which still makes her giggle.) She happily indulged the hounding cameras of TMZ.com in July 2009 on why she supported a posthumous Congressional honor for Michael Jackson because of his ties to Las Vegas. And as she walks me around her home pointing out her favorite tchochkes, we wind up in her bathroom taking stock of the framed pictures from exotic worldwide destinations she and her husband have visited.

“I love being the congresswoman from Las Vegas and a lot of the bright clothes and the bling and all,” she says. “I have an image I want to portray. I reflect the glitz and the glitter of the community I represent. And every now and then I take a step back and I just can’t believe that I am fortunate enough to be doing what I’m doing. I’m the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants who couldn’t speak English, and I’m a member of the House of Representatives. I mean, how amazing is that?”

Steve Friess is a Las Vegas-based writer who blogs at VegasHappensHere.com and contributes regularly to the Daily Beast and AOL News.

• The new Text/Context, which is published in a partnership between The Jewish Week and Nexbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

In a late article today, Mideast columnist Lee Smith profiles José María Aznar, the former Spanish prime minister who is now a major international actor in defending Israel. [Tablet Magazine]

• Noting that President Ahmadinejad is visiting Lebanon next month, influential columnist Aluf Benn has an idea: Kidnap him. [Haaretz]

• Arthur Penn, director of one of the most important films in American history, Bonnie and Clyde (to understand why, read this), died at 88. [NYT]

• They’re young. They’re in love. They’re Polish neo-Nazi skinheads who turned out to be Jewish and are now practicing Orthodox Jews. [JPost]

• Borat is please to explain how great and impressive Israeli coalition government function for benefit of mankind. [Haaretz]

• David Miliband, one-time foreign secretary and older brother of new Labour leader Ed, is backing away from high-profile politics in deference to his victorious sibling. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish Fiction.net. Bookmark it.

• Don Draper’s love interest on this season of Mad Men is (like in season one) a Jew. [LAT]

• Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon see their best hope for returning to the land not in a peace deal but in continued violence that eventually leads to Israel caving. [Christian Science Monitor]

• In 2000, as peace talks faltered, Yasser Arafat ordered Hamas to conduct terrorist attacks. [JPost]

• Jewish groups and U.S. museums are coming into conflict over art restitution claims, reports frequent Tablet Magazine contributor Robin Cembalest. [ARTnews]

• What is up with Jews not really drinking much alcohol? [Forward]

• There are more American Jews living in poverty than ever before. [Jewish Week]

• Why the rest of America is going kosher. [TNR’s The Book]

• A profile/interview of controversial Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. [The Independent]

• An Israeli court decided Israel was responsible for the high-profile gunfire death of a 10-year-old Palestinian whose father is a militant-turned-advocate. [AP/NYT]

• Profilee Aaron David Miller predicts that building Park51 will end as well as his inviting Yasser Arafat to the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Museum 12 years ago did: Not well at all. [WP]

• Former Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner takes to Commentary’s blog to condemn “ugly and unfortunate” anti-Islamic bigotry among Park51 opponents and stresses, “we have to be very careful not to equate American Muslims with al-Qaeda and Wahhabism.” [Contentions]

• Here is what happens when “a blond, tough-talking former gun-toting Texan” gets involved in one of those quintessentially complex Israeli-Palestinian quarrels. [LAT]

• Phillip Weiss pulls a Lee Smith and implies that New York Times blogger Robert Mackey exerts significant influence over commenters, or at least attracts commenters who agree with him. [Mondoweiss]

Pegged to his new Atlantic essay on anti-Semitism, Christopher Hitchens discusses with Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg why he was pleased to discover his Jewish heritage.

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

“After six Israeli prime ministers and three U.S. presidents failed at the peace process,” Gold says, “you’d think people would stop and say, ‘Let’s think about this, maybe a reassessment is needed.’ ” Instead, he continues, the default reaction is to pick up the shattered relics of Oslo, an approach that tends to ignore the Second Intifada and what he has noted was a 500-percent increase in rocket attacks from Gaza after Israel’s 2005 withdrawal. “In think-tank circles it’s said that we all know what the final settlement looks like,” he says. “But this is binding Israel to a legacy of failed negotiations. If you do that, no one would ever negotiate. What if Medvedev met with Obama and said, ‘Let’s pick up where Reagan left off at Reykjavik?’ ”

The sticking point is that Washington sees a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli agreement as a vital U.S. interest to ensure an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, the White House has been willing to beat up on Netanyahu over settlements in Jerusalem even as Obama seems to be hemorrhaging Jewish political support—and fund-raising—with a midterm election only four months away.

While Gold no longer works for the Israeli government, in his post as president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs he is widely held in Israeli and U.S. circles alike to be close to Netanyahu and his senior staff. “Since I left government service,” says the 56-year-old former academic, “I have been obsessed with the need for Israel to articulate in the public discourse its security requirements in the West Bank.” Netanyahu asked Gold in 1997 to accompany him to the Map Room in the basement of the White House for an intimate meeting with President Bill Clinton and one other official in which the IDF’s concept of defensible borders was laid out to the United States.

While the Palestinians’ political demands are clear (a contiguous state, a capital in Jerusalem), the Israeli side, as Gold wrote in Tablet Magazine last week, “has been far more vague,” dwelling in abstractions like peace and security without clearly articulating what that entails. The project that Gold is now pushing in Washington is meant to fill that vacuum. “Israelis have taken lots of risks for peace,” says Gold. “They should not be in a diplomatic testing ground again.”

The book Israel’s Critical Security Needs for a Viable Peace is a collection published this year under the auspices of the JCPA with essays about security and diplomacy by leading figures in Israel’s security establishment, like Maj.-Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash, former head of IDF intelligence, and Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan, former IDF deputy chief of staff and a former national security adviser to Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. The volume’s findings represent a broad consensus across the Israeli political spectrum, and the fact that Lt.-Gen. Moshe Yaalon—former IDF chief of staff and currently the vice prime minister—wrote the introduction is evidence that the ideas have won approval at the highest political levels.

The book pushes three common ideas, some likely to add to the friction between Washington and Jerusalem: First, Israel, must not withdraw to the 1949 armistice lines; second, Israel needs defensible borders; third, Israel must rely on itself to defend itself and not on foreign forces as proposed by U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones, who has talked openly about replacing the IDF with international forces in the West Bank.

The insistence that Israel must retain the ability to defend its own borders—a basic attribute of national sovereignty—is the least controversial element of Gold’s blueprint. The issue is not merely the inglorious record of U.N. peacekeeping forces—from Sinai to Bosnia and Lebanon—but also the fact that the international community rarely sends its blue helmets into the middle of a real shooting war, which is what the West Bank would become if an IDF withdrawal left Hamas and Fatah at each other’s throats and eager to gain credit for launching terror attacks on Israel.

The concept of defensible borders is closely tied to the drawing of 1949 armistice lines, commonly and incorrectly known as the 1967 borders. As Gold explains in his contribution to the volume, successive U.S. administrations since Lyndon Johnson’s have all recognized the danger in Israel withdrawing to those borders. George Shultz, one of President Ronald Reagan’s secretaries of State, explained that “Israel will never negotiate from or return to the 1967 borders,” and the Clinton Administration reaffirmed the Reagan White House’s concept of defensible borders. However, it was during Clinton’s Camp David negotiations that then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak abandoned the idea of defensible borders in the hope of a radical breakthrough with Yasser Arafat. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada and peace nowhere in the offing, the George W. Bush Administration pledged not to hold the Israelis to the Clinton parameters and returned to the traditional U.S. position. “It is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” reads an April 14, 2004 letter from Bush to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Gold, who was not officially in the Sharon government, was nonetheless employed in a number of missions and prepared Sharon’s presentation to Bush on the significance of defensible borders during their first meeting, in 2001. Gold sat in the Roosevelt Room as Sharon entered the Oval Office with the index cards Gold had written. “Years later, when Sharon completed negotiations over the Bush letter in 2004,” says Gold, “he instructed his team in Washington to call me in Jerusalem to say we got defensible borders into the letter.”

Even as the Bush letter applied regardless of who sat in the White House (it won wide bipartisan approval in the House and Senate, with both Hillary Clinton and Rahm Emanuel voting in favor), the Obama Administration has not yet clearly signaled if it intends to accept the commitments of its predecessor. Insofar as Israel sees the letter as “the foundation for the United States to accept new construction in the Jewish settlements that encircle Jerusalem,” it is yet another source of contention between Netanyahu and Obama.

Perhaps even more daunting is the prospect of any Israeli government having to explain to the Obama White House that many of the land swaps from Camp David are not plausible in the context of defensible borders. In other words, everyone in Washington who believes that they know what Israel’s vision of a final settlement looks like is in for a surprise. Israel will have to retain security control over the Jordan rift valley, which means not just the river bank but the eastern slopes of the West Bank hill ridge. It is important to remember that the West Bank overlooks Israel’s coastal plain and 70 percent of the country’s population. If the Hamas rockets fired from Gaza were launched from the West Bank on Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it could bring Israel to its knees, disrupting the country’s economic and social life on a massive scale and shutting down Ben Gurion Airport. Moreover, Islamist militants from all around the region would attempt to transit through Jordan into the West Bank to launch attacks against the Zionist entity, destabilizing the Hashemite Kingdom.

“The concepts in this book are very close to last Knesset speech of Rabin, given thirty days before he was assassinated,” says Gold. The rhetorical point is clear enough: For all the nostalgia in the United States for a visionary statesman like Rabin, a warrior and also a man of peace, he also articulated most clearly Israel’s need for defensible borders and said nothing about land swaps. If those ideas have been lost in the last 20 years, the Israelis are also to blame. “A lot of Israel’s biggest mistakes is that Israeli diplomats put forward plans and pushed it back to the military,” says Gold. “For instance, Oslo began with two academics, and later representatives of the Foreign Ministry came in. When it became official, that’s when the army came in, at the end. I strongly believe we have to reverse the sequence—to lay out Israel’s security needs and then come out with diplomatic process to protect them.”

There is no going back to Oslo, no matter what the Obama Administration believes or hopes. Perhaps the only thing saving Netanyahu from having to fight with a U.S. president and thereby unnerve the Israeli electorate is the incompetence of the White House. Had Obama not pushed Netanyahu so hard on settlements, twice, he wouldn’t have pushed Mahmoud Abbas into a corner where it was impossible for the Palestinian president to be less intransigent than the United States, thus freezing the diplomatic process.

The paradox of the U.S. president’s sympathy for the Palestinian cause and lack of sympathy for Israeli territorial and security claims is that he has managed to fulfill the dreams of hard-liners on both sides and turn back the clock 20 years to before the ill-fated Oslo process even began. For the first time in two decades, the Palestinians and Israelis are not in direct negotiations. A final Palestinian-Israeli agreement couldn’t be further away, which means that Netanyahu can smile for the cameras and shake the president’s hand and breathe easily, now that he doesn’t have to explain that a peace deal, if it happens, won’t look like what everyone in Washington thinks it will.

• Come on down! President Obama told Prime Minister Netanyahu that, y’know, since he is going to be in Canada next week anyway, he should probably just drop by the White House and say hi. [Haaretz]

• And Netanyahu told chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel that, since he is in the neighborhood and all for his son’s bar mitzvah, they may as well meet today, and they are. [JTA]

• The “Gaza flotilla” of nine aid ships should hit the Strip by Friday or Saturday. It is not entirely clear whether the IDF will allow them through the blockade. [JPost]

• Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Yasser Arafat’s Second Intifada “one of the worst mistakes of our lives.” [JPost]

• A New York left-wing activist named Lori Berenson was released from a Peruvian jail in order to raise her child, though she still may not leave the country until 2015, when her sentence for collaborating with terrorists is over. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, her lawyer is her husband and the child’s father.) [LAT]

While the Institute produces sober analyses on a host of regional concerns from Turkey to the Persian Gulf, it is best known as the home away from home of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is no surprise that the hottest topic of conversation at this family gathering is the seeming apostasy of everyone’s favorite uncle, Aaron David Miller. A former high-ranking State Department official who helped inaugurate the peace process in 1988 as an aide to Secretary of State James Baker and continued to knock Israeli and Arab heads together under President Bill Clinton, Miller just announced in a cover story in the new Foreign Policy that he no longer believes in the peace process. Recalling the hopefulness of the early 1990s and the Oslo process, Miller writes: “America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I’d become a believer. I’m not anymore.”

Most people in the room don’t know what to make of Miller’s apparent about-face on the single issue that has united the major institutional players in the American Jewish community’s foreign policy establishment from the Washington Institute to American Israel Public Affairs Committee for the past two decades. Combined with the recent vitriolic public attacks on Obama adviser Dennis Ross from outside and within the Administration for his supposed “dual loyalties” and insufficient dedication to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which Ross oversaw under President Bill Clinton, Miller’s article suggests that a watershed moment has been reached in the history of the peace process, which once served to show how American Jews could serve their country while also helping to bring peace to Israel. It has become a dead letter—or, at worst, a wedge to pry Jews out of decision-making positions in the U.S. government and suggest that the interests of the United States and Israel are necessarily opposed to each other.

Some suggest that Miller’s article is a mere bit of showmanship, meant to get the former policymaker some attention at a time when everyone—perhaps even those in the Obama Administration—knows the peace process is stalled. “You get a lot of respect if you make one big flip-flop in your life resulting from an epiphany,” says Washington Institute scholar Martin Kramer. He cites Francis Fukuyama, who declared “the end of history” in 1989 only to turn against his neoconservative colleagues when the Iraq war didn’t work out so well, and Benny Morris’s public disenchantment with the Israeli left. “Do it twice,” says Kramer, “and you’re dismissed as a flake.”

Miller sees his views as consistent with his public statements over the past few years. “What I’ve seen over time is that prospects for peace are getting bleaker and bleaker,” he told me over the phone last week. Miller believes that he is the same man he has always been—it’s the Middle East that has gotten meaner. “My perspective changed because reality changed,” Miller says. “This region has become much nastier, more complex. The political leaders are hostages, not masters, of their fate, and the issues are much more complicated.” Problems like the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees—the core of the conflict since 1948—seem no closer to being solved then they did when Miller began his peace processing under President George H.W. Bush. In other words, the region hasn’t changed for the worse; Miller’s just frustrated that it hasn’t changed for the better yet. But as Miller himself admits, he has not entirely turned his back on the peace process. “I didn’t reject the religion of yes to embrace the religion of no,” he says.

The religion of yes, which is as good a name as any for the faith that Miller claims to have abandoned, has little in common with a naïve belief in unicorns and fairies or in the righteousness of Yasser Arafat. Rather, it was a coherent strategy formulated more than 40 years ago by American statesmen like Henry Kissinger and other cold, calculating policy professionals. Jewish-funded institutions like AIPAC and the Washington Institute shaped the peace process’s moral core and in doing so gave American foreign policy one of its articles of faith: Someday, Israelis and Palestinians will have a negotiated settlement allowing both peoples to live side by side in peace, prosperity, and security.

The Washington Institute, one of the pillars of the peace process, was founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, then AIPAC’s deputy director of research who went on to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Clinton Administration. Indyk is often an acerbic critic of Israel and hardly a member of American Jewry’s right-wing militant fringe.

“They obviously come from a pro-Israel framework,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told me on the phone, describing the Washington Institute. “But they’ve brought in real quality people, not just Israelis, but also Arabs as well as European scholars, to do important work. They’ve made the stew here richer at an important time.”

Perhaps the Institute’s best-known alumnus is Dennis Ross, who has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and currently serves in the Obama White House. Someone in the Administration, under the cover of anonymity, leaked to a reporter the observation that Ross “seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” The accusation of Ross’s “dual loyalty” was quickly picked up by Israel Lobby co-author Stephen Walt, who used the opportunity to attack the Institute. “Isn’t it obvious,” Walt asked, “that U.S. policy towards the Middle East is likely to be skewed when former employees of WINEP or AIPAC have important policy-making roles, and when their own prior conduct has made it clear that they have a strong attachment to one particular country in the region?”

Walt’s article, as well as the charges made by Ross’s anonymous colleague, stunned Washington policymaking circles. After all, Ross is a lifelong peace processor whose willingness to ignore Arafat’s most egregious provocations earned him heaps of criticism in hawkish circles. Yet here was Ross portrayed as being yet another Jew whose loyalty to Israel trumped his obligations as a public official and U.S. citizen. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute, wrote a rebuttal to Walt’s article. “If terrorism is the use of violence against innocents for political purposes, this is the analogue in the policy debate,” he told me last week by phone. “To use the worst sort of attacks on people’s loyalty, legitimacy, ethics, and values to try to undermine them doesn’t belong in a sober policy debate.”

Yet for all the intellectual fireworks about dual loyalties and the peace process, the American electorate seems to have firmly made up its mind about Israel policy. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week shows that while 48 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s foreign policy in general (with 42 percent disapproving), only 35 percent approve (with 44 percent disapproving) of the way the Administration is handling the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. Some 42 percent believe that the president is not a strong supporter of Israel. Half of American Jews polled say that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel, but only 23 percent of Protestants and 35 percent of Roman Catholics agree. The issue is not that American Jews fear that Obama has no deep reservoir of feelings for Israel but that American Christians believe Obama is out of step with the rest of the country on the matter of the Jewish state.

“To Stephen Walt, pro-Israel is a bad thing, but to the American people it is a good thing,” says Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum‘s Washington Program. “If he thinks our national interests are not being followed, and that Dennis Ross and WINEP are instruments of a foreign power, then by that measure, the majority of the American people are instruments of a foreign power.”

Walt claims that his argument for favoring Israel less and pushing Jerusalem harder on making peace is based on a realist evaluation of U.S. interests. However, a sharper version of realism suggests that a real Middle East peace would actually weaken the U.S. position in the region. After all, it was U.S. arms shipments in the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that proved to the Arabs they could not hope to defeat an Israel backed to the hilt by the Americans. If the Arabs wanted concessions from Israel, they’d have to come through Washington. With that nifty bit of policymaking the United States went from being a Great Power to a regional power broker, capable of leveraging both sides against each other for our own national gain. A just and comprehensive peace between the Arabs and Israelis, allowing the two sides to deal with each other directly, would diminish our role dramatically.

The problem with the peace process, of course, is it makes no place for such cynicism. Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace is perhaps the most earnest book ever written about the Middle East, more plangent than all but a handful of King David’s psalms. Aaron David Miller is considered a skeptic because he says without a trace of irony that the Middle East is a nastier place than when he began two decades ago. Even a mild cynic might recall that 1989, the year that the peace process began in Madrid, was the end of two regional wars that killed millions of people: the Iran-Iraq war and the Lebanese civil war. Today’s Middle East is hardly the Garden of Eden, but the people living there are no worse off than they were two decades ago.

The peace process is perhaps the least cynical enterprise ever launched by the most optimistic country in world history, and the caretakers of that process are American Jews, a group for whom the peace process has indeed become the centerpiece of a kind of secular theology. Interestingly, Arab rejectionist movements such as Hamas see the peace process through a similar lens, though the language they use is quite different. In their telling, the peace process is a plot hatched by the Americans at the behest of their Zionist paymasters with the acquiescence of Arab quislings and Palestinian collaborators who would betray sacred Muslim lands.

Stephen Walt is an ideologue of a different sort than the rejectionists of Hamas, for they at least have to live with the consequences of their choices. Walt’s problem is that his realism and reality are totally incommensurate. He believes that the Israel lobby in the United States is blocking an attainable peace in the Middle East, when the rejectionists have made it quite clear that they don’t want any version of the peace that they have been offered, and would prefer an apocalyptic confrontation with the Zionists and the West. When Hamas says that the Middle East Peace Lobby and the peace process itself is a pro-Israeli front, there is an important sense in which they are right. Walt’s imagination can’t encompass the reality that no one cares more about the peace process than the American Jewish lobby, which is why he has to accuse Dennis Ross of being an enemy of the peace process and a traitor to his country.

The transformation of a political conflict over land into a religious war is one of the most dangerous and frightening goals of radical Islamist politicians—but it has nothing to do with the Quran.

Here the Italian Muslim communal leader and Quranic scholar Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi examines what the Quran says about the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Far from negating the historical claims of a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Quran actually confirms Jewish accounts of the building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and supports the Biblical claim that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God.

1. Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem

In August 2002, the Yasser Arafat-appointed “mufti of Jerusalem and the Holy Land,” Ikrima Sabri, told the Western media that “there is not even the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history.” By saying this, he confirmed what Arafat had already said to the London-based Arabic paper al-Hayat and reportedly repeated to Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David: “Archaeologists have not found a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there because historically the Temple was not in Palestine.”

In making such statements, Sabri and Arafat not only blatantly denied history, archeology, and the teachings of the Bible, but they also denied the words of the Quran. From the time of the Revelation of the Noble Quran until recently, all Muslims unanimously accepted that the Haram as-Sharif, or Holy Esplanade, on which the Dome of the Rock today stands is the same place where Solomon’s and Zorobabel’s Temples once stood. As a matter of fact, Haram as-Sharif, the Sacred Area of Temple Mount, includes a place called Solomon’s Standpoint, or Maqam Sulayman—according to the Muslim tradition, Solomon used to sit there and supplicate while Hiram’s masons were engaged in building the Temple. From that same place the Muslim tradition says that Solomon prayed to dedicate the House once it was completed and to intercede for those who will approach it for worshipping.

Accepting that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem is compulsory for every Muslim believer, because that is what the Quran and the Islamic oral tradition, called the Sunnah, teach.

In the Quran, Surah Bani Isra’il (the Chapter of the Children of Israel), verses 1-7, we find a description of Solomon’s Temple and of how it was destroyed twice by the enemies of the Jewish people:

Glory to Him Who caused His servant [Muhammad] to travel by night from Masjid al-Haram [in Mecca] to Masjid al-Aqsa [in Jerusalem] whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth everything. We gave Moses the Book [Torah], and made it a Guide to the Children of Israel, commanding: ‘Take not other than Me as Disposer of your affairs.’ O ye that are the offspring of those whom We carried [in the Ark] with Noah, verily he was a devotee most grateful. And We warned the Children of Israel in the Book, that twice would they do mischief on the earth and twice be elated with mighty arrogance. When the first of the warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our creatures [Babylonians], given to terrible warfare: they entered the very inmost parts of your homes, and thus the first warning was fulfilled. Then We did grant you the return as against them; We gave you increase in resources and sons and made you abundant in human power. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil, [ye did it] against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, [We permitted your enemies] to disfigure your faces, and to enter your Temple as they entered it once before, and to bring to destruction all that fell into their power.

Imam Abu Abdullah al-Qurtubi, who lived from 1214 to 1273 and was one of the most authoritative medieval Quranic annotators, in his Al-Jami’ li Ahkam il-Qur’an, or Encyclopedia of Quranic Rules, explains the context (asbab) of the verses by mentioning among other sources the authentic Prophetic tradition (hadith). He wrote:

Hudhayfah Ibn al-Yaman asked the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him:

‘I travelled more than once to Jerusalem, but saw no Temple standing there. What is the reason?’

The Prophet Muhammad replied:

‘Verily Solomon son of David raised Bayt al-Maqdis [i.e., Beth ha-Mikdash, the First Temple] with gold and silver, with rubies and emeralds, and Allah caused human beings and spirits to work under his command, until the raising of the House was completed. Afterwards a Babylonian King destroyed Bayt al-Maqdis and brought its treasures to the land of Babylonia, until a King of Persia defeated him and ransomed the Children of Israel. They rebuilt Bayt al-Maqdis for the second time [the Second Temple], until it was destroyed for the second time by an army led by a Roman Emperor.’

One can easily verify that Jewish and Muslim traditional sources are confirming each other: The Temple was built by Solomon and destroyed by a Babylonian king. A Persian king later defeated the Babylonians and ransomed the Jews, permitting them to return to the Land of Israel. The Temple was rebuilt but afterward was destroyed by the Romans. This Temple stood in the area referred to as Beth haMikdash in Hebrew and Bayt al-Maqdis in Arabic. Those political and pseudo-religious Palestinian leaders who claim that “there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem” are surely aware that, in order to support their political claims, they are compelled to lie, hide sources, and contradict the letter of the Quran and the Islamic tradition.

An earlier Quranic exegete and jurist, Imam Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari, who lived from 838 to 923, writes in his Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, or History of Prophets and Kings, that the same sacred area was the place where Jacob had his vision of the Heavenly Ladder:

When Jacob awoke he felt blissful from what he had seen in his trustful dream and vowed, for God’s sake that, if he returned to his family safely, he would build there a Temple for the Almighty. He also vowed to perpetual charity one tenth of his property for the sake of God. He poured oil on the Stone so as to recognize it and called the place Bayt El, which means ‘the House of God.’ It became the location of Jerusalem later.

In Jerusalem on a huge Rock, Solomon son of David built a beautiful Temple to expand the worship of God. Today on the base of that Temple stands the Dome of the Rock.

Historical negation of Jewish and Islamic sources concerning Jerusalem is recent and does not predate the PLO and its political propaganda. In 1932, during the British Mandate period, the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem published a Brief Guide to Haram as-Sharif for Muslim pilgrims, written in English. “This site is one of the oldest in the world,” it says. “Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.”

Not only were Arafat’s minions and heirs in Jerusalem attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by others; they were also attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by Islamic Arab sources, too.

2. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel

The Biblical notion that God granted the land of Canaan to the Children of Israel is confirmed by the Quran. In the Surah of Jonah, verse 93, we read:

We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place, and provided for them sustenance of the best.

In Surah al-Ahraf (of the Barrier), verse 137, we read:

We made a people considered weak inheritors of the Land in both Eastern and Western side [of the Jordan river] whereon we sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We levelled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected.

Surah al Maidah (the Table), verse 21, is the only passage in which the Holy Land is mentioned by that title (al-Ard al-Muqaddas). It refers to the words Moses spoke to the descendants of Isaac:

Remember Moses said To his people: ‘O my People, call in remembrance the favor of God unto you, when He produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave You what He had not given To any other among the peoples. O my people! Enter The Holy Land which God hath written for you, and turn not back ignominiously [to this heritage of yours], for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.

In a commentary of Imam Abu al-Qasim Mahmud al-Zamakshari, who lived from 1074 to 1144, titled al-Kashaf, or The Revealer, we read the following explanation:

As for the borders of ‘the Holy Land,’ some scholars says its northern border is the Mount [Hermon] and its surroundings, and for others in also includes a part of the Land of Sham [the Golan]. Others say it extends from the territory of the Philistines [Gaza] until Damascus and a part of Urvum. Some say that God presented to Abraham this Land as an inheritance for his children when he went up to the mountain and said to him: ‘Look around as far as your gaze can reach. Every place reached by your eyes will be theirs.’ The Holy Temple was the dwelling place of the prophets and the residence of the believers. ‘God hath written for you’ means ‘God swore it and wrote in the Divine Tablets of Predestination: that it is yours, belongs to your people and do not turn back from it. Do not be afraid of the Philistine giants who live there.

A similar note is also found in a commentary of Abdallah ibn ‘Umar al-Qadi al-Baidawi, who lived from 1226 to 1260, titled Asrar ut-Tanzil wa Asrar ut-Ta’wil, or The Secrets of Revelation and the Secrets of Interpretation.

3. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was never abolished

Moreover, the Quran explicitly refers to the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel before the Last Judgment when it says in the Surah of the Children of Israel, verse 104:

And thereafter We [God] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.’

Therefore, from an Islamic point of view, Israel is the legitimate owner of the land God deeded to her and whose borders were defined by Abraham in Genesis.

All recent claims according to which the “assignment of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people was withdrawn or abrogated” are bereft of scriptural or traditional evidence. The Quran mentions the territory that God assigned to the Jewish people, but neither it nor the traditional Islamic sources mention a supposed withdrawal.

Imam al-Qurtubi explains in al-Jami that the last promise concerning the return of the Jewish people “together in a mingled crowd” after the destruction of the Second Temple will be a sign that precedes the coming of the Messiah.

The Quran only mentions a double period of mischief and a double punishment with exile from the Land. God says:

We warned the Children of Israel in the Book, that TWICE would they do mischief on the earth and TWICE be elated with mighty arrogance.

According to this Quranic proof, the contemporary Zionist rebuilding of the State of Israel—the third entry of the Jews to their divinely appointed land—is not mischief but rather a fulfillment of what Imam az-Zamakshari reminds the Jews: “God swore it and wrote in the Divine Tablets of Predestination: that it is yours, belongs to your people and do not turn back from it.”

Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi is secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly.

So we learn in a forthcoming book by that aide, Yehuda Avner. Rabin was extremely skeptical about Arafat’s desire and ability to make lasting peace, but, according to Avner, Rabin also felt that the alternative—the rise of Hamas and other jihadist groups, and the subsequent transformation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a political one to a religious one—was far, far less promising. “While a political conflict is possible to solve through negotiation and compromise,” Rabin argued, “there are no solutions to a theological conflict. Then it is jihad— religious war: their God against our God. Were they to win, our conflict would go from war to war, and from stalemate to stalemate.”

17 years after the signing of the Oslo Accords (and 15 years after Rabin’s death), that sounds nauseatingly familiar. The conflict is more religious than it was—on both sides—and peace remains elusive. Which does not prove that Rabin chose the worse or worst of his options: he very well may have had no good ones. However, it does mean that the path he took, from the perspective of the present anyway, failed.

Where Rabin was indisputably prescient was in his theory (anticipating that of Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeffrey Goldberg in this piece) that Israel could actually find common cause with its Arab neighbors over shared enmity with Iran. He apparently told Avner that “Iranian-inspired Islamic fundamentalism” threatens Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia as much as it does Israel. He continued:

Iran is the banker, pouring millions into the West Bank and Gaza in the form of social welfare and health and education programs, so that it can win the hearts of the population and feed religious fanaticism.

Thus, a confluence of interest has arisen between Israel and the inner circle, whose long-term strategic interest is the same as ours: to lessen the destabilizing consequences from the outer circle. At the end of the day, the inner circle recognizes they have less to fear from Israel than from their Muslim neighbors, not least from radicalized Islamic powers going nuclear.

So if you see any “radicalized Islamic powers going nuclear,” do speak up.

Rabin Thought Peace With Arafat Was Only A ‘Long Shot’ [JPost]
Related: How Iran Could Save The Middle East [The Atlantic]

Maybe most notably, Cohen suggests some form of U.S. engagement with Hamas, in much the same way that it was willing to engage with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah before it had ceased to call for the destruction of Israel. Cohen writes:

Obama needs to work harder on overcoming Palestinian division, a prerequisite for peace, rather than playing the no-credible-interlocutor Israeli game. The Hamas charter is vile. But the breakthrough Oslo accords were negotiated in 1993, three years before the Palestine Liberation Organization revoked the annihilationist clauses in its charter. When Arafat and Rabin shook hands on the White House lawn, that destroy-Israel charter was intact. Things change through negotiation, not otherwise. If there are Taliban elements worth engaging, are there really no such elements in the broad movements that are Hamas and Hezbollah?

It is important to understand the rebuttal to this; it was offered, at the debate, by former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Itamar Rabinovich. He disputed this comparison: Fatah could be reasoned with, he argued, because it was, at bottom, driven by secular nationalism, whereas Hamas may not be reasoned with because it is, at bottom, driven by religious fundamentalism.

Still, the title of the op-ed is “Hard Mideast Truths,” and that one—that the road to peace goes through Hamas—is surely among the hardest.

Hard Mideast Truths [IHT]

Earlier: NYT Columnist, Former Ambassador Stage Debate

Once, it was almost enough for Jimmy Carter to provide a neutral, secret place for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to meet, at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Today, the Obama administration finds itself playing the strongman, wrestling both sides, grudgingly, into just sitting at the same table. The meeting, which is being held while all three main players are in New York for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly—where, last year, Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres declined to meet—comes at a time when, perhaps, the United States is more interested in reaching peace than are “the parties,” as the two sides are referred to in diplomatic circles. Here, a brief evolution of America’s role in the drive toward peace.

Camp David, September 1978: Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter, Anwar Sadat

The summit that eventually took place in the wooded retreat at Camp David was originally set to happen in Geneva, under the auspices of a peacemaking conference established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That meeting, burdened with Cold War politics, never happened, and it wasn’t until after Sadat—with Israeli assurances—took the unexpected, dramatic step of going to Jerusalem later that year that Carter began his push for U.S.-backed talks.

At Carter’s invitation, Begin and Sadat traveled to Maryland for 12 days of secret negotiations—the first 10 days of which consisted of Carter shuttling among cabins, until Sadat and Begin agreed to meet face-to-face. The result was a U.S.-witnessed agreement that established a lasting peace in the Sinai, and an initial framework for negotiating peace in Gaza and the West Bank.

Oslo Accords, September 1993: Yitzhak Rabin, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

The photograph is iconic: Rabin, in his suit, and Arafat, in his keffiyeh and military uniform, shaking hands at the White House, ensconced in Clinton’s wide embrace, immediately after signing their historic peace agreement. But the United States did relatively little to bring about the Oslo deal, which was largely due to the efforts of Terje Rod-Larsen, a Norwegian sociologist who had done work in the Palestinian territories and Israel’s Labor government under Yitzhak Rabin, which was elected in 1992.

Months of meetings between the Israelis and the PLO, held secretly in Norway outside the framework of U.S.- and Soviet-sanctioned negotiations launched at a 1991 conference in Madrid, culminated in an agreement between the two sides to recognize each other as negotiating partners and to reach a permanent peace deal within five years, inked in Oslo in August 1993. Clinton, ever the showman, invited both sides to Washington the following month for a formal signing ceremony that would produce, at the very least, an indelible image of possibility.

Wye River, October 1998: Benjamin Netanyahu, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

Netanyahu is no stranger to negotiations with the Palestinians. The last time he was prime minister, he was meeting with Arafat at the Aspen Institute’s Wye River complex, in Maryland, under the supervision of the Clinton Administration. Netanyahu, much as today, found himself then bound by promises made by others that created political pressures for him in Jerusalem, specifically with regard to withdrawals from settlements—but Clinton used the fifth anniversary of the Oslo Accords, an agreement hallowed by the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of an Israeli objector, to force both sides back to the negotiating table.

Clinton, who called on King Hussein of Jordan to help grease the negotiations after Carter-style shuttling between the camps failed to produce results, eked out an agreement after a marathon 21-hour negotiating session, commemorated with a solemn indoor signing ceremony. The agreement laid out a timeline for land transfers from the Israelis to the Palestinians, based on security assurances, and set a target date of May 1999 for a final-status agreement.

Camp David Summit, July 2000: Ehud Barak, Bill Clinton, Yasser Arafat

After the Wye River timeline fell apart, the Palestinians and the Israelis—led now by Ehud Barak—set out a new timeline at Sharm el-Sheik, in 1999, which called for a final deal by February 2000. That date passed before Clinton, at Barak’s urging, convened a new summit in July of that year at Camp David—this time, with the world watching. Barak, it is widely acknowledged, broke every precedent and appeared to offer the Palestinians sovereignty over East Jerusalem and a Palestinian state on the West Bank. But Arafat said no—a decision that has been analyzed for a decade, but one that was at least in part driven by, ironically, the concern that America’s willingness to usher along an Israeli-led peace effort compromised its role as an honest broker between the two sides.

Aqaba, June 2003: Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

The summit at Aqaba was not an American event—the formal host was Jordan’s King Abdullah, who inherited his father’s role as a facilitator, but it was the moment when George Bush, fresh off the Iraq invasion, stood between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas and declared himself the local sheriff in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “I used the expression ‘ride herd,’” Bush told reporters after the meeting, on the Red Sea. “I don’t know if anybody understood it in the meeting today.”

Rather than playing couples’ therapist, and letting the Israelis and the Palestinians dictate the pace of negotiations, Bush said he would appoint an American team to monitor progress on the “Road Map” plan he originally proposed in 2002, and insisted he would hold both sides accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities under existing agreements. No firm commitments were reached on resuming formal peace talks, but Abbas promised an end to the terrorism of the Second Intifada, and Sharon promised progress toward a Palestinian state.

Rose Garden, November 2007: Ehud Olmert, George Bush, Mahmoud Abbas

Seven years after the failure of Clinton’s Camp David effort, Bush convened a Middle East conference of 44 nations at Annapolis, where Olmert and Abbas agreed to resume peace talks with the goal of reaching a lasting agreement by the end of Bush’s presidency, in January 2009. In a press conference that recalled the 1993 Oslo signing ceremony, Bush stood between the Israeli and Palestinian leader and pledged the “active engagement” of the United States in the peace process.

Yet Bush said at the time that he had no plans to go back to the Middle East himself to “unstick negotiations”—and he never called a round-the-clock, Camp David-style retreat before he left office, with no final deal signed.

Photos: Camp David, 1978 by Karl Schumacher/AFP/Getty Images; Oslo, 1993 by J. David Ake/AFP/Getty Images; Wye River, October 1998 by Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images; Camp David, July 200 by Stephen Jaffe/AFP/Getty Images; Aqaba, June 2003 by Hussein Malla/AFP/Getty Images; Rose Garden, November 2007 by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images.

Fatah Adopts Resolution Blaming Israel for Arafat’s Death [JPost]

Setting: A secret chamber in Ramallah, March 1, 2004

Mahmoud Abbas: Hi everyone, glad you could make it to our second International Conspiracy Steering Committee meeting! Let’s get down to business. How are we going to assassinate Yasser Arafat? Yes, Arik?

Ariel Sharon: I’m still thinking radioactive needle shot by a sniper. Nu?

U.S. diplomat William Burns: I like where you’re going with this, prime minister, but mightn’t it be easier just to poison him the old-fashioned way?

Sharon: Sounds lame. But, all right, as long as we kill a number of other Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders while we’re at it.

Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan: Even if we only get one or two, it’s Arafat who really counts.

Israel Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz: If we poison him right, I bet French doctors and the international press will think Arafat died of a brain hemorrhage.

Burns: Heh heh heh.

Abbas: Sounds like a plan, boys. On to the next order of business. How are we going to make the global economy collapse in five years?

Qaddoumi Drops a Bombshell [Arab News]
A transcript of Qaddoumi’s minutes: New Details on the Alleged Plot to Kill Arafat [The Faster Times]
Related: Palestinian Authority Suspends Al-Jazeera in West Bank [The Guardian]